It's obsessively detailed.
There are footnotes.
"Flynn."
"The footnotes are important."
"You numbered the boulders."
"For placement order. You can't set a thirty-two into a forty-seven's slot. The weight distribution collapses."
I stare at him. Potting soil clings to my collarbone from yesterday. His runes still glow faintly under his bandages. We don’t mention the garage. We don’t speak of Valerius standing in the driveway last night, thin lips pressed into a blade, watching us spring apart before gliding back to his luxury sedan without a word.
We certainly don’t mention the almost-kiss.
"Where do we start?"
Something shifts in his jaw. The tension bleeds out of his shoulders by a fraction. He taps the blueprint with one massive green finger.
"Boulders."
The boulders are stacked behind his garage on wooden pallets. Granite. Sandstone. Three slabs of obsidian-veined basalt that weigh more than my moving truck. He rented a pallet jack for the big ones. The smaller ones, the ones that only weigh two or three hundred pounds, he carries.
He just picks them up. Arms flexing, veins standing out against moss-green skin, the tee shirt straining across his back as he walks a two-hundred-pound granite slab to its designatedposition and sets it down with the precision of a jeweler placing a diamond.
I operate the pallet jack. Poorly.
"Left. More left. Junia. My left."
"These things don't have power steering!"
"They don't have any steering. You're supposed to pull, not push."
"I'm a florist, not a longshoreman!"
He crosses the yard in four strides, wraps his hands over mine on the jack handle, and pulls. The basalt slab rolls forward. He presses against my back. His arms bracket mine. His chin hovers above my head and his breath stirs my hair and the pallet jack moves like it's on rails.
"Pull."
"I am aware of the concept now, thank you."
His laugh is a short, low vibration against my spine. He steps back. I miss the warmth immediately and violently.
We dig trenches for the drainage channels. Flynn operates the excavator for the deep cuts. I follow with a flat shovel, shaping the edges. Clay and loam pile up along both sides. My arms burn after twenty minutes. His don't burn at all, because he's an Orc, and Orcs apparently don't experience muscle fatigue, which is deeply unfair.
By noon, the front property border is unrecognizable. Where a clean fence once stood, a series of terraced granite walls steps down from his higher elevation to my lower beds. The backyard fence still looms behind it, but the front is entirely open.
The trenches run between them like veins. The basalt slabs anchor the corners, black stone gleaming with quartz flecks in the sun.
I sink the first plants. Wild jasmine along his retaining wall. Cascading ferns in the terrace gaps. A cluster of moonbloom orchids, the survivors from the beetle attack, tucked into asheltered nook between two boulders where they'll get afternoon shade.
I plant. His hands hang at his sides, opening and closing. The bandages are filthy now, soaked through with sweat and dirt. The green glow underneath pulses in that steady rhythm.
"Proximity thing?" I ask without looking up.
Silence. A long one.
"Proximity thing."
