Chapter 13
The moment her eyes met Rowan’s as she entered the Tribal garden, Juniper took in a sharp breath of realization.
She didn’t want to allow herself to feel it.
She didn’t want to put a name to the tightening in her chest, the constricting force around the fluttering she felt in her heart.
The danger in feeling it was only rivaled by the strength of which she felt it.
Too much. Too soon.
She’d left Rowan’s house yesterday feeling brave, vindicated, even a little seductive. Now, she was a mess of nerves. She pretended to busy herself with the strawberries while she waited the torturous thirty seconds it took Rowan to get to her.
“We need to clear the area and prepare the soil in the raised beds. Mulch some of the soil since it’s getting hot so early this year. It’s time to harvest the strawberries too,” she rattled off, standing and swiping her hands down the front of her spandex shorts to brush the dirt off.
“Good morning to you too. What else?” Rowan smiled.
Hug me. Kiss me. Fuck me against the shed.
“That’s probably it.”
“Doesn’t sound like a long list.”
Juniper pinched the bridge of her nose.
That’s only just the beginning of what I want from you.
“It’s definitely doable,” she mumbled as she turned to walk back to the picnic table where she had her supplies laid out.
Rowan grasped her wrist. “Hey, are you okay?”
She was reluctant to angle her body back, to respond to that. She only gave in when Rowan tilted her head expectantly in the other direction to indicate she wasn’t going to let it go.
“This is embarrassing to admit, but you make me really nervous.”
Rowan smirked. “Juniper Banks? Nervous? Never.”
“Oh, more than you know. I think you saw my anxiety medication when I fumbled into bed drunk off my ass, almost naked, I think also attempting to pull you in there with me.”
She tried that as a joke, but it didn’t even come close to landing. With her free hand, she reached up to smooth the worry line that started to crease the center of Rowan’s brows with her thumb, realizing too late the surprising intimacy of that act.
“Junie, I don’t have any expectations for what this is between us.”
Juniper’s face fell with her hand. No expectations?
“No, no,” Rowan clarified, “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that I have a lot to do to earn your trust. I’m not expecting that to happen overnight. I don’t want you to feel nervous.”
“I know,” Juniper sighed.
She took a step forward and wrapped her arms around Rowan’s waist. Rowan responded by tucking Juniper’s head under her chin and wrapping her arms around her shoulders. Juniper melted into her body, like she’d been created to turn viscous on contact for her.
Juniper fought the inevitableness of letting go even though she knew they needed to get going with their day if they were going to get everything done.
She reluctantly took a half step back, and their gaze lingered on each other.
A silent conversation of longing, unspoken promises of what was to come electrified the air.
“Should we get started?” Juniper finally asked.
“Put me to work.”
Juniper attempted a steadying breath. Her intention was to help Rowan get her hands back into the land, to reconnect her body with her home.
Not fantasize about the ways she wanted to put Rowan to work connecting her body to hers.
She did have lots of ideas of how she planned to make Rowan work for it though.
“I can see you thinking,” Rowan teased just above a whisper.
Juniper took several quick buoyant steps back as she laughed. “Don’t think too hard about that.” She turned on her heel to finish her trek back to the picnic table. “Keep up, Birdsong.”
With the rapidly rising temperatures of late spring, exacerbated by the influence of climate change, their effort to complete the to-do list was surprisingly intensive.
They’d been able to hire two garden technicians in the last couple of weeks to take over most of the day-to-day maintenance, but Juniper would be damned if she didn’t get her hands in the dirt at least once a week.
She couldn’t stomach switching to being a total office worker.
By the time they were done and gathered next to each other at the picnic table, they both had a sheen of sweat coating their bodies.
Rowan lifted the bottom edge of her sleeveless t-shirt to wipe the sweat and dirt from her face, and Juniper’s eyes followed the slow reveal of the smooth plane of Rowan’s stomach as she did. Thirst besieged her mouth, and she gulped covetously from her water bottle.
“Want some?” She tilted the oversized bottle covered in stickers toward Rowan as she came back to her senses.
“Yes, thank you. That took more effort than I thought it would.”
“Same.”
