Her bush objects of attr.., p.3
Her Bush (Objects of Attraction), page 3
Right now, I was fitting fishing in between a release party and my overwhelming temptation to find my way back to the garden and talk to Nell again before she was out of my life—maybe for good.
I leaned back and let the sun sink into my skin. I tried to put everything from my head and go back to those simple days when I was younger, but I just couldn’t do it. I’d done what everybody tries so hard to do: I’d “made it.” I got to worry about the kind of things everybody thought they wanted to worry about. I worried about which accountants could handle my money best. I worried about whether “my money was working for me,” as the saying went. The most fun was worrying about what every new person in my life’s angle was. Everybody had an angle. That was a lesson I learned really early on once the money started rolling in.
But I coped. I had my ways. Today, it was being out on the boat and my early morning workout—even if the addition of my brother had been unexpected and somewhat irritating. Both experiences were also filled with visions of the orange-haired girl in the garden. During my workout, I had barely been able to stop staring out the window at her. Now I could hardly form a thought without circling back to her—imagining how her lips had looked so inviting when they spread into that crooked grin of hers. I only wished I knew if my quickly growing obsession was real, or if my brother had managed to artificially implant it in my brain with his comments in the gym.
I let the sound of the water lapping against my small, single-engine boat draw me out of my thoughts. I listened to the chirp of insects along the water and the rustle of wind against the trees. With my eyes closed, I could let those familiar sounds take me back to all the times I’d been on the water before, to the times when it felt like my mind was right.
Today, it wasn’t enough. Even a perfect, serene day like today couldn’t compete with the buzzing background noise of Nell. Half of me was sure she’d turn out to be like all the other women. The other half of me wanted to believe my instinct that there was something different about her. I nearly turned the boat around right there and just got it over with, but I still had to handle my brother’s conference call in a few minutes.
Taking things farther with her would be a mistake, anyway. I knew how that story ended before I even opened the book.
“You with me?” Peter asked.
I stirred a little, then glared. My brother knew the fishing code. He was supposed to respect the silence of the moment, especially when I was obviously deep in thought. Fishing had never really been a passion of his, even if he wouldn’t admit it. Peter was even grouchier than I was, so owning up to the fact that he just came out on the boat for an excuse to enjoy some brotherly bonding would’ve been too much for him. I let him keep his little secret.
He was sitting across from me on the only other spare strip of wood to sit on in the small boat. He looked out of place in the simple fishing button-down and khaki’s I’d let him borrow. Unlike me, Peter didn’t seem to be a different person depending on the situation. He was always Peter. Always contemplative, a little grumpy, and intelligent. You could’ve put him in full camouflage and still marked him as an author from thirty paces away.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m here.”
Peter glared right back. Ever since he’d met Violet a couple months back, he’d softened a bit. Good for him, but he could still go screw himself. “They are going to call in a couple minutes, and you probably want to be conscious when they do. No, let me rephrase. As my agent, I definitely want you to be conscious when they call because you’re supposed to be getting me a better deal. And you promised coming out on the boat right now wouldn’t screw it up.”
“I’m good. I was just thinking.”
“Yeah, I know you were thinking. You were brooding so hard I could practically feel the boat vibrate.”
“Contrary to popular belief, I don’t vibrate when I brood.”
“What has you brooding this time?”
“Is this going to be a new thing? Because I’ll change the locks if it is.”
“Until you stop looking so miserable when you think nobody is looking? Maybe it is. And I’ll break your fucking windows if you change the locks, so go ahead.”
I smirked. “Look. I appreciate that you’re looking out for me. I do, even if it’s weird. I just… I went on autopilot for a long time, and I guess when I finally stopped and looked around, I wasn’t sure I liked where I ended up.”
Peter nodded seriously. “You thinking about stepping away from being an agent?”
“No. I enjoy the work. I enjoy my hobbies. Something’s missing, though.”
“Yeah, a woman.”
I immediately pictured Nell. I’d done this to myself. By avoiding dating for over a year, I should’ve known when I finally wanted to jump back into a relationship, I’d fall dangerously hard.
“Did you ever have issues with women and your money?” I asked suddenly.
“What, like gold diggers? Sure.”
“I was thinking more like people changing once they got a taste of it. I don’t think most people are mentally ready to have more money at their disposal than they know what to do with. It breaks them.”
Peter grinned. “Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic?”
“No. Think about it. How many times did you meet someone who completely changed once they got a taste of your money? Or how many people have we known who became unbearable once they got their hands on some of their own?”
Peter shrugged. “Quite a few, I guess.”
“Exactly. And how many people would still wake up and go to work every day if they didn’t need the money?”
“Not many, probably.”
“Yeah. Money is the carrot on the end of the stick. It makes a long work week feel like it was a valuable use of time. It makes taking shitty jobs more bearable because you’re getting something you need out of it. But once you unplug from the system? You immediately alienate yourself from everybody who is still plugged in. How is somebody working sixty hours a week going to relate to any of your problems if you’ve got tens of millions in the bank?”
“And this ties back to your problems with women? Just date women who already have money. Problem solved.”
