Page 17
Still annoyed he did it, though. Even as light spills across the patch I’m working on, grounding me in my surroundings, and I tug the sheeting into place and move onto the next without checking every shadow for who knows what. Even as I reach the end of my rope for poly-tunnels and retreat to the house to take a shower in a bathroom that doesn’t flood every time I use it.
Should’ve let his boys do the kitchen.
Because once I’m clean, I’m hungry, but I’m tired too, and I don’t feel like lighting a fire. Or digging out the gas stove I’ve lost track of since I moved here for good a few weeks ago.
So I eat bread and cheese like a Hobbit, cherries from the healthy trees in the orchard, and snaffle some early strawberries. Though not too many. They need to go to market when the crop comes good. Everything does. The farm needs to pay for itself or it’ll fall on my head long before the barn does.
A thought that draws me to the hedgerows.
They’re thick with elderflower, crowding the lanes and spilling into the fields, claiming the space with an abundance most farmers cut down and discard. Not me, though. It’s not the Whitlock way, and it feels like the heavy white flowers have been waiting for me all along. I brush my fingers through the blooms and the scent rises, floral, sweet, and familiar, pollen sticky on my fingers with the promise of easy money. Quick too, if I do it right.
Cordial. Infusions.
Gin.
My lips twist in a wry smile. Memory tied to it, cutting through my thoughts. Heat that washes over me at the near-perfect recollection of a kiss I can’t shake loose—I can’t replace, and trust me, I’ve tried. With easy, uncomplicated hookups. Faces and bodies that don’t linger in my mind any longer than I need them to. Moments that start and end where I choose.
This moment doesn’t.
Hasn’t since Lithuanian lips claimed mine two summers ago and I feel him again, broad and solid, pressed against me, inked skin alive to my touch, muscles shifting in the dark. Eyes warm with cinnamon and curiosity drinking in every second we spent together as if he knew his memories of that night might hit him one day as visceral as mine do now.
Oscar.
I see him so clearly I’m half convinced I remember his voice, a sound I’ll never hear. And yet it lives low and steady in my chest, and carries me all the way to the western boundary of the farm, where the lane meets the road and a car idles in the lay-by.
German.
Grey.
Dinosaur sticker stuck crooked in the back window.
I slow, tilting my head and squinting into the night.
Know that car—
No. I remember it. Parked on gravel with the noisy muscle bikes, sunlight catching the ceramic paint. Then later, tucked away in the shadows of Moondust Farm as if it belonged there.
It didn’t.
And it doesn’t belong here either. I’m seeing things—it happens, sometimes. Not hallucinations, more that my imagination overcompensates for everything I’ve lost.
Daydreams on steroids.
Level-ten wishful thinking, but the nearer I get, the less there is to argue with. The car stays grey, the sticker stays where it is, and the dinosaur remains as stark and green as the first time I saw it.
Details.
They matter.
But as fast as I clock them, they blur and fade into the background, obsolete and irrelevant in the face of a sight etched too deeply into my memory to be anything but real.
Oscar.
Leaning against his car, tall enough he seems to hunch a little to fold himself into the space between the sandy road and the night sky. Strong shoulders curled in. One arm braced on the metal while the other works closer to his body, to his abdomen, committed to an act I’ve seen before.
Insulin.
But something feels off.
