“Of course I want to stay.”
She cupped the back of my head, fitting her thumb just under my ear as she dragged me down to her. This close, I could feel the trip of her heart, and tenderness welled inside me.
“You don’t owe me anything,” I husked out. “What happened at the meadow… If you don’t want this, we don’t have to—”
“Arthur.” Her voice dropped a register, and she shook her headslowly, the tip of her nose teasing mine. Behind her, the colorful pots of garden herbs swelled and stretched. “I do. I want this.”
I stared, letting the words crack open inside me, like seeds in fallow soil. Pleasure warmed the center of my chest, and I pushed away my instinct to flee.
I let myself be wanted.
“You do?”
Eva nodded. “I want so much from you it hurts.”
She looked so vulnerable in her confession. She looked so brave.
“Come on.” Knitting our fingers, she walked backward, leading me toward the greenhouse. I nearly tripped over my feet to keep up with her determined pace, a laugh huffing out of me.
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Fixing things.”
“What—”
Eva cut off my question. “Do you remember the day we met?” she asked, pushing the door open and dragging me in with her. I flashed to the meadow, to the way she’d pushed me against the door, cool against my feverish skin, rain scudding down her arms and the damp of that old sweatshirt.
Eva pulled me forward a few steps, then stopped. “It was right here,” she said softly.
“I remember. Your rake broke my nose.”
“And you refused to let me apologize,” she said with a grin. “You didn’t want to know me then.”
My heart beat hard in my chest. “I want to know you now, bee girl.” I moved one of my hands back into her loose waves, grasping her nape. The bow of her lips was ripe and pink, like something to pluck and devour. When I kissed along the ridge of her jaw, Eva sighed.
The smell of the sun on her skin assaulted my senses. I tugged her hair at the roots, tilting her head back as I planted warm, open-mouthed kisses down her neck. “I tried to stop wanting you.”
“Me too,” Eva whispered.
Maybe it was the wild honey lingering in my system, or the throb of her pulse and the spark of desire heating between us, but something in the roomchanged.I felt it before I looked up and saw the sway of potted herbs stretching new growth out in thin blades of bright green. My nose filled with the smell of summer. It was mortars and pestles, freshly ground basil, the bleed of petals down scissor blades as Eva prepped her worktable for some new infusion she wanted to try.
“And did you?” I asked softly. “Stop wanting me?”
Her swallow transfixed me, the way it moved down her throat in delicious confession. I wanted to eat it, to suck the skin until she was strawberry red, bruised and wanted and mine. Maybe I was depraved. Maybe all the time we’d lost was catching up to me at once, waking my baser desires. She made me want to worship things. The sun. The soil. Her.
“I thought I had,” Eva said. “Until you came back.”
My eyes shuttered. “I’m sorry I left.”
“I know.”
This time would be different. I was already different, because of her. Long after I’d left, the memory of her had become my anchor whenever I’d felt myself slipping back into the dark. It wasn’t just how I’d loved her. She’d woken up my hunger for life and made me believe, deep down, that I was worth my own fight.
She’d made me want to live again.
Eva slipped her hand beneath my shirt, so near to where the sprout had bruised my ribs. Her eyes shone with questions. “It’sokay,” I murmured, not wanting to discuss my tithe. Instead, I took her by the hips and swung her so her back faced the counter.
Ours had been a soft love, and I’d often let Eva lead. Something in the bite of her nails told me she didn’t want that right now. Maybe I didn’t either. For the first time, I trusted myself to fully let go and need her irreverently. I wanted to be hers again, to show her how well she undid me with a single command.
