Chapter 11
Felicity hated October twelfth. The memories of the exact night three years ago might be a blur, but she remembered enough. Or at least her body did.
The glow of victory from the council meeting a couple of days ago had faded into feeling the full weight of what they needed to do before June.
Luckily, this year, October twelfth fell on a Sunday, so the shop was closed anyway. She had even canceled the children’s plant care classes tonight for low attendance.
Felicity had stayed in bed most of the day.
Her brain cycled through all the things she would do once she forced herself to start the day.
She tried to turn on music, but couldn’t handle the noise.
Even an audiobook was too much. She grabbed a book she had previously started and reread the page beyond her bookmark three times before giving it up.
The boxes in the kitchen had been her sole goal for today.
She would unpack and make the apartment into a truly livable space.
But why bother? If she waited until June, she would know whether it was worth it to unpack.
As much as she wanted to fight for the store, there was a part of her almost wishing it would fail.
That exhausted part of her soul that she hated.
A feral dragon inside her that reared up at her most vulnerable moments.
Dylan had called today.
Derek had too.
Followed by her mother.
She had mustered up enough energy to assure them all that she was okay. She put on a mask of perkiness for the duration of the phone calls and pretended she was very, very busy.
Her father had sent her a card. She had opened it when it arrived yesterday. Her father’s love of gas station greeting cards was an odd juxtaposition to the rest of his personality, and usually she loved the silly cards.
She had barely read it before stuffing it in her bag downstairs in the shop.
She touched the place on her nose where the bone caved in slightly. The pressure change had it aching, unless it was her imagination.
Had it really been three years?
Aunt Jeannie had been gone for five months. And before that, there had been so much time when Felicity didn’t reach out to her. She had been too absorbed in her own selfish battles to call or visit. If Felicity had, maybe she would have realized that Jeannie was sick.
Stubborn old woman.
Nic was right about that. Jeannie Gallagher-Keegan was as stubborn as an ox when she wanted to be. Independent and hotheaded. All the matching traits that made them a perfect pair all those summers Felicity came out to visit. But Jeannie’s stubbornness didn’t absolve Felicity’s selfishness.
Jeannie’s birthday was yesterday. It was easy for Felicity to remember the last time they had spoken, since it was only a day before the incident.
Felicity had called, and even then, Jeannie had called out Felicity on seeming “down in the dumps.” She had been burned out long before the assault.
Like today, Felicity had pretended all was well, but her mask of perkiness had slipped.
Jeannie didn’t buy it. Felicity had been angry at her about it.
Then, the events of that next day had eclipsed everything else, and Felicity had forgotten about their conversation in the concussed haze of doctors’ appointments and meetings with lawyers.
She had missed so much time with her aunt while she wallowed in a brain bog that her mother insisted was of her own making.
The apartment suddenly felt oppressive.
The weather had turned again. It was ninety-five degrees yesterday.
But the AC wall unit was functioning so well she had even pulled on her favorite navy sweater full of wear holes and mixed memories.
Why did it feel like the walls were closing in and the floor was made of lava?
Felicity hauled herself out of bed. She splashed water on her face.
Her eyebrows and eyelashes were invisible, a true plight of being a redhead, and she rarely left the house like that.
But if she didn’t get outside this second, there was a chance she would spontaneously combust and burn down the entire building.
She opened the door quietly and scanned the garden.
No signs of anyone.
She grabbed one of the old quilts from the trunk near the door and headed down the metal steps.
She had spent hours clearing her favorite, hidden spot in the garden back in May.
It was under an overgrown trellis of star jasmine.
It was completely hidden from the surrounding areas, and it was only visible from her apartment window.
She plucked sprigs of lavender as she went, trying to remember what it had felt like when she first came here as a little girl.
She would pretend to be a witch and brew potions.
She would gather the willow branches of trees and weave them into pretend swords for slaying dragons, saving sleeping princesses and silly princes.
The garden was a playground for her imagination, and she would climb up into the giant bent branch of the bur oak in the empty lot next door to read and listen to music and live out her stories when she closed her eyes.
