Page 57 of My Forbidden Boss
I shook my head, smiling at the fond but archaic memories fading into blurry focus.
“Anyway… In between sports seasons, my group of friends and I were always on the move. That’s how I found this place, actually. We were up here climbing, and I busted my truck’s front axle coming out of a trailhead just beyond those trees.”
I pointed across the patio into the darkness, thinking back. “We barely had enough money for the fuel to get home, let alone food or any means of getting the truck fixed, so we wandered out of the forest over that way and into this back clearing in the glen… right into the middle of a wedding ceremony they had going on.”
I laughed hard, and Tisha smiled. I could barely control my breath as I remembered the full extent of the fiasco. “We were right up there next to the groom, priest, maid of honor, and best man… the violins, cellos, and harps were playing. Sure enough, here comes the bride, halfway down the aisle toward us with her Stetson-wearing, handlebar-mustached, cowboy daddy at her arm, an open-carry six-shooter holstered at his hip like he was just waiting for a showdown.”
Tisha giggled behind her hand as my face burned, remembering my sense of terror and shame.
“What happened?”
I sighed. “Well, right off the bat, everyone was staring at us, of course. The whole clearing was set up beautifully between the trees and, I don’t know if you noticed it earlier, but there is a big, round pergola out there, like a tunnel of branches or hedges starting just under the first branches of the firs. It forms a covered walkway that leads out beyond the glen, and… if you can believe it, Tisha… the whole thing is actually alive.”
“Alive?”
I nodded knowingly as if to say, ‘Crazy? Yes,’ but promised it was the truth.
“It was the brainchild of Bradley and Samantha. They were the old couple who owned this place before…”
I paused urgently, catching my tongue, and adding a quick revision.
“…the couple who owned it back then, I mean. Long before I ever stumbled onto the place, they had collected the wild cuttings, with a plan. Coming home from their honeymoon, they brought the little branches back as a kind of memento, meant for much more than just some simple keepsakes. You see, the two of them kept the little pieces alive, but in a state of shock, while they traveled and, when they were settled back home and both of them ready to fully break into the journey of their lives together, they enclosed the little branches and got them warmed up. With a lot of discipline, a little luck, and some fine-tuning between the two of them, they safely got the cuttings into a state of incubation… then really started to get them growing.”
Tisha’s eyes shimmered into fiery life as she watched me, listening closely. Flames danced across each iris, the inferno reflected from heating torches mounted and igniting automatically along the patio pillars as the sun’s warmth finally abated. The blue of her gaze on me burned bright and beckoning like bites of frost before the blush of warmhearted hospitality. All I could feel was the yearning urge to be singed, engulfed even… to wrap her up without worry, regardless of the wariness wagging like a dog’s tail in my subconscious, warning that, either way, she’d burn me alive… an actualized bed of enlivened embers, glowing as blue as Tisha’s eyes and burning brighter than any flame, for better or, otherwise, for worse
I swallowed, feeling the dry desert forming behind my tongue. She was watching, waiting, so I waved away the longing and sipped the wine, refilling our glasses as I retrieved a hold on my chain of thoughts.
“Every twig of the vine was strung up in the enclosure by its leafy, younger end, which left the stem’s thicker, older nodes to dangle just above a pool of shallow of water, close enough to the liquid surface below, so that the evaporating water molecules would climb up around the stem as humidity, teasing the plants with the will to drink and grow.”
I paused, suddenly aware of how far I had strayed from our casual conversation. Tisha’s expression didn’t seem bored but interested, so I warily continued, mentally noting not to accidentally abolish all ambiance from our table for the sake of some kind of lecture in horticulture.
“Using attraction and time as their tools, Brad and Sam ensured that the watery promise of life was only just out of the plants’ reach, just a root hair’s breadth beyond the base of each stem. Together, they were propagating the cuttings. Patiently, they waited, allowing the natural precedents of the species’ evolution to keep the pace of progress.”
Light and careful, I picked up the silvery stem beneath the bowl of my water glass, raising it above the surface of our table until the nearest torch of warm firelight shone through the drink’s curving liquid and glass, refracting the patio’s shapes and shadows. I thought better of the move and instead leaned back in my chair, resting my elbow on the armrest between us. My brow and eyes, tilting toward my companion, suggested that we should share the visual together. Tisha was already moving closer, wrapping both of her arms around mine with care and comfortably wedging her chin against my shoulder’s curve. The muscles of my neck seemed to move on their own, angling us together with Tisha’s face resting just beneath mine, my cheek rubbing against her hair as we huddled in to share the view.
Using my free hand’s thumb and forefinger, I plucked a small piece of green garnish from my plate’s edge with a pinch to its bladed leaf. I suspended its tiny stem over the rim of my half-empty water glass, threatening submersion, but careful not to let it go too far, dip too deep through the inner pocket of air and break the near-invisible barrier marking my drink’s surface.
“Then… one by one… life took hold.”
With the slightest motion, I let the lowest tip of the garnish touch the water.
“All of the individual stems started to show their own spark of movement, each sending out a single, searching string of cells… a root from their lowest nodule.”
I wondered.What kind of metaphor…?
One clicked, and I smiled. “It would be like a new kid, someone nobody knows, showing up for the sleepover that everyone else has been to a hundred times. The new kid is picked to seek while all the others run and hide. He starts counting, ‘One Mississippi, two Mississippi…’ After a few seconds of urgent whispers and socks sliding down hallway floorboards, breathless excitement, brilliant ideas, and a thick thump as someone trips running up the stairs… ‘Eighteen Mississippi, Nineteen Mississippi, Twenty Mississippi.’ Soon, the whole house is hushed. Billy’s dad, drinking alone in the garage, is suddenly alert, certain from the absence of anarchy occurring that his hearing has finally just said, ‘Fuck it.’”
Tisha giggled. The sound shivered like a sugar rush under my skin.
“For all the kids in hiding, the ones quietly cramped in a closet or cowering behind a curtain, those that are prone, laying and praying under the beds or burrowing themselves under the couch cushions, the two in the pantry playing tonsil tag, the twins crouching in the musty shadows behind the shower curtain, and young Billy sitting out in the open at the kitchen table, sipping another stiff one from his dad’s work thermos…”
Her laughter was sudden and powerful, muting moments later, but continuing nonetheless as she realized that, for all we knew, Billy and his pals weren’t a day over seven years old.
“Anyway, all these kids are thinking, ‘Man, I’ve got a great spot. Whoever that kid is, he’ll never find me.’ Then they all hear the echo coming through the house. ‘Ready or not…’ They all get excited, suddenly realizing how bad they wish that they had stopped to pee first – well, everyone except the twins. Those two planned ahead, I guess.”
Again, Tisha briefly rolled her eyes. I snickered but kept moving, knowing that it was cheap and childish.
“So, these kids are expecting, ‘Ready or not, here I come,’ right? Well… They’re all found in like… twelve seconds. Every single one of them. Instead of, ‘Here I come,’ it was, ‘Here comes all-seeing thermal recognition, or some kind of x-ray vision.’ Because the new kid doing the seeking turns out to be young Superman, or else just some brat who showed up with his stepdad's army goggles, complete with infrared night vision.”