Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76573 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76573 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 383(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
“Re-did the whole thing,” I said. “Once I’d started on the flower beds, I couldn’t stop.”
“Naturally,” he said. “This is gorgeous.”
Nobody had ever been quite so interested in my projects before. Typically if I brought a guy home we were beelining straight for the bed, then wrapping things up just as quickly in the mornings.
“I was finally out of the military. Everything felt sort of more… free than it had ever been before, but I was also more lost than I’d ever been. I closed on this place near the end of May. The days were already getting hot as hell. Nights were perfect. I needed something to do with my hands. And so I built, and built, and built. Did the greenhouse in the back.”
“Wait. You put together that whole greenhouse?” He glanced toward the top of it, peeking out from the gate that led to the backyard.
I nodded.
He crossed over to the side of the yard. I followed him down the stepping stone path, heading to the back. I scrutinized everything, wishing I’d trimmed the branches of the redbud trees more recently. Cam had to bend to walk underneath one, and his shirt rode up just a little, revealing the waistband of patterned boxer briefs peeking out above his pants.
No. We are not going there. No matter how cute he is.
I stepped ahead of him to open the short gate that led to the back. The smell of damp earth and grass surrounded us, the most comforting smell I knew. I bent down to move the big bag of soil I’d left on the stone path this morning.
“Holy shit, Luke,” he said, his voice quiet. “It’s beautiful back here. This is like a mini version of the Golden Goose gardens. I love those lights, too.”
I’d lined the back wooden fences with little solar string lights. It was nighttime, but back here, it didn’t feel dark and gloomy at all.
“I try to make it feel good back here, no matter what time of day it is,” I said. “It’s mostly for my own selfish reasons. I’ve spent plenty of insomniac nights out here, on a lawn chair at three-thirty in the morning.”
“Wow.”
“And I do use a lot of similar foliage here that I’ve implemented at Golden Goose. I use my own yard to work things out. If something looks good, then I’ll do it at the inn.”
“It’s like paradise,” he said, full of wonder. “I could be back here forever.”
Having Cam here was disorienting. I had an urge to show him absolutely everything—every flower, every plant, every little project I’d worked on. But I also didn’t usually bring people into my world so quickly. The garden was the place I felt safest when I was alone. I had a strange sense of things being topsy-turvy, like I was in some parallel universe where it was normal for me to do things like this.
I leaned against one of the tall beams of the greenhouse, clearing my throat. “Had no clue what I was doing when I built this one, I admit,” I said, nodding toward it. “I needed a lot of help from the people at Lizzy’s.”
“Lizzy’s Hardware & Plant?” Cam asked. “I love it there. They always help my clueless ass when I need to get something for my place, too.”
“I met my best friend there,” I said. “Liz owns the store. She’s still better at all of this shit than I am. Been helping me for four years, now.”
“Incredible.”
I showed him around, giving him a much more condensed tour than I wanted to. He liked my herb garden, and I picked us both some fresh mint to chew on.
“I used to chew on mint like this as a kid,” Cam said. “My grandpa always had a mint plant and a basil plant sitting by his kitchen window.”
“I love it,” I said. “When I first got back from overseas, it was one of the things that helped.”
“Helped?”
I cleared my throat. “Helped calm me down. If things got bad.”
I clammed up, not knowing where to take the conversation from here.
This was certainly something I didn’t usually bring up to anybody I took home with me. I didn’t usually mention that I was a veteran at all—it was easier to keep it to myself, especially if all I wanted was a hookup. The truth was that chewing fresh mint had been one of the things my VA counselor had recommended when I used to get night terrors. She called it a “grounding technique”—a way to make me feel like I was back down to Earth, a sort of signal to my brain that I was here again, and I was okay.
It didn’t always fix everything, but I sure as hell liked it better than the fucking sleeping pills. Fresh mint leaves still calmed me down. The fresh taste, the natural menthol.