"Laminating it tonight."
I laugh. His thumb traces my cheekbone. Gentle now. The rough pad of his finger catching every freckle like he's memorizing them.
"Junia."
"Flynn."
"Phase Fourteen needs a revised timeline."
"We just obliterated Phase Three."
His arms tighten. Drag me flush against him, my chin on his collarbone, his heartbeat hammering through the thin cotton between us.
"Good. We'll replant it together."
We don't move for a long time.
The soil is warm from the afternoon sun. Flynn's breathes beneath my cheek in a rhythm that slows by degrees, the frantic hammering settling into something steady and deep, like a drum buried underground. His arm stays locked around my waist. Possessive. Immovable. The other hand remains tangled in my hair, fingers absently working through a knot near my temple with a patience that borders on devotional.
"You've got a beetle wing in your curls."
"Keep it. Trophy."
He shakes with a silent laugh. His thumb works the wing free and flicks it into the ruined seedbed. Somewhere in the wreckage of the trellis, a cricket starts singing. Bold little creature. No sense of timing.
The light shifts. Gold melts to copper melts to the bruised purple that means evening in the subdivisions, and the automated sprinkler system three houses down kicks on with a hiss that carries across the stillness. Flynn's body tenses at the sound, some ingrained reflex cataloging the threat, then relaxes when his tactical brain identifies it as irrigation.
"We should get up."
"No."
"The soil moisture level in this bed is going to be completely compromised by morning."
"Don't care."
"Your Phase Three germination window closes in nine days."
"Flynn."
"Mm."
"Shut up about Phase Three."
He shuts up about Phase Three. His fingers resume their slow exploration of my scalp, tracing the spiral architecture of each curl like he's mapping topology. His forearm dimmed to a faint emerald glow, pulsing with the lazy tempo of his heartbeat. Fireflies blink to life along the fence line, little gold sparks drifting between the slats.
Eventually the ground gets cold. Not the pleasant cool of evening dirt but the bone-deep seep of moisture wicking through denim and cotton, and I shiver against him. His arm tightens.
"Tarp."
"What?"
He sits up. I slide off him like a cat pushed off a warm radiator, catching myself on my elbows in the mulch. He's already on his feet, brushing loam off his shorts with brisk, efficient strokes, scanning his garage with narrowed eyes. Thirty seconds later he returns with a heavy canvas drop cloth folded into a perfect rectangle. Military corners. Naturally.
He shakes it out across the flat stretch of lawn between Phase Two (the perennial border) and the ruined crater of Phase Three. The canvas snaps and settles, crisp and clean, a pale rectangle glowing in the last of the twilight. He smooths a wrinkle near the edge with his boot.
"Flynn, that's a paint tarp."
"Clean. Washed and dried on high heat last Tuesday. Thread count irrelevant but structural integrity confirmed."
