Chapter 27
The weather matched Felicity’s uneasy mood.
The early-evening air felt unstable. She’d been planting all afternoon since the May Day Festival had ended, prepping and weeding the long beds for the vegetables and berries that she and Nic had planned out.
The plant shop had closed early, so she was supposed to be making up for lost time on vendor accounts and checking in with customers.
But she wasn’t.
Last week’s weather shift meant the ground was warm beneath her in the garden.
The star jasmine blossoms were fragrant again.
There were so many memories here. Felicity had started visiting Aunt Jeannie for a month in the summer when she was ten.
All of her siblings had already left home.
Her aunt had come for a visit and watched Felicity spend her lonely days reading when she wasn’t tagging along with her dad and big brothers to their construction sites.
Aunt Jeannie had told her parents she was taking Felicity to Kansas and would bring her back in July for the Gallagher Grill Out.
So began the tradition. Summers were spent planting and helping Aunt Jeannie.
And she’d met Sam. She was three years older.
Felicity had idolized Sam. Samantha had been her first crush before that admiration turned into something more like sisterly love.
After all, Abbott had already been in the picture.
Aunt Jeannie taught her how to grow things. It had always been hard for Felicity to understand her mother. She could be passive-aggressive, and Felicity had a difficult time with that kind of layered communication as a teenager. She took things literally. Every slight and jab was devastating.
Aunt Jeannie was different. People might call her prickly, but to Felicity, her candor was safe. Felicity was never left wondering what Jeannie meant or whether she was disappointing her. Jeannie wanted her here. She drove sixteen hours each way every year because she wanted Felicity around.
That long drive had become how Felicity defined selfless love.
Jeannie loathed hotels, so she made that drive in a single day.
There was a time when Jeannie lied to her though.
For the first few years, Jeannie said she needed Felicity to come along to watch over the collection of plants in the back seat during the long drive.
Felicity believed her. Or course the precious plants needed to be guarded by a frizzy-haired, distractable child.
A couple of years later, Jeannie confessed to the laughable lie.
Jeannie said she was a mean, lonely old woman who needed someone to help out around her shop.
This was also untrue, though it wasn’t a lie.
Other than her useless stepson, Aunt Jeannie was beloved, grouchiness and all, by everyone she met. Her life was full of people.
Felicity had moved past being angry at Jeannie for not telling the family she was sick.
She missed her, but she was no longer actively grieving like when she first arrived.
Now there was only this lingering sadness that her aunt couldn’t tell her what to do.
They’d had shouting matches—two strong personalities often did—but there was no one in this world she’d trusted more than Jeannie.
If only she could ask Aunt Jeannie what to do about Nic.
At some point in this journey of thought, she ended up lying on the ground beneath the bower of star jasmine on one of the old quilts Jeannie’d kept in an old Rubbermaid bin out back.
Felicity had been in love before. The hyperfixation, whirlwind type that didn’t last. The unrequited type that had made her more cautious.
And she’d had plenty of fantasies in her late childhood spent among the flowers and the thorns, dreaming up scenarios like every lonely child did, that someone would find them and fall deeply in love.
True love’s kiss and all that other fairy-tale bullshit.
Every English major knew fairy tales in their original form were pretty gruesome, and Felicity was over a decade past that silly time when she’d hoped her prince would come.
She’d kissed a lot of (metaphorical) frogs. Still, she kept her heart open.
Nic—of course he would be named Nic—had wanted to be friends. She always had a thing for tall blonds of either gender, and his name seemed like one of those weird fate things, like the women who end up with a person who’s a dead ringer for their childhood Disney movie crushes.
And they were friends. He was the last person she spoke to at night.
The first person she saw in the morning.
They’d be announcing the winner of the pocket park grant soon.
Nic had mentioned he needed to go back to Texas for a few weeks in the summer, and she was already dreading it.
And because she was who she was, she felt a mixture of unease and almost guilt about that dread.
She was the main character in her story, no one else.
The plant shop was going well. And with the new business from the events at C’est la Vache, the plant maintenance side of the business was doing better than it ever had before.