“But it doesn’t. I don’t fit in with all these people. Not really. I need somebody real. Just a normal person, but if it gets serious with a woman like that, the money ruins them.”
“Don’t give them money, maybe?”
“What happens if I get married? And how long am I supposed to expect girlfriends to suffer financially while knowing I could solve all their problems with the stroke of a pen? It’s not that easy.”
Peter sighed. “Obviously you’ve thought about this a lot because you’ve got a thousand reasons to keep being miserable. Let me be an author for a second here and ask you a metaphorical question: If you were stuck in a hole and you knew there was almost positively no way to get out, and no help was coming, what would you rather do? Would you rather sit down and wait to die, or would you rather spend your last days trying everything you could to get out?”
“It pisses me off when you make good points. Even metaphorical ones.” I thought about Nell again. The truth was I wanted to try, even if I was almost sure it wouldn’t work. I wanted to fight for it to work because my gut told me she was worth a fight, as crazy as that sounded. I’d barely spoken to her. For all I knew she could belong to some crazy extremist group. Worse, she could be a vegan.
The only thing I knew was that my pulse spiked when I remembered her face, from the exotic angle of her eyes to the way her mouth moved—almost crooked and always with a playful expression, turned up at the corners looking mischievous.
My phone rang, snapping me back to the moment. I answered it on speaker phone.
“Harry and Peter here,” I said.
We exchanged formalities for a few minutes before getting to the part where Peter’s publisher tried to low-ball us on their offer for his newest book.
I absently set my hook with some fresh bait and tossed it back into the water. “This is what’s going to happen. I’m hanging up the phone. You all can take a few minutes to think about whether you really want to motivate us to call around and see what another publisher would be willing to pay. Then you call us back and make a respectable offer. If we don’t like it, we’re walking.” I hung up the phone.
Peter raised his eyebrows. “Do you always have to be such an ass to the people we’re trying to get to pay me?”
“It’s negotiating. I doubt we’d actually get a better offer anywhere else, though.”
“And what if they just tell us to go screw ourselves?”
“Then it’ll turn out that you shouldn’t have trusted your brother to be your agent. But they won’t. We have something they want. They’ve already told us what they’re willing to pay. Offending them isn’t going to change their mind.”
The phone rang again just a minute later. Once we listened to the slightly improved offer, I spread my hands at Peter and gave him my best shit-eating-grin.
After we’d wrapped up the call, I felt the usual, warm glow of nailing a deal. In a way, negotiating was an addiction for me.
“There’s a real smile,” Peter said. “I just wonder if it’s from getting the deal, or because you’re imagining giving this orange-haired girl the business.”
I kicked his leg and laughed. “Can I have my normal big brother back? The one who is too interested in himself to notice if I’m on fire?”
Peter punched my shoulder. “You mean go back to pretending I don’t keep an eye on you? Sure. For now. And good job with the contract, by the way.”
“Yeah, well, I’m on a constant mission to prove I don’t work for you just because I’m your brother. I work for you because you couldn’t find anyone better if you tried.”
“So you keep telling me.”
“Yeah, now if you don’t mind, I’ve got to turn this boat around to take care of something.”
Peter gave me a sly look. "I'm glad my pep talk worked. And you also realized you were going to lose our bet over who brought home the most fish."
I looked over at Peter. “How many fish have you caught?”
He scrunched up his eyebrows. “None. We just got here.”
“Just making sure.” I gave my line a little twitch and immediately felt the tug of a fish biting. After a few moments of pulling my line in, I lifted a nice-sized sheepshead out of the water. “I win,” I said.
Peter made an annoyed sound and dropped his tackle box to the bottom of the boat.
As much as I hated taking advice from anyone, especially Peter, I had to admit he had some decent points. Based on the few minutes I’d spoken to Nell; I couldn’t possibly know if we would be a good fit. All I knew was I liked how I felt when I talked to her, and I wanted a little more of it. For once, I just needed to stop trying to think about what was going to happen down the line. I needed to enjoy the moment, and at this particular moment, I wanted to see the gardener girl again.
The sun was out, but it had turned out to be a pleasantly cool day. I could see gardeners all over the property as I headed toward the large bushes where Nell should’ve been working. I’d only stopped in the house long enough to shower and get changed before going out to find her.
I paused when I saw her bush.
It was… interesting.
Nell was on a small ladder with a pair of garden shears while she made adjustments to what I had to assume was supposed to be the penguin.
“Wow,” I said.
Nell turned. She apparently forgot she was standing on a small ladder, because the movement immediately sent her toppling backward, bringing the ladder with her. If I hadn’t steadied the ladder myself, the whole thing—Nell included—would’ve crashed to the ground.
“Thank you,” she said once it was steady. “You scared the crap out of me. I mean, not literally. I’m potty trained.” Nell’s cheeks started to burn a bright red, and she was staring into the distance, almost like she had stepped into an alternate universe where she had to re-live the last few seconds for an eternity.
“That’s good. But if you weren’t, I guess it wouldn’t be so bad, considering your line of work. Human waste makes great fertilizer.”
