Different questions. Personal ones.
"So — Montana State?" she asked, crouched over a patch of lupine with her sketchpad on her knee.
"Entomology. Yeah."
"Right, right." She nodded. Too fast. She already had the answer. "And your family, they close by?"
"Parents in Billings. Brother in Missoula."
"Nate, right?"
My hands went still on the frame.
I hadn't told her my brother's name. Yesterday she'd been facedown in the dirt and I'd said maybe thirty words total, and not one of them was "Nate."
She caught the stillness because her pen stopped moving. "You — mentioned it yesterday," she said. Quick. Bright. "When we were talking."
"When you were on the ground."
"Yes. When I was on the ground. I'm pretty sure you said—" She was turning pink from her ears down to her collarbone and the flustered backpedal was almost distracting enough to make me miss the fact that she absolutely, definitely, knew my brother's name without being told.
Almost.
"Huh," I said. And went back to the frame.
I didn't push. But the way she asked questions — not casual, not curious, more systematic. It sat funny in my chest. My jaw tightened. My answers got shorter.
"How long have you been up here?" she tried. Breezy now. Steering.
"Six years."
"You like it? Being alone?"
I looked at her. She was watching me with those warm brown eyes and there was a weight behind the question that didn't match her light tone.
"I don't miss anything I left," I said.
Her lips parted. Closed. She looked at her sketchpad and started drawing with way too much focus for a woman sketching lupine.
By afternoon the sun had warmed enough that I'd stripped to a T-shirt. She'd unbuttoned her flannel and pushed up her sleeves. The combined effect of her bare forearms and the way her top clung when she leaned forward was actively destroying my ability to form thoughts. She was on her knees near the east hive cluster, sketching, and I was behind her trying very hard to look at the brood comb and not at the curve of her ass or her hips or the strip of skin where her shirt had ridden up above her waistband.
I was failing.
She rocked back on her heels and looked up at me. Dirt on her cheek. Braid half wrecked. Eyes bright. "The thing about cross-pollination," she said, "is you can't just throw any pollinator at any flower and expect results."
"That so."
"You have to match them." She stood up. Brushed her knees clean. Looked me dead in the eye. "The right pollinator for the right bloom. It's all about... compatibility."
The word hung between us. Thick as pollen.
I knew exactly what she was doing. She knew I knew. Her eyes were dancing, her teeth catching on a grin, and she was standing in my meadow in the afternoon light, sunburned and dusty. She looked like trouble I wanted to walk straight into.
My neck flushed hot. I turned back to the brood comb. "Compatibility."
"Mm-hm." I could hear the grin. "You want the pollinator to really commit. Deep, sustained visits. Not just a quick pass."
My cock strained against my zipper so hard I saw stars. I thought about American foulbrood. The lifecycle of the varroa mite. The going rate for a queen cell in spring. Useless. She was still talking and her voice had dropped into a register that vibrated in my spine and lower.
