13. Chapter 13 #2
“Is that what you were working on,” Jamie asks, tagging my attention back to the moment. “This weekend?”
I shake my head. “I haven’t had much time to paint lately.” Six months, to be exact. That was the last time I took out my watercolors.
“I’d like to see them. Your flowers.” I drop the pinecone and turn to see him looking down at me earnestly, like it’s the honest to God’s truth, not just the polite thing to say.
I imagine flipping through my watercolor book with him or showing him my abandoned Etsy shop where I’ve uploaded some of my designs for stationary and digital downloads.
It had a brief spark of success in the early days, but then Nana had her stroke, and I set it aside to take on more work with Vi.
It’s been my little secret since then. A labor of love that I’ve been reluctant to take any further in case I get attached. “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe.”
Jamie sits gingerly on the blanket, and I drop down beside him a little closer than I did on his couch. There’s something inherently romantic about this place. I tip my head back and slide my eyes to his profile. “Why’d you want to come here?”
“I had to look at my plants.” He says this with feigned innocence, and I nudge him with my knee.
“Tell me.”
“The brewery is my second favorite place. The taproom is my third. This is my first.” He nudges me back. “And I thought you might like it.”
I smile down at my shoes, relieved he didn’t say something like: I wanted you to wander around in this field and see if you get struck by a vision.
Not that he couldn’t. That’s what I signed up for, but… I’m glad he didn’t.
I look again at the vibrant green, thinking of the way I might capture it. There’s no way he could have known the effect this place would have had on me. But he thought I might like it.
“I love it,” I whisper.
“The harvest is tomorrow. All of this will be gone.”
“What?” I cry, and he chuckles.
“Everything has its season, flower girl. And next season, we get to drink it.”
“Huh.” I’m still not sure how these quirky little flowers become beer. “It smells like a pine forest,” I say, “… but also fruit salad?”
“Good nose.” Reaching behind him, he plucks one of the flowers, pinching it between his finger and thumb before holding it up for me to smell.
“It’s grapefruit. These hops are what we use for our IPA and our summer blonde.
The beer you had the other night, my fall ale, uses a different plant.
There’s less fruit scent in that one. More spice. Still has the pine.”
He takes the flower back and squishes it again. I watch, entranced by the way the delicate nubs roll between the pads of his fingers. “Let me see your hand.”
I oblige, holding my arm out, and he presses the two fingers he just held the flower with to the thin skin on my inner wrist.
“Some people use the oils for a natural anxiety reliever,” he says. “Or they’ll put dried plants under their pillow to help them sleep. I’ve tried it, actually. It works.” He lifts my wrist to my nose. “Smell.”
My eyes fall closed, and I take a long pull of the fragrant oil. I feel it too, a natural calm hitting my veins. “Do you have trouble sleeping?”
He shrugs. “Sometimes. I have a lot of energy. That’s why I don’t mind working until two a.m. every night.”
“God. I’m tired just thinking about that.”
He chuckles, and I think of the mismatch I originally saw in the two of us. Sitting together admiring his flowers, though, it feels more like complimentary colors. A yin and a yang.
“Back in the early nineteenth century,” he says, “hops farmers used to have trouble staying awake for a full day of work. That’s how they discovered the plant could be used that way.”
I laugh delightedly, picturing a field full of grown men, napping in the sun like cats.
Jamie seems to notice he’s still holding my wrist, a fact I’ve been acutely aware of, but instead of letting go, he pulls it to his face, pressing it under his own nose.
His lip rests against my wrist bone, stubble scratching.
Heat flushes through my body, a whip of it right through my center.
I imagine that scratch on other sensitive skin, the heat of his breath, and it’s a bit of a jolt that my mind goes there so easily.
Though, I suppose when you’ve already seen yourself naked with someone .
This is So. Freaking. Weird.
Jamie lets his eyes roll back and pretends to pass out on my shoulder, his fake snore blessedly breaking the tension.
I shrug him off, embarrassing myself with another one of these girlish giggles I can’t seem to control.
“How did you learn about all of this stuff?”
“Ronnie and I used to bounce downtown together,” he says, tossing the pinecone flower from hand to hand. “That’s how we met.”
“Bounce?”
“Like, man the door at the bar. Check IDs.”
“You were the muscle?” I cover my laugh with the back of my hand. “With those dimples?”
He scrunches his nose and proves my point. “I’m six-four. I’m very intimidating.”
It’s not his build—his height is unmissable, and he has thick hockey player thighs, and the sculpted arms of a man used to hauling kegs.
Physically, I would trust him to intervene in a bar scuffle.
It’s more that I can’t imagine him having the temperament.
It would be like choosing a Golden Retriever puppy for a guard dog.
“You’re more adorable than intimidating.” I say. “I can’t see it.”
“Adorable, huh?” He flashes me a grin I’ve labeled the Jamie Smile. It’s three parts sex and one part that boyish mischief from before. I dedicated my childhood to avoiding mischief. I was the mischief police from age nine to nineteen. Why do I like this hint of it on him?
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
He’s laughing as he stretches out his other leg, then lowers himself onto his back, staring up at the canopy, and it’s with a burst of courage that I do it too, sinking down until we’re shoulder to shoulder, our heads in the grass.
“Adorableness aside,” he says. “I wanted to learn the industry, and I had no experience, so I started there. Some nights were pretty slow, and we’d basically get paid to stand there and geek out about beer for a few hours.
I got moved to bartending pretty quickly, though.
