Page 79 of Where You're Planted

She shook her head at him, a wary smile stretching across her mouth.

He reached across the table to take her hands. She let him. “I’m offering use of my washing machine because the alternative is unnecessarily annoying,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.”

She huffed a laugh. “Fine.”

“Good. Now come over here.”

“Why?”

“Because the way you look in my shirt is doing things to me.”

She played with the collar, sliding it just over her shoulder, all innocent and sweet. “What kind of things?”

Jack shook his head. He loved her like this, playful and a little brazen, leaning into the sexiness she otherwise tamped down.

He pushed up from his chair and came around the table, standing over her so she tilted her face up to look at him, eyes dancing with anticipation. He held her cheeks in his hands, drawing it out. Then he brought his mouth to her ear and whispered, “Come find out.”

23

Tansy

“You coming?”

Tansy shot up from behind the circulation desk, heat climbing her face. All day, she kept mentally replaying the part of last night when Jack had flipped her onto her stomach and covered her back in agonizingly slow, open-mouthed kisses while his hand snuck between her hips and the mattress.

It was closing time, and Kai was returning the rolling cart from outside. They looked her up and down as she squeezed by to leave, a knowing smirk on their lips. “It’s getting hot in here,” they sang under their breath, closing the door to lock up.

“I’ve put in a request for a portable cooling unit,” Tansy mumbled. Sheila from admin had said she’d pass along the request, which didn’t mean they’d get it, but she also hadn’t brought up their dwindling borrowed time in the gardens—three more weeks.

“Babe, I’mnottalking about the weather. You look like you need a cold plunge.”

Tansy laughed, embarrassed, and then muttered, “I guess not having a water heater isn’t always bad.”

“Oh, shit, wait. Speaking of which”—Kai snapped their fingers—“I heard about this thing you should check out. Have you ever heard of Ernie’s Emporium?”

“No.”

“It’s this weird place deep in the woods that’s, like, a flea market, a drive-in movie theater, an arcade, and maybe some other things, too. The guy who ran it just died, and his family is selling off all the stuff for dirt cheap. Hang on.” Kai dug their phone out of their pocket and thumbed the screen before turning it to Tansy. “Look at this list. Right there—water heaters for a hundred bucks.”

“Okay, but do they actually work?”

“That’s the thing. The guy used to buy up inventory and equipment when businesses went bankrupt, so some of it’s used, like pizza ovens from restaurants and industrial washing machines, but some are straight-up floor models and sale stock from old department stores. His family is selling it off cheap because they don’t want to keep the business going.”

“I’d need a truck.”

A flash of movement pulled Tansy’s attention down the path toward the back property. Jack was returning from whatever he’d been doing back there all day, his mouth immediately quirking up at the sight of her.

“Something tells me you might be able to find help from someone with a truck.”

—

The drive to Ernie’s Emporium—afterwork on Tuesday—took two hours. Jack didn’t listen to anything when he drove, which made Tansy antsy for the first half hour, but he humored her questions about his day and listened to her ramble on about her own. All the while, he left his hand on her thigh, drawing circles with his fingertip over her kneecap. She could still feel the sensitive buzz in her skin when he parked the truck in a field that faced a compound of several outbuildings set in the dense pine trees.

“I’ll meet you in there,” he said, nodding at a bathroom sign over a side door.

Inside the main office, Tansy walked up to the counter, where two men had their backs to her. Following a baseball game on a small TV, they didn’t hear her approach, so she cleared her throat. The area behind the counter was cluttered with small appliances, sports equipment, and about a dozen traffic cones. She couldn’t tell if they were stored there or pulled for people to come pick up. She’d been told the water heater would be pulled ahead of time for her, but she didn’t see it.

“Excuse me,” she finally said.

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