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Sasha reached out her hand and let it hover near the rosebud. The sun was thin, bright enough to cast the garden in a golden hue, but the cold morning air whispered stories into her skin. Sleep hung heavy on her forehead, and she could feel the last wisps of her dream circle then float away. At least this morning was predictable. A bee investigated an open flower. It turned sharply, examining the pollen at all angles before lowering itself carefully into the golden dust.
Sasha wasn't all that into insects, but she knew everything about the bees that visited her garden. These were special bees, smart and organized, extensions of the one who made her heart light and hesitant all at once. They made a home of Martin, turned him even sweeter than whipped cream. He had a laugh that did things to her, made her feel gooey and out of place as black licorice. He would be kind until the snark came out, a muttered jab of sarcasm that made her feel she wasn't alone against the world. The shitty parts, the frustrations, the lost dreams—he saw it all, flipped it on its head 'till it was small, manageable. Just another thing to put in your pocket.
Sasha felt around in her pockets for the bottle cap he'd given her once. Her fingernail tapped the scalloped edge, and she felt her heartbeat align with the sound. Who put him on the Earth like this, hallowed and candied and complete?
"Oh!" The bee buzzed away, joining its group by the iron gate. They huddled in a pattern, trading places and buzzing rhythmically. It sounded familiar, like a taste at the edge of her tongue. A little guiltily, she reached for the Eye to tell her what it meant.
IAMBIC PENTAMETER, was the response. POETIC METER INDICATED BY—
"Yeah, yeah, I know what it means," Sasha brushed away the Eye's chatter with a smile. "Is Martin writing poetry?"
Bzzzbzzz!!!! A few of the bees broke formation to hover near her face.
"What's he writing about?" She muttered to herself. The Eye pressed at the edge of her mind, the answer to that question so easy—but.
She wiped her hands on her knees and stretched, one arm pointed to the sky. She would do this the hard way, the questions bubbling inside her like any other lovestruck volcano.
"You've got a really good host, you know," she told the bees as she turned back to her door. "He's such a sweet guy. He's..." She gathered her braids in her hands and let them fall. "I just want to..."
It would take shape if she spoke it aloud, the kind of desire that made her jealous and unkind. There was no point in admitting it, except that it was the truth. Sasha sighed and pressed a hand to the back of her neck. She only knew one way to handle the facts.
"I like him," she said softly, and the bees paused in their rhythmic dance to huddle amongst themselves, passing the secret along one by one. "I like the way he thinks. I like the way he wriggles inside a problem and solves it from the center. I like his hands. I want—" The words filled her throat, and the Eye finished the sentence.
YOU WANT TO BE THE PROBLEM HE SOLVES.
Is that so bad, she wondered as she fixed herself for work, jamming the buttons together on her dress shirt. She flipped open the messenger bag, checked for lunch, notebook, ID. The bees fluttered in and out of the open window. She checked the room for stragglers and locked it.
The bees made it back to Martin before Sasha could step onto the train. They were faster than they looked, diligent as they were adorable, and Martin always loved them for their duplicity. Duality, he corrected himself. He wasn’t trying to hide his feelings; they were just so easily covered by the warm sugar of his personality. He makes tea for people! He takes time to listen. His kindness is easy as Halloween candy, and not a single stray person confiding in him would guess he was thinking of Sasha almost all of the time. Sasha and her smile, Sasha and her damned curiosity. How easy it was for her to tease him, leaning over the desk with another clever joke, her shirt buttoned almost all the way to the top. She was in a constant state of pursuit, a search for something greater. She would breeze right past him one day, and he would stay the same, tucked away in an office no one ever needed to enter.
The bees flowed through the window like water. Martin put away his half-finished poem—too derivative of Keats, anyway—and welcomed them back to their home. They pressed into him like loose static falling into a TV. He ceased to be aware of the empty space inside himself; he had his inhabitants now. There was no reason for his hands to shake.
As the bees settled into their honeycomb, snippets of their memories floated like clouds into Martin's mind. They were airy things, colors warping and growing uneven as they adjusted to Martin's human synapses.