The sun had risen since our first conversation, and it seemed like I was fully seeing her for the first time now. The afternoon light made her orange hair glow like actual fire, which made for a shocking contrast between her dark eyebrows and blue eyes. There was a patch of freckles I hadn’t noticed across her delicate, sloped nose, too. Tiny beads of sweat formed there, still small enough that they seemed to defy gravity as they clung to her soft skin.
“I really—” she cleared her throat and deepened her voice. “I think maybe it would be best if I just communicated with you through hand gestures from now on. Every time I open my mouth, it’s like I’m trying to convince you I’m a bumbling idiot.”
I thought about that. I could see why she must’ve felt that way. From the green monstrosity that was towering behind us to the way she’d fallen in the bush earlier, I guess I normally would have considered her to be too much of a mess. So why did none of that seem to bother me? “No,” I said after a few moments. “I don’t think you’re an idiot.”
She bit her lip as she descended the ladder and turned to face me. Then she made a kind of upward brushing motion on her chest.
I narrowed my eyes. “Is that sign language?”
She nodded.
“I see. If you’re a sign language expert, can you tell me how to say, ‘is that bush supposed to look like a giant cock and balls?’”
Nell’s eyes widened in horror as she looked at her work. The “penguin” was nothing but a tall, cylindrical shaft so far. It looked like she had tried to show where its neck was, but the head was slightly larger than the rest of the shaft, which made it look like she’d actually tried to sculpt the rim of a penis. Then there was the snowman I'd asked for the penguin to be building. I guessed it was supposed to be at the point of construction where nothing but the bottom-most section had been set down, and the middle ball was being shaped. Except both balls were conveniently set at the "feet" of the penguin. In other words, the giant penis also had two lopsided balls.
“Well, this is just the part where I kind of do the outlines. I really wouldn’t put much…” she trailed off and put her hands on her hips. I absently wondered how small and fragile she’d feel if those were my hands there—if I was lifting her to sit her on my bed. “Okay. Yeah. It looks like a big penis.”
“I’d say this is sort of like a Freudian slip on your part, but I think those are supposed to be small. I’ve never seen one this big.”
“That’s disappointing to hear.” Nell clapped a hand to her mouth, and her eyes bulged.
I chuckled in surprise. I hadn’t seen that coming from the woman. She seemed cripplingly self-conscious at first, but the more I spoke to her, the more I saw there was an unquenchable flame inside her. What interested me was how her lack of confidence managed to coexist with what seemed to be an unstoppable force of will. “You’re more dangerous than you look.”
Nell’s cheeks were bright red. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know where that came from. But no, I’m not usually dangerous. Unless you’re a big bush whose deepest, darkest fear is being turned into a giant penis and balls, at least.”
“And what if I’m a man who wasn’t planning on becoming infatuated with a gardener?”
Nell smiled with what I was coming to realize was her trademark lip bite accompaniment.
“Well,” she said carefully. “I’d be curious to know what would be so bad if you became infatuated with a gardener? Is there something wrong with her?”
I eyed the bush penis and balls with a grin. “Probably. Yes.”
“Did you consider that the gardener girl may not welcome your infatuation?”
I studied the way she was watching me with that lopsided smile of hers. “No. I’m fairly sure it would be mutual.”
“You’re certainly a cocky one, aren’t you?”
“Considering the evidence at hand,” I said, gesturing to the bush. “Don’t you think it’s a little hypocritical to call me cocky?”
Nell laughed. “Do you normally flirt with your hired help? Is this some kind of rich guy ritual, I mean? Like you all gather around campfire’s fueled by dollar bills and talk about the housemaids you’ve deflowered?”
“Almost. We usually use hundred-dollar bills.”
“Funny. But you’re dodging my question.”
“No. Believe it or not, I don’t make a habit of flirting with anyone—hired help or otherwise. I kind of swore off relationships a year back. Every woman I dated just left me feeling more and more empty. Before long—” I cleared my throat and lowered my eyes. “And I also don’t know why I’m telling you all this.” Since when did I ramble on and open up in front of people I barely knew? There was just something about Nell’s wide, inviting eyes and easy smiles that made it feel all too natural to get comfortable.
Nell licked her lips. “I just got out of a bad relationship a couple months ago. I also make this kind of snorting, choking noise that’s really gross when I laugh too hard.” She paused, probably noting the confused look on my face. “I’m making us even. You gave me a slightly compromising bit of information, so I didn’t want you to feel like you were out on the ledge alone.”
I found myself smiling. “What’s the catch with you?” I asked.
“Pardon?”
“Forget I said anything.” Inwardly, I was still smiling. I couldn’t tell her what I was thinking without making myself look strange. I just didn’t understand how somebody like Nell could practically fall into my lap like she had. For years, I’d desperately tried to manufacture a spark between myself and dozens of women. I had begun to believe that love and infatuation were myths—just wishful thinking on the part of desperate men and women who were tired of being alone. Love, I had decided, was a delusion. It was nothing more than a mental trick to cope with the lie we’d all been fed by books and movies.
