He clicked on the newsletter. Scrolled down to the Unsubscribe button. And after a few more clicks, closed out the inbox he’d eventually delete entirely, when he was strong enough.
A particularly forceful gust of wind blew past the sliding glass door. Luca glanced up and watched the trees up the dirtroad sway. And then he looked at his spreadsheet, deciding which queries he could decide this week he was officially never hearing back from.
His phone vibrated against his thigh. Gratefully, he fished it out of his pocket.
His mom’s first text was a laughing-crying face. Which Leah Yaeger responded to almost every message with.
Have some stuff at the house you can use drop by later and I’ll show you love you
His last text to her, sent last night, sat above the laughing emoji.
Hey Mom, do you have any advice about the best way to fill in gaps in the walls of a wooden barn?
He was typing a response when Emerson’s stool scraped abruptly against the floor.
The moment stayed frozen for a long second: Emerson, standing dead still, staring out the glass of the sliding door. Luca, fingers paused against his phone, staring at Emerson.
The sound of sudden, heavy rain drops lashing furiously against the house and filling the silence.
And then a smile cracked open on Emerson’s lips, crawling up his cheeks, lighting up his eyes. He strode across the kitchen in long, steady strides, exiting through the glass door without a word.
Luca, without thought, followed.
After making sure the sliding door was latched behind him, Luca turned into the wind, stuffing his hands in his pockets. Within two steps, he was soaked. Man. He really wished he’d put on a sweatshirt or something before running into a downpour.
Emerson, twenty paces ahead of him, seemed to have no such qualms. He strode toward the fields, arms swaying confidentlyat his sides.
“Hey!” Tucking his chin toward his chest, Luca jogged across the road to catch up. “Everything okay?”
Emerson turned his head without slowing. Threw a smile at Luca over his shoulder. Luca was so disarmed—it was so easy, so happy, so sexy, that smile—that he almost slipped on the swiftly softening ground.
“Everything’s great,” Emerson said. Finally, they were shoulder to shoulder. He was staring straight ahead again, that smile still on his face, when he continued. “It’s raining.”
“Yeah.” Luca squinted around them, hands still stuffed in his pockets, shoulders up by his ears in an attempt to hold in his shivers. Yesterday it had been almost ninety degrees. Fucking Oregon Coast. “I can see that.”
“Late summer’s hard,” Emerson started to explain, his legs finally slowing. They walked through one of the veggie beds, Emerson glancing from left to right, surveying. He had to shout for Luca to hear him. “The coast isn’t as bad as the rest of the state. We usually get more moisture over the summer than other places. But everything’s coming to a harvest at the same time that the land’s the driest, you know?”
He was gesturing everywhere as he talked—to the peppers, the greens, the bush beans and onion tops. Luca squinted at him through the cold, slanting rain, trying to focus on his words. Mostly focusing on the way the rain had soaked Emerson’s t-shirt, sticking to all the lean panes of him. The way his arm muscles flexed as he flung his hands around.
“It’s like everything you do, all fucking year, is for these, what, two, three months? If you’re lucky? And then it gets here and it all just feels so tenuous. There are a hundred factors that can go wrong with each crop. You kill yourself trying to get the irrigation right. Making sure the pond isn’t getting too low. And then—” A laugh almost swallowed up by the wind. Luca hustled to get even closer, not wanting to missanother sound. “It rains!” Emerson finished, throwing up his hands like he was giving praise to God.
They had reached the end of Bed A. Emerson stepped back out onto the grass track that led between the beds, grass that had been dry and brown since Luca got here, quickly turning muddy now. Emerson increased his speed again, hands now loose in his pockets, head constantly rotating to take in everything he could as they passed Beds B and C, D and E, F and G, until they reached the base of the hill that led up to the orchard and the berry patch.
Without pause, Emerson started climbing.
“You don’t have to stay out here with me getting soaked,” he said over his shoulder, as Luca had, once again, fallen a step or two behind. “There’s no real reason for it. It’s just, when the first good rain hits at the end of summer?—”
Another smile, directed right at Luca, that once again almost knocked him right on his ass.
“I just gotta get out here and feel it, you know?”
Emerson faced forward again, almost full-on running up the hill now.
Luca paused for just a moment, watching him go. The way that ass looked, hustling up the incline, the jut of those shoulder blades. That smile, that jaw, imprinted now in Luca’s brain. Luca was still cold, still shivering, more soaked by the second, but something loose and hot was banging around his ribcage, crawling up his throat.
He wasn’t sure where this man had come from, this smiling, taking-strolls-in-the-rain-just-for-fun man who seemed years lighter than all the versions of Emerson Luca had met before. Lightyears away from the man Emerson had been last night.
Luca should go back inside. Take a long shower to warm up, to help this feeling burn out of him. Emerson had practically told him to go.You don’t have to stay out here with me.
