Helpless (Steel Demons MC #5) - Crystal Ash Page 0,55

flower that morning in a half-asleep daze, the memory murky and fleeting. Not crystal clear as it was now.

“It’s beautiful.” Mariposa turned back to gaze at the long, thin petals, the spines circling the base of the flower like a crown. Some of them rivaled the size of sunflowers, nearly as big as her face. “What does this flower mean to you, Shadow?”

“It’s called, um...”

My voice threatened to leave, to retreat into silence where I risked nothing, shared nothing, and closed myself off. But I didn’t want to do that anymore, not with her. I forced myself to speak.

“It’s called Night-blooming Cereus,” I said. “It blooms once a year, and only at night.”

“Amazing,” she breathed, eyes moving all around the various blooms. “So this is a rare opportunity, huh?”

“Yes.” Her observation was correct, but I could only bring myself to look at her instead of the flowers. Even wide-eyed and bedheaded, I never saw a more beautiful woman in my life.

Her gaze turned to me, a smile curving at her lips as her hand slid from my bicep, fingers trailing down my arm, to my palm.

“Thank you for showing me,” she said. “This is really special.”

“I…” I cleared my throat, still fighting past my instinct to retreat. “I thought you might like to see them.”

“So you’ve seen them before.” She said it as a statement, not a question.

“Yes.” Her fingers skimmed over mine, and I allowed my hand to close around hers. “A long time ago. It’s one of my few good memories of um, before joining the club and everything.”

“Will you tell me about it?”

Some of the flowers had already begun to close, their blooms incredibly short-lived, but nothing diminished the radiance of the woman standing next to me.

“I…met a man.” The memories were desperate to pour out of me now, but I held back on the grisly details. None of that deserved to be heard. “When I was a boy, maybe eight or ten years old. He was a plant scientist, a uh…”

“A botanist?”

“Yes, that. The only thing he had on him was a small book of his field notes. He showed me what he’d been researching when he, um, was placed with me.”

If Mari was confused or annoyed by my vague details, her face gave no indication. She just held my hand, circling her thumb inside my palm.

“He was researching these types of flowers?” she asked.

“Um, yes. He said it was strange for them to be growing this far north. They’re native to Mexico and Central America. So to see them in Arizona, either they had adapted to the drier climate, or the climate itself changed to become more habitable for them.”

I was rambling now, my nerves getting the best of me. Here was where the memory started turning dark, where the horror that followed didn’t deserve the light of day.

“You saw these blooms with him?” Mari moved closer to me, standing directly between my feet. The side of her body started to lean against mine with soft warmth and pressure. A light touch skimmed across my back, resting on the far side of my waist. “That must have been magical to see, especially as a kid.”

“It was.” I lifted my arm to rest it on her shoulders, spreading my fingers on the opposite hand to allow them to twine with hers. She kept me in the good part of the memory, and I was grateful for that. “He woke me up one night and told me to look out our, um, window. It was at a weird angle and I couldn’t see well in the dark then, but I saw something white and thought it was a ghost. Or a fallen star.”

Mari chuckled, resting her head on my shoulder as her arm tightened around my back. Her fingers laced through mine and gently squeezed as she watched the quickly-fading blooms.

“He was so excited,” I went on. “He’d been wanting to see one of them bloom for months. Their growth cycle was all different up here and he kept missing them when going out in the field.”

“And he got to share something meaningful with you.” Mari turned in toward me, her chest now against mine, and her cheek resting on my heart. “That must have been nice.”

“It was.”

The blooms had completely faded, but the last thing I wanted to do was move from this spot. Her body pressed against me, my forearm around her upper back, and our hands entwined at our sides. I just wanted to

readonlinefreenovel.com Copyright 2016 - 2024