Chapter 30
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in search of how-to-ignore-lust-and-NOT-love will do so in the form of tedious household projects.
DWINDLE’S FARMERS MARKET
RETURNS IN TWENTY FOURTEEN DAYS
The next few days were a blur of plants, regrets, and a lot of unnecessary cleaning in the middle of the night.
Hesper would wake me at an ungodly hour, and I would brace myself for a day in the garden.
There was no in-between with my magic so far.
It was either I played around in the dirt for hours on end with nothing to show, or my heart gave way ever so slightly and then a nestleberry bush the size of a small cottage would explode out of the ground.
The funniest part about all of it?
There were never any fruits or vegetables or blooms. Just leaves and stems. Even my radishes weren’t growing past their initial sprout stages.
Haha! What a fucking riot!
My lack of sleep was doing nothing to help matters.
There were a few nights… all right, several nights when I, too restless to sleep, would just lie on the giant reading chair, stewing in my thoughts. My mind wanted to slip back into old ways of thinking: not enough, you will fail everyone you care for…
But I’d promised to choose light. Even in darkness.
And the darkness felt thick in Dwindle. The sun took care to burn away the mist, but it always came back at night.
My windows would fog up, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that something pressed against the glass, desperate to come in.
Hesper assured me that Edge would alert her should anything be in the shadows.
My magic churned in my chest each evening, the sensation somewhere in between heartburn and heart nausea.
But when the sun rose, the feeling would dissipate, and I began to believe I must be making more of the mist than I should.
And to be honest, the feeling of impending doom was not why I was up at all hours of the night.
It was Hesper. Of course it was Hesper.
We spent every day together, and as much as I tried to fight my heart every day from growing toward her, I was losing miserably. I couldn’t even build a brittle fence around the thing anymore. But we had already discussed what would happen next. She had to return, and I… well, I would go home.
Still, I couldn’t stop dreaming of her. I would do anything to taste her body like she’d tasted mine. But instead of throwing my wits to the wind and knocking on her door in the middle of the night, inquiring something along the lines of “Art thou awake?” I opted for the natural next best thing.
One million middle-of-the-night projects.
I purchased robin’s-egg-blue paint and painted the day and night into the floorboards.
For then, in this cottage at least, the sun could be by her moon always.
From there, I moved on to painting the kitchen cabinets butter yellow, and then I took to the cottage walls themselves.
Each beam had simple floral designs now running across it.
Bundles of lavender, bunches of tulips, a few roses.
Everywhere a person looked, there was a small nook of whimsy hidden away.
The hearth was entirely pink now, with small sprigs of hyacinths painted here and there.
And suns and moons, of course. Because Hesper haunted my every waking thought.
No matter how much I painted her moonbeam soul, she never left my system.
I didn’t dare try to write. Hesper would be every line, every word, every stroke of my quill, every place I touched myself at night as I thought of her.
So, naturally, I tried to scrub the thought of her out instead.
Babette offered some cleaning supplies—lemons, sugar, and a soapy mixture to dissolve the stickiness of the sugar but keep the sweet scent.
When I asked her if she had anything other than lemons, she looked at me in surprise.
I couldn’t tell her that I needed another scent because Hesper smelled like lemons and spice, and if my cottage smelled like her than how would I ever escape the need for her?
I took the lemons.
Now, my cottage was covered in fractals of Hesper moons and her scent. A daily torture.
With each project came a lovely little chestnut from Hesper, like:
“Clara, it smells great in here!” She smiled, sniffing happily at the air.
“You illustrated Edge and Warty going on adventures on the hearth? Fantastic!”
“Oh my Goddess, I LOVE THE COLOR OF THE CABINETS!” she genuinely screamed.
And I love—
Don’t! Don’t you dare! I yelled at my heart.
“Do you?” I asked with a sardonic smile. “Well, isn’t that just great?” Then I broke whatever I was holding in my hand like an uncontrollable monster.
DWINDLE’S FARMERS MARKET
RETURNS IN TWENTY FOURTEEN NINE DAYS
I was quickly spiraling into an abyss of emotions. Canonically, this was not a good thing for me.
