Sunlight winked through the lace of leaves fanning from the apple tree overhead. It slid, viscous, over the round, ripe fruits, and dripped into the earth, saturating and sweet. The heat of the afternoon sizzled in the soil, crumbling it so it was shovelled easily by swelling roots and released rich, heady fragrances into the air - thyme, lavender, honey. Rose and nuts made the mouth water for Turkish delight.
Jess lay back in the grass and let the sun pad light, sleepy kisses over his face. Over the past few weeks, he'd become essentially a ghost haunting Kerenza Hall. The public, old Elizabethan Manor was far enough out of the way not to get too many tourists, and he could always find a corner of the patchwork of gardens and orchards to be alone. He'd wander through the timber building, trailing his fingers along the thick beams holding up the sloping walls, breathing the oak and straw scent and the quiet, then into the cool, echoing kitchen and out of the narrow back door. The sunshine and the sugared perfume of flowers and the savoury tang of herbs spilled over him. That moment was a rebirth.
His life was noise - housemates filling the rickety warren where he lived, customers at the coffee shop pelting him with orders and complaints and passive-aggressive nasal sighs, crowded buses, crowded supermarkets, crowded messaging apps, crowded mind. This place, this secret garden, was his serenity.
He nestled his shoulder blades into the grass and let the white-gold of the sky dazzle his vision. He sucked on his tongue and the essence of apple and rosemary in the air. He flung one hand up to rest above his head and twisted blades of grass around his fingers until they cut into the flesh. He anchored himself in the hundred tiny physicalities so apart from everything he knew beyond the vine-laden walls. He'd let his hair grow shaggy, it nettled his face and neck. He huffed a strand off his nose. The sun sank behind a cloud and re-emerged brighter, lancing his vision. He winced. He dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and swam in the splotches of dark colour.
"Submission."
A voice pricked through the blur. He lifted his hands from his eyes and scrunched his face up against the burst of light. He blinked. A woman hazed into focus. She was short and slight, the high hem of a floral dress fluttering at the tops of her thighs, her hair bubbling around her face in ringlets dyed berry pink.
Jess blinked again. "Beg pardon?"
The woman smiled, slightly bucked teeth sneaking through bubblegum lips. She shook her head and her curls jostled and shone warm in the sunshine. "Just thinking aloud." Her eyes flicked away, then back to him, one shaded and one sparkling, as she cocked her head. "My grandma told me the meanings of different plants - you know, the old language of flowers - and she said whatever plant you first see someone near is what they will mean to you." Her dainty fingers played on the hem of her skirt, a ribbon of shadow between it and her skin. "Grass means submission."
Jess told himself he should sit up, but something about her gaze kept him on his back. He felt the colour rise to his face and his fingertips tingled. He pulled his eyes from the raspberry figure and searched her surroundings. The lush, green spines of a dragon tree fanned behind her in a dark halo.
"What does dragon tree mean?" he asked.
She glanced round and saw the tropical plant sprouting behind her. She looked back at him and the corner of her mouth twisted. "'You are near a snare'."
Jess smiled. "Lucky me."
"You don't look lucky," she said thoughtfully.
He raised his eyebrows. "I don't?"
"No." She perused him. He felt each spot her eyes landed on, as if he was being swarmed by fireflies. Her mouth quirked. "Collapsed in the grass, all dark colours and lanky limbs at funny angles, that screwed-up look on your face. You look sort of tragic. You look like Hamlet, but in some artsy, modern adaptation."
Jess' face heated. He pushed up onto his elbows and frowned at her.
"Now even more so." She smirked.
The back of his neck prickled. He couldn't tell if she was trying to goad him or irritate him or really just thinking aloud, with pretty strange thoughts.
You are near a snare.
"I am not that lanky," was all he could think to say.
She giggled behind her hand, then folded it over her mouth and lowered it, showing a gentler face, as if she'd just plucked the mockery from her smile to keep in her pocket.
Jess' lower lip slipped behind his teeth and he felt the blood rise to it. It flicked back, darker, and words tripped over its curve before he could stop them. "If I look like Hamlet, sit down, I'll speak you some poetry."
