29. Scarlet Sage
Scarlet Sage
The cicadas are loud enough to make the cottage feel surrounded when Wes finally turns into the drive.
We left Honey’s house before noon, but the stop at the sheriff’s office swallowed the day.
Pepper met us there to draw the blood Dr. Cole had requested, then made me wait through two samples, an exposure questionnaire, and an observation period while Tom collected our statements and transferred Honey’s evidence to the county courier.
Now the lowering sun flashes across the greenhouse panes between the palmettos, and the scarlet sage beside the porch glows red at the edges.
My home looks the same as it did this morning, but I feel different.
Roman’s fingers rest against the inside of my wrist. He has kept them there since we left the sheriff’s office. Wes checks the mirrors, fence line, and greenhouse path before shutting off the engine.
Neither of them speaks.
Roman’s hand stays loose at my wrist, waiting. The front door stands ahead of us, and the path is clear, but neither man moves to lead me inside.
“I’m going through my grandmother’s field boxes,” I say.
Wes turns in his seat. “Tonight?”
“The person sending those packages thinks I can find the missing attachment. I would rather learn whether they are right before another box appears on someone else’s porch.”
Roman releases my wrist only long enough to climb out. “Do you know where to start?”
“Yes.”
My grandmother kept her field boxes in the attic.
She claimed the heat discouraged casual visitors, although locking the door might have accomplished the same goal with less risk to paper.
After she died, I moved the most fragile journals into sealed containers and promised myself I would catalog everything else when grief became orderly.
Grief has shown no interest in clerical work.
Wes comes around the SUV. “What do you need?”
The question loosens a tight place inside me. “Help with the heavier boxes. Clean gloves. No one decides a stack is trash because it contains three dead beetles and a receipt from 1987.”
Roman opens the back door for me. “That sounds less like an archive and more like a warning left for future generations.”
“It is a filing system designed by a woman who considered labels unnecessary when you have intuition.”
“I respect her process.”
“You would.”
Wes rests his hand at my waist. “Do you want us to check the attic first?”
I glance toward the narrow window beneath the roofline. The thought of climbing into a closed room filled with blind corners pulls unease over my skin. “Yes.”
“Give us ten minutes.”
Roman follows him inside, though he pauses long enough to kiss my temple first. “No heroic lifting while we’re upstairs.”
“I have never lifted anything heroically.”
His laugh follows Wes through the front door.
I remain beside the SUV for a moment, listening to the cicadas and the faint movements of the men inside my house. Their presence has settled into the space as though it belongs there.
That thought stirs a quiet, uncertain warmth.
I enter through the kitchen and head to my room to change out of the clothes I wore to Honey’s. The green dress I choose buttons down the front and skims my thighs when I walk. It is softer than my usual armor, a decision I don’t question too closely.
The fabric shifts against my skin as I move, a subtle reminder I can’t quite ignore. A low pulse of heat gathers beneath my stomach. I stop with my hand on the bedroom door and wait for it to fade, breathing through the slow rise and fall.
It recedes gradually, leaving my skin warmer and my senses sharpened around the cedar caught in the hallway.
The sensation lingers. Fear tightens low in my chest while desire answers just as forcefully beneath it, and I don’t know which one I’m supposed to trust.
The attic door stands open when I reach the back hall, light spilling down the narrow staircase. I climb halfway before stopping.
The attic has never looked this welcoming.
The overhead bulb remains dark. Two lamps glow from opposite corners, their light soft against the sloped ceiling.
Wes has opened the small round window above the east wall and secured the warped frame, so it no longer shudders in its track.
Roman has cleared the long worktable beneath it and covered the scarred surface with clean cotton.
Gloves, pencils, glassine envelopes, and trays wait in orderly rows. A clean stool sits at the center of the table. Beside it, a narrow vase holds scarlet sage.
Beyond the open window, the sky has deepened to indigo. The first stars are appearing above the greenhouse roof.
I grip the railing.
They didn’t merely make the room usable.
Wes noticed which window refused to open, and Roman brought up flowers from my kitchen.