I wasn’t anxious. I wasn’t despondent. I wasn’t hopeless.
I was in something with Hesper and didn’t know what was to be done about it.
Because every morning when she woke me to train, she made me coffee just the way I liked it.
Then, she would go into town and fetch me pastries before spending her entire day instructing me on magic that she’d told me I had all along, and I’d fought her tooth and nail until the last possible second.
She remained steadfastly jovial and unendingly kind, and—most disconcertingly—I was starting to memorize her smiles.
There was the smile she wore first thing in the morning, when sleep still clung to her.
There was the side-tug smile when I exasperated her.
There was the wide-mouthed smile when she ate something particularly delicious.
And then, there was the smile that sometimes played on her face when I caught her looking at me. It was those smiles that made my heart wonder… What if?
I’d never dealt in what ifs. Those were for people who were braver than me. What ifs meant good things could come, sure. But the flip side of a what if was usually painful. I liked to live in I know.
With Hesper, though, the what if was harder to run away from.
DWINDLE’S FARMERS MARKET
RETURNS IN TWENTY FOURTEEN NINE FOUR DAYS
“You’re getting better,” she said, looking at the garden bed full of marigold plants with no blooms.
“I’m getting nowhere.” I threw my dirt-covered hands in the air. “Are people supposed to gnaw on pumpkin stems and marigold leaves? That’s an abhorrent salad.”
Warty, who had been skittering around my ankles all morning, made a retching sound and bumbled inside the cottage. Edge, who had just finished his sweep of the village, swooped in after him. Even they were giving up on me.
“Clara, you’ve only been at this for a short time. You will figure it out.” She tried to soothe me.
“We don’t have time, Hesper,” I said quickly.
“Time is not on our side. Whoever she is? She hates me, I’m sure of it.
Things in this garden either don’t grow at all, or they turn out like this—” I pointed to the massive nestleberry bush that had kept growing and produced nothing at all.
“I don’t know what else to do, I’ve tried everything. ”
Thunder sounded in the distance; a menacing gray cloud gathered on the horizon. A proper summer storm was brewing. Maybe the rain would encourage the plants to flower.
“Based on how things are going so far, it seems like you still have a block somewhere inside of you.”
“A block?”
“Yes, something preventing your magic from completing whatever you are willing it to do.”
“Let me ask you a question: You said heart magic is like a knitting basket, yes?” She nodded.
“Great, so for this block, can I just unravel the sweater up to that point and restart again? How deep does that metaphor go, Hesper? How cosmically aligned is this blockage? How many billions of small, insignificant things do I have to do to get rid of this block?” I was getting unnecessarily petty, my tone dripping in sarcasm.
It was also close to dinnertime.
So.
Hesper laughed, her damned exasperated smile on her face.
“It is more than likely a heart matter.” She shrugged. “And while I’d like to think that I’m doing my due diligence learning every bit of you, there are parts of you that will always vex me.”
And there are parts of you that I want to—
Shut it!
My heart went silent.
“Hello, ladies!” Angus was at the garden gate, a large parcel in hand. “I brought dinner and—is that some leaves I see?” He asked so excitedly, his voice sounded like bird chirps.
“Uh, yes,” I called out, heading down the garden lane and unlatching the gate. “Not much by way of fruits and things, but plenty of green.” I took the heavy package from him. It smelled of bacon and butter.
“Look at it! Things are growing! And Clara and Hesper.” He clapped his hands together, his voice verging on that of an overly proud father. “What a lovely color for a cottage, if I do say so myself.”
“Thank you, Angus,” Hesper said, relieving me of the package. “I’m glad you approve of the exterior design.”
“I really do, and the garden is immensely impressive as well.” He elbowed me.
“Yes, well, hopefully you’ll have more than giant bushes to chew on for the market,” I tried to joke.
“Ah, anything will do,” he said merrily.
Would it?
“Any news from town?” I asked, trying to change the subject. Hesper and I had been locked away at the cottage for days. Who knew what could have transpired in our training haze?
A gust of wind howled through the garden. The storm was fast approaching, and the golden sunset was morphing into darkness.