“What the hell, Holden?!”
I paused where I was bent over my cucumber trellis, a knife in my left hand while I held a ripe cucumber in my right.
“Drop the vegetable,” Julep ordered as she stormed up behind me, and before I even had the chance to, she leaned down and ripped the knife out of my hand before tearing the cucumber out of the opposite.
“Whoa, relax,” I said, standing before she knocked me backward.
“What part of limited movement do you not comprehend?” she asked, slicing the cucumber stem before she started using it as a weapon to threaten me with.
There was more emotion rolling off that woman in those few seconds than I’d seen in the entire time I’d known her. She was radiant in her fiery, raging glory — an absolute vision of messy hair and tired eyes as she worried over my injury.
I smirked, holding my left hand up in surrender. “I was using my healthy arm,” I noted, wiggling my fingers.
“I literally pried this behemoth out of your injured hand,” she pointed out.
“Technically, it’s not my hand that’s injured. And nothing about this was triggering pain in my shoulder.”
“You’re impossible. Why didn’t you ask one of your roommates to do this?”
I snorted at that, hooking a thumb over my shoulder. “These guys? They would never.”
Julep glared at me, using the cucumber to point at the old white bench behind where I stood. “Sit down, shut up, and tell me what to do.”
I frowned, trying to decipher the meaning in that juxtaposition. But then she pointed at the bench again and, out of fear she might beat me over the head with that cucumber, I sat.
That’s when I realized what she was wearing.
The black shorts she wore reminded me of the kind the girls’ volleyball team sported, Spandex in nature and hugging every slight curve of her ass. They were heartbreakingly short, the tight band at the top stretching across her lean abdomen and wrapping over her hip bones. The sliver of her stomach that usually showed in the crops she wore was completely exposed now, along with the rest of her navel, all the way up to the band of the tiny sports bra that matched her shorts. It was simple, black and without any sort of logo or pattern, but it was cut in a deep V that accented the ample swells of her breasts.
My eyes hooked there, something primal stirring in my gut before I blinked and tore my gaze away.
I was met with a bored blink. “Are you done ogling me now?”
“Probably not.”
“You act like you’ve never seen a girl in a bikini before.”
“I haven’t seen you in a bikini.”
She rolled her eyes, then dropped to her knees right where I had been in front of the terrace. “What were you doing here, anyway?”
“Just harvesting the ones that are ready.”
“How can you tell?”
“If they look big enough to eat,” I said simply. “And if any of them are too big or have yellow at the bottom, they’re probably overripe. You can toss those to the side.”
Julep assessed the pile of overripe cucumbers I had lying beside the basket of ripe ones, and with a curt nod, she clipped the stem of one that was ready to eat and dropped it into the basket.
I didn’t hate the view of watching her harvest, not when her ass stretched against those shorts, her cleavage coming into view each time she moved her arm to cut a new vegetable. I sat back on the bench, stretching my left arm over the back of it.
“Do you always bolt into your neighbors’ yard in your underwear?”
“It’s a sports bra and shorts,” she said flatly. “And I was poling.”
“This early?” I nodded, impressed. “Seems like I’m not the only one with a morning routine.”
She scoffed. “As if. I just couldn’t sleep.”
Something about the way she said that made me pause, made me watch her more closely. When I looked past the lean lines of her body that was entirely too distracting to focus on much else, I could see the bags under her eyes, the fatigue weighing down her shoulders.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m used to it.”
Our drive home from the hospital popped into my mind, and I chewed the inside of my bottom lip a moment before asking, “Why don’t you have any friends?”
“Because I hurt my friends,” she said — matter-of-factly and as if there was no refuting that statement. “And because I don’t trust anyone.”
“Not even me?”
She snorted. “Especially not you.”
“What did I do?”
Julep leveled me with a look. “Other than disobey my father’s direct orders?”
Her words sobered me the way a cold shower after a night out would. It was easy to forget sometimes, how I couldn’t have her — especially with her dressed like that, looking at me like that, and actually fucking talking to me. Since my injury, it almost seemed like she cared about me… even though all previous signs pointed in the opposite direction of that notion.
I wished for some smart-ass remark but found myself silenced by the reminder of who she was, who her father was, and all the reasons I needed to stop giving in to my instincts that drove me toward her.
And so, we fell quiet, and I watched her finish off the rest of the cucumbers before she sat back on her heels and looked up at me.
“Anything else?”
I nodded to a couple holes I’d dug back around our fence. “Well, I was halfway into planting my peonies back there when this happened,” I said, lifting my right elbow a bit.
She gave me a warning glare when I did, as if even that movement would trigger my injury.
“But it’s okay. I can wait until next fall.”
“Why not plant them in the spring?”
I frowned. “Everyone knows peonies do better when they’re planted in the fall.”
“And by everyone you mean no one, right?”
“Well, anyone who knows anything about gardening,” I amended.
“It doesn’t make sense to plant them now. Everything will freeze in the winter.”
“Yes, but it’s not about this season. It’s about next season.”
Julep blinked at me. “You’re so weird.”
I just grinned.
