Page 9 of The Stars in the Sky
We walked up and down the rows, which were covered in black plastic.
"Why do you use all this plastic?"
"Keeps the berries pretty." He stopped at a row. "These were planted a little earlier. Wanna try one?"
I nodded enthusiastically.
He picked me a berry and held it out to me, with a look on his face that if I didn’t think that he despised me I’d think he liked me. Then he smiled. “Take a bite.”
So he was a flirt.
Okay, I’d flirt with him. I leaned over and bit into the berry as he held it, my lips brushing his fingers, tasting his salt. I’d never eaten a strawberry out of the field. If you were lucky, you could get little strawberries from farmer's markets or smaller grocery stores, which had real flavor unlike the almost wooden ones from the big stores. But this small, red berry that Will gave me? The flavor exploded in my mouth. And it was organic to boot.
“Oh, it’s so good,” I enthused, a dribble going down my chin. He gave me another look as I wiped the juice off my chin and sucked my finger and he stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans and adjusted them.
"Some saps call that a country valentine," he muttered.
God, I felt so confused. He was clearly flirting with me. But he didn’t like me? Or my politics? And he thought I was hot? What was going on here?
And what did I think? Setting aside his good looks, if this man was my political opposite, that meant that he believed in racism and homophobia. That meant that he was pro-life and anti-gun control. That he hated environmental regulation. That he didn’t support equal pay for workers and raising the minimum wage. Right?
All of the things that I cared about.
And that made me feel stupid, because he wasn’t a potential country fling. He was someone I couldn’t or shouldn’t consider. Because if I got together with him, then I was hypocritical. It was okay to believe what I believed out in the open, paint it on the back of my car and shout it to the world. But if I actually did it, I’d be letting down the side and I couldn’t do that.
That said, the idea of crossing that boundary felt so hot, like when a CEO is submissive in the bedroom. Shedding my image privately might be freeing. I was entitled to my sexual fantasies. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I should do something, but what, I had no idea.
I broke my gaze away from him and shuffled back to the truck.
We drove past new avocado orchards, then kept going and went to a higher area, with long rows of large metal hoops, most of them covered in plastic. "What's growing here?" I asked.
"Blueberries."
He stopped the truck, again getting out, and this time I totally checked out his ass. Not that I hadn’t done it before. I just let myself do it again. Again, he kept the truck running, but this time, he scanned the area and pulled out his cell phone. I wandered down the rows and fingered the leafy plants, Trixie at my heels. I could hear him talking.
"Guillermo?" He waited for a response.
"Hace falta cubrir las moras." The berries needed to be covered. Still, interesting that he spoke Spanish.
"Bien. Bueno. Adios." He hung up. I walked back to him and looked up into his dark eyes.
"Where did you learn to speak Spanish?"
"Here." I rolled my eyes, feigning patience, willing him to go on, and surprisingly, he did. "Grew up with these guys and you gotta talk with them." That was weird and not what I was expecting. If he was conservative, wasn’t he against anyone who didn't speak English? I must have had a weird look on my face, because he asked, defensively, "What?"
“You’re a Republican.”
“You know it.”
“And you speak Spanish.”
“Yeah.”
I kicked a rock to the side. "Then how can you support those candidates who want to round up everyone who is not like them and deport them?"
He rolled his eyes and asked, "Do you really want to get into that darlin'?"
All I could think at first was how sexy his voice sounded when he called me darlin’. God, I was so fucking shallow sometimes. He brought out the worst in me.
