Growing and Kissing (10 page)

She was only a little thing but God, she had spirit.

She marched up the second flight of stairs. Each step was a little slower than the last. By the time she reached the top, she was barely moving.

“I’m going up to nine anyway
,”
I said. “I might as well take one of them.”

She was panting but trying not to show it. “What are you now, neighbor of the year?”

I just held out my hands for a sack.

She looked up at the stairwell above her...and with a despondent sigh she pushed a sack towards me. I took it, trying not to make it look too easy.

As I’d thought, the label said it was some sort of chemical fertilizer. I really hoped it was for her house plants.

We moved on, making faster progress now that she could heave her sack in both hands. She managed another four floors before she ran out of steam. I stopped beside her. She was red-faced, now, and her legs were shaky, but she was still doing her best to hide it. She gave me a glare, as if daring me to doubt her. But I could tell she was wiped out.

“When we get to your place, you’re going to need your hands to open the door,” I said carefully. I wasn’t used to this diplomatic shit, but I was doing my best. “Why don’t I take the other one?”

She just looked at me with hate-filled eyes...but then her exhaustion overcame her anger and her shoulders slumped. She didn’t offer the sack, but she didn’t resist when I scooped it out of her arms, either. My forearm accidentally brushed across the soft swell of her breast and I felt my cock go rock hard in my jeans.
Jesus,
this girl did it to me
every single time.
Just looking at her now, with all that shining red hair cascading down her back and those big, green eyes—I didn’t care if she hated me. I was imagining pushing her back against the stairwell wall, kissing her hard as I unfastened the belt of her jeans, hooked her panties down, and pressed her thighs apart—

“What?” she asked, bemused.

I realized I was staring at her. I hefted a sack onto each shoulder and set off up the stairs. “Nothing.”

When we reached her apartment, she opened the door and then turned around, blocking the doorway. “Just put them down here,” she said. “Thank you.”

I didn’t put them down. I had to know what was going on—was she growing somewhere? “Let me carry them inside.”

“I’ll be fine.
Thank you.”

That’s when I caught a faint scent wafting from her apartment. “Ah, no,” I groaned, my stomach tightening. “You couldn’t be that fuckin’ daft....”

Before she could protest, I pushed past her. Since she was trying to block the doorway, that meant muscling her out of the way. I tried not to think about how good she smelled, or how soft her skin was as it brushed against mine.

Inside, everything was long drapes and too many cushions—you could tell women lived there. And I’ve never seen so many things growing: plants in pots, plants on shelves, even plants on the window ledges. But the normal plants weren’t what were making the smell.

Right in the middle of the room, arranged in neat rows, were about thirty marijuana plants.

“Are you kidding me?” I said to myself. I dumped the fertilizer sacks on the floor and spun to face her. “Are you
fuckin’ kidding me?!
You can’t grow
here!”

She quickly shut the door. “I don’t have anywhere else!” She crossed her arms defensively.

“So you do it in
your apartment?
You’re going to just haul everything up here: fertilizer, lights, the
plants...
oh, Jesus, you carried those up here! How many people saw you?”

“None! I brought them up one at a time, in boxes.”

“And you’re going to do that for the other—how many do you need, to make half a million?”

She shifted from foot to foot and looked at the floor. “A few hundred.”

I looked around. “There’s no space! And what about the smell? I could smell these out in the hallway and that’s thirty plants, at the start of the season. When it’s two hundred, fully grown, you’ll be smelling it a block away!” She stared at the floor. “And what happens when the super comes around to fix a leak? What happens when your sister comes home?”

She finally snapped her head up and glared at me. “If I don’t do this, she’s not
coming
home!”

We stood there glaring at each other. Those big green eyes were blazing at me, her chest was heaving and her lower lip was stuck out in an angry, sullen pout.

I’d never wanted to kiss a girl so much.

“You can’t grow here,” I said again. The anger was ebbing away, to be replaced by a sense of impending doom. I wasn’t going to be able to talk her out of this. I could see that now. She was going to grow, no matter what I said. She was going to wind up dead or in jail...unless I helped her.

I let out a long sigh and tapped the nearest pot with my foot. “Can you really grow this shit? Do you know what you’re doing?”

She tilted her chin to look up at me and her eyes narrowed. Hopeful, but cautious: I’d disappointed her once already. “Yeah,” she said at last. “Yeah, I know what I’m doing.”

I looked around at the plants and ran a hand through my hair. Then I let out an enormous sigh.

It was the only way.

“Okay,” I grunted. “I’ll help you.”

She bit her lip and nodded quickly, thanking me. I wasn’t ready for how that made me feel: like a hot bomb going off in my chest.

“But on one condition,” I told her, as gruffly as I could. “We do it my way. You do the growing but when it comes to the other stuff, you do exactly what I tell you.”

She swallowed. “I’ll do exactly what you tell me,” she repeated. In her voice, it sounded like the most erotic thing imaginable.

I had to keep my distance from her. The deeper she got involved with me, the more chance there was I’d destroy her life the way I destroyed everything else. This had to be a temporary alliance, a business relationship. Nothing more.

The next six months were going to be fucking unbearable.

