Chapter 26 #3
“Unfortunately yes.” He chuckles. “She has all these tiny tools that she uses to sculpt miniature flowers and other detailed shapes. I didn’t think it would take off, but other women love that stuff.
She makes like a thousand dollars a month, and she’s growing too.
So it’s clay central station and I can’t even be mad. ”
“That’s pretty cool.”
“Anyway. Nothing like what you’ve had going on. Harmony Sonora? The media’s been tough on you two.”
“Well, the label’s encouraged it. They made us work together hoping to cause a stir on purpose.”
“Guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It worked.”
I scoff. “I know.”
“It’s … actually had me thinking. Ever since Glambam signed you, in fact, I’ve been thinking.”
“About what?” I twist off an especially plump orange, even though I’m supposed to leave those ones.
“About your career. About … how you still haven’t been able to control your brand much. How you’re having to put out yet another country album.” Garrett rubs the back of his neck.
I think I know where this is going.
“It’s not your fault,” I say.
“It kind of is, though. It was me who pushed you to take the deal with SiNKroNyze. It was me who told you to just get your foot in the door.” He huffs.
“As your older brother, I should have given you better advice. I should have told you to hold out for something better—because that’s what you deserved—and a better deal would have come along, I know it would have. ”
“You were eager to see me succeed,” I reason.
“And, at the time, you’d been watching me struggle for years.
You went to so many of my gigs, let me bounce all my new ideas off you, talked me up to anyone who would listen—and probably to plenty of people who preferred not to.
I know you wanted my ‘big break’ as much as I did, and we both thought SiNKroNyze was it.
Or at the very least that it was a medium-sized break that would lead to the big one.
Regardless, you can’t take all the responsibility for that; I was an adult and I made that choice. ”
“Maybe. But I still supported it. And now I’ve watched you struggle for yet another three years, in a different way of course, but struggle nonetheless.”
“I’m really lucky. Luckier than most. It’s hard, sure, and I want more control—of course—but I’m not miserable.”
Garrett nods toward Harmony up ahead of us, who is listening intently as Grandpa Joe tells her something about the orange-tree leaves. “Especially not now.”
“Especially not now,” I agree. “I don’t know how things would have panned out if I’d gone a different way, but there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have met her.”
“Or the timing would have been off.”
“Who knows. I’ve never been big on destiny and all that, but … I’m starting to feel like maybe some things can happen for a reason.”
“‘God bless the broken road.’”
I nod. “Amen.”
Trailing the others, I peel the plump orange and then catch up to Harmony. She stops to look at me and I raise a wedge to her lips. She takes a bite. Swallows.
“It’s good,” she says.
I kiss her, tasting the tart-and-sweet flavor on her lips.
Tart and sweet—just like her.
We all take the oranges into the barn, where my dad, grandpa, brother, and I load the oranges into a brush washer in batches.
The stainless-steel machine is basically a table where the main surface is a series of cylindrical brushes laid side by side. The brushes rotate under parallel pipes that spray water onto the oranges as they’re rolled from one side to the other.
At the end, they’re pushed into a lug (plastic container with vented sides), filling it fast. The kids always like to watch this part up close, seeing the brushes scrub down the oranges all at once with the water’s help.
Once we’ve filled multiple lugs, the adults and Lily each carry one—Jackson and Ari share—inside to the utility kitchen at the side of the house (just a few yards from the barn) and stack them next to the commercial juicer.
“I think I’ve seen one of these at a grocery store before,” Harmony says, observing the transparent front that reveals the big metal wheels and balls inside.
“Greenbough’s?” I ask. What she’s referring to is similar to the stations where you can crush your own peanuts into peanut butter, or grind your own coffee beans, and pay by weight or volume.
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
The utility kitchen is the perfect place for it, with a concrete floor and a drain for when it needs rinsing out.
