We hadn’t spent any time together just the two of us since before her heat. As she turned back to her books, I stepped closer. She had said that if we had nothing else, at least we had sex. And we hadn’t had sex since the heat, either.
Only, I wanted more. I didn’t want things to stay in this cautious space where we’d fuck and nothing else. Guilt sank in my stomach. How could I really ask for more when we still had so much unprocessed between us? I’d done my best to explain why I did what I did, telling her the same thing that I’d told the others about my father, but that wasn’t enough.
“I would like to spend more time with you,” I blurted.
Jasmine lifted her head. “Hmm?”
“I want to spend time with you,” I repeated, my shoulders relaxing. “I feel like I need to prove myself to you. That I need to prove that I am truly sorry for my past behavior. I also know that I don’t necessarily have that right. I was cruel to you. If our positions were reversed—”
“There’s no point in that.” Jasmine shook her head. “If our positions were reversed, I’d be the alpha, and you’d be the omega. That would change our lives so much that it would change how we respond to things. But it would be lovely to spend some time with you. Did you have plans?”
I shook my head. I had a few errands to run, but it was nothing important. We were running low on coffee and would be out in a few days. I could pick up some more milk. Today was my day off from alpha duties, though.
Jasmine pushed back from her table. “I’d like to go to the trailer park, then. My garden is in a state of bad neglect. I moved my grandmother’s herbs to it, but I’m not going there as often as I’d like.”
“I’m not much of a gardener, but I will help out if I can,” I offered.
We headed out. First, we stopped by the trailer park and worked in her herb garden there. She had more types of plantsthan I knew could be called herbs. She explained the purpose of each and talked about the things she’d done with them. More than once, she pruned a plant, mentioning someone in the pack who was ailing who could use a pick-me-up.
After her herbs, we went to the community garden. We worked there, too, and harvested a bunch of the ripened berries and vegetables and took them to various people who were sick or had busy schedules. I was shocked to see how much she knew, how aware of other people’s circumstances she really was.
I’d never known anyone who was so determined to help others. She did it all without complaint, and sometimes without thanks, until they saw that I was there, too.
Afterward, we went to what had been her grandmother’s garden, which was tucked away in a sketchy part of town. There were still a few plants there that she wanted to salvage. The garden was covered in garbage from kids who came to drink and party here.
Jasmine walked through, touching crushed plants here and there. Several times she wiped her eyes. Clearly, seeing it in this state hurt her.
“Why don’t you take it all away?” I asked her as she tried to fix up a wonderful-smelling plant. It appeared to have been trampled, maybe even deliberately stepped on.
“I don’t have a place to put it all.”
I frowned. There were still dozens of plants here, ones that were going to be killed by the mistreatment if she couldn’t move them. “We could dig up a plot in the yard back home.”
Jasmine shook her head. “That won’t work. The soil isn’t any good. We’d have to dig out a huge section, then refill it. And even then, the drainage would be all wrong.”
“What about garden boxes?”
She lifted her head. “That would be a lot of work,” she said, but there was a hopeful gleam in her eyes.
I smiled, glad that I finally found something I could do. “I’ll be happy to build them. In the meantime, if we get a few big tubs of dirt at the store, we can at least dig up these plants, right? Get them out of here so they don’t get further damaged.”
“You’d really do that?” she asked, her voice hushed.
“I’ll help you as long as I can today, and continue to work on the garden boxes when I’m able. If it takes too long, you can hire someone to make them for you, and I’ll cover the costs,” I promised.
Jasmine beamed at me. It transformed her entirely, making her even more beautiful. My heart skipped a beat, and my wolf purred in contentment. I smiled back at her.
“Thank you,” she said, her voice hushed and full of emotion. “The last thing my grandmother told me was to look after her garden. She’d be heartbroken to see what I let it fall into.”
I hated hearing her blame herself like that. “It’s not your fault. You have been struggling to survive. Time, money… It’s not your fault.”
She gazed at me with something new. Something bright that seemed to make the world around us grow a little brighter. We collected a bunch of tubs and dirt from the store and returned to the garden to dig up the plants there. It took a lot of work, and by the time the sun sank, leaving it too dark to keep going, we were both sweaty and covered in dirt.
But Jasmine was smiling. She cooed over the plants as we took them back home, and that made it all worth it.
***
“Maybe we can all do some work tonight when we get home,” Killian called over the noise of the music. “Between the five of us, it shouldn’t take long to get the basic structures built. Then you can keep working on the linings and whatever else you need tomorrow.”
