“Tell me something to distract me.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Anything. Tell me about your family. You have a sister, right?”
This was virgin territory for us. We hadn’t discussed my family before, and though I was reluctant to go into some of the grittier details that still gave me the occasional nightmare, my sister was a safe subject. “I do.”
“Is she younger or older?” Somewhere in the background, her fingers clicked against the keyboard. The soft pitter-patter of nails on keys reminded me of raindrops on a roof.
“She’s three years younger.”
“Twenty, then?”
“Twenty-one. I had a birthday recently, remember?”
Her sharp inhale made my chest rumble.Oh, she remembers.I knew exactly what she was thinking about—our kiss that day in the street.Best birthday ever.
“She’s away at college in Maine. Although, if she had it her way, she’d drop out and move out here tomorrow.”
“To Oregon?”
I dug my fingers into a particularly painful kink in my neck. “To wherever is farthest from our parents and that also allows bees.”
“Bees?”
“That’s right, bees. Bella is what you might think of as a professional hobbyist. Bees are her latest intrigue.”
Now that I thought about it, the fact that Belles was still as into her bee craze as she was spoke volumes. Her interest in things tended to wane as quickly as it began, but that didn’t seem to be the case with bees. Of all the things.
“Bees are cool.”
A smile tugged at my lips. “That doesn’t mean I want them in my yard. Especially not when I have plans of my own.”
“Plans for what?”
“A poison garden.”
Her stunned silence spoke volumes.
“I’m sorry,” she said, biting back a laugh. “Apoisongarden?”
“That’s right.”
“What are you, a serial killer?”
I didn’t expect her to understand my strange fascination with plants; most people didn’t. It wasn’t something I talked about with many people either, not even my teammates. I gave enough of myself away already—to my fans, to my family, to the game. I deserved to have a little something for myself, a kingdom of my own.
“When I was in college, I studied abroad for a semester in England and visited this garden full of intoxicating and narcotic plants. Over a hundred species, if you can believe it.”
“That’s wild.”
My eyes drifted to half-mast while her keyboard clicking continued, syncing seamlessly with Bennett’s dulcet snores.
“Are some of your tattoos poisonous plants?”
“Yeah, actually. All of them.” I traced a finger across the ivy down my side, circling the sprig of hemlock nestled just between the belladonna, I’d gotten in honor of my sister, and the blooms of oleander. “I think I was taken with how something so beautiful, like a flower or shrub—”
Or bookstore owner.