In more ways than one.
She took the bottle back from Rowan and pulled a handful of strawberries from the overfilled gathering basket.
After rinsing them in her hand, she handed a few to her, ate one for herself, and set the bottle on the table.
Then she brought her boot up to the bench and bent over to readjust her sock and swipe some of the mulch out that had accumulated around her ankle.
“Sex is sacred?” She heard Rowan mumble as she bit into a strawberry.
“I’m sorry, what?”
Rowan finished chewing and wiped the juice from the edge of her lips with her thumb. She nodded toward the bottle. “Uh, sex is sacred. One of your stickers says that.”
“Oh. Right. It was from a campaign the health office did last year for young people. To encourage safe, consensual sex. Get rid of some of the guilt we learned from colonization and replace it instead with the idea that it’s good and sacred.”
“You’ll have to tell me more about that sometime.”
“About the campaign?” Juniper’s heart almost leapt out of her chest. She knew damn well neither of them were talking about the campaign anymore.
Rowan smiled slowly and shook her head. “No, Junie. About how sex is sacred.”
“When that time comes, you’ll know exactly what that means.”
Rowan gave her a calculating look that sent her pulse right to the center of her thighs. Apparently they reversed the timeline and picked the horny teenager thing right back up.
Juniper grabbed her backpack and the gathering basket from the table and walked with a very self-satisfied swagger back to their vehicles.
Rowan’s long-legged strides helped her catch up quickly, and they walked side by side the rest of the way.
Her hand felt empty without Rowan’s in it, but for some reason despite the heavy innuendo of the morning and afternoon, it felt like too much of a vulnerable risk to do something about it.
For someone who guarded their heart as much as Juniper normally did, it was easier to joke about sexuality than to express and receive genuine intimacy.
“Let’s ride together,” she suggested tentatively to Rowan as she met her eyes, “in your truck.”
“You afraid I’m going to run away and not make it to your Mom’s house?”
That time the joke didn’t land with Juniper.
“Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t think about how that would sound. I was trying to joke about being scared to see your Mom again. Which… I guess is all related just the same.”
Juniper slid her backpack and basket in through the open window and paused.
The sheer number of emotions they’d cycled through in the last few days – even just today – was staggering.
Would it always feel this raw? Would they ever be able to actually put all of that behind them?
Would their future always be marked by this volatility?
But then again, how else would she expect this to go between two people with intense history, connection, and chemistry? Of course it was bound to get messy. It wasn’t time to be afraid, not if she intended to push herself past her vulnerabilities and really learn to trust her with her heart again.
She felt the sudden warm presence of Rowan’s body behind hers. She closed her eyes and breathed in deep before opening again.
“Junie, please turn around. This is me, pleading.”
Juniper felt her heart thudding wildly in her chest and answered its call to circle around before her brain could tell her not to.
They were both breathing heavily, the rise and fall of their chests telling the truth in case they weren’t brave enough to acknowledge it.
Her eyes slowly traveled up to meet Rowan’s, and she felt absolutely consumed by what swirled within those deep brown eyes.
This look contained so much more. They knew so much more. They were so much more.
It was different. It could all be so different this time.
Rowan’s eyes flickered to her lips. She brought her hand to cup Juniper’s face, shifting almost right away to trace her thumb down the center of her lips, parting them just slightly enough.
Rowan’s other arm wrapped around Juniper’s waist to pull her body flush against hers, ribcage to ribcage.
The crease between her brows reappeared, this time not signifying worry but the depth of the emotion Juniper felt she was conveying to her.
Juniper watched each syllable of the gentle question Rowan asked next as it formed on her lips.
“Can I kiss you?”
Juniper nodded quickly, and her eyes fluttered shut as she gave in to the final, undeniable pull toward Rowan’s lips.
Their lips brushed together, barely at first, in the most achingly soft and tender of ways.
Then their lips lingered, barely un-touching for a moment longer, basking in their recognition of what this moment held, what it meant.
Rowan’s lips were just as soft and warm as she remembered.
And while still gentle, her kiss was commanding, bolstered by time, experience, confidence, and what Juniper hoped was a confession of a lasting connection this time.