The Night Garden (26 page)

“How’s the water?” Sam asked.

She was acutely aware of the way the black surface obscured her from view, small ripples lapping her hair where she’d pinned it off her neck. “It’s freezing.”

He put his hands on his hips and his chest broadened with the movement. She was glad for the semidarkness because it let her admire him in secret, the contours and planes of his body so unlike hers. “Freezing, huh? Then why don’t you come out?”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

She pointed to her dress, slung over a shrub.

“Ah. I see. Well, I could use a splash of cold water myself,” he said, and he waded in. The moonlight made his skin glow unusually pale, with undertones of purple and blue so that he looked almost more water-creature than man. He dove when the surface reached his belly, and she lost sight of him. While he was underwater, she had the oddest sensation that she was alone and yet not alone, the high, dark walls of the quarry rising around her. After a time, she grew nervous. Where was he? Had he hit his head on a rock? Was he okay?

He finally surfaced ten feet behind her in the deepest part of the swimming hole. And she let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.

“Oh man,” he said, laughing. “I’m much taller than the last time I tried this, and I still can’t touch the bottom out there.”

She smiled. “How did you know where to find me?”

“It’s a summer night. You’re either in bed, in the garden, or here. Not bad odds.”

She pushed herself backward a few feet closer to the shore. In the years since he’d left Green Valley, she’d thought of what it might be like to have him back, right here, swimming with her. But in her reveries, she’d always felt very peaceful and carefree with him: They splashed and laughed and floated on their backs to look at the stars. Instead, she felt tangled, torn, and edgy. Too serious for play. She eyed him as he swam through the water, making a slow, languid circle around her, disturbing the smooth surface of the pool.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Better. A thousand times better. I could jump the moon.”

“Good,” he said.

“I recover pretty quickly. Once I go back in.”

“Olivia …”

She braced herself. She knew what question was coming. All day she’d thought of it, and yet she hadn’t been able to settle on an answer.

“Why did you try to stay out of the garden?”

She bobbed away from him, just a few feet. Admitting the truth would put everything out in the open. She wasn’t sure she could do it. She was afraid that if he felt the same way she felt, and they both spoke it aloud, she might as well condemn him. “I wanted to see if I could.”

“But … why?”

She dropped her arms below the water. “I just thought …”

“What?”

Something about Sam’s face made her want to tell the truth, to be brave. She said, “I want to be able to touch you again.”

He exhaled, moved closer in the water. The sounds of the waves lapped at the rocks near the stony walls. She could not make out the color of his eyes in the darkness, but she could see his intentions, his longing, and—maybe—his relief. “Ollie. I want that, too.”

“So … What do we do?”

“We figure something out. We try the serum again, tweak the formula. And in the meantime … we consider creative alternatives.”

Her face heated. “I don’t think there’s … much. It seems like you’re still pretty sensitive to poison ivy. Is that right?”

“Well … it’s a little better.”

“But not much better.”

“A little better. That’s all.”

“So we would have to be really, really, really careful.”

“We will,” he said.

“I don’t think I could handle the risk. I wouldn’t want to hurt you. And I wouldn’t want your sensitivity to get worse.”

He was quiet.

“Also …” She ran her palms over the water. “I don’t want to risk our friendship.”

“You couldn’t. Not even if you tried. You know that, right?”

“I do,” she said. But she was not being completely honest with him. She
did
believe that she could rely on Sam’s friendship for the rest of her life in one form or another. The bond between them felt strong and deep, almost fundamental. But while his friendship was certain, she did not know that she could always be
happy
with just his friendship, or if a near-but-not-near-enough relationship was destined to be more painful than rewarding. Would he tire of her someday? Would she have to watch as he slowly but surely relegated her to the “friends without benefits” category of people in his life? Would she have to witness him bringing home a real lover, a woman who could share his bed and fill his house with children—while she would be alone on the farm? How would she be able to stand it?

He seemed to sense some of her misgivings. “You don’t have to have all the answers right now, Olivia. I want to be with you. Just you. Just as you are.”