Images of Sasha, threads of sound and color weaving into a tapestry. A stuttered, imperfect, "I like him."
Martin sat stock still at his desk, too stunned even to tremble.
"You must've remembered that wrong," he told them, pale pink spreading across his face. "Heard her wrong. You misheard her." He closed his eyes and thought again of Sasha reaching out a finger to let a bee sit there, held above the rest of the world. She looked at the bees as if afraid of hurting them, like they were fragile and she was monstrous.
He wished someone would look at him like that sometimes. Not the whole thing—just the part where someone else saw that he wasn’t indestructible. That under all the whir and glint of beestings, he was another lonely heart trying to be loved.
* * *
"Enough." Jon pressed his palm on the back of the laptop and placed it out of reach on the kitchen counter. Sasha looked up at him with her signature puppy-dog eyes, mouth pressed into a sweet pout.
"But I like this one," she pleaded. "The beekeeper is named Marvin..." Jon sighed, but he couldn't hide the sparkling glint in his eyes.
"That's how I know you're in too deep." Sasha groaned and pressed her face into her hands.
"One of his bees landed on my wrist yesterday," she said quietly. "Just stayed there, like it was feeling my pulse."
"Hm." Jon pressed his thumb on her pulse point. "Bit quick, if you ask me." Sasha eyed his face, the silver strands of hair tangled in his glasses.
"And what do you plan to do about that?"
"Well," Jon said, a teasing lilt to his voice. "Logically, there are two options." He took her glasses from her face and pulled a soft cloth from his shirt pocket. "I could settle you down. Make you some tea, read aloud to you. That set of behaviors is well within my range." He plucked the eyeglass cleaner from the edge of the desk and spritzed each lens with it, his elegant fingers gently wiping the glass clean.
Sasha swallowed.
"Or?"
"Or," he started, nimbly flipping the glasses and repeating the small, circular motions on the other side. "I could...use your current state of distraction."
"How?" She asked. The compulsion crackled at the edge of her words, and Jon's eyes glowed green in response as he batted it away. "I've got a few ideas."
Sasha watched him fidget with the cloth, the folds in it rising and vanishing.
"And which one seems more appealing to you?" She asked, her voice getting a little dry in the middle.
"Ah." Jon leaned forward as if to kiss her, then swerved as she began to close her eyes.
Jon folded the glasses neatly and set them on top of Sasha's computer. "I think I should make you some tea."
Sasha leaned back against the sofa cushions. Jon tapped his fingers together as he left, a downright devious grin on his face.
"You're a real prick, you know that?" She called into the kitchen. But she was smiling big enough that the sore feeling in her chest sewed itself shut for the rest of the night.
* * *
"The bees told me you have a...no. The bees told you feel...no! Urgh!" Martin kicked the side of his desk. "You could just tell me what to say," he said to the nearest bee, which responded with an affronted bzz!! and flew directly into his chest. "Bit aggressive, aren't you?" He closed his eyes and concentrated on their eerily-colored memories. There was her face, her mouth, the almost-unintelligible words that didn't make any sense.
"You've got it wrong," he said aloud to no one in particular. "It's all—it can't be true." He opened a desk drawer and pulled out a mishmash of unfiled notes, haphazardly held together with a single paper clip. They just didn't know how to interpret human speech, Martin reasoned to himself. They could understand him because of their bond, but everything else was a mishmash of sound, cacophony of accent and implication. Sasha's voice was deeper than his at times, soared and landed in a way that made his stomach drop. No wonder they got it wrong. She was her own language. She wasn't meant to be comprehensible.
Martin was so busy building Sasha into an unattainable figure that he didn't notice a cluster of bees wriggle out from under his arm, buzzing quietly to themselves as they snuck out of the open window. He did, however, notice when they came back, balancing an enormous tulip between them and dropping it onto his desk with what he could only imagine was excessive pride.
Martin took off his glasses and pressed his face into his hand.
"And how is this supposed to help me, exactly?"
Bzz! The bees pushed the flower closer to his hand. Bzz bzz!
"I'm not just going to give her a flower. That would make it obvious I have feelings for her! There would be no dou—oh. Hm. That's actually—that's smart."
