I doubted that Thaddeus, bless his cotton socks, had even noticed the plants, let alone thought about watering them. When I succumbed to curiosity one evening and asked him, he turned beetroot red and immediately dashed to his bedroom. He returned a moment later with two pots of leafless sticks, a miserable expression, and a fistful of apologies. Using the bald-faced lie that I might be able to save them, I’d rescued the pots from his hands and hidden them in the laundry to dispose of when he went to bed. Thaddeus narrowed his gaze but didn’t press me on it.
Ten days of having my evening meal cooked—except on the weekend when we bumped around the kitchen together, laughing and giving each other shit in a frightening domesticity that positively reeked of a relationship that didn’t have the right to exist after only ten days. A relationship that Thaddeus didn’t want to exist and one that I increasingly did.
Ten days of watching Thaddeus lying on my sofa every evening, propped on a pillow, tapping away on his laptop, the tip of his tongue poking out the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on whatever he was doing—coding the next NASA trip to Mars for all I understood of his screen whenever I peeked over his shoulder.
I’d asked him once what he was working on, but lost interest and understanding somewhere around the thirty-second mark when he drifted into explanations about some kind of cooling system. Considering he was without a job, I wasn’t sure who the system was for but figured it was none of my business. Instead, I settled for the much more interesting job of watching his lips move around the words and the way his enthusiastic tawny eyes sparkled with the gold and rosy hues of the setting sun.
As for what had happened between us the week before—AKA the best fucking sex I’d had in a long, long time, not that I was dwelling on it—Thaddeus had drawn a clear line in the sand about who we were to each other, and I’d become a ridiculous caricature in my own life. I spent every night sitting in the armchair opposite him as he plugged away on his keyboard, while I worked on client plans or at least pretended to. Most of my time was, in fact, spent watching him and those two creases between his eyes—one longer than the other—as they notched in concentration.
We’d fallen into the habit like it was the most natural thing in the world when it clearly wasn’t. The sofa had always beenmyhaunt after dinner. I could see the garden from there, watch theblackbirds feasting on the cut oranges I’d pinned into the lawn, consider what was doing well and what needed attention, plan for the future, and snuggle into my happy place.
I’d almost never sat anywhere else until Thaddeus started sitting there. Then, funnily enough, it becamehisspot, andmyspot was anywhere that gave me a prime view of... well,him. Most of the time, that was the armchair opposite where I sat with my back to the glass and not a glimpse of the garden in sight. Go fucking figure.
Tap and I needed to work on the Saturday, but on Sunday, I suggested to Thaddeus that he and I could take a drive to look at a couple of properties we were landscaping, including the Cumberland job. He’d jumped at the chance and been lavish in his praise of our work, praise which seemed genuine enough.
When Delia Cumberland unexpectedly turned up, Thaddeus had listened avidly to our discussion about natural-filtration swimming pools and self-sustaining pond ecosystems. He’d asked a ton of questions about the regeneration zone with its gravel beds and aquatic plants, and the two of them had sat on the grass and talked filtration and irrigation for almost an hour. The experience had left me somewhat taken aback by both the degree of Thaddeus’s interest and his obvious knowledge. Then I remembered the water-cooling software he was working on and figured there was probably a crossover.
Delia Cumberland was a bright spark of a woman and well into her sixties. An avid gardener and a friend, she was also a distant relative of James. She had to have known about our break-up but had come to me anyway, a fact that earned my respect. The large acreage was perched atop the Remutaka Hills and was undergoing a complete overhaul. The 150-year-old villa looked beautiful in its new cream skirts and jazzed-up interior, but the gardens were a work in progress and would remain so for the foreseeable future, due to their size and Delia’s ratherambitious plans. Not to mention, she had a predilection for changing her mind on a regular basis.
I desperately wanted Delia to have the garden she craved, but I couldn’t swear that I wouldn’t throttle her before we got there. I had two things in my favour. One was that Delia wasn’t in a hurry. She wanted her garden perfect, not quick. And the second was her bank account. There was a lot in it, and she wasn’t shy of splashing it around. We were going to come out of the project smiling and with an epic garden to show on our résumé.