It had been so many years since her tree-climbing days.
She sniffed the lavender, but its scent was muted.
Everything was muted today.
She came around the corner, relieved to have made it out the door and to the spot where no one could bother her.
But a man slept there. Snoring slightly, and completely unaware of the large wasp crawling over the crotch in his jeans.
She bent and brushed it away, careful not to touch the fabric as she guided the creature away, telling it in a whisper to find a new place to be.
Once the wasp was gone, she found Nic’s eyes were open.
At least it seemed like he knew what she’d done and didn’t think she was trying to cop a feel.
“What are you doing here?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t want to talk to anyone today.”
“Me neither.” His voice was crackly.
“But this is my spot.”
He studied her. “Can I stay? I won’t talk to you.”
After a moment of hesitation, she nodded and spread her blanket a foot away from him. She lay down with her eyes closed. She almost cared that he was seeing her look a mess. But her October twelfth vibes didn’t leave a lot of energy for anything else.
The low angle of the sun reminded her that she had let nearly an entire day pass without doing anything. Clouds moved quickly overhead, heralding the shifting weather patterns of Midwestern autumns.
True to his word, Nic didn’t speak. He didn’t ask her what was wrong.
When he rolled from his back to his side, a musky male scent reminded her of the only other time she had lain in her aunt’s garden with a man.
That time, it had been under real stars, not just the flowers shaped like them.
The first tattoo she had ever gotten was based on a photo of the star jasmine here.
Vines and blossoms with a few words hidden in the tangled ink.
Ad astra per aspera.
“What?” Nic’s head was nestled on his crooked elbow.
She must have spoken it aloud.
“Nothing.” She blinked away from any eye contact and shifted her weight onto her other hip and elbow. History was repeating itself, and Felicity was sick of all the bitter memories. “Sorry, I interrupted your nap.”
His eyes widened. “That’s … that’s not a surgical scar, is it?”
Her hair must have pulled up at the wrong angle.
Luckily, it was usually thick and frizzy enough to conceal the places where it was still growing out three years later.
She smoothed her hair down, but then saw she was wrong about where his focus was.
“No, probably just a weird section of one of my tattoos.”
“That’s not a tattoo. Who the fuck did that to you?”
“Oh…” Her shorts had pulled up on one side. She rarely wore shorts except around the house, so she forgot the scars on the back of her left thigh would be visible from this angle. “It’s a long story.”
And of course, it had to be today that he accidentally saw her scars. It had to be on the day she wanted to talk about it the least.
He shut his eyes and then opened them, his gaze softening. “I’m sorry I reacted like that.”
“It’s fine. I know it’s shocking looking.” She pulled her knees up to her chest. “I wish I had a cooler story. Shark attack. Saving a kitten from a crocodile. The real story sucks.” Her attempt to be funny about it fell flat.
He nodded. “Felicity, you don’t have to—”
“Remembered that I have to call my brother back.” The perky mask refused to fit correctly right now, but even if she couldn’t hide everything that she was feeling, she could hide herself. She tugged her blanket up and rushed inside, ignoring the sound of Nic calling her name.
The door slammed behind her louder than she meant for it to. She nearly tripped over her boxes as she steadied the pile of books by the door.
She lay down in the only available space in the kitchen.
If she closed her eyes, she could re-create the scene from outside, down to the delicate jasmine breeze. She used to be able to do that when she read too. Felicity could build magical universes in her imagination full of color, adventure, and … hope.
But right now …
What would Aunt Jeannie tell her to do?
If she closed her eyes again, she could imagine Aunt Jeannie was lying beside her on the kitchen floor. She did that once, when Felicity was mortified about something dumb she’d done in front of a crush in college and ended up in the same position she was in now.
But as much as Felicity wanted to resurrect Aunt Jeannie in her mind, it hurt too much to remember all the details of the woman she had lost.
After an unknown period of time, she got up. The work on the courtyard should be priority number one on her off days. Maybe if she kept as busy as possible, she could ignore the shadowy thoughts when they reached into her brain.
