In the Weeds (Lovelight, #2)

by B.K. Borison

All I know is that it was a challenge for me to be around her. I couldn’t stop thinking about my body curled around hers. The way the skin just below her ear tasted. How it felt to have all that hair brush against my jaw, my shoulders, the tops of my thighs. I found myself wanting to make her laugh, wanting to talk to her.

He looks up at me through his lashes, and it’s the moment after a storm when the sun decides to peek out from behind the heavy clouds—rain still dripping from the edges of the roof, the trees, the mailbox on the corner.

“These from the farm?” I ask. I already know the answer. The carrots are from the farm, and the bread is from Nessa, and the music is a playlist Harper made over the summer, and the delicate bouquet of wildflowers drawn on the back of her arm is by Nova. My dad whittled the spoon she’s using, and this whole kitchen is filled to the brim with pieces of my family. The love between my parents and for all of us, mixing together with thyme and butter and pie until all the tension I usually feel in a roomful of people is back in the hallway, shoved in the pocket of my coat. I’ll pick it back up later, I’m sure, but for now I’m settled. I’m home.

Would she laugh at my dad’s stupid jokes? Would she dance with Nessa around

the kitchen during cleanup? I can’t stop picturing her in all the places I am.

“The first night you were here, you said something about looking for your happy. Did you find it?” I’m surprised he remembers, but I guess I shouldn’t be. Beckett has always been good with the details. “Bits of it.” Gus and Monty dancing at the fire station. A sausage-and-cream-cheese biscuit. The smell of fresh blooming jasmine at Mabel’s greenhouse. Handwritten notes next to the coffee machine.

Standing there like that, fingers curled loose around the neck of a beer bottle, face angled down toward mine—a bit of dirt on his brow and on the back of his hand—he looks like every flicker of a warm thought I’ve had in the past six months. A soft and steady glow burning under my skin.

That was the problem, I think, in that little room in Maine. It was way too easy to imagine being with Beck. To want more.

“It’s okay if it takes you some time to find it again. And it’s okay if you find it, just to lose a bit of it here and there. That’s the beauty of it, yeah? It comes and goes. Not every day is a happy one, and it shouldn’t be. It’s in the trying, I think.”

I like hearing her move around on the other side of the house in the middle of

the night, a muffled curse under her breath when she runs into something in the dark. I like listening to her talk to the cats, arguments with Prancer about who has a right to the big fluffy scarf she loops around her neck. I like her shoes in the hallway and her bag on one of the hooks by the door. Her tube of lipstick on the kitchen counter and her hair ties forgotten on the edge of the sink.

With her eyes still heavy and a yawn making her nose scrunch, she’s better than any dream I could ever come up with. Soft. Sleepy. Perfect.

She is happy laughter and easy smiles. Genuine interest and affection that leaves you feeling like you’re floating with the clouds. That’s the magic of Evelyn, I guess. She shines so bright she casts everyone around her in that same glow.

I want to feel that light too. But all I’ve gotten is hesitant smiles and a carefully maintained bit of space between us.

“I’ll stay. I think I’m finding some happy out here.” She looks at her hands with a grin, the dirt caked over

her knuckles. Her eyes find mine and her smile tips wider. “Out here in the weeds.”

I don’t know if it’s the sliver of my childhood or the field of flowers or Beckett’s hand-drawn map or my time away from everything I thought was important, but I feel the wayward pieces of myself sliding into place. It’s not quite there yet, not the perfect fit, but isn’t that what Beckett said that night on the back porch? Some of it comes, some of it goes. It’s about the trying. Settling into the happy when you find it, being okay when you don’t. Feeling all the misshapen bits and pieces and where they fit together. The delightful ordinary blank space in between. I finally feel like I’m trying.

She frowns at me, and I wish I could swipe at it with my thumb. Make everything a little bit easier for her. Be half as good at this as she is.

“I chose that bar because it was the least crowded place on the street.” Then I saw Evelyn and I didn’t want to go anywhere else. “Plus, everything gets quiet when I look at you.”

“It’s okay to want different things,” she says. “People change. You’re allowed to change. Doing less doesn’t make you less.”

I want this version of him in my memory always. Cornfields flashing by the windows, magnolia leaves in his hair. Eyes hooded but glowing, his knuckles resting under his chin. Handing me his secrets like he wants me to hold them for him.

“Did you find your happy today?” I ground my teeth and shook my head. A quick jerk. “No.” He had hummed once, head tilting to look out over the fields. “You want a hug?” And that had been its own sort of magic, hadn’t it? He hadn’t tried to fix it. Just . . . asked if he could hold me through it.

Maybe this is what happy is supposed to be. A person, a place. A single moment in time.

I’d make her pancakes and bacon and a fucking all-you-can-eat buffet—anything she wanted—if she told me she wanted to stay. But I push that thought away as quickly as it enters my mind. Bury it deep. It’s wishful thinking in the worst of ways. Evie is too big to be contained by a place like Lovelight. Far too bright to be tucked away on a small-town farm. I won’t have her lose her shine because—because I can’t stand to see her go.

want to talk to her about her day and then fuck her senseless up against the wall. I want to make her grilled cheese and tomato soup and then spread her out on my table.

I didn’t realize falling in love could be so simple. Bacon in a take-out container and earplugs in the bottom of a handbag.

“You can have me any way you want me, honey.” His hand cups the side of my face, cradling my cheek. “You know that.”

“Sometimes love is greedy, kiddo.” My dad sets his mouth in a firm line. “Sometimes it’s a little bit selfish too. You think it’s never crossed my mind that your mom deserves something better than the life we carved out for ourselves here? It has. A million times. A million and one. But I’m holding on to her with both hands. I’m trusting her to make her own choices. To choose me.”

“I got a new job, you know. Down in Durham.” The subject change leaves me grasping. I blink at her, confused. “Durham?” I don’t care if it’s in Antarctica. I’ll buy a parka and learn how to speak penguin.

Because I feel it every time he brings me a mug of tea on the porch or slips a thick pair of his socks over my cold feet. In every handwritten note and pot of coffee and touch against my bare skin in the stillness of night. In the drives we take along the dirt road that leads to the farm, all the windows down and my hair in the wind. In every familiar face we pass on the way into town, a call of my name and a happy wave, Beckett’s hand warm and comforting in mine. In the tiny tattoo of a lime on the inside of my forearm—the very same place he licked a line of salt from my skin the first night we met. A birthday present that made him laugh so hard he fell out of his chair. In the tattoo of some poorly drawn tulips, just above his heart. I don’t ask because I don’t need to. He found his happy in me. Like I found mine in him. In us. In this.