Chapter 10 #2
The fern benches were around the back of the second greenhouse, in the shady corner where the buildings met.
The light came down soft and green through the poly, and nobody ever came there unless they were looking for it.
She led him along talking, about spore propagation and about the specific ferns colonizing his wall, maidenhair and Christmas fern and the little polypody she was proudest of.
He followed, and he asked exactly the right questions, the ones that meant he was actually listening.
By the time they got to that quiet green corner she’d half-forgotten to be careful.
Then she turned to point out the polypody, and he was right there, and she stopped talking.
The shop noise was a long way off. A hose somewhere.
Junie’s faint laugh. Water dripping off the benches.
Between the greenhouse wall and the potting shed there was maybe four feet of shaded space, a bench of ferns, and the two of them.
She was suddenly, ruinously aware of every inch of him, the warmth coming off his skin, the way his shirt stretched over his chest. And the fact that his eyes had shifted, right in front of her, from solid grey to something with gold bleeding into the edges of it.
“Maris.”
“I’m not—” she started, with no idea where the sentence was going.
He kissed her.
This time it was his idea. No thank-you launched it, and no tired end-of-day fumble.
He simply reached out, cupped her jaw in one enormous careful hand, and kissed her like he’d been thinking about it since last night.
And there was nothing tentative in it. His mouth was warm.
He tasted faintly of coffee and something clean and stony and dark.
He kissed her slowly and thoroughly and deliberately, and the slowness affected her faster than fast would have.
She made a sound against his mouth and grabbed his shirt.
Actually grabbed it, with both fists, the exact gesture from the dream, and she didn’t even care.
She yanked, and he came, crowding her back against the greenhouse wall, one hand sliding behind her head to protect it from the wall.
His other hand left her jaw and slid down her throat and her collarbone.
It skimmed over a breast and a suddenly taut nipple and her breath hitched as she arched into him.
Her hands were traveling too, up over the hard planes of his chest, his shoulders, the astonishing breadth of him.
His wings shifted. She heard them stir and felt the air move, and the giddy triumph that went through her had no business being that satisfying.
Then his thumb found the strip of skin where her shirt had ridden up, and she stopped thinking anything coherent at all—
“Mr. Garrick!”
They came apart so fast she nearly took out the fern bench.
Toby stood at the mouth of the little green corridor with a dinosaur in his hand. His face was lit up with the pure uncomplicated joy of a five-year-old who has discovered his favorite person in an unexpected place. He hadn’t seen anything except that Garrick was there.
“You’re at the shop,” Toby said, delighted, like this was the finest coincidence ever engineered. “I didn’t know you’d be at the shop. Did you come to see the ferns? Mama has the wall ferns here. She has backups.”
“I heard,” Garrick said, and his voice had gone gentle the way it always did for her son.
She watched him drop into a crouch that put him nearly at Toby’s height, entirely composed, entirely unflustered, as if his wings hadn’t just been halfway to a full spread.
“She showed me. The polypody’s the best of them. ”
“That’s the little one.”
“It’s tough for its size.”
Toby considered this with total seriousness, and nodded, evidently satisfied that Mr. Garrick understood ferns correctly. She pressed the back of one dirt-smudged hand to her burning mouth and prayed to every plant god she’d ever half-believed in that the flush would die down before—
“There you are!” Sylvie swept around the corner in a cloud of perfume and mischief, her mahogany hair loose.
She took in the two flushed adults, the beaming child and the suspiciously secluded fern corner with one all-encompassing glance, and produced a slow, spreading, absolutely delighted grin. “Well. Ferns. How educational.”
“Sylvie.”
“Found this one wandering the front looking for you.” She ruffled Toby’s hair, and he leaned comfortably into her hand.
“And,” she went on, before Maris could get a word in, “I have news, and the news is that you are coming out tonight. Ben’s singing at the Moonlight, and Sara will grab us a table.
Robin is coming too, and you need to actually leave the nursery after dark for once. ”
“I can’t, I’ve got Toby—”
“Dot’s nana is gonna take him. Already arranged. Half the class is having a sleepover with the goat, it’s practically a national holiday.” Sylvie’s grin sharpened. “So the only question left is whether you’re wearing something other than jeans and a work shirt for a change.”
“Sylvie, I really don’t think—”
“You should go, Mama.”
Everyone looked down. Toby had said it—Toby, who never volunteered opinions to a room, who weighed every word before he spent it.
He was looking up at her with those serious hazel eyes and that earnest little face, entirely certain of himself.
“You never get to go do the fun stuff, Miss Sylvie said. And I get to sleep over with the goat.” He thought for a moment.
“And Mr. Garrick could come too. He should come too. So he’s not by himself. ”
The silence that followed was going to kill her.
Sylvie’s eyebrows had climbed to somewhere near her hairline. Garrick, still crouched at Toby’s level, hadn’t moved at all. And Toby stood there in the green shade looking up at her with complete faith that he’d solved everyone’s problems.
“Out of the mouths of babes,” Sylvie breathed, savoring it, then shook her head. “Sorry, sport, not this time. This is a girls’ night. No boys allowed.”