“Would you ever … If you’d never gotten stuck here,” I asked, choosing my words, “would you ever think about doing something like this? At Lilymoor?”
“What, gardening?”
I turned in his lap to sit sideways, so I could see his face. “Being its steward,” I said.
He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “The questionshouldbe ‘would I now.’”
Realizing my mistake, I quickly looked away. “Yeah, I mean, what I meant—” Before I could finish, he took my chin between his thumb and first finger and turned me to face him.
There was a sinking, terrible suspicion in his eyes. He knew. He knew I was going to stop him from ever finding this garden.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, because I’d failed. Because all I could do, I felt, was fail. Over and over and over again. To the point where I started to wonder if I just liked the pain. “I’m so sorry that—”
“I distinctly remember that I made you a deal,” he interrupted gently, and it took a minute for me to recall that deal—the one in exchange for saving him from Damnit. I hadn’t thought he’d been serious. I certainly hadn’t. “In exchange for saving my life, you could ask anything of me. Anything within reason.”
And we both knew this was the last time he’d be able to grant it.
Can you walk out of this garden with me?I wanted to ask.Can you save yourself? Can you save me?But those were all impossible things. So I simply asked, “Can you kiss me again?”
My voice wobbled; I couldn’t stop it.
His eyes grew soft. “Well within reason,” he whispered, and he kissed me again.
For the rest of golden hour, because it was so short, we sat in each other’s company and rocked back and forth on the swing.
After a while he said, “You know what I miss the most, being stuck in here? The sound of birds in the morning.”
I hadn’t noticed before, but there was no noise outside the garden. It was just . . .quiet.
It felt lonely.
“There’s a word for that—waking up in the morning to listen to the birds,” I said, trying to rack my brain, “but I can’t think of it.”
“One of your friend’s untranslatable words?” he guessed.
“Yeah. I’ll have to look in her journal, and I’ll tell you what it is . . .”Next timelodged itself in my throat. I swallowed it thickly, and we returned to that same silence, neither of us wanting to talk about it.
Instead he said, “When I was a kid and I came here for the summers, I used to wake up before dawn all the time. The world’s so quiet in the mornings, you know? And then there’s suddenly song. So much of it.”
“I think you were a weird kid,” I replied frankly, and he laughed. “I used to dumpster-dive for houseplants people threw away, think I could save them.”
“And you callmeweird?”
I smiled at that. “Like calls to like, I guess.”
“I’m glad it does. If not for this garden, I would never have given you the time you deserved. I’m sorry for that. Thank you for waking me up,” he said, soft like a secret between us and the walls too high to climb, and then he kissed me long and deep, and I wanted to stay like this forever.
But time, even in a space that felt infinite like this garden, ticked on, and the magic began to make itself known, pulling me back toward the door. I closed my eyes and tried to cement myself by his side, to keep the world from spinning.
No, not yet, I begged.
“Is it time?” he asked gently, and my lips wobbled. All I could do was nod.
He walked me to the door with our hands clasped together, though he’d taken to just looping his pinkie through mine. It was effortless, and yet it meant so much. The garden was turning into a kaleidoscope again, colors pulling away from each other in dilation. Lilymoor was telling me to leave, more ur-gently with every moment.
“If tomorrow doesn’t go as planned,” he finally said, for the first time really acknowledging the truth of it, “and I’m stuck here, will you . . .” He swallowed thickly. “Will you promise something?”
“If the door still appears for me, I’ll come visit. Even after my contract’s up, I’ll rent an apartment and come here every day and—”