She laughed. The sound hummed in the earth. "Or drive me mad."
He shrugged. "Whichever, it's a Saturday."
"Madness isn't so bad on a Saturday, then?"
"Well, you've got Sunday to shake it off."
"That was Ophelia's problem, was it? No Sunday hangover?"
"I don't know, I never read it."
She regarded him, laughter still playing about her face like a carp around the surface of a pool.
She stepped through the grass. Her floral dress fluttered around her, tugging his gaze to the parting of her thighs and its vanishing point under the restless fabric. His tongue felt too large for his mouth. The dragon tree reached for her as she pulled away from it. She sat by his side, her legs folded under her, leaning on one hand so her shoulder bunched up and nudged a ringlet to bounce. He folded forward to sit up with her, his knee rising and his elbow hooking over it. He didn't really decide to move, his body seemed to instinctively mirror her. As she came close to him, he caught a scent on her, something fresh and citrus, laced with icing sugar. Her eyes were intense periwinkle blue. There was a tea-stain tan over her nose and blushing her collar. It gave her a ripe look. The sudden urge to bite her bunched shoulder prodded the back of his mouth. He swallowed it back and looked down at a dandelion nodding between their hands.
She ducked her head and caught his eyes back up. The day went from comfortably warm to close and humid under her gaze. She surveyed his face, brazenly, as if he was a specimen in the rainforest.
"Actually," she said, "You've got more colour in your face than I imagine in Hamlet."
A single laugh whisked out of him in a relieving breath. "I'm here a lot, cooking out in the sun, like an idiot."
"Why here?" she asked.
He looked past her. Bees zipped manically around a spray of lavender, a thrush chiselled into the ground with its sharp beak.
"Madness hangover," he said.
She leaned towards him, bringing her body so close that static crackled between their clothes. His mouth went dry, heat stole up his spine. She reached past him to the flower bed he'd settled next to. A long, pink-painted fingernail snicked the stem of a bright, flamingo flower, with a cup like the mouth of a French horn. She leaned back, leaving him cool and tense, and held the flower between them.
"Petunia," she explained, "It means, 'your presence soothes me.'"
Jess hesitated, then nodded his head to smell the petunia's light nectar sweetness.
She traced the petals over his lips.
He started and snapped his head back up, his breath snagging and his heart kicking. Her hand retreated an inch. He almost shot his hand out to catch it and stop her leaning away. He resisted and curled his fingers into the grass. It tickled his knuckles. His skin was so alive. He could feel his clothes sitting on him, the sun flushing his back, every whisper of air like mosquitoes. A bead of sweat on the nape of his neck rolled down his spine like a scuttling beetle. His spine rolled under it and pushed his torso towards the woman. Her eyes dropped down to the scoop of his collar and he saw the small mounds of her breasts bob up and down in a quick intake of breath.
"'Your presence soothes me'," he echoed softly, "Is that me speaking to the garden or the garden speaking to me?"
"Or me speaking to you?" she suggested.
Jess' smile broke out warm and sincere. He gave her a quizzical look. "Do I?" He hoped so. He wanted to. That certainty surged to the surface of his bubbling reactions to this peculiar, magnetic creature.
She shrugged coyly and chuckled low, he felt it in the pit of his stomach. She reached up and tucked the petunia behind his ear. Her fingers brushed his hair as she withdrew her hand. "Would you like to?"
***
Anna pressed her lips together and felt anticipation well in her abdomen. When she'd seen this young man sprawled in the grass, like a shot-down falcon, curiosity had taken her over. He was long and lithe, all legs and crooked, nimble fingers. His hair was woodland brown, crinkled and tousled and flecked with grass. It fell into his grey eyes, ghost grey, dawn grey. There was an apricot tint to his skin, sun-drenched. He wasn't really dressed for summer; dark jeans and a black, cotton top with the sleeves pulled up to his elbows, showing forearms scattered with freckles. He was obviously too warm in it; feverish heat pulsed from his body and there was a cobweb-dew sheen in the hollow of his throat. The petunia flower sat snugly in his hedgerow hair, incongruous with his muted look. She liked it, it made her feel like she'd had some kind of effect on him. She wanted to have an effect on him.
