Page 54
By then, it’s late enough that I’m starting to think about food for reasons beyond numbers on a screen. Because I’m hungry and I like to eat. With people, preferably, but I decline Hanna’s offer of dinner and leave her pretty house on the hill. Step outside with a weight on my chest as I contemplate going home or traipsing back to the Joker.
I’m not in the mood for either and I don’t fight the pull in my bones to head for Poet’s farm instead.
The cash in my pocket helps.
I tell myself that’s why I amble down the lane with purpose in every stride; because Poet trusted me with his plants and I have money that belongs to him, and I detect no lies. Only butterflies in my stomach and a skippy rhythm to my pulse as I slip through the gate and the farmhouse comes into view.
The evening is warm and still. I can’t see him yet, but I know he’s here this time. Heat lingers in the hedges and the earth, clinging to the land as the sun glows orange over the fields. In the sky, starlings move in loose flocks and somewhere nearby a tractor rattles.
Drawn to the sound, I rotate and find Poet before he notices me. Watch him ease the tractor to a stop and jump down with dirt smeared on his shirtless skin. He looks tired, but he’s beautiful. And as if he senses my attention, he glances up and smiles so immediately it feels like sunlight breaking through cloud.
I smile back and it splits my face in half. All day I have wrestled with too many feelings to name. But as Poet starts towards me and I move towards him, those feelings…they make sense.
We meet by the barn. I open my arms and Poet steps into them.
“Eat dinner with me?”
I say yes without words.
11 POET
Oscar kissing me against the orange glow of the sunset feels like a reward. My limbs ache with exhaustion, but it’s a distant thing, drowned out by the buzz in my veins and the full body shiver tingling in my spine. I’ve never kissed anyone as much as I’ve kissed Oscar. Never wanted to be kissed as much as he’s kissed me. But I’ve craved his lips on mine for two long years and it’s showing no signs of shifting.
For me or for him.
He kisses me off-balance, caging me in his arms as I wrap a hand around his velvet jaw. I feel a sound rumble through him and a thready sigh escapes me.
A sigh he likely hears.
Oscar pulls back with a softer version of the smile he arrived with. “I have something for you.”
I know he has. I can feel it. But I don’t think he’s talking about his sizeable dick, so I keep quiet and wait for him to elaborate.
Oscar reaches into his pocket and produces a slim roll of notes. “For your plants. We sold them all.”
“All of them?”
“In the first half hour. Lots of people asked when we would have them again.”
Taken aback, I let Oscar push the rolled cash into my hand. “I thought you were just being nice.”
“I am nice.”
“Nice to me, when you saw I had a truck full of surplus.”
“You are not hard to be nice to.” Oscar punctuates the statement with a featherlight kiss to my cheek. “But your surplus sold itself once people knew where it came from. Locals like to buy local, and tourists will buy anything if you spin the right yarn.”
“Yarn? No wonder you get on with my dad.”
“Your father is a good man. Aras liked him very much. He keeps asking me when he will see him again.”
Aras.
Oscar has been on my mind every moment not taken up by the farm, but not just because I can’t stop thinking about kissing him. Stripping him. Watching him come. I’ve thought of his sweet boy too, his little hands and mouth stained red with strawberry juice.
We’re still wrapped up in each other by the barn. I ease back and take Oscar’s hand, tugging him towards the poly-tunnels. Inside, I show Oscar the summer fruits ripening in the balmy atmosphere. Then I take him outside again to the established fruit crops I’ve managed to salvage over the past few weeks. “I don’t know when Iggy’s coming back, but you can bring Aras to pick his own berries if you want.”
“Really? He will love that.” Oscar stoops to examine the unruly canes I’ve managed to train into rows with the help of a new wire fence. “What are these?”
