In the Weeds

Beckett


March

"Do you plan on coming back to bed?"

Her voice is raspy with sleep, and she has a hickey at the base of her throat, a deep purple bruise that I can't stop staring at. She stretches her arms above her head, and the sheet slips half an inch, the swell of her breasts rising from beneath. I want to catch that sheet in my teeth and drag it down until she's bare beneath me. I want a hundred other things too.

I shake my head from where I'm perched on the desk in the corner of the room and take another sip of coffee instead.

Restraint, I tell myself. Have some goddamn restraint.

She smirks at me.

"Oh, I get it." She drops her hands back down, one twisting through her hair, the other slipping beneath the sheets. One eyebrow arches high in invitation. "You like to watch."

I'm pretty sure I'd like just about anything with Evie. I want all that black silky hair wrapped around my fist, that smiling mouth at my neck. Last night she spent twenty-two minutes tracing the tattoo across my bicep with her mouth, and I want that too. I want to return the favor with the freckles on the inside of her wrist and the marks at her hips.

I push off the desk and set my cup to the side. I step toward the bed and watch the movement of her hand. She swipes it low across her stomach, a wicked smile on her pretty face. I plant my knee on the bed and find her ankle, her bare foot dangling off the edge.

"I love to watch," I tell her as I grip her thigh and make room for my body between her long legs. I drop a kiss to the inside of her knee, and her whole body shivers. I drop another kiss just above it. "But I like to touch more."

A finger digs into my ribcage as I'm violently yanked from my favorite daydream.

"Are you paying attention?"

My knee jolts and my boot catches on the chair in front of me, sending Becky Gardener rocking precariously to the side. She curls her hands around the edges with a white-knuckled grip and shoots me a look over her shoulder. I fix my attention on my boots and mumble an apology.

"I'm paying attention," I tell Stella, and swat her hand away.

Kind of. Not really. There are too many people in this room. All of the business owners in town are sandwiched together in the conference space at the rec hall, an old room that I'm pretty sure is used to store Easter decorations, if the slightly terrifying six-foot bunny in the rear corner is any indication. It smells like stale coffee and hairspray, and the ladies from the salon haven't stopped cackling since they stepped through the door. It's like sitting cross-legged in the middle of a parade while the drumline marches around me. All of the sound pulls my shoulders tight, an itch of discomfort pricking at my neck.

And I keep making eye contact with that bunny.

I don't usually come to these types of things, but Stella had insisted. You wanted to be a partner, she said. This is what partners do.

I thought being a partner meant I could buy the fancy fertilizer without checking with anyone, not attending meetings that serve absolutely no purpose. There's a reason I chose a job where I spend seventy-five percent of my day outside.

Alone. In the quiet.

I struggle with talking to people. Struggle with coming up with the right words in the right sequence at the right moment. Every single time I go into town, I feel like everyone is looking right at me. Some of that is in my head, I know, but some of it is-some of it is Cindy Croswell pretending to fall in the aisle at the pharmacy just so I have to help her up again. Or Becky Gardener from the school asking me if I can host a field trip while eyeing me up like I'm a rare steak with a side of potatoes. I've got no idea what goes on half the time I'm in town, but I feel like people lose their damn minds.

"You're not paying attention," Layla chimes in from my right, legs crossed and hand rummaging around in the giant bowl of popcorn she brought with her. Layla runs the bakery at the farm, while Stella holds down the tourism and marketing sides of things. Since Inglewild is the size of a postage stamp and Stella has a bone-deep urge to make Lovelight Farms a cornerstone of the community, we're now expected to be involved in a lot of town business.

I don't even know what this meeting is about.

"Where did the popcorn come from?" I deflect.

I glance at the gargantuan bag stuffed under Layla's chair. I know for a fact there's some brownies and half a box of crackers in there. She says the Inglewild bimonthly small business owner's meeting is a drag without a snack, and I'm inclined to agree. Not that she's offered to share.

Layla circles one finger right in front of my face and ignores my question. "You have that moony look on your face. You're thinking about Evelyn."

"Am not." I sigh and roll my shoulders, desperate to relieve the tension that sits between them. "I was thinking about the pepper crop," I lie.

I'm distracted. I've been that way since two hazy nights in August. Sweat-slicked skin. Hair like midnight. Evie St. James had smelled like sea salt and tasted like citrus.

I haven't had my head on straight since.

Layla rolls her eyes and crams another handful of popcorn into her mouth. "Okay, sure. Whatever you say."

Stella reaches across me and snatches the bowl out of Layla's hands. "They're getting ready to start. If we could pretend to be professional, that would be great."

I raise both eyebrows. "For the town meeting?"

"Yes, for the town meeting. The one in which we are currently in attendance."

"Ah, yes. Always very professional."

At the last town meeting, Pete Crawford tried to filibuster Georgie Simmons during a vote on new parking restrictions in front of the co-op. He had reenacted Speed, complete with props and voices.

Stella levels me with a look and turns back to the front of the room with the bowl in the crook of her arm. Layla shimmies closer and rests her chin on my shoulder. I sigh and look up at the heavy wooden beams that cut across the ceiling and pray for patience. There's a deflated balloon stuck up there, probably left over from the Valentine's Day event the town had last month. A speed-dating thing, I think. My sisters had tried to make me go, and I locked myself in my house and turned off my phone. I stare at the balloon and frown. A faded red heart, deflated and stuck, string wrapped around and around.

"Have you talked to her since she left?" Layla asks.

A couple of times. A bland text sent in the middle of the night after one too many beers. A generic response. A picture from her of an open field, somewhere out there in the world, a line of text that said, Not as nice as your farm but still pretty nice. I had fumbled my phone into the dirt when that message came through, my thumb tracing back and forth over her words like it was her skin instead.