Oranges roll down a wire chute into the center where the balls smash them until they break open, then push them down to get smashed several more times, raining juice as they go. Peels are ejected out the back.
Grandpa gets a clean plastic jug and sets it under a spigot at the bottom where the juice has accumulated. He turns the spigot and the jug starts to fill.
It’s not long before we’re pouring it into glasses and passing them around. The kids drain theirs in a matter of seconds and ask for more. Harmony sips and swirls hers like a fine wine, stating that it’s “brighter … somehow” than the juice she’s had before, and “more aromatic.”
“It’s because processed juice,” Grandpa tells her, “strips out a lot of the natural aroma from the oils and the compounds. They have to add flavor back in afterward, if you can believe that.”
Rachel and my mom somehow end up sharing embarrassing stories about me. Like the time I was playing in a field bin, burying myself under the oranges to hide, and fell asleep—I was four—and woke up in the air when the bin loader showed up to take the oranges away.
“Garrett was supposed to be watching me,” I remind them.
“You kept running off,” Garrett says.
They also mention the time my cousin and I were trying to see who could pick more oranges in an hour but neither of us wanted to lose time emptying our picking bags more frequently than we had to, and mine busted open and spilled the oranges everywhere.
“To this day, Zack never lets him live that down,” says Rachel.
“Neither do the rest of you,” I say.
Harmony lays her head on my shoulder. “And now, neither will I.”
When Harmony finishes her juice, my grandpa says, “Why don’t you give your girl a tour of the house? She should really see that view from the upper deck.”
“You want to?” I ask her.
“I’d love it.”
The utility kitchen leads to the actual kitchen, which is smaller and less industrial-looking.
We take off our shoes in the mud room in between, and I show her all the basics: the pantry that is heavy on orange marmalade, the living room with the brick fireplace and the black-and-white photos of early days at Eckhart Groves, the old floral rugs my grandpa can’t part with because they were Grandma’s favorites, and the antiques in the entryway.
Upstairs, I take her straight to the deck.
Thick, leafy green stripes stretch out before us, hills hazy in the distance.
“It’s like a zen garden,” Harmony says. “The clean lines, the repeating pattern. It’s … calming.”
“That’s a really good way to describe it. I’ve always liked this spot but … never really understood why.”
“The order in the chaos. Plus all the fresh air, nature, quiet.”
“Hmm. Makes sense.”
Indoors again, we pass all the bedrooms on the way back to the stairs, and I point to one of the doors.
“I used to stay in that one.”
“This was your room?” she asks.
I nod and open it up, flicking on the light and gesturing for her to check it out.
“Every summer from eighth grade until I left for UCLA. It used to belong to my uncle Rick while he was growing up, but he moved to Minneapolis and works like crazy, so he pretty much never visits—and when he does, he prefers to stay at a hotel. Rachel and Garrett used it before me, but with our age gaps it was never at the same time. By the time Rachel started her summers here, Garrett was an adult, and by the time I came, Rachel was pregnant and living with Ari’s dad. My grandparents left it like this.”
Harmony studies the walls—my Iron & Wine and Lord Huron posters and some faded instant-camera pictures of me and my siblings during Christmases and other family gatherings over the years.
She eyes the acoustic guitar in the corner (an old one handed down from my mom) with the capo clipped to the head, then the handful of guitar picks on the desk next to a stack of tattered books.
Thumbing through a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, she says, “You have parts of this highlighted?”
“I was serious about my craft.”
“Kind of ironic,” she teases as she kneels next to a vintage wooden orange-crate full of CDs and picks up Birdy’s self-titled album. “Your journalism craft is all about the rules, but your songwriting craft kind of thrives on taking creative license with them.”
“Hey, I’m not the one singing, ‘I can’t get no satisfaction.’”
“Double negative.”
“Right. Or, ‘the magic between you and I.’”
“The singer is the object, not the subject.”
I narrow my eyes at her accurate critique. “Or ‘the way I are.’”
