Chapter Four
Jude
I don’t know why I’m nervous. Or why I even drove up here.
I remembered Birdy telling me she works at this farm, but I don’t have a reason to be here except to see her again.
So while I was driving over, I figured I could ask about plant supplies and flowers.
If they even sell those? Maybe they only sell seeds or tubers?
I honestly have no idea. Buying flowers isn’t exactly something I have experience with.
But I can’t stay away from Birdy. I need to see her again.
The craving is so strong, I can’t even explain it with words.
The greenhouse door opens before I reach it, and she steps out holding a bouquet of flowers. She looks up at me. I look down at her.
“Hey, Jude,” she says.
“Birdy.” I clear my throat. “I was in the area.”
“Oh, okay,” she says.
“Needed supplies.” I look past her at the greenhouse. “Flower supplies.”
“You need flower supplies?” she asks, looking both confused and amused.
“For my, um, yeah.”
I sound like a fool. Years of coordinating disaster relief operations in some of the most chaotic places on earth, and I cannot complete a sentence in front of one woman.
A woman appears in the doorway and smiles at me. “Hi there! I’m Nell. I own the farm. You must be Jude.”
Birdy’s cheeks grow red, and she looks up at the sky to avert my gaze.
“Birdy’s told me so much about you,” Nell continues. “Can I just say thank you for what you did yesterday?” She presses a hand to her heart and sighs. “A bear. Can you imagine! And you rescued her.”
“Nell,” Birdy says.
“I’m just saying thank you to your rescuer.”
Nell turns back to me. “Now. Flower supplies, you said? What are you looking for specifically?”
I have no answer to this because I have no idea what I need. Hell, I don’t even need anything, and I know nothing about growing flowers.
“Not flowers exactly, but more… um… general supplies,” I say.
Nell frowns. “General supplies.”
“For the garden.”
“What kind of garden?”
I shrug. “A general one.”
Nell stares at me for a long moment. I can’t tell if she’s confused or thinks I’m crazy, but kudos to her, because she keeps smiling at me professionally.
“You know what? I think Birdy can help you with that. She knows our stock better than anyone.” She takes the wrapped flowers from Birdy’s hands. “I’ll just put these back inside. Since you won’t be needing them after all.”
“Right, because these were for, um, well, for…” Birdy starts.
“For a customer,” Nell says. “Obviously.”
She disappears back into the greenhouse, and the door slides shut behind her.
I kick at some dirt with the tip of my boot, just to have something to do that’s not staring into Birdy’s eyes.
“So, do you actually need plant supplies? For your general garden?” she asks with a laugh.
“No, I’m sorry, but I don’t.”
From somewhere inside the greenhouse, I hear Nell make a faint sound that resembles a suppressed squeal.
Birdy closes her eyes briefly. “I am so sorry about her.”
“Don’t be,” I say. “She sounds like she loves you a lot. Who can blame her?”
I can feel my cheeks redden the moment I utter the words, which is so alien to me. I don’t think I’ve ever blushed in my life. Maybe as a toddler, who knows, but definitely not as a grown man.
Birdy’s eyes widen.
“I came here to check on you after yesterday,” I say.
“I’m okay. The cut’s fine. I barely feel it. But I’m still a bit shaken about meeting a bear. I’m honestly not sure if I’ll be going hiking again soon. But I do want to thank you for rescuing me.”
“You don’t have to thank me. And if you ever go back out there, you’re not going alone. I’m coming with you, Birdy,” I say, and I mean it.
“Can I at least buy you a cup of coffee?” she asks.
“Sure, I’ve got time now.”
For you, I have all the time in the world.
“Now?” She glances back at the greenhouse. “I’d love to, but I’m supposed to be working.”
The greenhouse door slides open approximately one second later.
“Take an hour,” Nell says, not even pretending she wasn’t eavesdropping.
“Okay, thank you,” Birdy says, then turns back to me. “Do you want to have coffee here? An hour isn’t enough to get to town and back and order coffee.”
“Sure.”
Her face lights up. “Great, come on.”
She leads me to a converted barn that sits behind the greenhouse. I hold the barn door open for Birdy, and she ducks under my arm to get through. Man, she would fit perfectly in my arms.
I quickly shake the thought away and look at the old wooden beams overhead.
