Chapter 34 cwtch
cwtch
On my slow, meandering walk that morning, I visited Wykofski at his shed to ask if he’d make a swing for me.
He was sitting back in a pool chair, lemonade in one hand and binoculars in the other.
Birdswatching, as he did most mornings. Damnit was happily in her new she shed, Reggie on the other side of her.
Wykofski was very proud of the miniature home he’d fashioned out of old pallet boards and painted hot pink and purple.
He wrote damn nest on a piece of driftwood and nailed it to the front of the little house.
“I think there’s a red-throated loon over there in the hedge pond. Wanna see?”
I did, so I took up the binoculars.
“Bit in the reeds,” he instructed. “It’s got a red throat.”
After a moment of looking, I found a rather large, brown-colored waterfowl with a red throat and breast. “Oh! I see it! That’s so pretty.”
“It’s a rare one,” he supplied happily, taking back the binoculars to look again. “It’s come here every year for the last four years. I think it makes a home in the boxwoods.”
“You really love this place.” I sat down in the beach chair next to him. “You know everything about it.”
“Nah, not everything. I just watch, is all,” he replied, setting down his binoculars. “And speaking of watching . . . where is it you go in the late afternoons?”
I feigned ignorance. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Wykofski gave the goose a look of disbelief.
Damnit honked in return.
“I agree, sweetheart. That’s some goose shit if I ever heard it.”
I mocked hurt. “Why is it goose shit?”
“Because everyone—including Eula, and you know Eula can barely leave the house—notices that you go missin’ for close to an hour every day. Where do you go?”
“I can’t go anywhere really,” I replied, dodging the question. “I’m still in the gardens.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Hmm.”
“I don’t go anywhere,” I reiterated, though I couldn’t look him in the eyes as I said it, because while it technically was true, what I didn’t say did an awful lot of heavy lifting. But soon—hopefully soon—I wouldn’t have to keep it a secret anymore.
“Mm-hmm. Wanna lemonade?” he asked, pouring himself another glass, and I decided to indulge a little. “Take a load off, Sunny.”
We clinked our lemonades together and drank.
“You’re a good gardener,” he said, finishing his drink. “Best we’ve had in years. I’m gonna hate it when you go. Unless you don’t go.”
“I can’t stay,” I said, and started picking flowers from around me. The shed had a pretty bad weed problem, and the weeds all turned into wildflowers over the summer, so there was a lot to pick. I rarely came out this way to work, so I busied myself with it.
He gave me a thoughtful look. “Why not? What’s New York got going for you that we don’t?”
It wasn’t New York that I was going to go back to.
It was the end of an era for me. The throwing in of a towel.
I’d come up to Lilymoor just to put some distance between me and the life I had while Harrie was alive.
My boss, Jeff, thought that Lilymoor could shake off my gloom and revitalize me, like a plant at a new window.
But … I thought it had done the opposite.
At that new window, I realized that I was never going to be happy back in New York. I didn’t have any friends in the city, and I didn’t really like that I couldn’t see the stars, and my apartment was way too expensive, and my roommate never did the dishes, and—
It was a good life. I had a job I liked and a boss who was kind and coworkers who weren’t terrible.
But it was a life that felt half formed. A dream unfinished. A sentence without a period. Like the Someday Garden. I just did it because I wasn’t sure what else to do, and it was something that I liked, and something I was good at.
It was a good life.
But I didn’t want it to be mine anymore.
And that felt frightening to realize, because maybe that meant that staying was the right choice.
But what if it wasn’t? How could I be sure?
I didn’t know, and so sticking to the plan I’d had all summer—working at Lilymoor and then returning to the city to finally admit that I still wanted to quit—felt like the safest course.
“My contract’s only for the summer,” I reminded him, though I didn’t sound very convincing anymore.
With a handful of flowers, I went back to sit down in my chair and started twining the stems together.
“And if Eula’s retiring and the future of Lilymoor is in the air .
. . seems kind of a bad time to decide to stay. ”
“Or,” he posed, “it’s the best time to try somethin’ new.”
I laughed. “I like your optimism.”
“Thank you. My ma did, too.” He motioned to the crown. “Hey, how do you do that?”
I braided another stem into the circlet.
“My friend Harrie taught me when we were in garden club together. I would always get so sad that we had to pick flowers—that it was healthy for the plant when we picked its flowers—so she taught me how to make crowns.” I finished and showed it to him.
The crown was flimsy, more of a circlet that would fall out in half an hour, twined with violets and dandelions and forget-me-nots. “Wanna learn?”