Two white points of moonlight shone out from the dark of his eyes. She was glad for the water around her; it held her up a little, and she needed holding. She didn’t have the willpower to turn away his affection—not anymore. She wanted, more than anything she’d wanted in a long time, to wrap her arms around his neck and press her whole body against him. She knew exactly how he would feel, his skin cooled by the water, his muscles warm beneath. Her hair was damp at her neck, tendrils curling around her face. She pushed them behind her ears.

“We should head in,” she said.

“Suit yourself.”

She fanned her arms over the surface of the water. “My dress is hanging up.”

“So?”

She laughed. “I need you to turn around.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Please?”

He splashed her with his fingertips. “How did you get to be so modest?”

“How did you get to be so stubborn?”

His chin dipped below the water and bobbed up again. “Oh, fine. But only because your lips are turning blue.”

Olivia touched her mouth. She
was
getting chilly; her teeth were beginning to chatter. But all of it—the cool night air that smelled of wet rocks and moss, the way the water had darkened Sam’s hair, and even the cold ache in her bones—she loved it all. He winked at her and turned around. On the rocky shore, she slipped on her dress, one arm at a time, then turned away from the water to work the buttons. She heard Sam making his way toward her, the whoosh of each step echoing in the quarry like a roar.

When she was done, she went to sit beside him on the grass, where he was wiping droplets of water from his chest and legs with his T-shirt. She turned to him with a smile, but his mood had changed. His cheery eyes had darkened; his mouth was a hard line.

“Olivia … is your hair safe?”

“Safe?”

“To touch.”

“Oh.” She reached up instinctively to pat the wayward strands of damp hair that had loosened from her bun. “I think so. My hair and nails don’t seem to be affected. Once in a while someone will brush into my hair, if I have it down, since it’s so long. But I don’t think it’s ever caused a problem.”

“May I?”

At first, she didn’t understand what he wanted. May he
what
? But then he reached out and worried a single heat-curled tendril
that had fallen beside her cheek. “Oh. Yes. If you’re sure you want to …”

“I want to.”

She turned away from him to give him better access to her hair. She felt the brush of his fingers—no, the brush of the strands of her own hair, moving by his conduction—at the nape of her neck. Gently, he searched for the pins she’d used to fasten her bun. He prodded and sought and plucked until the weight of her hair landed squarely on the back of her neck. And then he was threading his fingers into the mass, twisting and untwisting it in his hands. She didn’t even try to make conversation while he touched her; the sensation was too exquisite, too painful and pleasurable at the same time. He combed his fingers through her hair from top to bottom, and each time he caught a tangle it was like a little bite, a small and precise blast of desire like the spark from flint and steel.

When he was done, her hair combed through and trailing down, he asked her to lie back. He spread her hair out around her. She knew the way the thin cotton of her damp dress was clinging to her, and Sam made no secret of looking at her body. His perusal was slow and delicious, his countenance full of naked desire. With other men, her sense of her own beauty had been theoretical—a thing sketched out on paper that she didn’t much care about. When Sam looked at her, she was glad he thought she was beautiful—and the sensation of being glad was entirely new.

“Do you want to know the other reason I stayed out of the garden?” she asked softly.

He ran a strand of hair through two fingers, a gentle, tugging pressure. “Tell me.”

“Because nobody’s ever made me feel the way you do. And I’m … afraid of it. I know how to solve just about any problem that can come up on any given day on this farm. My whole life
is about solving problems from sunup to sundown. But with you, I have no idea what to do. There’s a problem, and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t know if I ever will.”

“There’s nothing to fix.” His gaze roamed her body, greedily and intimately, and the look on his face was pained. “
God,
Olivia.” His voice was tight. “Can I see you?”

She felt a breeze cool her skin, fanning the beads of water on her bare legs. The Green Valley moon was as bright and fat as it always was, magnified by the lens of the sky. “Yes. All right,” she said, breathless. She reached for the top button of her dress.

