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Lily
*Not Yet*
When I was fourteen, the old couple who had been living on my family’s property as groundskeepers retired and moved to Florida. I liked them, but ever since I had readHarry Potter, I was disappointed that they were in no way similar to Rubeus Hagrid in personality or as adult friends, and their total lack of magical creatures was unfortunate. They were replaced by a nice middle-aged man named Toby Carver, and I was told that he had a son who would be helping him out with the gardening. It didn’t even occur to me that that son of his would be the magical creature I had been longing for to visit my secret garden.
If that sounds naughty, it’s because that boy has only ever inspired naughty thoughts. Secret, forbidden, uncontrollable naughty thoughts. Even calling him a “boy” seems silly. I think he must have been born a man, and I know he made me want to grow up. Fast.
My first sighting of him was burned in my brain forever: tanned and shirtless in a pair of tight dirty jeans and unlaced low-cut boots. He was pushing a wheelbarrow filled with soil toward one of my mother’s flower beds. He’d had the kind of muscles that I had never seen on a guy in real life before, and his skin had glistened with sweat in the midday sun. He’d carefully lowered the wheelbarrow handles to rest it on the grass and wiped his brow with his forearm.
Even at sixteen, on a hotness scale of 1 to 10—where every actor on a CW show is an 8 or 9 and Chris Hemsworth is a 10—Wes Carver was the entire Marvel Universe.
* * *
When he looked over and finally saw me standing there in the shade of a crabapple tree and those soul piercing eyes studied me as if he were deciding whether or not I was a flower ready to be plucked, it didn’t matter how many boys had asked me to dance at Homecoming that year. I felt like a knobby-kneed, buck-toothed dork. I could tell the answer was:Not yet.I was simultaneously disappointed and relieved, paralyzed by the conflicting desires of wanting to run away from him until I’d stop feeling so much and leaping toward him while singing “A Whole New World” and hoping that he would wrap me in his arms and put his mouth on my mouth until we took flight together.
Instead of doing either of those things, I stood my ground, blinked at him, and said, “Hey.”
“Hey,” he replied. His voice was deeper than I was expecting it to be, rich and earthy as the soil he’d been transporting. “You must be Lily.”
Teehee. He said my name!I managed to maintain my carefully cultivated resting b-face. “You must be a genius.”
He grinned and shook his head and gave me aso that’s what you’re likelook.
“And you must be the gardener’s son.”
“Groundskeeper’s son. I’m Wes.”
Wes.I couldn’t decide if that name sounded British or like a cowboy from one of my mom’s romance novels. I loved his name. Loved. It.
“Good for you.” I shrugged. I had perfected my ability to seem like I didn’t give a fuck by the time I was eleven. It was a defense mechanism, sure, but my real defenses were in no way mechanizing when it came to this person. I was pretty sure he could hear my heart beating from twenty feet away.
“It’s pretty good. Can’t complain.” He mirrored my shrug and then ran his fingers through his wavy brown hair, turned around, and bent over to pick up a bottle of water.
My eyeballs nearly sprang from their sockets when I saw that butt in those jeans. If every member of every boy band had bent over in front of me in a lineup, I would not have had anywhere near as overwhelming a response as I had to Wes Carver’s behind. I hated knowing that another person could have that much power over me, just from being naked from the waist up and having a well-formed posterior. It was humiliating. I hated this feeling.
I decided then and there that the only way to overcome the feeling that I hated was to hate the guy who made me feel that way.
As he bent over again, I took one last look at his bum before turning to walk back to the house.
“Hey,” he said before I had even taken three steps.
I took a deep breath and casually glanced over my shoulder.
He was holding up a fresh bouquet of purple calla lilies from my mother’s flower bed. “For you,” he muttered as he sauntered toward me. He wasn’t smiling or anything, just handing me nine elegant, perfectly clustered flowers like it was no big deal.
I took them in both hands and cradled them in one arm like a prom queen. When his fingers grazed mine, I looked up into gray eyes, the color of an overcast Pacific Northwest sky when it weighs down on you until you just can’t take it anymore. Calla lilies are not scented, but he was. He smelled like pine and freshly cut grass and an honest day’s work, and I inhaled deeply, my eyelids fluttering.
I thanked him, genuinely, in the way that a teenager can only ever sound genuine when caught off-guard.
“Put them in water right away, okay? Cold water.”
“Oh my God… Is that what you do with flowers? Thanks, I had no idea!”
“Oh my God… Is that sarcasm? I’ve never met a sarcastic teenage girl before. You’re super unique andamaze.”
Who was this guy? People didn’t talk to me like that. I was either moderately revered (by my peers), lovingly placated (by my mom), politely tolerated (by most adults), or politely ignored (by my dad).
I didn’t know how to respond, but I also didn’t feel like leaving anymore, so I switched gears and changed the subject. “My mom’s name is Calla,” I said.