“Hell yeah! Lemme go pick some,” he added, and a few minutes later he came back with an armful of wildflowers. “Do it slow and I’ll follow.”
So I did.
“You take two, and you loop one over the other, and through the middle . . .” I instructed, and he followed me, and then it was just the simple repetition of that over and over again, tucking the stems into each other’s loops, until it was long enough for a crown.
Wykofski caught on quickly and said that sticking his tongue out of the side of his mouth helped him concentrate better.
I laughed. “Harrie used to do that, too.”
“She sounds like a cool person,” he replied. “She going to come visit you while you’re here?”
“No.” I looped a violet around a dandelion and then picked up a pretty pink bee balm. “She died last year.”
It was getting easier to say the more I said it, which felt odd. It should have been hard each time—but the sting of loss was quieter, too. Not that it would ever go away, but it was a pain that was becoming a part of me.
I wondered if I’d ever get used to it.
I hoped not.
“Ah,” he replied, nodding. “I came up here after my ma died. She always wanted to go to Maine but never got the chance. I was only supposed to be here for, like, a year or something, but you know”—he shrugged—“I found I liked it. Vacationland became Foreverland.”
I grinned at that. “What made you want to stay?”
“That’s easy. It felt like home.” Then he held up his tiny crown. “Aha! I did it! Damnit, come here—wait, Damnit, Damnit, down girl—ah!” He jumped back as the goose, newly anointed with her crown, gave a biting hiss. Then she spread out her wings.
Reggie rolled over on the grass with a grunt.
“Run!” Wykofski cried. “I provoked the beast! I’ll get you your swing by the afternoon!”
Damnit charged at him.
I didn’t have to be told twice. “You’re my hero!” I shouted, and hurried away from the shed.
The sounds of Wykofski taming the goose, like some Jurassic Park zookeeper with a velociraptor, faded into the din of the garden as I moved back toward the cottage.
It worried me that people had begun to notice my absence in the late afternoons, though by the time the door appeared in the Wildflower Garden, I couldn’t find it in me to care.
“You taste like lemonade,” Cyrus murmured against my mouth.
“Wykofski’s been making a pitcher every day for the last week.
He doesn’t have a recipe, so it’s always a little different.
I think he can tell we’re all a little stressed leading up to the bicentennial,” I replied.
My back was pressed against the stone wall, his hand planted just beside my head, his other on my waist. While most of the garden was in sunlight, he cast a cool shadow on me.
He kissed the side of my neck, his mouth warm and hungry against my skin.
“We should get back to work,” I said half-heartedly, because I’d brought the swing for him to install on the willow, but we’d barely made it halfway across the garden.
“We are working,” he replied, and nibbled my ear.
I squirmed with a laugh. “Cyrus,” I tried to chastise him, but I couldn’t stop smiling.
“Sophie,” he replied with equal fake seriousness. Though with that lawyer-esque slant to his brows, it was a whole lot more convincing. And ridiculously hot. “Sometimes working is taking a break.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be the workaholic?”
“Maybe I’ve just stopped to smell the roses finally,” he replied.
His fingers delicately traveled along my middle.
I imagined what they would feel like without the barrier of my shirt, how gentle he would be—as gentle as he was at planting sprouts, I was sure.
“And maybe I’ve come up with some ideas on how to busy ourselves, if you’re bored. ”
My heart fluttered. “What sorts of things?”
He made a rumbling noise in his chest and kissed me again to tell me exactly what sorts of things without saying a single word.
His body did all the talking it needed to do.
With his tongue, he demonstrated what kinds of things he could do other places, and with his fingers through my hair, he showed how delicate he could be.
“Things you deserve,” he finally said against my lips. “Things to tell you just how much you’re appreciated, how much you’re seen. How much I appreciate you.” Then he took one of my hands.
And he kissed my fingers.
Oh.
“Stop,” I pleaded, and his eyebrows jerked up at the word. I pulled my hands out of his, my heart thundering so loudly in my chest I was sure he could hear it. “Stop saying all the right things.”
“Why? I’m just telling you what’s true.”
That was the most frightening part of it all. I dipped out from beside the wall, stepping into the sunlight. It warmed my pink shoulders. “Because I’m afraid I’m going to mess this all up. The garden’s almost finished in here but I’m no closer to finding it out there, Rus.”
“That’s okay,” he said, quietly coming up behind me, and wrapped his arms around my middle. He pressed his face into the corner of my neck. “I believe in you. Besides, you promised, and you said you never break your promises.”
“But what if I do?”
He kissed the skin of my shoulder. “I trust you,” he whispered, but that wasn’t an answer at all.