The windfall from that account Wallace Randalls had finally gotten through the probate process had helped. At least she’d been able to fix the broken things around the store and buy seeds and start to rebuild the business to a point where she could feel like she had given it her all.
A face appeared above hers.
“Where have you been?” Nic’s voice was almost frantic.
She sat up too quickly, triggering a spasm the likes of which she hadn’t felt since she’d almost fallen off the balcony back in the autumn.
“Shit,” she hissed as pain shot up her spine, spotting her vision.
She braced her arm against the ground. Wind whipped her hair.
It must have picked up while she’d been lying there in the darkness.
Her wild hair cut sharp streaks over her right eye, making everything blurry.
Warm hands held her shoulders, helping her to standing. “Are you okay? What happened to you? Why were you lying in a dark garden alone? I thought you said you were going to bed early.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I’m fine. Why—”
“There’s a tornado watch. I couldn’t find you.”
“The last couple tornado watches we didn’t even get any wind.”
“Still, can you just keep your phone on you for emergencies.” His eyes had a feral, wild look about them. He ran his hand through his hair, and the wind picked up even more. He scrutinized her. “What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me? You were yelling at me. And it’s May Day.”
“I wasn’t yelling.” He pushed his hair out of his face. “What’s wrong with May Day?”
“Do you ever feel like certain days are haunted?”
“Yes.” There hadn’t even been a moment of hesitation. His hand held her head. His long fingers dragged over her neck.
She leaned into his touch. “Nic.” She stepped forward and up, until their lips were a breath apart.
“I thought you said…” Nic gulped.
“I was an idiot back then,” said Felicity. She fisted his shirt.
“It was ten hours ago.”
“Ages ago, really.” She pulled him down to the blanket, until he was on top of her.
“Felicity…”
Her hands dropped. “Unless you don’t want…”
“I want you so bad I can barely see straight when I’m with you. I want you so bad I burn breakfast orders when I watch you garden.”
“Really?”
It was a moment when a symphony should swell. A drumroll thundering, cymbals crashing. Hundreds of violins playing a single melody in perfect synchronization. All they had was that rumble of thunder in the distance and the flashes of faraway lightning.
Instead, their bodies crushed together. His mouth was on hers and she lost all control. There was nothing but them. This moment. The feel of how much he wanted her too. This taste that was everything she’d been craving since he first came into her garden that morning in September.
His entire body shuddered.
Her hair had come free.
She kissed the stubble of his jaw and down the perfect column of his neck, licking his Adam’s apple.
Her core was pulsing. The friction from her jeans wasn’t enough.
She was wildfire flame, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to stop. Her lips felt sweetly bruised when they next parted. The wind had strengthened into a gale. Her shoulders shuddered with a sudden chill.
“You’re cold again.”
“I have a sweater.” She reached over and pulled the ancient navy-blue cashmere sweater over her head. Despite the holes from years of wear, it was still the most comfortable thing she owned.
She rolled over on top of him. And everything changed.
Nic’s body was rigid beneath her, his face nearly as pale as it had been that night at the council meeting when Felicity found out how afraid he was of public speaking. “I think I need a second. I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t want this. I do.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just don’t know if this is right.”
“Look, I’m sorry I said I wasn’t sure earlier.” Felicity sighed. “I got a little scared by how much I was feeling. I didn’t mean to make you feel rejected or something.”
“That’s not it. Christ, Felicity. How could you think I was that fragile?”
“Then what’s wrong? Everything was great forty-five seconds ago when your tongue was down my throat, and now—”
“It’s complicated.”
“P-please explain.” She was crying. Why was she crying?
A frantic few blinks, and he spoke in a hoarse voice. “I wanted you to know me first. I thought it didn’t matter, but I’ve been so stupid.”
“Nic, what the fuck haven’t you told me? I know you.”
“I wanted to tell you first.” He voice broke.
“Tell me right the fuck now. Are you in love with someone else? You’re not still married to someone, are you? Is it the Tuesday woman?”
“Still married to someone? I’ve never been married to anyone at all. Shit, Felicity, how could you even ask that? And what do you mean Tuesday woman?”
“So what is it? Why are you so determined not to—”
Both of their phones began ringing.