A social media influencer. An important one, apparently. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that. Over a million followers. I looked her up one night when the silence of my house felt suffocating, my thumb tapping at the screen of my phone. I checked her account and couldn't stop staring at that little number at the top.

I never checked her account again.

I've had one-night stands before. Plenty of them. But I can't get Evie out of my head. Thinking about her is like a hunger in the hollow of my stomach, a buzzing just under my skin. We spent two nights together in Bar Harbor. I shouldn't-I don't know why I still see her when I close my eyes.

Twisted up in bedsheets. Hair in my face. That half smile that drove me crazy.

"I was thinking about peppers," I say again, determined to hold on to this lie. It's best not to give Layla an inch. She'll take a mile and the shirt off your back for the trouble of it. I grew up with three sisters. I can sense the inquisition like a wind change.

"Your face does not say you're thinking about peppers. It says you're thinking about Evelyn."

"Stop looking at my face."

"Stop making the face you're making, and I'll stop looking at it."

I sigh.

"I just think it's a shame, is all." Layla reaches across me and grabs another handful of popcorn, and a kernel lands in my lap. I flick it off and hit Becky Gardener right in the back of the head. Christ. I wince and sink farther in my chair. "You two seemed to hit it off."

What we seemed to do is circle each other like two skittish kittens. After I went to visit her at the bed-and-breakfast, I promised I'd give her a wide berth to do her job. It had been harder than I expected, keeping that promise. Seeing her standing among the rows and rows of trees on the farm, a smile on her face, her hands passing over the branches-well, it was like taking a baseball bat to the face. Repeatedly. But the contest meant everything to Stella, and I wasn't about to ruin our chances with a . . . with a . . .

A crush? A flirtation?

I don't even know what.

All I know is that it was a challenge for me to be around her. I couldn't stop thinking about my body curled around hers. The way the skin just below her ear tasted. How it felt to have all that hair brush against my jaw, my shoulders, the tops of my thighs. I found myself wanting to make her laugh, wanting to talk to her.

I can count on one hand the number of people I want to talk to.

But we figured it out, settled into a routine while she was here. Cordial conversation and polite nods. A single slice of shared zucchini bread on a quiet afternoon-plenty of space between us. That same electric current that tugged us together at a dive bar in Maine knit slowly back together into a thin thread of connection.

And then she left. Again.

And unfortunately for me, I still haven't figured out how to stop thinking about her.

"What kind of peppers?"

I shake my head once, trying to pry loose an image of Evelyn standing in between two towering oak trees on the edge of the property, her face in profile and tilted toward the sky. The sun had painted her in shimmering golds, leaves fluttering lightly around her. I clear my throat and adjust my position in the folding chair, my knee knocking sideways into Layla's. I'm way too big for these chairs, and there are too many damn people in this room. "What?"

"What type of peppers are you planting? I haven't seen any markers for peppers out in the field."

The back of my neck goes hot. "You never go out in the fields."

"I'm in the fields every day."

She walks through the fields, sure, on the way to the bakehouse, situated smack-dab in the middle of them. But she never finds herself in the produce crop. Not unless she needs something. I scratch at my jaw, frustrated. I'd bet my savings she finds something she needs out there tomorrow morning.

"Bell," I manage between clenched teeth.

Shit, now I need to go out and plant bell peppers.

Layla hums, eyes alight with mischief. "What color?"

"What?"

"What color bell pepper"-she puts an annoying emphasis on the words-"have you planted?"

"He planted red bell peppers in the southeast fields in two rows next to the zucchini. Which you will get absolutely none of if you do not pay attention," Stella snaps.

Layla and I both glance at her in shock. It's not like Stella to get aggravated. Not to mention that is . . . not a true statement. And we both know it.

Some of the steel melts out of her shoulders and she slumps, handing Layla her popcorn bowl. "Sorry. I'm stressed."

"Clearly," Layla says with a laugh, hand back to rummaging around in her snacks. Her eyes find mine and hold, narrowing until all I can see is a glimpse of hazel. She still has some jelly in her hair from baking earlier today. Strawberry, by the looks of it. She points her finger right between my eyebrows and taps me there once. "Don't think I'm going to forget about this."

I swat her hand away. She could persist on this topic for the next six months for all I care. It'll just sound like background noise.

I turn my attention to Stella and wedge my boot against hers. She stops the nervous tapping of her foot and grimaces. "Sorry."

"Nothing to apologize over." I shrug and scan the edges of the room. "Luka not coming?"

If Luka were here, he'd smooth his hand between her shoulder blades, and she'd melt like butter. They were like that before they got together, and it took them a stupidly long time to see what was right in front of them. I didn't win the townwide betting pool, but it was close. Gus over at the fire station hasn't shut up about it, going as far as making a plaque to hang above the ambulance bay at the firehouse. It says Inglewild's Top Matchmaker, like he had anything to do with Luka and Stella orbiting each other for close to a decade. I slip down farther in my seat and try to rearrange my legs so I actually fit in this damn chair.

"He's on his way," she says, eyes darting to the door and holding like she can make him appear by sheer force of will. A hand pushes tangled black curls off her face. "But he's running late."

"He'll be here," I assure her. Pretty sure Luka wouldn't miss this for anything. Even if his tiny Italian mother and all her ferocious sisters were blocking the door. If he said he'd come, he'll be here.

"Hey." I lower my voice and lean closer, conscious of Layla still snacking away on my right. She's started tossing pieces up in the air and catching them in her mouth. Accurate every time. "I didn't plant any bell peppers."