Chapter 90 #3
“I’ve been trying to build walls,” I said.
“Without what you have. Your magic.” I looked at my hands.
“Yours holds things. Up, In. Steady. Mine just—takes everything in, all of it, until I can’t tell what’s mine.
So I learned to shut it down. Wall it off.
But it’s really all or nothing, most of the time.
But here, it’s impossible. Here, it’s like I’m on high alert, all the time.
” I looked at him. “When I realized what you were doing in the greenhouse—holding all those plants steady, all that life, without it costing you anything—I thought, if I could learn that. To hold something instead of either drowning in it or walling it out. If you could teach me that.” A breath. “I could stay.”
“Could stay?” he asked, his body language changing immediately, hope growing in his eyes.
“I don’t think I want the walls anymore.”
Jonah smiled again, this time full on, and wow did something inside me just tumble.
The cat opened one eye. Looked at me. Closed it again.
We walked back up Harbor Street as the town settled into evening, windows glowing warmly, the smell of other people’s dinners and woodsmoke and low tide. The October dark came down around us, soft and fast the way it did in New England, one minute amber and the next just—night.
I walked a little closer to him than I had been.
The cat was on the porch when we got there. Sitting in front of the door, its white mark bright in the dark, looking at us with the patient authority of something that had already made a decision. I looked at it. It looked at me.
You don’t choose the cat.
I opened the door and it went in.
The greenhouse was unlocked. It was always unlocked.
We’d been talking in the house, and he’d asked me if I was avoiding something in the greenhouse. I knew I was, but I didn’t answer. He just took my hand, and before I knew it we were at the greenhouse door.
I don’t know which of us went in first.
The foundation cuttings were on the north bench, their white buds fully open now in the warmth.
The whole greenhouse smelled of them—that deep green thing with no season, earth and stone—and my magic had been open since the hawthorn and I hadn’t closed it back down.
I turned around to say something practical about the morning inventory and Jonah was right there, so close my hand instinctively rested against his chest.
We looked at each other in the warm dark of the greenhouse.
He kissed me first. Quiet, deliberate, unhurried—the way he did everything.
His hands came to my face and my magic opened toward him before I could decide whether to let it—the way it had reached for the hawthorn, the way it had cracked open at the market.
What came through was nothing like the thing I’d spent my life afraid of.
Just him. The real version. Present and solid, unflinching.
For once his walls didn’t come up.
I kissed him back and his hands moved into my hair, and somewhere behind me the cuttings were doing something—I could feel them, all of them, leaning toward us the way they leaned toward warmth.
The greenhouse held us. It was October outside the glass and inside just this, the smell of rosemary and the earth and the warmth of his chest under my hands when I pressed them there, and slid them up his neck into his hair.
He kissed me harder, and I took a step back and found my back against the bench. I braced a hand on it, and used the other to coax him from my ear to my mouth again.
I felt a tickle and started, looking behind me.
A tendril from the foundation vine—the one in the largest pot, the one that had been reaching toward the window for weeks—had extended itself across the bench and was resting, lightly, on the back of my hand. Barely any contact, but deliberate.
We both looked at it.
Then he started laughing. A real laugh, surprised out of him, and I started laughing too, and the sound of it filled the greenhouse, warm and unguarded and completely undignified, and the tendril stayed exactly where it was.
“Did it just—” he started.
“Yes,” I said.
“June,” he said. Just that.
“Absolutely June,” I said.
We were forehead to forehead, laughing, catching our breath.
My bra strap had slid off my shoulder. He noticed before I did. Reached over with one hand and slid it back carefully, kissed my shoulder lightly, and then tucked a strand of hair back from my face.
I went still.
The greenhouse was very quiet.
We went inside.
The fire was still going. The cottage was warm when we crossed the threshold, the sitting room amber from the blaze. The cat made one dignified circuit of the room and arranged itself on the armchair with the air of something that had seen everything and chosen to stay anyway.
We didn’t make it past the sofa.
He kissed me with his full attention, nothing held back, no part of him somewhere else. His hands came to my face first and then into my hair, and I felt the moment his magic stopped containing itself—a movement toward me, deliberate and warm.
His mouth was at my jaw, my throat, the curve of my shoulder where my bra strap had been.
My hands found the hem of his shirt and pulled it free and then found skin—the warm solid plane of his back, the muscles moving under my palms as he shifted his weight over me.
He smelled like woodsmoke and cedar and the cold he’d carried in from outside, and underneath it, something that was just him, that I’d been cataloging without meaning to since the first morning on the porch.
“Sylvie,” he said, against my collarbone.
Just my name. The way he’d said it in the burying ground, like something important. Something more than just my name.
I pulled his shirt over his head.