Chapter 28 rire dans sa barbe
rire dans sa barbe
Thunder rumbled in the distance as I escaped out of the Rose Court.
There was a thundercloud approaching, dark like a bruise. A violent wind rippled across the gardens, bringing with it a wave of petals and leaves.
The door appeared again in the Wildflowers, as if asking me to go back inside.
I ignored it. My mouth was throbbing, the taste of strawberries still sweet on my tongue.
I knew it was childish, and that Rus needed help, but I figured that I could help tomorrow.
I needed time to think about what had happened—or to stop thinking, I guess.
To forget how he kissed me, and how I ran away.
And the look on his face, like he feared he was the reason.
Of course he wasn’t.
It was me. It was always me.
As I escaped into the Central Garden, Juliette called me from the veranda, and I went to go say goodbye to her for the evening.
Shake it off, I told myself, as I climbed the steps to her.
Juliette was in a disastrously good mood, which made me feel even worse.
As it turned out, she was going on another date with Dentist Myke with a y, and she was positively glowing at the idea of being the one to pay this time.
“We’re going to that Italian place,” she gushed, “and I think he’s going to make it official!”
“That’s great,” I replied, wondering if I could excuse myself to my cottage, and crawl into my bed, and never leave again.
She sighed happily. “It is, isn’t it?”
And then she floated away to her happily ever after or whatever kind of night she was about to have.
I ignored the door three more times before golden hour ended, and each time it was in a place I didn’t expect, in corners increasingly more random, as if it was desperate for me to go inside.
But I was desperate not to.
When I returned to the groundskeeper’s cottage, I sank down at the table. My mouth still felt raw from our kiss, the sound of his breath in my ears, his hands cupping my cheeks, muttering about how I tasted—
“Stop it, Soph,” I told myself. “You’ll be gone soon. It’s not worth it.”
The Magic 8 Ball sat in the middle of the table. I started to reach for it, like I always did when I was unsure, but then I stopped myself because I wasn’t sure I wanted to be wrong. Not that I was.
So I forced myself to my feet. I made a cucumber salad for dinner.
I scrolled endlessly on my phone, happening upon social media posts from coworkers and people I’d dated and college friends, during birthday parties and anniversaries and banal workdays, snapshots of life.
On my feed, Sanchez’s announcement finally came up, and that reminded me that I had never responded to him. I needed to do that, at least.
Congrats on everything, I texted. I hope you have a great life—and I mean that. You deserve it. <3
I wasn’t sure if I meant it, but I wanted to. So I sent the text and went to take a scalding shower.
I ate a chocolate for dessert.
Sanchez texted me back. You deserve that, too, Soph. Have a good life.
A good life. What did that even mean to me?
Was that a long career at the New York Botanical Garden? Was it published papers in National Geographic? Was it a cozy house in the woods with a small garden that kept getting eaten by rabbits? A white picket fence in a neighborhood where every house had two point five kids?
My entire life, I hadn’t planned very far ahead because I hadn’t seen the point. When I was little, I was always moving, and when I was an adult the world kept changing faster than I could think up a dream.
But I wanted a good life, whatever that meant.
I wanted that so badly.
It was why I couldn’t let myself have it—even if I couldn’t get the kiss out of my head.
Did I do the right thing? I wanted to ask the 8 Ball, though I was afraid the die would tumble onto an answer I didn’t like.
I picked up the toy and set it down three different times.
I wished I could talk to Harrie, but I made do, finally, when I picked up the 8 Ball for the fourth time, and asked it, “I made the right choice, didn’t I?”
And I shook it.
The die tumbled and tumbled in its blackish liquid—
The sound of my phone going off distracted me. I blinked, coming back to myself, and abandoned the 8 Ball on the table to answer.
“Hello?” I greeted without looking at the caller ID, figuring it was Mom.
It wasn’t.
“I need you,” Juliette’s voice warbled. She sounded like she was crying. “I hate men. I hate all of them.”
“Where are you? What happened?” I asked, snapping myself back to the moment.
Juliette’s date took her to the Hook, the Italian restaurant down in Odette, and halfway through the dinner told her that he was seeing someone else and had decided to go monogamous with them instead. Then, to add insult to injury, he still expected her to pay for dinner.
Of course she did, but she couldn’t stomach him driving her home so she demanded that he leave her at the restaurant.