Together, they turned the place where I stored unfinished grief into a room prepared for me.
This is what being courted by them looks like.
Wes makes the room safe. Roman makes it beautiful.
Both pay attention to what I need before I find the language to ask.
Wes waits at the top of the stairs with one hand braced against the frame. Roman stands behind him, watching my face.
“Did we change the space too much?” Wes asks.
I look at the flowers, waiting trays, and stars framed by the repaired window.
“No.” The word comes out softer than I intend.
Wes offers his hand. I take it. He brings my knuckles to his mouth, his kiss warm and unhurried.
Roman passes behind me and presses his lips to the back of my shoulder. “Where do we begin?”
I turn toward the boxes. My grandmother used three systems at once and trusted none of them.
Dates appear when she remembered. Locations are marked by weather, blooming seasons, or complaints about tourists.
One container bears the label Flood Year, although Sweetheart Haven has endured enough floods to make that nearly useless.
I start with the boxes moved from her bedroom closet after the funeral.
Wes carries them to the table one at a time. Roman keeps an inventory as I open each container. His handwriting is slanted, elegant, and far too attractive for a list containing beetle casings.
“You write like a man who sends love letters from overseas,” I tell him.
He glances at the page. “My current letter begins Dearest Scarlet, today we discovered mildew in the attic.”
“Passion survives.”
“Against terrible odds.”
Wes’s phone rings while I lift wax paper from a stack of pressed leaves. He answers near the stairs, his voice shifting into the restrained cadence he uses for official calls. “Osprey.”
Roman continues logging while I listen around the edges.
The rental company has confirmed that C. Rusk used a temporary festival-services account. The identification on file may be false. The address leads to a storage and repair yard off Old County Nine, where several bays are leased month to month.
They haven’t located Rusk, and no one has established whether he has an actual connection to a motorcycle club.
Wes ends the call and returns to the table.
“Physical location?” I ask.
“Tom is preparing the request for the rental records and yard footage. BESTF is checking the address against the regional transport cases.”
“So the next stop in my increasingly glamorous life is a repair yard.”
Roman writes Beetle Collection beneath the current box number. “You say that as though grease stains can’t be romantic.”
“They can, but only when applied with artistic intent.”
Wes slides another container toward me. “We’ll keep that in mind.” There is dry amusement in his voice, but his fingers brush mine before he lets go.
The third box contains seed packets, two journals swollen from humidity, and a bundle of field cards tied with faded blue ribbon. The first cards document water levels near the marina. The next record is swamp lily bloom times.
Roman sits across from me, the inventory sheet angled beneath his left hand.
I work through several cards before I notice his pencil is no longer moving in straight lines. His gaze flicks from my face to the small sheet near his wrist. The pencil travels in a quick curve, pauses, then shades the fall of hair over one shoulder. He is drawing me.
I lower the card in my hand. “That is not an evidence log.”
Roman’s pencil stops.
Beside the list of box numbers, on the back of an unused label, he has sketched me leaning over the table.
My hair hides part of my face. One foot hooks around the stool rung, and my fingers hover over a pressed leaf as though it might answer if I wait long enough.
At the edge of the drawing, Wes’s hand rests near mine.
Roman makes no attempt to cover it. “I draw when I want to remember how a moment felt.”
I hold out my hand. “May I?”
He passes me the sketch.
The woman on the paper looks absorbed rather than braced. Her mouth is soft. Her shoulders are lowered. She belongs in the room.
“You made me look peaceful.”
“You were peaceful.”
I glance at him.
His humor has receded, leaving the open expression he rarely shows anyone but Wes and now me. “You change when you trust a place,” he says. “You stop measuring how quickly you could leave it.”
The sketch trembles once between my fingers.
I place it beside the flowers where I can keep seeing it. “Draw me again sometime.”
Roman’s eyes darken. “I was planning to.”
Wes returns from checking the far stack and sets a flat cedar box on the table. “This one?”
The brass latch is shaped like a cypress leaf.
My shoulders draw in slightly. I remember the box when it was on the highest shelf of my grandmother’s wardrobe.
