Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MONDAY, ONE WEEK LATER
RYDER
A week on from the bedroom affair, and Thaddeus was still ensconced in my cottage; Tap and I were back on the Cumberland job; and the council had given me two weeks’ notice to remove the rocks or they would do it for me.
Considering I didn’t really have a leg to stand on as far as the rocks were concerned, I took the delay as a win, and it was all down to Thaddeus’s quick thinking.
Not wanting to risk the long-term welfare of Thaddeus’s tooth, I’d ignored his protests and loaned him my ute to visit the closest emergency dentist in Featherston.
The woman had phoned his Wellington dentist and taken a cast for a new crown.
She’d told Thaddeus that she would notify him when it was ready, and he could either have her replace it or have it delivered to his Wellington dentist.
When Thaddeus had told me about it that evening, he’d been coy about whether he thought he’d still be in the cottage when the crown was ready.
I hadn’t pushed. To be honest, I didn’t want to know.
In ten days, I’d got used to him being around.
More than used to it, I liked it, and not just because I craved the sight of him like a starving man, but because he was genuinely good company.
Ten freaking days and I was losing my shit over this charming young man.
Ten days of ignoring my sisters’ repeated demands for information on my mystery man—a factoid about my life that could only have come from Tap’s boyfriend, Will, who got on with my eldest sister like fire and kindling.
Ten days of sharing breakfasts with Thaddeus and sometimes Tap as well, the conversation flowing like we’d known each other for years.
Ten days of coming home to a clean house, a goddammed working ventilation system in my glasshouse, and two dead pot plants that I couldn’t water because they were in Thaddeus’s bedroom—previously known as the guest bedroom.
Oh boy.
I’d tried to go in there once to check on the poor things, but the sight of Thaddeus’s unmade bed and the smell of his body wash—my body wash—and I almost sprang a boner on the spot, the memory of him in my bed as clear as if it had happened just yesterday.
I doubted that Thaddeus, bless his cotton socks, had even noticed the plants, let alone thought about watering them.
When I succumbed to curiosity one evening and asked him, he turned beetroot red and immediately dashed to his bedroom.
He returned a moment later with two pots of leafless sticks, a miserable expression, and a fistful of apologies.
Using the bald-faced lie that I might be able to save them, I’d rescued the pots from his hands and hidden them in the laundry to dispose of when he went to bed.
Thaddeus narrowed his gaze but didn’t press me on it.
Ten days of having my evening meal cooked—except on the weekend when we bumped around the kitchen together, laughing and giving each other shit in a frightening domesticity that positively reeked of a relationship that didn’t have the right to exist after only ten days.
A relationship that Thaddeus didn’t want to exist and one that I increasingly did.
Ten days of watching Thaddeus lying on my sofa every evening, propped on a pillow, tapping away on his laptop, the tip of his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on whatever he was doing—coding the next NASA trip to Mars for all I understood of his screen whenever I peeked over his shoulder.
I’d asked him once what he was working on, but lost interest and understanding somewhere around the thirty-second mark when he drifted into explanations about some kind of cooling system.
Considering he was without a job, I wasn’t sure who the system was for but figured it was none of my business.
Instead, I settled for the much more interesting job of watching his lips move around the words and the way his enthusiastic tawny eyes sparkled with the gold and rosy hues of the setting sun.
As for what had happened between us the week before—AKA the best fucking sex I’d had in a long, long time, not that I was dwelling on it—Thaddeus had drawn a clear line in the sand about who we were to each other, and I’d become a ridiculous caricature in my own life.
I spent every night sitting in the armchair opposite him as he plugged away on his keyboard, while I worked on client plans or at least pretended to.
Most of my time was, in fact, spent watching him and those two creases between his eyes—one longer than the other—as they notched in concentration.
We’d fallen into the habit like it was the most natural thing in the world when it clearly wasn’t.
The sofa had always been my haunt after dinner.
