Our shoulders brush while we work side by side in the quiet. My skin lights up like someone took a match to my kitchen.
“These need about a day to dry.” I glance at Jack. “He’s ready for duty.”
Rhys laughs but stares down at my tank top and shorts. “Are you going to change your clothes? The temperature dropped.”
With my body humming next to him, it feels like a furnace in here. I glance at the counter-top organizer that holds a calendar. Noting the date and the time, along with the cloud cover that rolled late this afternoon, my brain computes that it’s probably forty-seven degrees outside.
“Right. I’ll just be a minute.” I pop into my bathroom and change into jeans and a sweater since my apartment is all one room except for the raised alcove for my bed.
By the front door, Rhys helps me into my coat. He snatches the carved pumpkin and carries it for me, too. I follow, swinging a bag of candles. After a quiet elevatorride, we step outside where the air bites as cold as I imagined. We walk around the corner to Neverland Garden.
“It’s through here.” I unlock the gate.
Fallen leaves crunch under our feet, but when we reach my plot, my stomach drops.
The man who harasses me stands there, bent trowel in hand, cigarette glowing between his yellow teeth as he barks into a phone, “Damn city with their ridiculous regulations. Fuck them. And fuck their permits, too. I don’t need one.”
“What are you doing?” I snap and reach for the hand spade I always keep in my jacket, visions of violence dancing in my head.
“Taking over your plot,” he snaps, raising the trowel, pathetically plunging it into some hardened dirt in my garden. “To expand my cannabis operation.”
“No!” I rush forward. “You can’t.”
“Back off, psycho. I’m running a serious business. You’re planting nonsense.”
Rhys steps in front of me so smoothly, it’s like his shadow moved before his body. “What the fuck did you call her?”
The man snorts. “Where did you dig this guy up?”
Rhys’s nostrils flare like he’s holding back a beast who wants out of his body.
“Get the fuck away from her plants,” he says, low and dangerous. “Or I’ll make sure you never walk again.”
“Go away, you tall freak.” The guy stabs the dirt dangerously close to my Christmas plants. “Before I get the shears and cut off all that hair.”
“Come here, you little prick. I’d love to see you try to say that again, this time up close,” Rhys murmurs, taking deliberate steps until the man stumbles back into a bag of soil.
“Rhys?” I whisper, touching his arm.
He turns to face me and blinks like seeing me wrenches him from somewhere dark, and he forgot I was here.
Softer, quieter, snapping out of his coiled anger, he rasps, “Turn around, Fallon.”
“I’m not?—”
“Do what I tell you.” His voice is lethal. “I don’t want you to see this.”
Rhys spins me around, but I peek and see him grab the guy by the collar and slam him into the one solid brick wall that borders the garden. The sound of the impact is ugly.
Now I can’t look away.
The man spits blood and coils back. “Hey, man, this has nothing to do with you.”
“Yes, it does. That’s my girlfriend andhergarden you’re fucking with.” Rhys drags him into the narrow alley behind the rows of garden plots, their souls disappearing into the kind of darkness I’ve avoided my whole life.
Iwantto see what Rhys does to him, but a sharp crack of bones triggers panic inside me. Familiar sounds from my past. I kneel in the dirt, my hands steady despite the thunder of my heart.
I focus on fixing what the guy ruined.