Once, when I was nine, she slapped my hand away from it.
She apologized by teaching me to press marigolds between sheets of blotting paper, which was her preferred method of admitting she had overreacted without saying the words.
“I forgot this was up here.”
I open it and find vellum sheets lying between layers of tissue.
The first holds a hand-drawn map of the cypress glade.
The public festival path is marked in red pencil.
A second line, faded brown, breaks away near the old post office and curves south toward undeveloped land.
Across the bottom, my grandmother wrote: Protection path is not release path. Compare before using either.
Roman moves to my side. “Could that be the missing overlay?”
“Maybe.”
The backing is the right size. Green residue stains one corner, where a pressed stem has crumbled. The center section, however, has been removed. Four tiny cuts show where a smaller piece of vellum was once stitched over the map. The missing attachment has its own missing attachment.
A breath escapes me that almost becomes a laugh. “She could have hidden a confession inside a puzzle inside a locked drawer and called it convenient.”
Wes studies the map without touching it. “Where does the brown route end?”
“It doesn’t show the end.” I follow the line in the air. “It passes south of Old County Nine, near the abandoned drainage road and the older cypress access.”
“The repair yard is off Old County Nine,” Roman says.
“Close enough to be irritating. Too far apart to call it a match.”
Roman photographs the map while I search beneath the vellum.
An envelope lies at the bottom of the box.
My name crosses the front in my grandmother’s handwriting.
Scarlet.
My hands go cold.
Wes notices before I break the seal, and his palm settles against my lower back. “You don’t have to read it tonight.”
“Yes, I do.”
The paper inside smells faintly of cedar from the box.
Scarlet,
If these notes reach you before I’ve explained them, then I’ve failed at another difficult conversation.
I stop. Roman’s fingers close around mine.
I once watched people mistake keeping a bond intact for keeping the people inside it safe. They held tighter after consent had fractured. They called the pain protection because admitting otherwise would have required release.
The next sentence has been struck through so heavily, the paper is nearly torn. Below it, she wrote Love that asks you to disappear in order to preserve it is not protection.
My vision blurs. Through the open window, the stars sharpen above the greenhouse roof.
I read the final lines. If this pattern returns, look first for what was forced to remain. Then ask who benefits from calling it sacred.
There is no signature and no further explanation, only the fear I’ve carried for years written in the hand of a woman who never told me she understood it.
I fold the letter along its old crease. “I thought she believed I was dramatic.”
Roman’s thumb moves along my knuckles. “Maybe she was afraid you were right.”
“That isn’t better.”
“No.” His voice stays gentle. “It isn’t.”
Wes turns my stool toward him and crouches between my knees. His hands settle on my legs, warm and steady, while he waits for me to look at him.
My grandmother’s words are still open on the table behind him. They held tighter after consent had fractured.
I look at his throat, his mouth, and the teeth he kept from closing on my skin when instinct urged him to mark me. “If we bite-bond someday and I need to leave?”
His expression doesn’t change. “Then you leave. My bite would never be used to hold you where you didn’t choose to stay.”
“You want to bite-bond me.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t.”
His thumbs stroke the inside of my knees. “A permanent bond deserves a choice made together, not when you are frightened, exposed, or trying to prove your feelings. We’ll wait for your answer, but we want you for ours.”
Roman stands behind me, his palms resting on my shoulders.
“And if I ask for a bite later?” I ask.
Wes’s eyes hold mine. “Then I’ll ask whether you’re feeling playful or asking for forever.”
The attic becomes too warm. My skin notices every point of contact: Roman’s hands, Wes between my knees, the dress gathered beneath his thumbs. I breathe in cedar and cardamom. My body answers with slick gathering between my thighs.
Wes’s gaze drops for one brief second, then returns to my face. “Scarlet,” he says, voice low and certain, “keep looking at me like that, and I’m going to forget how to hold back.”
Heat unfurls in my belly. Wes’s hands remain steady on my thighs, his thumbs moving no higher even as slick gathers between my legs.
“What if I want you to stop holding back?”