Chapter Text
She’d like to say it’s the greatest love story ever told. And in her heart of hearts, (the one that stopped beating quite some time ago) she holds it to still be true.
But the thing about love stories, as with any just regular old one, is that they all have to end somehow. Whether that be in magic or contentment or soft, quiet peace. Whether they resolve in ache or strife or longing. They all end someday.
But for every shadow cast across the lawns and lakes of the grounds at the manor, something greater than the darkness grew here too.
It’s this she thinks about as she gazes up at the moon each night, imagining its circular shape as the middle of a flower bearing its name too. It’s the face she longs to see as she glides across the grounds of the place each day—of one emerging from the foliage and containing the most radiant smile she ever had the pleasure to see.
//
She isn’t supposed to notice the gardener, but she does. The air of aloofness to her is cursory and confounding. It’s something the woman uses as restraint, Dani senses.
While England is still new, her grasp on manners is not and she’s sure that what’s considered them is the same both here and across the pond. How openly staring is probably not the way to go, no other outlet for her curiosity seeming to fit though.
If poles exist in people, the gardener is very much Dani’s opposite. Dirt on her hands and faded overalls on her body. Hair a little disheveled and still managing to look so damn cool. Even the combat boots on her feet project a sense of no nonsense, ready to stomp through what may come.
Even though, Dani suspects, the gardener doesn’t automatically default to that setting. Again, the restraint. And maybe it’s this that causes her to look longer than she knows is polite. But if she’s honest with herself, truly and wholly, it’s because the woman with the soil on her skin is also becoming someone she imagines with a flower behind her ear.
She’s mesmerizing.
No part of watching her across the brunch table should feel like familiarity, no single second one of irrational ease. The gardener doesn’t even look at her for most of it as it passes by in chatter.
Dani moves around the food on her plate, irrevocably stuck and not knowing what to do. Somewhere deep, a smile unfurls and threatens its way forth. A plan splutters to life, jolted by the electricity thrumming in her chest.
She’s going to catch the gardener’s eyes. She’s going to learn what color they are.
//
Her name is Jamie and she is a conundrum and a half. When she’s not lost somewhere dark inside of herself, Dani reminds herself of what she has planned.
When she’s not checking mirrors or peeking over her shoulder, she tells herself that Jamie is someone she wants to know. She can’t help but feel drawn to her, a moth to the proverbial flame.
When her throat develops sound and her mouth opens though, she’s a stammer. A stutter kind of speech trips off of her tongue any time that Jamie is near and what is this that’s happening when she’s just buried a man under the ground?
Has this always been lying there, in the dark or paralyzed? Or has Jamie simply given Dani sight when she was wandering around aimlessly? Maybe she’s had her own glinting lights overtaking her eyes, so gone from the possibility in the world, that she’s never been able to take it in properly.
The thing becomes looks passed, a shakiness of her heart developing. A constant earthquake, always rumbling inside her ribs. Dani sees Jamie for all that she is and she wants to know absolutely everything.
It’s why she touches her hand one night as Jamie starts to leave. Like maybe she can take away the trauma and every flicker of what aches incessantly down below if she just gets to feel some of that goodness that Jamie seems to have endless amounts of.
Like maybe Jamie could calm that rampant beat that she causes in Dani’s heart too. Like maybe, just maybe, Dani wants to let her.
So it’s inevitable really. Dani begins to fall for the gardener and why not this new thing too? She never gets to be more alive than in those wonderful moments where she can forget who she is for a little while.
//
There’s this thing about ghosts. How people always say they have unfinished business which is why they’re strapped to the mortal world, destined to roam forever. She’s seen enough stories to know what the facts are supposed to be of them.
That they come on foggy nights or stand in dark corners. That they hover over beds to slide into ears and brains when dreams are starting to form. That chests hold them packed tightly, that they develop on feet like chains and in ears like wails.
It’s all of these things he has become to Dani as time has gone by. Running should have never been the answer, but she has let it be. From one nightmare into another. Or perhaps the same one on repeat.
Dani doesn’t know how long she can truly beat herself up over his death. Over the man she was supposed to love endlessly but couldn’t quite get to the finish line. As if love could or can ever be a race.
The story of him and them comes out over the crackle of the fire, dancing like fireflies in the cold air. Some version of the loss she’s never spoken of, now only alludes to.
She walks away from it, running again, never expecting to let the whole thing hit that same crisp air. But in comes Jamie.
In comes Jamie and whatever Dani thought she would be able to say or do goes right out the greenhouse windows because this person before her isn’t just the gardener anymore.
It’s Jamie with her curly hair and lopsided grin. It’s her furrowed brow and the sweet gentle ease of her Cockney accent that lulls Dani into a sliver of serenity. Into not looking over her shoulder or out of her peripheral, searching for out of place things in her increasingly out of place life.