On the drive back to the cottage, when I suggested a detour to a local brewery for a couple of beers, Thaddeus was more than down for it. We took our drinks to an outdoor table shaded by a large oak, prettily dressed in its bright spring leaves. There we talked more about our families, our coming outs, our first loves, my early jobs as I tried to find a way in landscaping, and Thaddeus’s aborted time at university. I told him about my travels and that, although I loved formal gardens like Versailles and they had their place, I preferred the laid-back vibe of English-style perennial beds near my house.
Thaddeus talked about the difficulty of finding a place with his peers after coming out and how he’d done it through gaming and becoming the tech whizz go-to of his year. It was something that Phillip, who didn’t publicly come out as gay until he left high school, hadn’t needed to worry about. According to Thaddeus, Phillip had always been popular in school. He had a handsome face and the gift of the gab, and Thaddeus had clung to their friendship like some kind of lifeline.
He understood that although gaming had helped him escape the bullies, it had also come at a cost. It stopped him from ever finding his tribe, both in high school and beyond. He’d gone quiet after that, and without thinking, my hand had found his. He’d looked surprised but didn’t pull away, and we’d sat like that for a long while, finishing our beers in silence.
After the brewery detour, Thaddeus had directed me to a supermarket where, against my protests, he’d bought a truckload of groceries. He wanted to contribute, and so I’d let him, following him up and down the aisles while he loaded the trolley I pushed. It was a shared effort that was both achingly familiar and frighteningly pleasurable. And when I’d crawled into bed that night and tried not to think about Thaddeus alone in his across the hall, I’d pulled my pillow against my chest and decided it had been the best Sunday I’d spent in a long time—well, since the previous one when Thaddeus and I had worked together in my glasshouse.
So, yeah. There was that.
Was I pathetic? Hell fucking yes, I was. And I’d have been embarrassed by the sheer scope of my crush if I weren’t in a constant state of denial about what was actually going on inside me. That veneer was admittedly wearing thin, but I was trying to shore it up as best I could by focusing on the lust part of what had happened between us, not all the other uncomfortable feelings that were surfacing in my heart.
It had been the most confusing ten days of my life.
And the most frustrating, in that blue-balling kind of way that had me painting the shower wall with my spill almost every bloody morning. The bottle of lube I kept there was running low, and if I wasn’t careful, I’d have no more skin left on my dick.
But if Thaddeus felt the same way, he wasn’t showing a glimmer of it. After the initial awkwardness of that first morning after we’d...whatever... he’d quickly returned to the charming, funny, smart guy I’d come to know.
Dammit.I drove my shovel into the hard earth, lifted the hem of my shirt, and wiped my sweaty face. If I couldn’t have Thaddeus in my bed, I could at least work until I dropped and was too tired to even think about him, right?
We’d spent the morning digging the footings for Delia’s massive circular fountain in her driveway turnaround, and the weather had been anything but obliging. Way too hot for early November, thirty degrees Celsius at least. And humid enough to make you want to stab your eyeballs with a weeding fork.
Tap paused in his excavations and leaned on the handle of his shovel, gasping, “Fuck, it’s hot.” He ran his sleeved forearm over his brow and squinted up at the sun. “Throw me my water bottle, will you?”
I shot him a tired look, grumbling, “What did your last servant die from?” But I did as he said before grabbing my own and chugging half of it back without breaking for air.
Still leaning on his shovel, Tap dumped the rest of his water bottle over his head and groaned with pleasure as it ran in rivers through his wiry black curls and down his neck and face. “Oh, fuck yeah. Throw me another.” He snapped his fingers, and I threw a clod of dirt instead.
“Get your own,” I griped. “I’m not your damn mother, or Will for that matter. Although I know for a fact, you’d never talk to either of them that way.”
Tap looked horrified. “Damn right, I wouldn’t. My mother’s a Fijian goddess and all-around badarse. I’d be lucky to see Christmas. And Will would just deck me where I stood. For a twink, the man has a deadly right hook.” Tap trudged to the cooler, grabbed two more water bottles, and handed one to me.
I held up the bottle in my hand. “I’ve still got some.”
He waggled his brows. “Not for long. Come on. You know you want to.”
And he was right. I upended the bottle over my head, and when the ice-cold water hit my head and face, I whimpered like a baby. Then I accepted the fresh bottle he offered and guzzled some more.
