This is bad. This is so bad. This is exactly the situation I've spent my whole life dodging—falling for someone with one foot already out the door, wanting something I'm not going to get to keep, lining myself up for the day she flies back to Chicago and takes a piece of me with her.
But every time I close my eyes I see her out in that field, arm flung up at the sky, writing a secret she wouldn't tell me and laughing like she'd forgotten how not to.
I stay out until the wine's gone and the night's gone fully black, until I'm cold enough to have an excuse. Then I rinse my glass, kill the lights, and head for my room.
Iris's door is shut. No light underneath.
I stand there a long moment, hand half-raised, my heart doing that thing again—half fear, half hope, no idea which one's winning.
I don't knock.
I go to my own room, shut the door, and sit on the edge of the bed in the dark. The window's open, and the lavender drifts in on the night air, sweet and everywhere.
I press the little crushed sprig to my lips without really meaning to.
"Fuck," I tell the empty room.
The room doesn't answer. The lavender just keeps breathing its perfume into the dark.
I fall asleep eventually and when I finally do, I dream in gold and dark: her face in the last of the light, her arm sweeping up toward the stars, and the word she wrote where I couldn't read it, hanging over both of us like a promise neither of us has said out loud yet.
13
IRIS
I can't sleep.
This is not unusual—I have a complicated relationship with sleep at the best of times, and these are not the best of times. My brain won't stop replaying the same stretch of the evening on an endless loop: Cat gold in the last of the light, telling me I looked like a dream. The lavender stem in her hand. The two of us writing wishes across the sky like a couple of children—and the thing I wrote up there that I still won't say out loud, even to myself.
That's the terrifying part. For an hour in that field, I wasn't managing anything. I wasn't planning or performing or bracing for the next disaster. I was just feeling, just wanting, just leaning toward her like she was gravity and I was helpless to resist.
I roll onto my side, stare at the wall, try to think about anything else. The harvest schedule. The lawyer's next steps. The seventeen emails from my Chicago office that I've been ignoring.
The way she laughed when I finally wrote something back. The way she looked at me like I was worth looking at.
Damn it.
I flip onto my back and stare at the ceiling instead. The moonlight is coming through the curtains, painting silver stripes across the plaster, and somewhere outside a night bird is calling—something plaintive and repetitive that matches the spiral of my thoughts.
The thing is, I've been attracted to people before. I know what attraction feels like—the flutter, the awareness, the way your eyes keep finding someone across a room. I dated in college. I had a boyfriend for two years, a perfectly nice man named Dylan who worked in consulting and looked good in photographs and left me feeling absolutely nothing.
I told myself that was just how it worked. That the butterflies were for teenagers and romance novels. That adult relationships were about compatibility and shared goals, not about wanting someone so badly you forgot how to breathe.
I was wrong.
Because what I feel when I look at Cat—what I felt in that lavender field—is nothing like what I felt with Dylan. It's not even the same species. This is hunger. This is my whole body lighting up like someone plugged me into an electrical socket.
I sit up in bed, giving up on sleep entirely. The clock on the nightstand reads 2:47 AM, which means I've been lying here for over three hours, accomplishing nothing except driving myself slowly insane.
I grab my phone and do what I always do when I'm spiraling: I make a list.
Things I Know For Certain:
1. I am attracted to Cat.
2. This attraction is intense.
3. This attraction is possibly reciprocated (see: lavender field incident).
