Chapter 11 #2
The cricket sings. The fireflies patrol the fence. Three streets over, a dog barks once and stops.
My eyes close.
The canvas holds us both.
Something warm pins my arm to canvas.
Heavy. Immovable. The weight of a small car distributed across one enormous green forearm.
I crack one eye open and the world is sideways, blurry, lit by the pale gray wash of pre-dawn.
My cheek is stuck to Flynn's bicep with a paste of dried sweat and potting soil.
My neck has fused into a shape that necks should not be.
Every vertebra in my spine files a formal complaint as I shift, and the canvas beneath me crinkles with the sound of someone wadding up a grocery bag.
We slept outside.
On a tarp.
In the garden.
Like animals. Like beautiful, stupid, soil-covered animals who forgot that houses exist.
I peel my face off his arm. The skin beneath is warm and faintly ridged with rune scars, and there's a perfect imprint of my cheekbone pressed into his flesh.
He doesn't stir. His mouth hangs slightly open.
A faint, rumbling snore rolls out of him like distant thunder, steady and rhythmic, and a single blade of grass is stuck to his lower lip.
Six feet seven inches of fastidious Orc, mouth open, grass on his face, spine pressed into a paint tarp, one massive hand still resting on my stomach.
My heart does something structurally unsound.
I ease his hand off me like I'm defusing a bomb. Finger by finger. Each one thick as a breakfast sausage and twice as warm. His pinky twitches. I freeze. He snores. I resume.
Free.
My boots sit at the tarp's edge. His next to mine.
Toes still perfectly aligned to the weave.
I grab my clogs and pad barefoot across the wet grass toward my back porch, dew soaking through my socks, the morning air sharp with the green smell of overnight irrigation.
The sky is brightening along the eastern fence line, salmon pink bleeding into steel gray, and somewhere in the subdivision a garage door grinds open.
Coffee. I need coffee. Industrial quantities.
My kitchen is a disaster. Moving boxes still stacked against the breakfast nook, a bag of slow-release fertilizer propped against the fridge, three coffee mugs of varying cleanliness lined up on the counter like suspects in a police lineup.
I acquire the least offensive one, fill the French press, and lean against the counter while the kettle heats.
Outside the window, Flynn sleeps. A moss-green mountain range on a canvas plain. The tee shirt has ridden up past his navel, exposing a strip of dark green abdominal muscle that catches the early light. My hand presses against the cool countertop. The tile steadies me.
The kettle clicks off.
I pour. Press. Wait. Pour again. The first sip is scalding and bitter and exactly right, burning a clean line down my throat, and the caffeine hits my bloodstream like a starting pistol.
Okay.
Plan for the day. Rebuild trellis. Re-rake Phase Three.
Mix the magical loam into the border beds.
Prune the climbing jasmine before it eats the drainpipe.
Check the competition timeline. Not think about the way his hand felt on my hip.
Not think about the sound he made when I bit his lip. Not think about the trembling.
Focus.
I take another sip. Steam curls past my nose. Through the window, Flynn rolls onto his side, drawing his knees up, and his snore changes pitch. Lower. Almost a purr. The grass blade falls off his lip.
A bird lands on the trellis wreckage. Hops along the splintered beam. Pecks at nothing. The morning settles into its quiet rhythms and for one perfect, suspended minute, the world is still.
Then Flynn screams.
Not a shout. Not a bark. A full-throated, ground-shaking roar that rattles the window glass in its frame and sends the bird exploding off the trellis in a burst of panicked feathers.
The coffee mug jumps in my hand. Hot liquid sloshes over my knuckles.
I slam it down on the counter and I'm already moving, bare feet slapping linoleum, then porch boards, then wet grass.
Another roar. Longer. Louder. The sound rips through the neighborhood like a siren. A dog three streets over starts howling. A car alarm blips to life..
Rage.
Pure, uncut, weapons-grade rage.
I round the corner of his garage at a dead sprint.
My socks are soaked through, my shin catches a wheelbarrow handle and pain flares white-hot up my leg but I don't stop.
His front yard opens up before me, that immaculate expanse of emerald green that he grooms with religious devotion, and Flynn stands in it.
Shaking.
Fists at his sides. Runes blazing so bright they throw green light across the grass. Every muscle in his back locked rigid beneath the ruined shirt. His breathing sounds like a bellows, fast and ragged, and he's staring down at the ground.
At a hole.
Massive. Three feet across. Two feet deep.
Raw earth torn open like a wound in the middle of his perfect lawn, clumps of root and soil scattered in every direction, and at the crater's edge, tossed aside like garbage, the shredded remains of his prize rosebush.
Canes snapped. Blooms crushed. Root ball ripped clean from the earth and split in half.
Gone.
Everything he built. Everything he controlled. Ripped out overnight while we slept thirty feet away on a paint tarp.
His hands won't stop shaking.