“No, no,” Rowan clarified, “I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that I have a lot to do to earn your trust. I’m not expecting that to happen overnight. I don’t want you to feel nervous.”
“I know,” Juniper sighed.
She took a step forward and wrapped her arms around Rowan’s waist. Rowan responded by tucking Juniper’s head under her chin and wrapping her arms around her shoulders. Juniper melted into her body, like she’d been created to turn viscous on contact for her.
Juniper fought the inevitableness of letting go even though she knew they needed to get going with their day if they were going to get everything done. She reluctantly took a half step back, and their gaze lingered on each other. A silent conversation of longing, unspoken promises of what was to come electrified the air.
“Should we get started?” Juniper finally asked.
“Put me to work.”
Juniper attempted a steadying breath. Her intention was to help Rowan get her hands back into the land, to reconnect her body with her home. Not fantasize about the ways she wanted to put Rowan to work connecting her body to hers. She did have lots of ideas of how she planned to make Rowan work for it though.
“I can see you thinking,” Rowan teased just above a whisper.
Juniper took several quick buoyant steps back as she laughed. “Don’t think too hard about that.” She turned on her heel to finish her trek back to the picnic table. “Keep up, Birdsong.”
With the rapidly rising temperatures of late spring, exacerbated by the influence of climate change, their effort to complete the to-do list was surprisingly intensive. They’d been able to hire two garden technicians in the last couple of weeks to take over most of the day-to-day maintenance, but Juniper would be damned if she didn’t get her hands in the dirt at least once a week. She couldn’t stomach switching to being a total office worker.
By the time they were done and gathered next to each other at the picnic table, they both had a sheen of sweat coating their bodies.
Rowan lifted the bottom edge of her sleeveless t-shirt to wipe the sweat and dirt from her face, and Juniper’s eyes followed the slow reveal of the smooth plane of Rowan’s stomach as she did. Thirst besieged her mouth, and she gulped covetously from her water bottle.
“Want some?” She tilted the oversized bottle covered in stickers toward Rowan as she came back to her senses.
“Yes, thank you. That took more effort than I thought it would.”
“Same.”
In more ways than one.
She took the bottle back from Rowan and pulled a handful of strawberries from the overfilled gathering basket. After rinsing them in her hand, she handed a few to her, ate one forherself, and set the bottle on the table. Then she brought her boot up to the bench and bent over to readjust her sock and swipe some of the mulch out that had accumulated around her ankle.
“Sex is sacred?” She heard Rowan mumble as she bit into a strawberry.
“I’m sorry, what?”
Rowan finished chewing and wiped the juice from the edge of her lips with her thumb. She nodded toward the bottle. “Uh, sex is sacred. One of your stickers says that.”
“Oh. Right. It was from a campaign the health office did last year for young people. To encourage safe, consensual sex. Get rid of some of the guilt we learned from colonization and replace it instead with the idea that it’s good and sacred.”
“You’ll have to tell me more about that sometime.”
“About the campaign?” Juniper’s heart almost leapt out of her chest. She knew damn well neither of them were talking about the campaign anymore.
Rowan smiled slowly and shook her head. “No, Junie. About how sex is sacred.”
“When that time comes, you’ll know exactly what that means.”
Rowan gave her a calculating look that sent her pulse right to the center of her thighs. Apparently they reversed the timeline and picked the horny teenager thing right back up.
Juniper grabbed her backpack and the gathering basket from the table and walked with a very self-satisfied swagger back to their vehicles. Rowan’s long-legged strides helped her catch up quickly, and they walked side by side the rest of the way. Her hand felt empty without Rowan’s in it, but for some reason despite the heavy innuendo of the morningandafternoon, it felt like too much of a vulnerable risk to do something about it.
For someone who guarded their heart as much as Juniper normally did, it was easier to joke about sexuality than to express and receive genuine intimacy.
“Let’s ride together,” she suggested tentatively to Rowan as she met her eyes, “in your truck.”
“You afraid I’m going to run away and not make it to your Mom’s house?”
