Chapter 11
“I love this color on you, it’s very springtime.”
RJ blew on Penny’s newly painted Lovely Lavender toes. They reminded her of the lavender patch in her mom’s garden, the blooms a muted purple.
“Why, thank you. Your color is very…” Penny scanned RJ’s legs where they stretched out beside her. His fluffy blue robe split open to reveal his pajamas, a blue background covered in heart-eyed emojis, and, farther down, toes that were very… “Bright?”
He gasped. “You don’t like my Mango Bango?”
“I love it,” she assured him. “As long as it’s on your toes, not mine.”
“You don’t have to embrace my color choices,” RJ assured her. “I’m just glad you showed up for Spa Night. I know how busy you are.”
Penny nudged a foot against RJ’s leg. “How could you doubt me? Spa Nights are sacred.”
With the exception of a week she’d been knocked out by the flu, Penny’d made every Spa Night with RJ since he instituted the tradition just after her breakup with Henry.
RJ hadn’t made her talk about her feelings—he knew Penny preferred action—but he had insisted that they spend time together outside of work, and the Spa Night tradition was born.
This week RJ had gone all out, surprising Penny with fresh pajamas and luxurious robes for both of them.
Penny’s pajamas were pink with red cardinals on pine branches, the robe a red to match the birds.
He’d even whipped up an avocado-honey mask, which they’d smeared on their faces before starting on their toes.
“Soooo…” RJ let the word drag, and Penny knew just what it meant. She’d gone a whopping thirty-six minutes without talking about a certain someone, and that time was at an end. “I got an interesting text from Zander today.”
“Did you?”
RJ scooted across the old wood floor until his hips were lined up with Penny’s. He looked fairly ridiculous covered in avocado, only his brown eyes and lips exposed.
“Zander said he’d love to help me scale up my baking business. I wonder where he got that idea. Or, better yet, how he got my number?”
Trusting that her nails were dry, Penny stood up and stretched, working out the kinks from sitting on the floor and retying her robe. It was silly to change into pajamas when she’d be going home to sleep, but RJ insisted they model their new looks. And she was super comfy.
Penny put the kettle on and riffled through the cabinet for the jar of dried chamomile flowers she’d gathered from Becker Farms gardens the summer before. “Couldn’t say.”
Still on the floor, RJ stretched to touch his toes. “This is your doing, I assume?”
“I may have suggested he check in with you about it. You seemed so excited about his restaurant prowess, after all.”
“Interesting.” RJ stood and shook out each leg. “Last I heard, you’d turned down his generous offer of help with the festival and were refusing to talk to me about anything pertaining to, and I quote, that annoying man. Should I take it that something has changed?”
Penny pulled out a pinch of chamomile and held it under her nose. The dried flowers evoked long evenings of summer. “I’m not sure.” She dropped the chamomile into the tea strainer. “I went over to his grandfather’s house yesterday to remove a swarm. We ended up talking more.”
RJ pulled a mug for her from his cabinet. “And?”
“And…” How could she put it into words when she was still searching her mind for a landing place after the last few days? “I guess he’s not as bad as I thought. We both admitted that we’d maybe made some assumptions about each other, and we agreed to start fresh, whatever that means.”
“And…?” RJ slid a mug to her as his brows raised.
“And.” Penny sighed, knowing an I told you so wasn’t far away. “I told him he could help with the festival, on a trial basis.”
RJ’s grin was smug as hell. “Because you realized it was actually a great idea, huh?”
“Because he gave me a line about wanting to prove to everyone that he’s grown up, showing people how he’s more than the person they remember.”
Although comparisons between their childhoods were slim, Penny understood Zander’s urge.
Growing up under the noses of everyone in town meant everyone knew her, but she sometimes wondered which version of her they knew.
When they talked to Penny at the market, did they still see the little girl with perpetually skinned knees?
Or the quiet teenager who stood at the edge of school dances?
Did they see her now—running the market stand, keeping Becker Farms just barely above water—and assume she didn’t have a problem in the world, the way Zander had?
“And maybe I realized he had some skills that could be useful,” she added. “And because he agreed to help you, too.”
RJ bumped his shoulder into hers. “Aw, Pen, you’re the best friend a guy could ask for. What job did you give him?”
“I’m gathering up all the invoices from last year.
