"Would it help if I threw you over my shoulder right now and carried you back to the truck?"
My belly flipped. I wasn't the kind of woman anyone threw over their shoulder. No one even joked about that sort of thing with me. "You wouldn't."
"I would. I'd smack that ass while I had the chance too." He drew his hand down my spine to settle, once again, on my backside. "You were in my shower. All week. Do you know how many times I turned around? How many times I almost went home? How much I wanted to walk in there and, fuck…just watch?"
The hard shaft nudging my thigh suggested the number was greater than zero. And that wasn't the worst thing in the world. "Why didn't you?" I asked.
"Because we'd established the rules and I wasn't about to break them until I knew you'd want me breaking them. Until you were ready for me to break them."
So precise.
"I never pay much attention to rules. I look for ways to get around them."
He smoothed his hands down my sides and back up. "That's a solid argument for me to respect them even more."
"You might be right."
I hadn't been desired—not in a non-sexually-harassing way—in a dreadfully long time. I'd stopped believing I could be desired like this.
But that was one stop too far on the self-discovery train.
I wanted it, I wanted Linden's interest and attention. And I wanted to be pressed up against trees and kissed silly, to be playfully kidnapped, to be thrown over his shoulder, to be smacked on the ass. Though I couldn't experience any of those wants until my world stopped spinning. I'd just now—this afternoon!—turned clear eyes on my life and I had to understand what I was seeing before I allowed it to get blurry again.
"We're losing the light," Linden said. "And god forbid you get your shoes muddy. We better go."
We untangled ourselves from our embrace and walked side by side back to the main trail, our hands linked. Linden pointed out birds and commented on the trees, which were young or old, healthy or declining, native or non-native. He didn't seem to mind that I was only half listening. He might've been giving this guided tour for that exact reason, considering he rarely spoke more than necessary. With every murmur and nod I offered him, another newly distilled realization sounded in my head.
You only stayed in that job because you didn't know what else to do.
You stayed because Timbrooks let you do whatever you wanted.
You stayed because you didn't want to start over, didn't want to work your way up all over again.
You stayed because you felt important there.
You stayed because you wanted to prove to your family you were better and smarter and more capable than they said you'd ever be.
You stayed because you wanted to prove it to yourself. Because you wanted to believe it.
We returned to Linden's house and there was no debate as to whether I was coming inside with him.
There was stew in the fridge, he'd said by way of explanation.
We'd have stew and we wouldn't talk about any of my confessions, I'd decided. Though I didn't say it, Linden picked up that signal without a problem. From the moment we stepped inside, he chattered on about a golf course on Cape Cod he visited frequently because they insisted on planting trees that didn't belong in this region, the baseball game he recently attended with his siblings, and something about neighborhood Halloween festivities.
I leaned against the countertop while he poured the stew into a cast-iron pot to warm and went on about the baseball season and how it was running long this year. Everything he said hit me about ten seconds after he said it, as if my brain was stretched beyond the point of withstanding regular conversation. I knew it was happening because he'd stare at me expectantly in moments when I was due to react or respond but I'd only blink at him.
"What was that?" I asked. "I'm sorry. I didn't catch the last part."
"No worries," he murmured, setting several muffin-y things on a baking sheet. "I just asked if you like popovers."
I pointed at the sheet. "Those are popovers, I take it?"
"Yeah. My mom bakes them whenever she's cooking stew. She believes it to be a symbiotic relationship." He cocked his head to the side, frowned. "Are popovers not a thing in the South?"
"I can't speak for the whole of the South but they're not a thing where I'm from."
Nodding, he shoved the tray into the oven. "They won't be as stunningly bad as your cupcakes so you might not like them."
"It's a risk I'll have to take."
Linden pulled a bottle of wine from the fridge and I decided it was pure coincidence he had the same bottle I was drinking last week on hand. Lots of people drank sauvignon blanc. It was nothing. This was nothing.
"Would you like a glass?" he asked.
"Please." I wanted to cross the kitchen and stand beside him while he prepared the meal, letting our hands and hips bump as we worked together. I wanted to drop my head onto his shoulder and be content for one minute. I wanted to wrap my arms around this thick torso and bury my face in his shirt. I wanted to crawl into his lap and let him hold me. I wanted to link my arm with his, tip my head toward the bedroom, and let him lead me there. I wanted to be the person who asked for those things without talking myself out of it, without convincing myself he'd refuse me. Without believing I didn't want or need it. "So, this stew. Does your mother cook for you frequently?"
He barked a laugh into the refrigerator as he reached for a beer. "Hardly. I mean, she always has a freezer full of soups and casseroles and will send me home with twenty pounds of rice if I'm not careful."
"And somehow you ended up with half a dozen popovers and a week's worth of stew."
He rolled his eyes. "My mother was in rare form today. I took a lot more than stew."
"What does that mean?"
"Some of the shrubs in her yard died over the summer—that drought was a bitch—so I agreed to meet her at a garden center to pick out replacements. To say my mother is a kid in a candy shop when it comes to garden centers would be an insult to kids. My mother doesn't care whether a tree is too big for her land or she doesn't have room for more potted plants. She will buy it all and then she'll get back to the house and holler at me to make it work for her."
"The next time you accompany her on one of these shopping trips, I'd really love to come along. I won't say a word, I just want to watch."
"You're hilarious." He tapped his beer bottle against my wineglass. No disasters occurred this time. "But here I am, thinking I'm along to help with the shrubs, and she busts out with all this—" He stopped himself, taking a deep pull of his beer. "Well, she had a lot of little things she wanted to share with me and then she casually says she and my father are having a fortieth anniversary party because they don't want to wait in case either of them die before they hit their fiftieth."
An unpleasant wheezing noise came up from my chest. "Oh. Oh, wow. That's—"
"It's fucking nuts," he said. "And, like, do I need to think about my parents dying sometime in the next ten years? No, I really don't. That's what we have my brother for. He's the one who handles that shit. Not me."