okay this is super last minute but my best friend/maid of honor, Julie, is going to be in town this weekend and she’s asking to see the site of the wedding.
Please say no if we are imposing, but could we perhaps take you out to dinner on Saturday night? And then maybe do a quick swing by the farm after?
no worries at all if you’re already busy! She just threatened violence if i didn’t at least ask
I promise her partner Elle is much nicer
(Elle won’t be here this weekend but you’ll meet her at the wedding)
Okay now Julie is telling me i’m overexplaining things
Just let me know!
eight
A thud soundedfrom the ceiling.
Luca blinked awake into the darkness.
The thud was followed by the unmistakable wail of a small child.
It took him a moment to remember where he was. It was one of the first times that waking up here, in Emerson King’s guest room/seed storage, had left Luca off balance.
Maybe it should have felt stranger, getting used to living with other people again, living in a new place. But most days so far, Luca had simply been too exhausted to even really think about it.
Fishing was physically taxing, too; no doubt about it. Both the actual work and the endurance of it: your body against the elements for such long stretches at a time. A lot of that time involved waiting, though. Patience. Navigating. Shooting the shit.
There wasn’t a whole lot of being still on a farm. He was sore in muscles he couldn’t remember ever feeling before. Jansel had taught him stretches he should do for his back thatfirst day; even with following those instructions, his spine felt abused. His hands were almost never clean.
And he was pretty sure he loved it.
Being too exhausted to think about anything else was kind of fucking awesome.
Except.
It wasn’t true that his brain had been empty. Not completely.
There was something ironic about it, that he hadn’t been at Short King Farms five minutes when Emerson had said that thing about nightshades. And even though Luca had taken this job to turn a new leaf, to leave both fishing and his old useless writing dreams behind—fuck if that word hadn’t sparked something deep inside his brain. It was so visual, so dark and atmospheric. He could picture where it would fit into the world ofDriftimmediately.
It had been so long since he’d had that feeling. Opening up his laptop had felt more like self-imposed torture than anything else for, god. Years now. He’d forgotten the sparks. How something could unexpectedly slot into place, how special it was that you could take this world you’d been tinkering with forever and still find ways to improve it.
It wasn’t even just the Nightshades, already capitalized in his head. It was everything about the farm. Studying the plants and the soil and the lay of the land in a way he had never fully done before. The world ofDriftwas mostly composed of sand, water, and wood, but this—the greenery, the colors of it all—they filled in details he’d been missing. Either for the alternate world his characters had been struggling to find for so long, or maybe for how their own world used to be. Or maybe there was a new story hiding inside all of it. He hadn’t worked it all out yet.
He’d allowed himself the indulgence of jotting down some ideas on paper each night after dinner. This felt innocentenough. He hadn’t opened his laptop, hadn’t looked at his spreadsheets in all of the five days he’d been here so far, and he counted that as a victory.
He wasn’t a perfect human being. He’d still check his writing email sometime this weekend. But he’d promised himself to only do so once a week. The fact that he hadn’t caved yet—that deserved a drink. Or like, a good, thorough orgasm. A quiet, no-thoughts afternoon of watching a baseball game. If he could find the time or the energy for any of that.
A more familiar sound carried through the ceiling now. Emerson’s feet on the floorboards, quicker than his usual tread.
Luca’s bedroom on the bottom floor of the split-level was right underneath Daisy’s. He’d barely spent much time in this room other than to make his nightly scribbles and to sleep; his backpack and suitcase still lay sprawled open in the corner, barely unpacked. But he had gotten used to the sounds of the house, the pitter-patter of Daisy’s small feet, the heavier weight of Emerson’s; the high-pitched murmur of her voice and the deep, calm rumble of his as they got ready for bed. It probably should’ve embarrassed Luca, that he’d been falling asleep at roughly the same time as a four-year-old. But it seemed Emerson likely did, too. The house was always quiet as sin once Daisy’s storytime was over and her door snicked shut.
This was the first time Luca had been woken up to this.
More sounds filtered down. The creak of a door opening. The reverberations of Emerson’s voice, barely audible over the frantic pitch of Daisy’s. Luca felt the breath he’d apparently been holding release at the sound of it. Knowing Emerson was with her now. He’d heard Daisy cry a few times, during the rare times he actually crossed paths with Emerson and Daisy during the day: when she was overly tired and trying to refuse her nap; when she’d gotten a finger pinched in the fenceof the goats’ pasture; when she’d tripped and fallen, bare kneed, onto the gravel drive.
But he hadn’t heard her cry like this before. The sound of unfettered fear.
Her calls of distress lessened as soon as Emerson started talking. They grew intermittent, and then quiet, until Luca could barely hear her at all. But Emerson’s cadence remained steady.