I could see the garden from there, watch the blackbirds feasting on the cut oranges I’d pinned into the lawn, consider what was doing well and what needed attention, plan for the future, and snuggle into my happy place.
I’d almost never sat anywhere else until Thaddeus started sitting there.
Then, funnily enough, it became his spot, and my spot was anywhere that gave me a prime view of .
. . well, him. Most of the time, that was the armchair opposite where I sat with my back to the glass and not a glimpse of the garden in sight. Go fucking figure.
Tap and I needed to work on the Saturday, but on Sunday, I suggested to Thaddeus that he and I could take a drive to look at a couple of properties we were landscaping, including the Cumberland job.
He’d jumped at the chance and been lavish in his praise of our work, praise which seemed genuine enough.
When Delia Cumberland unexpectedly turned up, Thaddeus had listened avidly to our discussion about natural-filtration swimming pools and self-sustaining pond ecosystems. He’d asked a ton of questions about the regeneration zone with its gravel beds and aquatic plants, and the two of them had sat on the grass and talked filtration and irrigation for almost an hour.
The experience had left me somewhat taken aback by both the degree of Thaddeus’s interest and his obvious knowledge.
Then I remembered the water-cooling software he was working on and figured there was probably a crossover.
Delia Cumberland was a bright spark of a woman and well into her sixties.
An avid gardener and a friend, she was also a distant relative of James.
She had to have known about our break-up but had come to me anyway, a fact that earned my respect.
The large acreage was perched atop the Remutaka Hills and was undergoing a complete overhaul.
The 150-year-old villa looked beautiful in its new cream skirts and jazzed-up interior, but the gardens were a work in progress and would remain so for the foreseeable future, due to their size and Delia’s rather ambitious plans.
Not to mention, she had a predilection for changing her mind on a regular basis.
I desperately wanted Delia to have the garden she craved, but I couldn’t swear that I wouldn’t throttle her before we got there.
I had two things in my favour. One was that Delia wasn’t in a hurry.
She wanted her garden perfect, not quick.
And the second was her bank account. There was a lot in it, and she wasn’t shy of splashing it around.
We were going to come out of the project smiling and with an epic garden to show on our résumé.
On the drive back to the cottage, when I suggested a detour to a local brewery for a couple of beers, Thaddeus was more than down for it.
We took our drinks to an outdoor table shaded by a large oak, prettily dressed in its bright spring leaves.
There we talked more about our families, our coming outs, our first loves, my early jobs as I tried to find a way in landscaping, and Thaddeus’s aborted time at university.
I told him about my travels and that, although I loved formal gardens like Versailles and they had their place, I preferred the laid-back vibe of English-style perennial beds near my house.
Thaddeus talked about the difficulty of finding a place with his peers after coming out and how he’d done it through gaming and becoming the tech whizz go-to of his year.
It was something that Phillip, who didn’t publicly come out as gay until he left high school, hadn’t needed to worry about.
According to Thaddeus, Phillip had always been popular in school.
He had a handsome face and the gift of the gab, and Thaddeus had clung to their friendship like some kind of lifeline.
He understood that although gaming had helped him escape the bullies, it had also come at a cost. It stopped him from ever finding his tribe, both in high school and beyond.
He’d gone quiet after that, and without thinking, my hand had found his.
He’d looked surprised but didn’t pull away, and we’d sat like that for a long while, finishing our beers in silence.
After the brewery detour, Thaddeus had directed me to a supermarket where, against my protests, he’d bought a truckload of groceries.
He wanted to contribute, and so I’d let him, following him up and down the aisles while he loaded the trolley I pushed.
It was a shared effort that was both achingly familiar and frighteningly pleasurable.
And when I’d crawled into bed that night and tried not to think about Thaddeus alone in his across the hall, I’d pulled my pillow against my chest and decided it had been the best Sunday I’d spent in a long time—well, since the previous one when Thaddeus and I had worked together in my glasshouse.
So, yeah. There was that.