I took a deep breath and sealed my fate. “Alright then,” I said. “Let’s grow some weed.”

Louise

The next day, after my shift at the garden store, I went to visit Kayley. I’d already decided that I wasn’t going to tell her about the plan. If she knew what I was doing she’d start talking sense into me, repeating all the things that were already keeping me awake at night: that I’d get caught, or shot, that people would find out what I’d done and hate us. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to so easily push all the protests aside, when they came from her. And even if I did ignore her and go ahead, all she’d have to do would be to threaten to go to the cops and then I’d have no choice but to shut down. She had to stay totally oblivious.

I’d thought I was going to have to fake happiness with Kayley, but it was surprising how easy it was to slip into it. We’d spent so much of our lives together, there was a kind of inertia that the disease couldn’t stop. We talked about boys at school and getting her a new backpack; about whether she was allowed to watch that cop show,
Blue & Red,
on Netflix (no, way too much sex and violence); about new Ben and Jerry’s flavors we’d like to see.

And then I made the mistake of mentioning last year’s vacation. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I tried to scrape together enough for us to go somewhere each summer: last year had been camping in the Los Padres forest. Kayley grinned excitedly. “This summer—” she started.

And then she stopped. And her lip trembled.

I pulled her quickly into a hug. “Hey,” I said, stroking her hair. She was starting to tremble. “
Hey!
It’ll be fine. We’ll just make it fall, instead of summer.”

She gulped and nodded. But when she eventually pulled back from me, her face was white. “Can we plan it?” she asked.

I looked at her, thrown for a second.

“Can we plan it?” she asked again. “Really plan it?”

And then I understood.

“Yeah,” I said. “Absolutely.” We got out her phone and started planning where we were going to go, once she’d recovered, and what we were going to do when we got there. Every meal. Every last detail. Because both of us needed to feel like it was really going to happen.

While we were browsing hotels, she suddenly said out of nowhere, “This isn’t bullshit, is it?”

For once, I didn’t pull her up on her language. “No,” I said firmly. I grabbed her hand and squeezed. “It’s not bullshit.”

And I told myself it wasn’t.

I’d been wavering since the talk with Sean the night before. I knew I needed his help and I was glad of it. But getting mixed up with him changed the whole feel of the thing. When it was just me doing it, in my apartment, I could almost kid myself I wasn’t doing anything wrong. It felt just like growing any other plant. But as soon as I started working with him, it felt like I would become part of the whole system, a drug grower connected with dealers and enforcers and God knows who else.

I knew it made sense. I knew I couldn’t operate in a vacuum if this was going to work. I knew I’d been kidding myself that I could. But none of that made it easier. By even talking to Sean, I was getting myself—and by extension, Kayley—involved in a world I’d always swore I’d stay away from. Sean was everything my folks had warned me about when I was a kid. I’d always been a good girl and men didn’t come much worse.

Except...sometimes, when I looked into his eyes, he didn’t seem as ruthless as everyone made out. I was still scared of him, but less than when he’d first grabbed my arm, up on the roof. I was having trouble imagining him actually hurting me. But I was having no trouble imagining him doing other things to me.

I flushed and hoped that Kayley didn’t notice. Whenever I was around him, my mind slipped into fantasy mode. Each touch of his hands was enough to send me into a downward spiral that always ended with him on top of me...or me on top of him...or him behind me. I was finding that I was permanently, shamefully wet when he was close. No man had ever done that to me.

What was maddening was that sometimes, just occasionally, I’d feel his eyes on me, a lick of heat traveling up and down my body, or he’d narrow his eyes in that certain way, when we were arguing, like he wanted to take me over his knee. I’d get just the tiniest hint that maybe he wanted me too. Then it was gone again, too quickly for me to be sure I hadn’t just imagined it. If he hadn’t been interested in me, it would have been easy: I could have written off my fantasies as just that, fantasies, and pushed them down inside. But the little hints of interest were just enough to keep them bubbling up to the surface, every damn time.

Hence the wavering. Could I really become a criminal, like Sean? And could I even function, working side-by-side with him for six long months? What if something...
happened?
What if the hints were real and he made a pass at me? Hell, what did I mean,
make a pass?
Sean wasn’t the sort of guy who’d
make a pass,
he’d just throw me down on the ground and—

I pressed my thighs together.

Nothing was going to happen. I wasn’t going to get involved with him. I wasn’t going to bring someone like that into Kayley’s life: no way. I’d take cold showers three times a day if I had to. Sean and I would be just business and, at the end of six months, we’d go our separate ways.  

I pulled Kayley close and kissed the top of her head. For her, I’d make it work.

***

After the hospital, I headed straight for Sean’s apartment and knocked on his door. A moment later, he opened it...and froze.

“What?” I asked. I looked down at myself. I wasn’t wearing anything out of the ordinary, let alone sexy, just a green scoop-neck top and blue jeans.

He glanced away for a second, then back at me. “Nothing. Come in.”

He wasn’t topless, this time, although the black tank top didn’t cover much. It almost made him look bigger, drawing attention to his tight waist and the way he seemed to flare out in an X from that point, up to the broad, muscled chest and shoulders and down to his hips.