Page 72 of Late Bloomer
Her lips fall open as she looks at our hands. I give her palm a squeeze, hoping she’ll look at me. This would be so much easier if she’d look at me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, my voice hoarse. “I’m sorry I hurt you.”
Her eyes slowly trace up to meet mine, widening further. I’m at risk of falling into her stare, drowning in those light brown eyes. I was wrong; this is actually way harder with her looking at me.
“I don’t have an excuse or an explanation or even a qualifier,” I continue. “I’m just sorry. And I hope you can forgive me. Because I don’t like you being mad at me, and I don’t like making you mad at me even more.” I swallow, the pad of my thumb tracing the knobs of her knuckles. I clear my throat. “So, um, can we talk?”
Pepper stares at me, face falling into something unreadable. And she slips her hand from mine.
She clears her throat, mouth a stern line and eyebrows furrowed. She’s mad. And she has every right to be. But that doesn’t stop it from breaking my heart into a million pieces anyway.
She takes a deep breath. Then another. “No one’s ever said that to me before,” she whispers. I watch her swallow. “That they’re sorry they’ve hurt me.”
“That seems… not right.”
Pepper shakes her head like she’s trying to shake off a jitter.“Thank you,” she says after a moment, voice rough. “I… That means a lot.”
“Can I… Will you let me help you? Or at least help you figure out what to do?” I gesture vaguely at the flowers around us.
Pepper reaches into the pocket of her grass-stained jeans, pulling out a sprig of flowers. “Okay,” she whispers, twirling the plant between her fingers. “Maybe you can start by helping me here?” She waves at the plot next to us, flowers of blue and pink and purple waving in the sun.
“Sure. Every garden needs a hoe, right?” I say back. “Tell me where to start.”
Pepper’s lips part as she looks at me, then they stretch into a smile. “Okay.”
She hands me an extra pair of shears, explaining that I should keep the stem long and cut at an angle, removing any leaves that will be below the water before depositing them in one of the buckets sitting in the grass.
While it seems pretty self-explanatory and basically the same thing I did that day with Diksha, my hands still tremble as she watches me make my first few cuts. When I look at her, wide-eyed and desperate for approval, she smiles like I discovered buried treasure.
“Perfect,” she says, grabbing her own shears and going to work next to me.
We trim in silence for a while, the sun stroking its fingers down my neck and across my shoulders. It’s nice at first, but then I start sweating, back muscles cramping from my kneeling position in the dirt.
Despite the twinges of discomfort, I feel… happy. Good. My hands are comfortably busy as they play in the dirt, my mind still, and my heart—
My heart isn’t a participant in this moment because feelings aren’t a factor in harvesting flowers in peaceful silence with Pepper.
“I really do think we can do the competition,” I tell Pepper as we fill another bucket with snapdragons. “I’m not bullshitting you when I say I want to help.”
Pepper glances at me. “I believe you,” she says, a drag of wind lifting a few loose strands of her hair. “It’s just very overwhelming for me. Life in general kind of is. It takes me an obscene amount of time to wrap my head around a new idea, a change in routine. I don’t even feel like it’s indecision, when it comes down to it. It’s more that I physically and mentally don’t feel capable of starting something new.”
I stare at Pepper, the way the sun creates a halo around her. “Maybe that’s how I can help,” I say, setting down my shears and wiping some sweat from my forehead. “I have no issues diving into something headfirst without a second thought. It’s the seeing-things-through part that kills me.”
Pepper snorts. “My polar opposite.”
“Maybe we can use it to our advantage,” I say, bouncing up and down on my heels from my kneeling position. “I’ll bulldoze our way into it, and you create the refinement for us to finish it.”
She eyes me from tip to toe, and my skin heats under her gaze.
“What the hell,” she says, throwing her hands up and smiling at me. “Might as well go for it. I apologize for being a neurotic mess during it in advance.”
“Right back atcha,” I say, giggling.
“I still have concerns about how we’ll get a big enough yield to make anything worthwhile,” Pepper says, nibbling her bottom lip.
“I was thinking about it last night, actually. What if we spend these weeks leading up to it drying some flowers? I checked the rules and regulations, and dry flowers are permissible as long as fresh flowers make up the majority of the design.”
“That’s actually not a horrendous idea.”