I figure he can look through everything for places to cut costs, and it’ll keep him from messing up anything already in process this year.
” A twinge of guilt twisted in her gut, recalling his defensiveness about being seen as a fuckup.
“Not that I think he’d mess something up, it’s just—”
“Hard for you to relinquish any control?” RJ smirked. “Gosh, I hadn’t ever realized that about you.”
“You’re hilarious.” Steam curled into the air as Penny poured water over the tea. “He said that when we were teenagers, when he was here in the summers, he hated me because he thought I was perfect.”
RJ frowned, pulling a jar of Becker Farms honey from a cabinet. “You two never even talked, right?”
“No, we didn’t. He always just glared at me, and I never understood why. He told me his grandfather used to say he should be more like me.”
She’d judged Zander for never coming back to see his grandfather, but this tiny insight into their relationship shed new light on why he’d stayed away.
RJ whistled as he pulled a quart of goat milk from the fridge and slid it across the counter to Penny. “That’s messed up.”
“I know. And yesterday he kept saying things about how much I knew about the bees, how much I must do to keep the farm going.”
When Penny’d continued with the hive removal, vacuuming up the majority of the bees before cutting down sections of comb, Zander peppered her with questions about what she was doing, marveling at each new detail.
“You do know a lot about the bees,” RJ said. “And you do do a lot to keep the farm running. What’s wrong with him noticing that?”
Penny stirred in the milk and honey, giving herself a moment to let the aroma envelop her. “I feel like a fraud. He’s over there thinking, what? That I’m some kind of superwoman? Meanwhile, he doesn’t know how much I have riding on this festival, how much I’ve royally screwed up.”
“You are not a fraud.” RJ took the mug from her hand and set it on the counter.
“You made some decisions that are blowing up now, yes. And, in the opinion of one very wise friend, you’re compounding those problems by keeping them to yourself.
But you get to be a competent beekeeper and a person with some problems at the same time.
” He held Penny’s shoulders and gave them a squeeze.
“That’s called being human. You’ve just been an overachiever for so long you don’t have much practice. ”
RJ paced across the kitchen, finally stopping in front of their leftover takeout, which Penny knew he’d finish before the night was out. Her best friend consumed a mind-boggling number of calories.
He pulled out a clean fork and pointed it at her.
“Now that I think about it, you and Zander have that in common. You were overlooked at home, so you compensated by working so hard and being so perfect that people couldn’t ignore you.
Zander felt overlooked and misunderstood, and he compensated by committing mischief and getting in trouble. ”
“I’m not sure I like you since you started therapy.”
“And now, you just both need people who really see you.”
“Enough. We’re not seeing each other.”
“You could, though.”
“Could what?”
“Could see each other. I was only around you both for a few minutes, but that was enough time for me to pick up on it. Not being into sex myself doesn’t mean I can’t sense sexual tension.
Especially when it’s thick. He was checking you out while you were in the bee suit, Pen.
That thing is practically a burlap sack. And now you’ve got this fresh start…”
Penny clutched her tea and went to the couch. “We aren’t talking about this.”
RJ sat beside her with a huff. “I know you haven’t been with anyone since Henry, and that’s been… what? Two years?”
Had it really been that long? Penny lived her life by the seasons, always managing one set of tasks while preparing for the next set around the bend. Sometimes she’d look up and realize a whole half year had gone by in the snap of a finger.
Things slowed in the winter months, when deep snow blanketed the ground and the whole farm went into a quiet dormancy. Winter was when she rested and read, when she laid plans for the spring and spent time with her mother and Mimi.
And time went by like that. Sometimes it was lonely, but mostly it was busy and beautiful.
“I haven’t really missed it,” she told RJ truthfully. “After Henry, I kind of resigned myself to doing things on my own.” When RJ grinned behind his hand, she rolled her eyes. “Not just the sex stuff. Everything.”
“Just tell me this,” RJ said. “Do you like Zander?”
“I tried not to like him,” she admitted. “It was easy to think of Zander as some jerk who hates this town, just another guy who’s left and didn’t want to come back.”
“But he’s more than that.”
She remembered his hand over hers on the ladder, the way he’d thought of her safety even after she’d accused him of abandoning his family. “Yeah.”
RJ crossed his arms over his chest with a satisfied smile. “Because we’re all more than what people see.”
Penny laughed. “When did this turn into an after-school special?”