A long potting table sits against one wall, covered in seed packets, gardening books, and a fancy coffeemaker.
A worn leather sofa sits in the corner next to a small wood stove with a stack of catalogs on the cushion beside it.
“Sorry about the mess,” Birdy says, already moving toward the coffee maker. “It’s a private working space, not a showroom.”
“I like it,” I say.
“How do you take it?”
Any way you let me.
“Black,” I say.
“Easy enough.”
She reaches up for the coffee on the shelf above, but it’s slightly too high. She goes up on her toes, but I take one step forward and pull it down before she can reach it.
“Thanks, Jude.”
I hand her the coffee, and she pours the fresh beans into the coffeemaker. The grinding noise is loud, which is a relief because I don’t want Birdy to hear that my breathing has picked up. Just being near her makes my body react in unpredictable ways.
Once the coffee is ready, she pours us both a mug. When she hands me mine, our fingers overlap for a split second. We both let go slightly too fast, even though I don’t really want to let her go.
She wraps both hands around her own mug and nods toward the door. “There’s a bench by the flower field. Unless you’d rather stay in here?”
“Outside sounds great,” I say.
We head to the flower field and sit down on the bench. Before us are rows and rows of gorgeous tulips. Although nothing out here looks as good as Birdy.
I drink my coffee and say nothing. She drinks hers and says nothing. A bird makes noise somewhere in the tree line, the wind moves through the tulips, and that’s the whole world for a minute.
“Can I ask you something?” she says eventually.
“Sure.”
“Do you ever get lonely up there? On the mountain?”
“No.”
“I’d like that. Knowing exactly what you want and just having it.”
I look at her. “You don’t know what you want?”
She shakes her head. “I’m twenty-eight, and I still work a seasonal job. I love it, but is it what I want to do with my life? I’m not sure. And I moved to this town because I wanted something different, but I’m still not entirely sure what. Sorry, I must sound crazy.”
“Not at all.”
“Every time I try to picture what my life is supposed to look like, I just get this big fuzzy blur of nothing. No shape. No direction.” She pauses. “I went on that hike yesterday to figure it out, actually. Clear my head a bit.”
“How’d that go?” I ask with a grin.
She arches her eyebrow and smiles. “I got attacked by a bear.”
“Right. So, did that give you any insights?”
“I wish.”
I think about what she just told me.
“You moved here on your own in your early twenties,” I say.
“Yes.”
“To a town where you didn’t know anyone.”
She glances at me. “Correct.”
“And you’ve built a life here. A job you love and a boss who clearly thinks the world of you. That’s not nothing, Birdy. That’s not someone who doesn’t know what she wants. That’s someone who’s braver than she gives herself credit for.”
She stares at me.
“It’s true,” I say.
“Thank you, Jude. I never looked at it like that.”
“What about you?” she asks. “You said you moved here after a job in the military?”
“Yes,” I confirm.
“And this is what you wanted? Just peace and quiet?”
I think about lying. It would be easy. Yes, just some peace and quiet, exactly what I wanted, nothing more to it. But how could I ever lie to this woman?
“I needed to stop being needed for a while. Fifteen years of showing up when everything fell apart. And don’t get me wrong, I was fucking good at it. But there’s only so much a person can carry before it costs more than you’ve got to give.”
“And now? Has it helped? The quiet?”
“Yes,” I say. “I know.”
It’s true. I know what I want. I’ve known it since the moment I looked out my window yesterday morning and saw Birdy standing at my fence line. I want her. That’s not something I’m going to say out loud, though. Not now anyway.
“You should come and see the dahlias,” Birdy says after a stretch of silence. “When they bloom. In July. Nell grows these dinner-plate ones that are completely insane. You’d have to come into the valley for it, but—sorry, you probably don’t want to leave your mountain to look at some flowers.”
“I’ll come to see the dahlias in July.”
But even as I say it, I grit my teeth. July is a damn long time. Three months. I don’t think I can wait that long to see her again, which is insane because forty-eight hours ago I didn’t even know she existed.
The idea of not seeing her for months makes me sick to my stomach.
“I’m making dinner tonight,” I tell her. “Come over and eat with me.”
She smiles. “I’d love that! What are you making?”
“What do you think about bear stew?”
She laughs, and fucking hell, I already know I need to hear that laughter every day or I’ll be a starved man for the rest of my life.