Chapter 7
Fallon
Iclose my apartment door with my hip, my fingers smoothing across Rhys’s T-shirt until I reach the collar. It’s too big on me, but it feels perfect.
I only imagined his smell by the subtle hints left behind in the hallway, or ones I encountered while inside his place. Now I have it, clinging to this T-shirt.
I press my nose into the fabric and inhale deeply. It’s soap and the kind of musky warmth of male skin from exertion.
My heart does a giddy pirouette in my chest. It’s the chemical reaction to his scent, I am guessing. I actually buzz. It’s soft and gentle, but it’s nothing I’ve ever felt before.
I scoop up Basil from my kitchen and march into my living room.
“Okay,” I whisper, putting the noisy plant on the cocktail table. “Squad meeting, everyone.”
Basil rolls his eyes. He’s always been dramatic, the loudest of the group.
“Don’t give me that look,” I say, plopping onto my sofa. “You’d be starstruck too if you had hormones.”
With this persistent blast of heat under my skin, I realize I haven’t thought about intimacy with another man since my first, awful time with Kosta.
In college, I dated a few guys. After they met my father, I never saw them again.
I never examined it too closely. Examining things tends to hurt.
Then college got to be too much, so I dropped out.
Men around my neighborhood smile at me. But they all leave me cold.
Rhys stirs my blood to a smoking sizzle under my veins. And he’s an assassin. The person I am least safe with.
When a dangerous man rapes you, you shouldn’t drool over a bad boy. But here I am. And Rhys is bad. But not to me. He’d never hurt me.
I pick up Basil and kiss him. “Who knew?”
‘I didn’t get a chance to talk to my brother,’ Basil grumbles, his leaves flopping with exaggerated offense. ‘My IDENTICAL TWIN. What if Rhys kills him?’
“First of all, all basil plants are identical.” I put him back down on my cocktail table.
‘Blasphemy.’
“We’re calling him Little Basil, by the way. And you’re Daddy Basil,” I argue, heading to the kitchen to get my watering can and to avoid eye contact.
‘I like THAT. Daddy Basil has a nice ring to it.’
“And Rhys is not going to kill a plant. He looked…careful. You saw how he cleans his guns. People who keep order like that don’t murder plants.”
‘He might NEGLECT Little Basil,’ Basil fires back.
I return to the living room and pour a measured line of water into Basil’s soil.
“Which is why I bought the camera scope,” I remind him. “You should be thanking me for my strategic thinking.” And almost falling off the ledge for Little Basil.
‘I’m thanking you for nothing,’ Basil grumbles.
“Careful, or you’ll end up as pesto,” I warn with a wicked pinch.
Behind Basil, Ivy chimes in from the top of my bookshelves.
‘I think it was romantic,’ she says, her voice clipped and proper. ‘The way he saved her from falling off the ledge. Very action hero of him. I’d have lent a vine to wrap around your ankle myself if he didn’t pull you in.’
‘You’d have fallen out the window, too,’ Basil mutters, perpetually unimpressed.
Swinging in her hanging pot bolted to the ceiling, Fern sticks up for Ivy in her smoker’s rasp, ‘I’d have used my fronds to grab hold of her.’
My stomach flutters at the idea that if my leafy friends tried to help, we’d all have crashed into the courtyard.
It should’ve terrified me, hanging fifteen stories.
It mostly did. But everything vanished when Rhys looked into my eyes with a brewing pulse of heat.
It was low and fierce and wildly inconvenient to absorb while I was trying not to die.
‘He’s probably nailing that window shut right now,’ Basil mocks.
I sigh at my little squad. I know the voices aren’t real. Not the way other people would understand, anyway. My plants help me sort through the noise in my head. Ivy and Fern say what I’m too afraid to admit. Basil brings me back when I drift too far.
It’s the perfect balance I need.
I flop backward on my sofa with a sharp exhale, staring at the ceiling fan spinning lazy circles. “You’re impossible, Basil,” I murmur.
‘He’s too dangerous,’ he counters.
I catch the smug tilt of his leaves. He always has to have the last word.
‘He’s so handsome,’ Ivy sighs, brushing leaves against a romance book cover.
“He’s my boyfriend, I don’t care what he looks like.” I roll onto my side and pull the collar of his T-shirt up to my nose to smell the soft black cotton again.
I can never wash it. I’ll disturb the molecules of him woven into the fabric.
‘What does his apartment look like?’ Fern asks, swinging away.
“Plain, unlike him. He’s so layered and complicated.
But that place needed Rosemary, Cami, Minty, Little Basil, and the others to add color and warmth.
” The words tumble out in a rush now that I’ve opened the floodgate.
“He has these impressive knives on magnetic strips in the kitchen. He likes to cook. But all his spices were fake.”
‘So you sacrificed my brother and his friends from the garden?’ Basil grouses.
‘How do you think you ended up in here, you smelly grump?’ Fern sticks up for me.
‘She’s clinically obsessed with the man, and she’s going to get hurt,’ Basil sounds like my father.
I’m considering putting him in the refrigerator to shut him up.
“I’m just curious,” I insist, though my voice cracks.
My cheeks are still hot. I feel unzipped, skin-thin, and I think all my nerve endings are on fire. All I want to do is press my head against the wall between our apartments.
“New rule: no more Rhys talk tonight. It’s getting weird.”
‘It was weird thirty minutes ago when you almost died,’ Basil mutters.
“Mute mode,” I command, striking my finger in the air like pressing a remote.
They hiss and grumble but eventually comply, settling into leafy sulks. But even as they fall silent, the weight of their collective judgment feels like a scratchy blanket.
So I sneak another breath into the T-shirt for the briefest second. Just one controlled, scientific inhale. Then I pull it over my head. It swallows me, soft and warm and vaguely threatening my equilibrium.
It’s a test.
I don’t need the meds. I don’t need the meds.
I’ll claw through all this angst and anxiety.
My heartbeat slows. The voices recede. Then sleep claims me, smooth as silk.