I expected her to let it go, but instead, she waved for me to follow her over to my half-finished project. After she pulled on my gloves, I walked her through what was left, adding a bit of compost to the soil along with some bonemeal and then setting the roots so that the eyes of the peonies faced upward. I made sure she didn’t plant too deep, and once everything looked good, I instructed her to backfill the hole before we both gently used our feet to tamp down the soil.
“Jeez, you ran over here barefoot?”
“Did you just say jeez?” she shot back, ignoring my assessment.
“Don’t change the subject.”
“Like I said, I was poling.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t run over here in heels, then.”
“I wish I had so I could take them off and gouge your eyes out with them, perv.”
I smirked. “You love my eyes on you.”
She paused where she was tenderly working the soil, eyes on her feet before they slowly crept up to mine. For a moment, she let me hold that weighted gaze, and I soaked up every second of it until she broke eye contact and stepped back, peeling my gardening gloves off each hand.
“What got you into pole?” I asked.
“My future dreams of being a stripper, of course.”
I honestly thought she was serious, and I nodded appreciatively. “That’s cool. Seems like a really difficult career. I feel like you need to have thick skin to do it, put up with the asshole clients and the club owners stealing your wages.”
Julep blinked at me. “You idiot, I was joking.”
“How am I supposed to know?! You have the same expression for everything.”
That earned me the tiniest smile, and she hooked a hand on her hip. “I’m actually kind of impressed with how you reacted to that. Most people don’t have any respect for dancers.”
“Oh, I have all the respect for dancers.”
Julep gave me a look. “Don’t ruin it.” When I zipped my lips closed, she shrugged, glancing back at her house across the street like she could see her pole from there. “It’s a long, stupid story. Let’s just say I was drowning, and pole was the life raft that kept my head above the waves.”
“Is it still like that now?”
Her eyes were dark when she faced me again, but in lieu of answering, she shook her head and nodded toward the flowers we’d just planted. “What got you into this? I don’t know a single grown man who gardens, let alone one in college.”
Without hesitation, I answered, “My sister.”
I didn’t know why it came out so easily, especially when her asking about my CDs just two days prior had made me clam up. Maybe there was something about that morning, about her helping me that set me at ease.
“Well, not just my sister,” I amended, grabbing the back of my neck. “It was a family thing. My mom was the one who was good at it. She had the greenest thumb,” I said, smiling at the memory of Mom always being covered in dirt, stains on the knees of her overall jeans and grime under her nails. She used to wear this red bandana in her hair to hold it out of her face, and on Hannah’s eighth birthday, Mom got her one just like it. “But she taught me and Hannah what she could. Even Dad helped out, taking on the weeds and such.”
There was something hollow in Julep’s gaze when she said, “Sounds like you’re the All-American family.”
“We were.”
Julep arched a brow, and my mouth suddenly felt dry. I wondered if there was a possibility she actually didn’t know my story, given that it was one every sports channel loved to cover — especially as I approached the draft. If anything, she had to have heard it from the training staff, from her father.
But the longer she stared at me, confused, the more I doubted that she knew a single thing. And suddenly, it felt like I’d been stripped bare in front of her, like I was standing completely naked under her scrutinizing gaze while she waited for me to tell her about my biggest scar.
I swallowed. “Sorry, I… I just assumed you knew.”
“Knew what?” She frowned, folding her arms over her chest.
There was never an easy way to tell this story. In fact, I felt as if I’d almost become… cold with it. Detached. “My dad and sister disappeared when I was thirteen,” I explained. “And my mom took her life a year later.”
For a moment, shock colored Julep’s face, her eyes widening as her mouth parted just the slightest bit. But it happened quickly, almost so quick I wondered if I’d seen it at all before something else washed over her.
It wasn’t pity, which I was used to, or sorrow or anger, or that look I saw in some girls’ eyes when they thought, “Ah, this is it. He’s let me in. This is my way to his heart.”
No, it was… soft, subdued, and a distinct kind of sad.
Understanding.
It was the look of someone who truly understood.
“Disappeared?”
I nodded. “We had a little sailboat, and my sister… she loved to sail with Dad. They took it out one day when the forecast was clear, but…”
I shrugged, not having to finish the sentence. Julep was smart enough to figure it out.
“Your uncles,” she said, skipping over the traditional I’m sorry I was so used to hearing after revealing the truth about my past. “They took you in, didn’t they?”
I nodded. “The summer before I started high school. They moved me from Florida up here with them.”
“I thought he was your dad before you told me,” she said.
I smiled. “They look a lot alike.”
Julep bit her bottom lip, looking down at where she held my gardening gloves in her hands. Those haunted eyes that mirrored mine flashed with a ghost of her own.
“What?” I asked.
She shook her head, swallowing, and still she clamped her teeth down on that bottom lip like if she let go of it, she’d tell me what was wrong.
Like it would be the end of the world if she did.
“You know loss, too, don’t you?” I asked — softly, carefully.
But not careful enough.
Julep sucked in a shallow breath like she was drowning in a memory and my question had pulled her up for her first breath. She shoved my gardening gloves into my chest.
“I have to go,” she said, words tumbling out in a rush, and then she turned and darted across the back yard.
She was through the gate before I could say another word.
