"You wash your tarps."
"You don't?"
I stare at him. Green skin gone dark in the fading light. Soil on his cheekbone. "A handprint of potting mix smeared across the W. Cargo shorts riding low on his hips. Military-pressed drop cloth at his feet.
He extends one enormous hand.
I take it.
He pulls me up like I weigh exactly nothing and guides me onto the tarp with the careful formality of someone ushering a guest into a ballroom. My boots hit the canvas. Clean. Sturdy. Still warm from being folded in his garage.
"Shoes off."
"Excuse me?"
"Canvas integrity."
I kick off my boots. He removes his, placing them side by side at the tarp's edge with their toes aligned to the weave. My boots go next to his. They look absurd together. His size fourteen steel-toed workboots. Mine, paint-splattered garden clogs with a daisy print.
We lie down. The canvas is stiff against my shoulder blades, nothing like a mattress, nothing like comfort, and it's the most comfortable surface I've ever touched because he's beside me. His arm curls under my head. My cheek finds the shelf of his bicep, the muscle hard beneath warm green skin, and his other hand settles on my stomach. Palm flat. Fingers spread. Covering the entire space between my hip bones.
Above us, stars. Actual stars, visible despite the subdivision's light pollution, scattered across a sky the color of spilled ink. His breathing slows. Mine matches it. Syncopated at first, then aligned in tandem like two instruments finding the same key.
"Your trellis is firewood."
"Mm."
"Need to rebuild it before judging."
"Tomorrow."
"Six AM."
"Eight."
"Seven."
"Done."
His thumb moves against my stomach. One slow circle. Another. His breathing deepens. The runes go dark entirely, just faint green lines under his skin, dormant and satisfied. His jaw unclenches. The permanent furrow between his brows smooths out and ten years of warband tension drain out of his face.
I turn my head. Press my lips against the inside of his bicep. Salt and grass and copper.
His arm tightens around me. A reflex. An anchor. Already half-gone, his consciousness sinking into the deep black water of genuine, uncomplicated sleep, and his face in the starlight looks younger. Unburdened. A little foolish. A lot beautiful.
The cricket sings. The fireflies patrol the fence. Three streets over, a dog barks once and stops.
My eyes close.
The canvas holds us both.
Something warm pins my arm to canvas.
Heavy. Immovable. The weight of a small car distributed across one enormous green forearm. I crack one eye open and the world is sideways, blurry, lit by the pale gray wash of pre-dawn. My cheek is stuck to Flynn's bicep with a paste of dried sweat and potting soil. My neck has fused into a shape that necks should not be. Every vertebra in my spine files a formal complaint as I shift, and the canvas beneath me crinkles with the sound of someone wadding up a grocery bag.
We slept outside.
On a tarp.
