Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Kell
Machetes were cathartic.
Especially when you used them on grandfather vines.
Rare was the opportunity to take something toxic and eliminate it at the root; people just didn’t have that ability. Not in society, not in government, and certainly not in corporate environments.
Out here, hunting for grandfather vines and systematically debriding trees of them, one at a time, gave Kell a sense of purpose.
Vine removal was an arduous affair, one that could lead to third degree burns if he wasn’t careful.
Under his Tyvek suit, he wore silk long johns, jeans, and protective windbreaker pants.
Triple gloves to his elbows, he had multiple layers for maximum effect.
The trick to killing a grandfather vine was to cut it low, at the base of the tree, then paint only the exposed ends from the cut with poison ivy herbicide. While Kell was no fan of commercial plant poisons, in this case, he could use as little as a few milliliters to do the trick.
Now finished hacking the vine, he pulled out a tiny paintbrush and a little glass container of herbicide.
After carefully layering the herbicide on the open vine, he placed the brush and the jar in three layers of ziplock bags, to be thrown away.
As much as he hated the waste, this wasn’t a job you could do without getting urushiol everywhere, so some trade-offs had to be made.
Done. Not a drop of poison on him, and he hadn’t touched the vine at all. Win-win.
After a few weeks, the herbicide would soak in fully, weakening the vine. Kell had cut and painted these vines in flights over the last few years, but this sucker had evaded him. In a few weeks, he’d return, just as carefully protected but with even stronger gloves.
Because the next step involved peeling the vines off the tree from the top down, using a ladder. He’d put them into a bag to be taken deep into the woods and tossed out onto the ground, the bag returned home to the trash.
This was rewarding work. He knew that the hair-like tentacles on the vines represented thousands of future vines that he was killing off, saving people from miserable rashes, reclaiming public space for his town.
Work didn't get any better than this.
Concrete and clear cut, he was doing good.
And doing good was in his blood.
“YOU!” someone screamed from off to his left, forcing him to look up and see Rachel storming toward him in a show of red.
Red coat, red face.
Red rage.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, marching around in a spacesuit in front of my presentation?”
Steam from the water rose between them, making the moment surreal.
“What?” Her words were a bit muffled by the helmet he wore, but he wasn’t about to touch it to take it off, unless he removed one of his layers of gloves. While he’d been careful, poison ivy oil was like a virus.
Designed to go everywhere and make life miserable.
“You heard me! Sashaying around in front of that window at the exact moment I was trying to close a deal. And you sabotaged me! What are you telling Boyce about me? And who else, Mr. Poison Ivy? Because you might be removing poison from the ground, but you’re spreading it all over this town when it comes to me! ”
She dropped her bag with a thud on a bench close to the water, then came back to him, standing right next to the tree he’d just been working on.
“And LOOK AT YOU,” she shouted, continuing her rant but glancing toward Love You Chocolate, making certain they were out of view. That’s when it hit him.
He’d done exactly what she was upset about. All of it.
Including the comment to Boyce.
“I’m surprised you’re not wearing a pink suit during your precious peak season!
I’ve never been in a place so sickly sweet and fakey fake.
All that time in D.C., when we’d make fun of Love You, you’d get grumpy about it, but it turns out we were right!
The people here are so close-minded. All about community,” she said, her voice dripping contempt, “but never thinking about how change could make this an even better community.”
“Change.” He huffed. “You mean change that benefits you. Not us.”
“This is NOT about ME! This is about a business deal, one you had no business sticking your nose in!”
“I warned Boyce,” he said, stripping off his outer layer of gloves. He set them carefully in an open brown paper bag he’d brought for storing anything with urushiol on it. Then he lifted his helmet off and set it on the bench next to–but not touching–her bag.
“Why?”
“Because I want what’s best for him and Lucinda, and you’re not trustworthy.”
“You personalized this? You sabotaged me because you still can’t let yourself be wrong about what happened five years ago? You’re literally destroying my career because your pride got hurt in D.C.? I had no idea you were such a weak man, Kell. Good grief.”
Weak man.
Weak man?
Those words out of her mouth were intolerable. Unacceptable.
Damnable.
And they dove straight into the source of his fear.
His chest expanded as he breathed harder. “It’s not weak to protect my town and the people I care about.”