She’d get home some other way. The closest Uber was thirty minutes away, and it was storming too badly for her to walk back to the boathouse she rented, so I told her I’d be there in twenty.
I wasn’t sure I could comfort her—I was never good at dating. I didn’t do it often. I didn’t know what she needed, what would help, but there was no one else to call, either.
“I don’t want to stay h-here,” she said with a sniffle. “Pick me up at the Wharf?”
The town’s only bar. Where there were drinks.
Drinking I could do.
So I hurriedly put on some jeans and a ratty old college T-shirt, grabbed my Jeep keys, and hurried out the door. I should have brought an umbrella—or at least my raincoat—because by the time I got to the parking lot, it was pouring here, too.
The drive down into Odette took maybe ten minutes, and I white-knuckled it the whole way, plotting how best to murder Myke with a y, dentist idiot extraordinaire. At least it distracted me from Rus.
The trees bent ominously as the storm came in, lightning crawling across the skies like centipedes. Driving anywhere in this kind of storm was reckless. Maybe it would be best to stay at the Wharf until most of the weather blew over.
I could use a drink after a day like today, anyway, because in my head I kept replaying his kisses. The way he cradled my face. The way he had whispered against my lips—
I have been starving, I think.
The words curled hungry and hot in my belly. Something I wasn’t accustomed to. Something that scared me in its intensity—scared me not because I was afraid of it, but because I wasn’t.
Not in the way I told myself to be.
“Stop it,” I muttered, curling my hands around the steering wheel tighter.
I found street parking for the dive bar and ran inside. Not that it mattered—even though I’d just taken a shower, I was muddy, wet, and sweaty. Again.
A work of art, obviously.
There weren’t many people in the Wharf, thankfully, aside from a group of men playing pool and Wykofski with his banjo and his hodgepodge band, all looking like he got them from Craigslist that morning, so Juliette was easy to spot at the bar, drawing flowers into the condensation on her beer bottle.
She’d ordered two beers already and had requested One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful” from Wykofski, and apparently every other hit song from their discography.
The bartender looked like he was debating whether he was in a horror movie or a rom-com.
Neither, sadly.
I came up to the bar and climbed onto the stool beside Juliette. She didn’t look terribly destroyed, only a little wet and sad. “Hi there,” I greeted her gently.
She glanced over at me, then returned to morosely drawing flowers on her bottle. “Hi,” she mumbled.
I shifted on the barstool. “Wykofski’s kinda good, isn’t he?”
“He’s great. He’s always great,” she said dourly, and huffed, wiping the flowers away with her thumb. “I feel so dumb, Sunny.”
“You are not dumb,” I told her.
“Mmh.”
“He’s dumb.”
“He’s not dumb.”
“And neither are you,” I said adamantly.
She lowered her head. “Thank you.”
I motioned to the bartender for a drink and told Juliette we should stay awhile.
There was a storm raging outside, after all, and I drove a Jeep.
“Not very seaworthy,” I added in all seriousness, and ordered two shots of whatever was cheapest, because even working as the head gardener of a historic house and garden didn’t pay as much as you’d think.
The bartender poured us two shots of cheapass Jimmie Beam, and I slid over my credit card to open a tab. I raised my shot glass, and so did Juliette. In the corner, Wykofski howled about “Night Changes.”
“To hoping all of Myke with a y’s teeth rot out,” I declared.
“Cavity-pocalypse,” she agreed.
We clinked our glasses and downed them.
I winced at the taste. It never got better, not in college, and certainly not now.
On the other hand, Juliette took it without a blink.
I had a feeling she could drink many of the men here under the table.
She seemed like the unexpected person who could.
Harriett loved surprises like that—people who you assume one thing of, but it turns out you were wrong.
She loved being wrong. It was ironic, really, because she rarely was.
When I first met Juliette, she reminded me of Harrie in how different they were. Cherry ChapStick instead of mint, kitten heels instead of sensible flats, bright colors instead of muted tones. They were like reflections of each other in a funhouse mirror.
They would’ve either loved each other or hated each other, with no middle ground.
“Do you think we could get away with murder?” asked Juliette, pulling her blond hair into a half ponytail. “Just a small one.”
“Probably,” I replied with a reassuring smile.
She laughed, knowing I wasn’t serious. Of course not. Though if anyone could get away with murder, it would be a gardener. We knew how to bury things and keep them hidden.