The Co-op

Chapter Twenty-One

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Before

DEACON

The first time I wonder if I’m falling in love with LaRynn Lavigne is after only two weeks together. It’s mid-morning on the Fourth of July, and we’re lying together in my car with the back seats folded flat, windows down to let in the breeze. She’s naked under a beach towel, a light sheen on her skin as she watches our hands tangle and make shadows on the ceiling. I’m boneless still, all the edges of my vision a bit dreamy, I think.

“You have really great hands,” she says. A thought given freely, and a compliment, no less. I sigh out a surprised laugh. I’m about to remind her that I mainly just used my mouth this time, but she keeps going. “You’re just good at figuring things out with them, aren’t you?” She frowns like she’s puzzling something together herself. “Did you always know you’d want to do something with them? Like, how do you know you don’t want to be in… I don’t know, finance or something?” She looks at me, lying half on her side, and I feel strangely honored that she wants to learn anything from me, about me, and to be so noticed by her.

“I’m not sure, I guess,” I admit. “I think it was kind of process of elimination for me.” I chuckle. “I’ve always liked being outside.” My breath catches a little when she brings our hands to rest on her cheek, still watching me, soft and curious. “And, um.” I swallow, my knuckle on her upper lip suddenly the most important part of my body. “I like knowing how something works, I think. I’d like to know that I could fix something if I ever needed to,” I say. “Or hell, build it myself if need be.”

She smiles. “I like that,” she says. And I think the words right then. I like you . I might love you. And I am completely caught off guard and totally mystified by it in that second. I wonder if she notices all my scars between my fingers, where the skin stays light. But then she straightens my middle digit and slips it into her mouth and all my thoughts go white with bliss.

It happens again, maybe a week or so later. Neil sends me to the closest nursery one morning to grab a few plants for a residential project he’s finishing, and I spot her from a distance, under a small palm. When I notice what she’s wearing, I second-guess my assumption that it’s her. A gigantic gardening hat over two long braids, and an apron covered in smiling sweet peas over her tank top and shorts. I am fucking delighted about it. She’s gently playing with the fronds with her fingertips when she does a double take and sees me. She grins, an open-mouthed, sunny thing that probably makes my own go dopey for a moment. And in less than a second I see the recognition wipe its way across her face. She looks down at her apron and adjusts the strings on her hat, her expression going flat and irked.

“Well, hi there, Larry,” I practically sing.

“Shut up. I’m helping the grands,” she drawls. “They got new planter boxes.”

“I know,” I tell her. “I built them.” I’m smiling so big I feel it in my scalp. “I really like all your pockets,” I tell her. “You look pretty cute.”

“Cute?” She says it like it tastes bad.

“Fucking adorable, sweet pea.”

She lifts a brow at me like I’m in for it, before she has me push her cart around the lot, collecting and tracking down a variety of plants from a list she’s made. The effort she’s put into this thing is also very cute. She’s researched soil varieties and plants based on the sun exposure. It’s clear she’ll go all out for anything when it comes to the grands, even if it’s seemingly small.

Less than an hour later I get a photo message of her in front of a full-length mirror, half turned so I can see that she’s in nothing but the apron, the bow tied across her back above her pert, bare ass, her braids messy from her hat and the side swell of one of her tits on full display. Cute?

I take four large steps away from the nail gun. Jesus Rynn I almost just fell off a roof .

I thought you were doing something with plants today? You’re not on land?

I’m currently being sent into orbit , I reply. But I send her a picture of my own with what I hope is a serious face, balancing on top of some framing.

So don’t send the one of me bent over in it then?

Shit. Something wobbles beneath me. I haven’t even had her bent over yet. I always get the sense that she’d rather be face-to-face. Neil’s gonna wonder why I’ve got a semi over trusses, you menace .

Another photo. I force myself to climb down before I open it. This one’s a close-up, just the slope of her hip bone with a scrap of the apron in the corner, a mark I know I left with my mouth, right above the crease where her thigh meets it. I want one of your face , I say.

She sends it immediately, and it’s another moment that collapses and folds into the rest. I look at the coy tilt of her lips in the picture here and can imagine exactly how it would change into the sunny one from earlier, before it’d stumble back into that determined scowl she wore while she bossed me around the plants. I love this, I think. I know the orgasms are a factor. I’m sure they’re at least partially to blame for whatever these chemicals are. But most of the time, I’m having the most fun I’ve ever had with a person.

But then there are the other times, too… When she always finds a way to shake off my questions for her, whether by distracting me or downright changing the subject. I feel like I have to disguise my inquiries as a game, or catch her off guard and get her to answer something silly, then dissect her responses later. Like one day when I’m lying on her bed at the grands’, eating an apple.

“Do you think flavors all taste the same to people?” I ask. She looks at me like one might look at a kitten. Like she wants to pet me and put me in her pocket, and I want to purr in response. “I just mean, like, this is an apple, right. And it tastes like apple, and we both know it’s apple. But what if apple tastes like blueberry to you? We’ll never know.”

“I definitely don’t think that we experience things the same,” she says, smiling before she takes a bite. “I bet colors are all different and maybe even feelings get mixed up, too. Words are words but we read them differently, at different cadences and we take different meanings from them.” She looks away. “I mean, our brains are all different. Something in your brain translates mustard as being delicious and something in mine knows the truth.”

One day we go to the beach with Elyse, Jensen, and June, and she and I stay onshore while we watch them surf. Neither of us likes to go into the ocean, I discover. “I love being by it, but I have no desire to go in it,” she says, echoing my own thoughts. “There are enough things on land that you can see coming that still hurt you, why go where you can’t?” The twins get into an argument about something out on the water, Elyse catches a wave and rides away from them.

“Do you ever wish you had a sibling?” I ask when June shoves Jensen off his board in the distance.

She answers immediately and steadily. “No. I wouldn’t want anyone else to have to live in my house.” She looks at me with an untethered expression after, like she shocked herself by this admission. I realize that at the beginning of this summer I would have assumed this meant she didn’t want to have someone else to share things with. I would have thought it was bratty or immature. Now, I’ve gathered in chunks that it’s an unhappy home, but I still find her answer surprising. Knowing that she would take loneliness over someone else’s suffering.

Sometimes it feels like my opinions or thoughts concerning her matter so little that it doesn’t occur to her to share with me in the first place, though. Like one day when I ask her why she wants to be a lawyer and she blows me off, or when I see her on my favorite beach bench a few days later, her face rigid while she speaks French in clipped tones. I try to find out what the conversation was and the most I can get out of her is a cavalier, “Sounds like maybe my parents aren’t having a great trip.” A little while later she sneaks me into the grands’ house while they go on a hike at Henry Cowell, and I try to ask about it again. She says she doesn’t feel like talking about it, but that she does want to understand whether or not sixty-nine’ing is actually efficient.

It becomes difficult to remember what I wanted to talk about after that. (And we determine that it is not, but it is fun anyway.)

But that’s another thing. Her insistence that we keep it hidden from the grands is a joke. They all know we’re more than friends. I don’t even know if we’re true friends. I don’t know what we are.

Nan and my mom have both given me their versions of the same talking-to, where they tell me I had better “Be safe,” “Be careful with her,” or “Whatever you’re doing, you better keep things on the up-and-up, Deacon James. That girl is special.” No shit. It’s like even my own family thinks she’s too special for me.

It feels like I can’t get enough of her, or like I’m asking for too much from her.

Maybe it’s just me that’s not enough.