“Verb conjugation fail.”
Now I fold my arms. “Are you secretly a grammar nerd?”
“No, but I did take AP English.”
“That’s … pretty sexy, to be honest.”
Harmony sets down the CD and stands back up. “Even though I sometimes like to split infinitives?”
“Just you knowing what an infinitive is”—I grab her around the waist—“makes me want to lock the door and throw you on the bed.”
“Yeah, well, I’m really liking this whole farm-boy thing you’ve got going on.”
“Are you?”
I strain my reach to shut the door and lock it.
Next thing I know she’s kissing me senseless and unzipping my jeans.
I spin her around so I can hold her against me while I handle her breasts from behind through her shirt, and then I reach lower and unzip her jeans too and push them down her hips.
She turns back toward me and kicks her jeans the rest of the way off and starts on her panties but I stop her. “Keep those on,” I whisper.
Partly because we’re not in a fully private situation and it would be best to stay as dressed as possible (in case someone knocks and we have to pretend we weren’t doing anything risqué) and partly because I’ve always wanted to try something.
Harmony raises an eyebrow but complies. I back up until I get to the bed—this pathetic twin I spent so many nights alone in—and drag her on top of me.
With the pillows stacked, I get into a semi-reclined position while she straddles me.
Her hair falls loose around both our faces and I suck on her bottom lip, which still tastes like citrus.
She whimpers but her mouth curves up at the same time and her other response is to grind on my cock through both our underwear (hers still covers the part I want to dive into while mine gets tight behind my undone zipper).
Giving herself a little space, Harmony slips her hand under my waistband and curls her fingers around me.
I close my eyes and make an incoherent sound.
“You’re so hard,” she breathes as she teases the head with her thumb.
In a choked voice I reply: “That’s … all you, babe.”
She strokes me up and down for a minute and I can’t take it anymore. I have to get inside her.
I reach between us and brush my fingers over the fabric at her center, which is damp and warm. Then, like I’ve been planning, I push the fabric to the side and stroke her.
Her breathing speeds up and she leans into my touch.
When I groan at how wet she is, she tells me, “That’s all you, babe.”
Sassy as ever.
“Ride me?” I say.
Together, we get her onto me and I ease in. She lets herself sink down, tilting her head back at the sensation.
All her weight and pressure promising to wring me out? I’m really starting to wonder what the hell I did to deserve this kind of special treatment.
I make more incoherent sounds.
We thrust desperately at first, but the bed starts to creak so we slow down. I pull halfway out, then push back in gradually, taking the time to pay attention to how she feels at every point.
Her panties still on her feels illegal, just as I suspected (hoped) it would, and I twist my fingers into the elastic to keep her tight against me while we fuck.
Then, because she did something similar once before, I take her hand and put it at the base of my cock—at the edge of where we meet—so she can feel what her body does to mine.
With that, she rides me to bliss.
The sight of her teeth sinking into her lip at the end does me in. I can’t contain myself anymore. I’m gone.
We both quietly wince, panting and grasping at each other.
Luckily there is still a tissue box in the room.
Dealing with the aftermath is tricky, but I peer into the hallway to make sure it’s all clear, then Harmony darts across to the bathroom with her thighs closed while also carrying her jeans. I sit awkwardly at my desk chair until she’s done, then we switch.
We go downstairs like nothing happened, but my brother gives me the side-eye and I have to literally bite my tongue to keep from grinning.
After a half hour or so of conversation and pleasantries—during which Rachel apologizes for her defensive behavior earlier—my family sends us off with two gallons of juice and a mesh bag full of misfit oranges.
On the way home, I take Harmony to the diner. A few customers—who are used to seeing me but not her—get excited, but after a quick selfie, they don’t bother us. We order milkshakes, and when I’m done with mine, I get a text from my mom.
MOM: Harmony is a keeper. Thanks for sharing her with us. Love you ??