“Please,” he said. “Let me.”

She hesitated.

“It only hurts me if I touch your skin. Trust me.”

“But—”

He tugged a button and lifted the puckering fabric. “I’ll be fine.”

She let her hands drop to her sides.

With unbreakable focus, he worked open the top button, and then the next, and the next, leaving the two sides of her dress no more than an inch apart. She could not take her eyes off him; it was as if with each button that bared more of her skin, more of who
he
was had been exposed. She was breathing heavily by the time he got to the last button at her thighs. He looked at her face—a quick checking in to make sure she hadn’t changed her mind—and then he peeled the dress open, and she was fully bared.

“You’re perfect,” he said. There was tension in his voice that made her skin break out in goose bumps. He looked at her for a long time; she fought the urge to move. His gaze was almost tangible, sliding over her hotly. He leaned over her to peer into her eyes. “Will—will you touch yourself?” he asked. “Will you do what I can’t?”

She felt a frisson of uncertainty.

“Please?” he said.

The way his voice cracked made her bold. “Like this?” She ran her hands along her ribs, up her belly, across her breasts.

“Yes,” he said.

All at once she felt immensely powerful, beautiful, and sure. She closed her eyes and heard only the sound of his breathing, and then the sound of his voice, giving instructions that were somewhere between demands and pleas. She held on to his words, his dictations and appeals, and somewhere along the line, her hands became his hands, so that it was his palms that skimmed her belly and cupped her breasts, his fingers that found her, wet and aching, until at last her body bowed, and shook, and collapsed against the grass.

She drew her dress closed, fastened a few key buttons. The wind blew. Slowly, the heat went out of her, and in spite of the warmth of the evening she began to feel cold.

“Are you okay?” Sam asked.

The water shimmered black and silver at their feet. She rolled toward him and propped her head on her palm. “I want you to be happy.”

“I am happy,” he said. “Are you?”

She nodded.

“Then what’s the problem?”

“I just keep thinking you’ll, you know, get frustrated and want to—to find someone else.”

He didn’t speak for a long while. “I know what I’m doing.”

She bit her lips, chagrined. He was right, of course. He was willing to give up a life of normal sex. But was she willing to let him? “And what about kids?”

“What about them?”

“Do you want any?”

He cupped the side of her head over her thick hair. “I guess I always pictured myself having a family someday.”

“You can’t with me,” she said. The words hurt.

“There’s adoption.”

“But I can’t put a Band-Aid on somebody with a scraped knee.”

He dropped his hand. “We’ll just have to get a subscription service for surgical gloves,” he said. “And besides, you
can
do the important things. You can read bedtime stories. And teach a kid how to plant seeds, and shuck corn, and work the farm that you love. Those things matter. A lot.”

“Something tells me an adoption agency wouldn’t like ‘mother is deadly’ when they see it listed under medical conditions.”

“Mmm,” Sam said.

Olivia got to her feet; her legs were shaky. “I want you in my life, Sam. Any way I can have you. But the moment you want to walk, I’ll … I won’t try to keep you in a position you don’t want to be in.”

He frowned and sat up. “It’s almost like you’re expecting me to run away.”

The words caught her heart at a surprising angle, like banging an elbow in just such a spot that it radiates tremendous pain. Even as he promised to stay with her, she expected him to go. To vanish from her life as swiftly as he’d flown back into it. And why shouldn’t he? He’d done it before. And he wasn’t the only one. Nature took its course. People were there and gone and there again, and only the farm remained the same—the farm, and the great safe bastion of her Poison Garden, hidden in the heart of the maze.

She said, “I want you to be happy. And I just don’t feel right about making any permanent claims on your heart.”

He laughed and got to his feet, his T-shirt balled in his hand. “Too late for that. You had your stamp on my heart when you
were eleven years old and you made me spend an afternoon chasing a frog down a creek because you were certain it belonged to a family of fairies.” Carefully, he tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Do you remember that night in the Promise Garden?”