Page 69 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

In the present, alone, my fist moves slowly, and my breath goes ragged and quiet.

Yet, in the memories that keep dancing in my mind.

I'm inside her, both of us gone still at the fit of it, her legs around me and her fingers in my hair and her scent and mine braided so tight the greenhouse itself seemed to lean in.

"August," she breathes, my full name, the way she only said it when she was undone, and I move in her slow and deep and endless, watching her come apart under the grow lights like something blooming in time-lapse, and I follow her over with my mouth at her throat, right over the gland, right where the bond bite was always going to go.

It never went there.

My release wrung out of me into the dark of an empty greenhouse with her name on my lips and no one to hear it. The knot swells after, useless and aching, throbbing for a bond we planned and I torched, and I sit there in the drip and the dark and work it down with my own hand, breathing through the specific pain of it, because we saved that for her. All three of us.

The lock, the bite, the fourth flower for my tattoo that I never added and never will now.

It’s humiliating how little space there is between my body’s memory and the present: how quickly I can conjure every detail of Abercrombie’s skin, how my hands move to cup air where her waist used to be, how the taste of her—floral, honeyed, a little bit wild—haunts every inhale. I don’t even bother trying to stop the reel; I know from experience that denial only makes the wanting crueler, more insistent. Instead, I lean forward, elbows on knees, and let the memory fill me whole.

"August," she breathes, my full name, the way she only said it when she was undone.

I move in her slow and deep, hips drawn all the way back, then forward again, over and over, her body hot and slickaround me. She watches me with those huge eyes, dark and a little wild, and I realize she’s reading every flicker of restraint on my face, cataloging it, storing it for later. She tilts her chin, exposing her throat—the fragile hollow where it meets her collarbone, the place where the bond bite is supposed to go—and the flash of want in me is so sharp it almost knocks me off balance. I lean in and mouth at it, just above the gland, not biting, just breathing her in. The way she shudders tells me she wants it, too, but we’ve promised ourselves we’ll wait, that we’ll do it right, that we’re not the kind of people who rush.

Yet, we’ve always been the kind that thrives on the rush behind closed doors.

She wraps her arms around my shoulders, and I can’t remember how to breathe. Her scent is everywhere but under it all is the unmistakable note of Amber, a dark-sweet tang that blots out every other sense. I lose the script entirely. I’m not supposed to rut into her like a starved thing, but I do anyway, and she soaks it up, her mouth open on my name, her nails digging crescents into my back.

She comes first, always. She has exquisite control, but underneath it is a coil of hunger so feral she can’t hide it from me, and when it snaps, it drags me with it.

The second I feel her go, I’m lost.

My own release is violent, overwhelming, my hands shaking where they brace her hips, my vision going white at the edges. The knot that swells at the base of me is a punch of pleasure and agony both, locking us together, and for a second I can almost believe it’s real, that the bond will click into place and we’ll be permanent. But we both know that’s not how it happens here. We’re not mated, not officially, not yet. Her pulse throbs wildly under my mouth, but she does not ask me to claim her, and I don’t.

The whole memory is completed in the span of a dozen seconds, and when I come back to myself, I’m still on the cold cement bench, my own hand sticky and useless in my lap, nothing left but the ache in my chest. I work my knot down methodically, ignoring the echo of her name in my head.

Eventually, the pressure subsides, but the emptiness does not.

Maybe it never will.

The ache in my chest does not go down at all.

She built the same dream I did, in the dark, without me. She armored her own scent to walk through my field. And she still stopped at that bare rose bed and told me the truth about my own cowardice, because she is more honest at wanting than I have ever been at loving.

I clean up.

I sit a while longer.

Then I do the only constructive thing available to a man at midnight with more feeling than sense.

I go out to the second field with a headlamp and the orange tape, and I find the coral.

The loud, almost-orange coral she wanted, the color that would make a nervous mother nervous. I mark the rows for cutting. I find the dark plum scabiosa and the rust and the wild grasses that look like a field instead of a shop, and I flag every one for her wedding.

Then I walk back to the display beds.

The bare ones.

Where the apricot roses used to stand before I cut them out of the farm to prove I wasn't haunted.

The stems are already throwing new growth. Roses forgive faster than people; it's their best and most annoying quality. By September, there'll be a second flush, a hundred apricot heads at least, her exact color, coming back whether I approve or not.

I crouch in the dark and look at them for a long time.