It killed him to admit it to himself, but she was smoking hot right now, fierce and angry, in his face. Passion like that was never limited to one part of a person. She had every right to be pissed at him, but he had every right to warn Boyce.
The Rachel who was screaming at him wasn’t just upset that he’d sandbagged her.
She was upset that he’d hurt her feelings, too.
“Your motives aren’t pure! You’re poisoning them against me because you have a personal vendetta. You’re doing to me exactly what Alissa and John did to you in D.C., Kell! Backstabbing–can’t you see it?”
His skin tingled, hands and feet turning to lightning.
“You are so full of it, Rachel. The situations are nothing alike. Don’t you dare accuse me of that.”
“How is it different? It’s not. You’re just trying to protect your ego by denying it, and that’s weak. You’re intervening where you don’t belong, to ruin my career!”
“Where I don’t belong? Where I don’t… You’re literally standing on land that belonged to my great-great-great grandfather!
This is exactly where I belong, more than anywhere else in the world!
And you’re here as a corporate drone for Markstone's, looking for a hot business to turn into a profit center for a huge conglomerate. Get in, get out, and get what you want. You just want to use the company Lucinda built for your own benefit.”
Just like Alissa used him in D.C., with Rachel’s help.
“That’s not true!”
“You’re not here to benefit your boss? Or your boss’s boss’s boss? To improve some quarterly report so Markstone's can continue on with its world domination via chocolate?”
“I am here to do my job, but that doesn’t make me a less valuable human than you.”
He snorted. “Human. Hah. You’re nothing like the woman you used to be. The woman you were, before you schemed with Alissa.”
“I’m the way I am because of you!”
Kell stopped cold.
“Excuse me?” he said, struggling to keep the growl out of his voice.
“You heard me. And thank you, by the way. Sincerely. The way I used to be made me a target for people like Alissa.”
He almost interrupted her, but stopped because of something in her voice. Cold as steel, sharp enough to make a piece of him from the past bleed a little.
“I was so hurt that you didn’t trust me,” she said in a voice intended to make it sound like she didn’t care now. She added a little huffy laugh at the end, like that was a childish thing from a childish past, but he caught the truth in there.
He really had hurt her.
Deeply.
“I didn’t trust you because you hurt me.”
“See?” A harsh laugh poured out of her, and he wanted to unhear it, destroy it, to yeet it as far into the woods as possible, never to be heard again.
Because he had caused that harshness, and he hated the way that made him feel.
Every aspect of Rachel’s presence in his hometown was shredding him on the inside, too many warring factions pulling his heart in different directions. Could a heart be drawn and quartered? If so, she was doing it to him.
And it had to stop.
One way or another.
“You’re never, ever going to get out of this emotional prison you’ve created for yourself, Kell, and now you’re letting the poison inside you spill over into the town,” she tossed out, her voice going low and quiet, hitting him with more emphasis than her screaming.
“You’re turning this into my fault?”
“You never listened to me! Ever! At some point, you have to let go of the hurt you’re carrying around inside you, buddy, and let people tell you their experience. Otherwise, you’re just living in a cocoon, a miserable existence where you’re always right but you never get to really learn and love.”
Love. Did the word love just come out of her mouth?
“You’re preaching to me about love? Here?”
“For a guy whose name literally has the word love in it, you’re a pretty miserable person. And a jerk. And a backstabber. You turned half the town against me!”
“I did not!”
“If you told Boyce I’m not trustworthy, how fast will that get around in this gossip mill you call a town?”
She had a point.
“I did it for the town’s own good.”
“You did it because you hate me.”
Hate.
How had the words love and hate come out of her mouth so close together, and both directed at him?
And both so damned right?
“I don’t hate anyone, Rachel. You give yourself too much credit. You have to have strong feelings for someone to hate them. I feel nothing but apathy toward you.”
“Okay. If you say so.”
She leaned against the tree, her action too quick for him to stop her, the palm of her hand leaning flat against the open vine, her pants falling directly along the length of it.
“Rachel, stop!”
“No! I won’t stop, damn you! Quit telling me what to do! I have every right to say what I want to say, when I want to say it, and just because you hate me doesn’t mean–”
As she ranted at him, her hand rubbed against the vine again.
“STOP MOVING!”