It’s where I met most of the people who would give me a chance later when I started brewing my own stuff. ”
Huh. Most beer guys I’ve met are nerdier, scientists at heart. Jamie strikes me as a party guy who figured out how to make a living at it.
“That’s creative,” I say. “And smart.”
He turns his head and there’s surprise there, like maybe people don’t often notice this. Little does he know I’m on a mission to notice everything about him, prop his pieces up and study them in the light of what I know about us: That we might be destined.
Despite the fact that having my brain hijacked is still not something I'm looking forward to, a small part of me starts to hope that I’ll be able to give him what he wants.
That I’ll see something to help him. He’s passionate about this.
I think it would make me want to root for him even if I wasn’t there for the inception of this whole thing.
Even if he hadn’t asked me to help him with the future of it.
We fall into that same surprisingly comfortable silence as last night, staring up at his flowers. The vines sway softly in the breeze, and I sigh contentedly. A flower farm. How could he possibly have known how much I would love this place?
I wish I could keep one, put it in a jar in the cottage. I don’t know how it works, though. Maybe he has to pay for them or something. Maybe each one is important and it’s a big ask.
Jamie sees me chewing my lip and grins.
“What?”
“You’re looking at that plant like you want to take it to bed.”
“I’m not!” My cheeks scream pink.
He holds his finger and thumb an inch apart. “A little.”
I glance at his too-handsome-to-look-at face. Then away. Then back. His grin is easy and open, and I’m suddenly braver than I was just before it.
“Can I have one?” I ask. “To paint? I mean if it’s not a problem.”
That grin births the most beautiful laugh. “Why would it be a problem?”
“I don’t know!” I laugh back.
Jamie gets to his feet, reaching up to cup a pinecone flower in his hand, weighing it like he’s choosing something precious.
He tests another few before deciding on one directly overhead.
Once he’s plucked it, he chooses a few more, handing me the miniature bouquet.
I pull it to my nose, and my eyes fall closed.
Affection pools warm and low in my belly, and for the first time in a long time, I feel some of that color coming back.
It’s all over my face when we get back to Jamie’s truck, that color.
He’s outside of the barn saying goodbye to Ronnie, and I wait for him in the cab, staring at my reflection in the side mirror.
My hair is tangled from the windy ride in, the last of my highlights catching gold in the afternoon light.
My cheeks are colored from the sun. The lipstick I put on for this non-date is gone, but my lips are still a bright pink.
I feel like an indoor plant that’s been set out on the porch for the afternoon. Revived. Vibrant.
I slide my gaze to Jamie. His hat is backward now, shirt stretched across his broad shoulders. Okay, yeah , I say to the imaginary Kate in my head. I like him.
He turns toward the truck, and I jerk my head forward, pretending to adjust the visor while he climbs in. “Sorry about that.”
“It’s fine.”
“Are you ready?” he asks, pressing the ignition.
I twirl the stems of my flowers between my fingers. “Yes and no. I kind of want to live here, take naps under the plants.”
He laughs. “You might rethink that when they’re under a foot of snow.”
I’ll be back in Connecticut when the snow comes . The thought comes like a pin prick to a balloon, and I sink back into my seat.
I remember that bitter feeling I’d get as a kid, whenever August would wind down and my time here would end.
Knowing that for the next nine months I’d ache for my favorite place, my favorite parts of myself that seemed to fade out like a bad connection the further away from Nana’s I got.
I wasn’t sure I’d find much of that to cling to here without her, but the idea of this trip ending soon suddenly fills me with that same longing.
Not in any small part because of the man beside me. A man who I’d initially been afraid of, then curious about, and now find myself… very fond of.
“Thanks for taking me here, Jamie.”
He looks over, eyes soft, and for a moment so quick I almost miss it, they settle on my mouth. That thing I saw between us, I think maybe we’re both thinking about it after all.
He sets his hand over mine, squeezing affectionately in response, and there’s a flip in my stomach that was a lot easier to ignore yesterday. Yesterday, I was afraid of that touch. Now I find myself imagining what would happen if I didn’t let go.
He does let go, though, because obviously . He wraps his fingers around the gear shifter, leaving my skin too cool and my brain conjuring the vision of that hand sweeping over my shoulder and down beneath the sheet. Big palms. Clean, short fingernails. Just like I remember.
Except… There’s something new. I lean forward for a closer look. It’s a crescent moon shaped scar below his knuckles. It’s purply-red against his fair skin, and spans the whole back of his hand. Impossible to miss.
“How did you get this scar?” I ask, pointing.
He glances at it as he pulls away from the farm. “Cut it on a broken pint glass.”
“When?”
“The day I opened.” He gives me a little smile. “Bled everywhere. Made for a rough time behind the bar. Good thing it took me a bit to get this popular.”
I tilt my head, look at it again. So he got it after we met on the roof, and at the place he said he wouldn’t have if not for that vision. But it wasn’t there in the vision of us. I don’t pretend to know how telling the future works, but that seems strange to me.
I decide that kind of detail is above my paygrade and cast my eyes out toward the windshield. We pull onto the main road, passing a sugar maple turning yellow, the color slowly seeping into it too.
“Jamie?”
“Hmm?”
I suck in a breath for bravery and remember the safety net of knowing the future. “Do you want to hang out again tomorrow?”
He looks at me with that full smile, and it’s like a rogue wave engulfing me. I’m completely sunk. “Yeah,” he says. “I do.”
Thank you, universe.