There’s something to be said about compulsion too, just like possession. How it can twist even the most innocent of things into sentience. Just like it does inside of Dani’s head because it starts to whisper at her to look at Jamie’s lips.
Then it’s telling her to kiss those same lips, to taste them and take the flavor of them home to her own body. To sift through the experience of it and then bury it deep so that the world will never know of the desire laced against it. So they can never judge her for flipping to the other side and craving Jamie like air.
So without any good sense and a thousand different reasons, Dani leans forward to take Jamie’s mouth against her own. The peace of the act washes over her immediately, a lock clicking into place, and she knows she’s well and forever ruined for another soul again.
Just as this thought takes hold, her eyes flutter open between the interspersed moments of bliss to see his shining, beam-like eyes watching. Always watching.
Dani jerks back with a cry, not at all connected to the wilting woman in front of her and everything to do with the silhouetted face of the man she could never cherish completely.
Now more than ever, she knows her assertion that night had been right: that she couldn’t give him what he sought because it didn’t exist in her anymore anyway. That if she’s being honest, it never really did.
As her heart lurches in her chest watching Jamie walk away carrying her misguided shame, Dani lets the absence of sound envelop her once the greenhouse door closes.
This is the thing about ghost stories though. In hers, Dani thinks that he’s not appearing because he has something left to say. In this version, maybe it’s because she did.
Closing her eyes, she can still see the calming of the blue green irises of the woman who has walked away. When she looks at Jamie, the woman turns mere wondering into knowing. Because Dani has been haunting herself with the words she never spoke that day.
That she believes in being in love with a soul, not a gender. And his soul hadn’t been right. And Jamie’s is feeling like it absolutely is.
//
There’s a lot the world doesn’t know about Jamie. How she is soft. So incredibly so. That for that tough girl exterior, she’s equally opposite of that inside where it counts.
They never get to see that she is thoughtful in her touch, be it plant or animal or Dani’s own wild and careening heart. That she smiles into kisses. Kisses like breath will always end and she’ll be left with phantom tendrils of something that she never got enough of.
But Dani notices. Dani gets to see it all as they chat about things that matter a lot underneath canopied trees and raindrops on fall nights. Jamie weaves her story into the fabric of her philosophy of life, tells exactly why she has given up on a lot of humanity.
Dani has experienced more ache attached to this woman than she knows what to do with, even in the short time of knowing her. Ache tied to want. Ache tied to desire. Ache tied to wanting to sweep her in her arms and protect her from absolutely everything.
The flower’s bloom feels like a metaphor for what’s going on in Dani’s chest cavity, how it feels full up with Jamie and all the more beautiful because of it. How it needs her touch and seeks her encompassing essence, begs for her to be near even when she’s far away.
That night, she pushes Jamie back near her flowers, wraps her own fingers around the wrought iron like the vines. She presses her body against the woman who makes life spring from her fingertips and falls a little more, sinks a little deeper.
By the time that they’re sharing that beer and sharing more chatter about things that don’t really matter, Dani is to the point of wanting to know body in addition to soul. She admits this when the amber liquid in their glasses have disappeared, when the only place left to go is up and down. Up to Jaime’s apartment and down to, well…
So they do. They fall together again or climb to the tippy-top, lips never once leaving one another as hands claw and rake and find.
Jamie pulls Dani up the stairs and up to the clouds and up up up until there’s nowhere left to go but plummeting back to earth again.
There’s the wood of Jaime’s flat door and there’s the pliant but strong flesh of Jaime’s body and the silk softness of Jamie’s sheets as she takes Dani apart at the seams.
By whisper, by moan, by nimble fingers, by growing emotion, Dani absolutely doesn’t know how she can continue to survive the onslaught of what this woman makes her feel, all sense of forbidden things.
A jolt of epinephrine to her chest, socked in the gut and ribs and in the always present pool in her belly. These are Jamie’s things, the places that she lives. These are lovely on end.
Dani lets go for this completely. It’s what sends her submerging herself in the idea of Jamie when they’re both together and apart. It’s what has her drowning over and over again.
Because there suddenly isn’t a day Dani can imagine without her. There isn’t a single one she wants to. And that seems like a type of ghost story all it’s own: tasting something once and chasing it the rest of your life.
To remedy this, Dani formulates another plan. If she can successfully learn eyes and skin and soul, she supposes she might also master the art of being someone’s everything.
Months pass before she finds the courage in a drooping damsel in distress (and least she likes to think of it that way) sitting outside, waiting to be taken, waiting to be loved. But rather than giving Jamie the chance to rehabilitate the weeping leaves, Dani decides to give her another task.
She decides to deposit the ring at the upended roots, hoping that the little gold loop makes Jamie want to develop her own type of anchor with Dani in the form of becoming her wife.
Dani tells Jamie that she wanted to save the plant. But really, what Dani hopes is that what’s down below will really save them both from what’s coming. And if not, having this will somehow be enough, even if it’s just between their two hearts.