And I…I like him in here. This is my space and he fits in it. It feels right.He’sright.
“I’ve brought heritage tomatoes,” he says, nodding at the tray. “The nursery finally had them. I may have gone to three different places before I found them, but that's — not important.”
I look at the seedlings. Six small pots. Warmth moves through my chest.
“You went and got them?”
“I know how much you've been looking forward to planting them. You said it's the right window,” he says.
I'd said that over lunch. I'd been looking at the tomatoes in the salad and I'd mentioned it might be nice to grow some ourselves, and he'd just nodded and asked me which type. I hadn't thought about it again.
He always does this. A comment lands in passing and a day later the thing is just there. The magazines: Dad's old gardening magazine, the one I'd mentioned once because I'd seen a flowering chart I recognized, and the next morning three back issues had appeared on the coffee table. It was Lex all along.
“Can I help?” he asks. “If you'd like company. I won't get in your way.”
“Yes,” I say, and I mean it. I want him here. The greenhouse feels steadier with him in it. “Yes, I’d…like that.”
Lex is here. His scent is here. I'm glad of it, genuinely glad, and that's exactly the problem, because I want the rest of them too. I want Kev's oakwood through the back door and Ezra's linen on the stairs and I want Sera's basil cutting clean through all of it, sharp and present and here. I want all of them. I want the full thing, the whole shape of it, and there's a hole where one of them should be and isn’t.
My vision blurs and then the pot is blurry and then I can't see it at all.
Then Lex's arms are around me “Cry if you need to, Omega. I have you.”
Which is the exact thing I needed him to say. My hands are dirty but I grab the back of his shirt and he doesn't say a word about it. I push my face into his chest and I breathe him in hard, trying to hold on, and instead I just cry. The kind that racks through my chest. He runs his hands up and down my back, slow and even, and he doesn't try to talk me out of it.
“Did she leave because of me?” The words shudder out of me. “Did I do anything? Was it a word I said, something I didn't do?” I pull in a breath and look up at him. “She didn't say goodbye to me. She didn't even say goodbye.”
Lex ghosts his fingers along my jaw, making me shiver. “It wasn't you, Espie.”
“How do you know?” My voice is tight.
He holds me tighter for a second. Then he says, “The first night you were here, after we brought you home from the OHC, I found Sera in the hallway outside your room at three in the morning. She'd been there all night. She never moved.”
I go still.
I remember the hospital room. The chair by the window. There, but separate. Always that margin of space.
“She wasn't keeping you in,” Lex says. “She was keeping herself out. She didn't trust what she'd do if she went in there,how much she'd need from you when you had nothing left to give. That's not rejection, Espie. That's Sera struggling with her own worth.”
I pull back enough to look up at him. He's holding his jaw tight. There's a tension in his face that isn't just concern for me, a pull that runs deeper, that's been there longer. He misses her. He wants her back as badly as I do.
“She doesn't think she's enough. I think she never has. And I'm afraid everything that happened has only made her more sure of it.” He pauses. Runs a hand back through his hair, and it's the first time I've seen him look anything other than settled. “I kissed her. Last week. I thought — I don't know what I thought. That she needed to know she was wanted. That words weren't going to be enough.”
My brows raise. “You kissed Sera.”
“There's a Neruda line that keeps coming to me.” He stops. Looks almost embarrassed. “I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. That's what she is to me. What you both are. Not a function. Not a role. Just — that. What spring does.” He regards me steadily. “Are you upset? About Sera. About me kissing her.”
“No.” I say it without having to think about it. Then, because my brain catches up half a second later: “Actually, I—” I stop. My scent blooms, thickens around us, and from the way Lex goes very still I know he can scent it too. “I don't think upset is the right word.”
His gaze roams over my face, his fingertips stilling on my cheek. So soft. Gentle. He won’t hurt me. He’ll never hurt me.
“What is the right word?” he asks, and his voice has dropped.
I don't have one. What I have is the image of him and Sera that my brain keeps pulling back to no matter how many times I set it aside. His eyes behind those glasses darken and lock on me completely.
He shifts his knuckle under my chin, tips my face up toward him. A question in the touch.
“I'd like to kiss you.” He pauses, and an almost awkward look crosses his face. “But only if you want that too. If you don't, that's fine. That's absolutely—”