If the bees ever had the ability to look offended, they certainly looked it now.
"Alright. I'm sorry," Martin said quietly. "I just...I find it hard to believe anyone cares about me at all. Let alone...like that." He turned the flower over in his hands, careful not to bend the deep red petals. "I'll do it. And if she hates me and never wants to look at me again, at least I'll have all of you."
* * *
Sasha poked her head into Martin's office.
"You said you wanted to see me?"
Martin stood up from his desk so abruptly it jolted forward an inch.
"Erm. Did I say that?"
"Martin, you've been acting weird for days. Just tell me what's going on so things can go back to normal again. Please?" Sasha nudged the door closed with her foot and leaned against the wall. Hard not to be spellbound when she always managed to look relaxed, braids piled on one shoulder, hands heavy in her pockets.
"It's...not really something wrong, exactly, just something a little uncomfortable—" Sasha took his hands in hers.
"Tell me." Her face was close to his now, painfully close. Her lipstick was brighter than usual, a bold, cherry red. Her earrings were long today, thin trails of silver swinging side to side with moons and stars at the ends. She searched him with her face, her eyes mapping the crease of his mouth, the avoidance in his eyes.
"I—you know what, it would be easier if I just—" Martin pulled himself away from her eyes and back to the relative sanctuary of his desk. A few of the straggling bees insisted on watching the encounter from beneath the scuffed wood, buzzing hypotheticals to themselves.
Alright. Alright! If this fails, well...
"Here." He held out the flower to Sasha and rambled on, his words piling on top of each other like daisy petals. "I'm not good at saying things directly, and I'm not that great at metaphors, either, apparently, so, I guess I just have to—"
"Martin—"
"—it started a long time ago, and I don't really know what to do about it, or, or, what it means, I mean, that's kind of your domain, isn't it—"
"Martin—"
"I like you! I...I like you. In the way where we...kiss." Martin cursed himself internally. He'd probably curse himself eternally for that stupid mistake. What was he, twelve? Was he hiding in the jungle gym, waiting for his stupid crush to pass by—
Oh.
He knew her lips would be soft. Like petals, maybe, or cool water, or, or—
Martin cupped her face in his hands and kissed her again.
"You taste like honey."
"Oh, do I?"
"You do." She twirled a curl of his hair around her finger. "Must be all the...bees."
A pause, then laughter. Martin pressed his face against her chest, and her giggles made his heart thrum, made his whole body go warm.
"Oh!" A bee brushed against her cheek as if planting a small kiss there. "Looks like even your bees are—oh, another! I'm under siege!"
"Hey, get back—" Martin scooped one bee into his hands, but two more flew out of his chest and bumped against Sasha's shoulder. "No! No that's not allowed, get back—" Sasha covered her smile with her hand.
"That's alright, Martin. They're cute."
Bzzbzz!!!!
"Yes, alright, as long as she thinks you're cute. But no weirdness. Understood?"
The bees buzzed in a soft monotone Sasha could only assume was reluctant agreement.
"It's kinda nice, knowing...I don't know. I thought you maybe liked me only a little, or just—and if the bees like me, too, then—"
"I like you in too—so many ways," Martin said as she held out the last little straggler.
"Enough to share your poetry with me?" Sasha leaned against the wall and tilted her chin up.
"That's—I—how did you even kn—"
"Bees," she said flatly, one final bee disappearing into his chest with an intensity that made him cough. "I know you don't like the Eye," she said, twisting one of her rings around her finger. "So I've tried not to....Look."
"You can look at me. Just not Look at me. Does that—does that make—"
"Yes."
Sasha let her eyes drift over the half-cluttered desk, the grey, faded file cabinets lining the walls.
"Soooo." Sasha let the syllable fall like a stone plopping into water. "I know the bees' favorite place to hang out. What's...yours?"
"Are you..." Martin pointed his thumb over his shoulder. "D'you mean—"
"A date, Martin," Sasha groaned.
"Alright! Alright. How do you feel about bookstores?" Sasha leaned in to wrap her arms around him, careful to avoid the loudly humming cluster of bees.
"That sounds just fine."