She changed into coveralls and tossed on a hat.
When she opened the sliding door, there was a cooler on the step.
Trying out a few new dishes, but I made too much.
P.S. Your stomach was growling so loudly, it interrupted my garden nap.
—N
“Asshole.” She sat down on the steps and lifted the cooler lid. It wasn’t cold. There was some kind of warming stone in it. She opened a round take-out pan and inhaled before forking a large bite into her mouth. “Asshole or not … Jesus Christ, that man knows his way around tortellini.”
While she ate, she wrote out a list of what needed to be done for the courtyard. She had been procrastinating on this assigned job. She felt better once she saw all the tasks down on paper.
The first phase wasn’t as overwhelming as she had expected it to be. Most of it involved raking and trash pickup, putting out pest deterrent, and cleaning off the old benches that had rusted over so they could be repainted.
She was supposed to coordinate a cleanup day with the group, but a lot of this could be done in shifts. Wouldn’t that be more efficient anyway?
Sam shouldn’t be handling any of this because she was pregnant, and old cat shit could be dangerous for her. Also, Sunday was busy at the bookstore. The restaurant was also decently busy today. But maybe she could get a few hours in now and assign the others some tasks throughout the week.
Mustering an amount of energy she would not have thought possible at the beginning of the day, she headed outside and got to work.
“Felicity Gallagher, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
She whirled around and found Nic in partially unbuttoned chef whites—holy shit.
She had mainly seen him in crisp T-shirts, but this added a new level of dangerous sexiness to his appeal.
The hint of chest hair. The purplish under-eye circles from a day of hard work.
The slight frizz to his hair from kitchen steam.
“I’m cleaning up the courtyard.” She gestured to the—she counted them quickly—seventeen bags of lawn refuse and trash she had collected. “Remember, we told that council lady we would—”
“I meant, why are you out here alone at eleven thirty at night when this was supposed to be a group effort?”
“Wanted to get a head start on it.”
“A head start?” He rubbed his chin. “I thought this was supposed to take days. When was the last time you had something to drink, or ate? I asked Holly, and she said you’ve been out here for hours.”
Holly, the manager at the restaurant, seemed nice when Felicity first met her, but apparently, she was a narc.
“Um … I had the tortellini. Not sure what time that was though. And … damn, I think I left my water bottle inside.” The slight croak to her voice betrayed that she was probably fairly dehydrated, but at least the weather was cooler now than it had been earlier.
ADHD was like an obnoxious, jerk-faced older sibling. It made you feel like an idiot in so many ways, but occasionally you could latch on to it and do something that made you feel like a badass superhero—like when her oldest brother used to fly her around high up over his head.
“I’m almost done. And this is still going to take a couple weeks. I did the preliminary work. I wrote up a list and figured it would be more efficient with our varied work schedules to get things done at different times.”
“More efficient but less fun.”
“My schedule is different than yours. I have the plant maintenance business as well as the store. Maud and Ethel are on a cruise this week. I’ve got to do their rounds in addition to running the store.”
His irritation softened. “Fine. Are you going to send out this list and get other people to help, or insist on doing it in the middle of the night like—I don’t know—a shoemaker elf?”
She snorted. “While yes, cleaning up yard debris and pest shit probably is the closest I’m going to get to living out a fairy tale, in this case, it was just a matter of timing and my brain hyperfixating on a task at the right moment.”
“Well, next time, ask for help.”
She narrowed her eyes. “If I need help, I ask for it.”
His response involved some highly attractive fuming and very little else. When she returned to her work to finish up the last bits of what she could get done, he stalked away without another word.
The next morning, she went down early to load up all the bags into the plant shop’s old hitch trailer to take to the dump.
They were already gone. The trailer hitch was gone too.
A note was tacked to the shed near the spot where she had lined them up.
Early elves get the worm. Go back to bed for some rest, sleeping beauty.—N
“Sleeping beauty? That cocky-ass motherfucker.” She yawned in spite of herself and headed back upstairs. Felicity was asleep again before her head hit the pillow.