"Good to know," I said, voice level, hands white on the hive tool. A man absolutely thinking about pollination science and not about pressing her up against the nearest tree and finding out what sounds she made with my mouth on her throat.
She grinned at my back. I couldn't see it but I could feel it — warm and impossible to ignore.
Flora: one. Atlas: zero.
The sun was dropping behind the western ridge when she started packing up. Gold light across the meadow. Bees settling for the night. The air smelled like warm grass and the faintest trace of her shampoo, and I was not going to think about that.
She should leave. It was the end of the day. She had a cabin in town. I had a kitchen full of nothing and a life that did not include someone who said "deep sustained visits" with a straight face and lit up when I couldn't answer.
Let her go, Morrow.
"I have trout," I said.
She froze. Bag half-zipped. "I'm sorry?"
I have, in my thirty-three years, spoken in complete sentences. I've communicated complex ideas to other human beings. I gave presentations in college. I talked to my bees this very morning with full paragraphs and tenderness and correct grammar. And what I said to this woman — the one with honey dried on her fingers, hips that'd been ruining my focus all day, a laugh I'd been hearing for hours — was "I have trout."
What I meant was: stay for dinner.
What I also meant: stay after dinner.
What I was not going to say out loud, because I was a man with self-control and a rapidly thinning grip on it: stay in my bed and let me find out if you taste as sweet as that sound you made this morning.
"Are you..." She tilted her head. "Offering me fish?"
"I'm saying I have trout and I'm cooking it tonight."
"That's the same thing."
"Are you staying or not?"
She said yes too fast. I turned toward the cabin so she couldn't see my face, which was doing something dangerously close to a smile. I didn't smile at anyone I'd known for two days no matter how good they looked covered in earth and sunshine.
I have trout. The bees got tender soliloquies. She got I have trout. My bees had a more sophisticated courtship ritual. At least they danced.
She stayed for dinner. She left after. I stood on the porch and listened to her tires crunch down the gravel until the sound faded.
The mountain went still. Creek running with snowmelt. A varied thrush in the conifers. The last of the light going purple over the peaks. Same porch. Same sounds. Same view I'd looked at for six years.
But the silence had a shape now — her shape. The space where her voice had been, her laugh, her closeness. My kitchen smelled like trout and beeswax, and I could still feel the buzz in my knuckles where her fingers had touched mine fourteen hours ago. I had not stopped thinking about it for a single second.
I finished my coffee. Went inside. Stood at the counter and thought about a woman with dirt on her cheek and honey on her chin who knew things about me she shouldn't know.
She'd be back at seven. And I'd be paying attention.
Chapter Three
FLORA
DAY THREE OF THE JOBthat didn't exist, and I was getting good at it. That was the problem.
I pulled up to Atlas's property at seven sharp. Not early this time, because showing up at six fifty-three twice would make it a pattern. Patterns implied eagerness. Eagerness implied I was thinking about him between the hours of leaving his mountain and arriving back on it. Which I absolutely was. But he didn't need to know that.
The morning was doing its best to ruin my composure before I'd even turned off the engine. Late April had turned the mountain overnight: balsamroot blazing across the south meadow in sheets of gold, lupine pushing purple through the volcanic soil along the tree line. The air was thick with wet earth and pollen and the low electric hum of sixty thousand bees who had places to be. I sat in the car and breathed it in. My chest ached. This place was starting to feel like somewhere I belonged.
Stop that.
I grabbed my sketchpad and got out. Canvas work pants again, last clean tee. I'd packed for a three-day trip and I was out of combinations, which meant tomorrow I'd either be doing laundry at the Juniper or showing up in a sundress andwork boots. Neither option screamed "professional." Also, my booking expired tonight. Three nights, paid in advance, and I hadn't called Connie about extending. Extending meant not leaving. Not leaving meant... well. I pulled my hair into a clip and walked toward the hives.
