Page 27 of Where You're Planted

“Talk about the festival.”

He cleared his throat, shifting his gaze to some point over her shoulder. He adjusted his hat. “Yeah.”

She laughed again, a kind of convulsive aftershock. He didn’t join her. He was all buttoned up once more, scowl back in place, that confusing heat in his eyes snuffed out. Could you miss something that happened just ten seconds ago? Because she did. That warm chuckle had fundamentally, alarmingly altered her.

He seemed determined not to acknowledge that a door, previously bolted shut, had swung open between them.

But Tansy felt the shift, the exciting whisper of possibility. She’d wedge herself into that small door gap if she had to. She wouldn’t let him slam it shut.

10

Jack

Today’s precariously fastened outfit was some kind of flowy yoga tank top that looked normal enough from the front but which, when Tansy wove among the handful of women on the main lawn, turned out to be two halves of cloth literallytied togetherat the small of her back, with a giant slit running all the way up her spine and exposing a sliver of cardinal red underneath—a sports bra or something, Jack didn’t know, and he was trying not to think about it.

He’d also spent the weekend trying not to think about her soft thigh in his grip, her leg hooked around his, and her body, soft and warm, pressed to his back last Friday. The way she’d dragged down off him. It had momentarily tipped him intowantingher. Not just interest, not simple attraction, but pure, screaming, unadulteratedneedlike he hadn’t allowed to sneak up on him in some time. Even though he’d shut it down, a ghost of that desire lingered, haunting even this wide-open space.

Someone cleared their throat, and he flinched at the interruption. Greta sipped her mug of coffee and nodded at the group. “Thinking of joining them? You could use some movement and meditation.”

“Hell no,” he grumbled, turning his back to Tansy in her meresuggestionof a shirt. “They were chanting earlier. Thought the Satan guy was back.”

Greta raised a skeptical eyebrow.

Fine. The women hadn’t been chanting exactly. They had recited a series of affirmations:I am safe in my body. I observe with curiosity, not judgment. I release limiting thoughts that do not serve me.And he’d wandered out of the greenhouse earlier not because oftheirnoise but to investigate an odd humming sound in the corner of the building, noticeable because the exhaust fans weren’t working. He’d gotten distracted by the sight of Tansy.

Now they were near the end of a familiar grounding exercise, identifying five items in the environment that they could see, four they could hear, three they could touch, and so on. At the beginning, Tansy had kicked off her shoes and dug her toes into the grass with the others, only to scrunch her nose up and shudder, he guessed, at the slick morning dew. With each new instruction, she’d cast sidelong glances at the instructor, then around the group. They were on the final sense now—taste—and her eyes popped wider as a lithe white woman with dreadlocks yanked up a fistful of grass and put it in her mouth.

No one else reflected Tansy’s horror, and Jack stifled a laugh as she scanned the area for something to taste that wasn’t disgusting. He would have said something if she’d gone for the berries on the bush behind her, which were a purgative, but he didn’t have to because she took a pull from her water bottle instead.

He was enjoying watching her struggle to maintain her charade of serenity—until the group returned to their mats and began stretching. Now he realized he would have to avoid the main lawn from eight to eight-forty every Monday morning because seeing the smooth, bare curve of Tansy’s back and her perky ass in those leggings as she pushed her hips up into downward dog absolutelydid not serve him.

“Can you spare a minute?” Greta asked, still standing there all this time. He couldn’t be sure, because her delivery was always pretty dry, whether she was genuinely asking or subtly skewering him, but he thought he detected a teasing lilt in that question.

Jack physically turned his shoulders away from Tansy. He returned to the corner of the greenhouse, where the faint humming persisted. “What’s up?”

“I don’t want to make a big deal of my leaving.”

He laughed. “Don’t see how it could be much smaller of a deal.” She’d nixed every party idea he’d suggested, which had put him in the unfamiliar position of pushing for fanfare instead of limiting it. He didn’t personally want a big event either, but he did want to honor her twenty years of leadership and give her the send-off she deserved. They’d settled on coffee and pastries in the courtyard with the staff on Friday morning.

“I don’t plan on making a speech,” she warned.

“That’s fine. But I’m pretty sure the others are going to.” Some of the staff had even looked into having a bronze statue of her created, but it was a lot more expensive than they’d expected and couldn’t be done that quickly. Jack had been preparing his own remarks, although so far nothing he’d come up with captured the magnitude of her legacy here, the challenge of adequately filling her shoes, and the recentrealization that his professional relationship with her was one of his longest-running ones, period.

“I don’t want to make a speech,” she said again, frowning in confusion as he bent his ear to the solid wall below the window panes, “but that doesn’t mean I have nothing to say.”

“Okay,” he said slowly.

She stood straighter, as though she were about to make an important declaration, only to frown at his distracted investigating. “What is this?” she asked. “More rabbits?”

“Nah, I got all the holes patched up. Do you hear that humming sound?”

She bent beside him. “Yes. What is that?”

“No idea. There’s nothing mechanical over here.”

“Hmm,” she said, standing back up.

He stood, too, perplexed, then asked, “Sorry, did you have something to say?”

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