THE CLOUD COVER broke and freed the sunlight, but it wasn’t the brightness that woke her. The scent of the flowers enveloped them like a blanket. Lucia opened her eyes and squinted until she no longer saw black spots. Her arm had intertwined with Ben’s as they slept, their naked bodies attached at the hip, their clothes tossed all around them. Lucia squeezed Ben’s arm and he woke to the same image: the hedge nearest them had stretched and constructed a canopy over Lucia and Ben. The hedges were taller than Lucia had ever seen them before, and the flowers were a healthy white again. Except when she propped herself up on her elbows and detached herself from Ben, the plants pulled away and the flowers began to turn green. Ben sat next to Lucia, hip to hip, and the blossoms that had been in the process of hardening and turning green were once again softening, succulent, and white as an angel.
Ben gripped her hand hard before he whispered, “It’s like they healed because we . . .” But he wouldn’t finish his thought.
“We what?” Lucia said, and looked over at his naked torso, the defined muscles in his abdomen, and the strength in his arms. He was better than she remembered. Much better. Enthusiastic but in control. Lucia had never had an orgasm with him all those years ago, and if it took different lovers for her to come back to Ben and be in sync with him, then she’d made the right choice. Emotionally it was like they’d never parted.
“It’s too insane.” He pulled his clothes over and covered his exposed lap.
“Say it.”
Ben put on his shirt and stood to put on his boxers, and the flowers straightened, just like him. He stepped away from them and hurried his tasks. “Like they grew because we, you know, because.”
“Had sex?” Lucia laughed, still seated in the grass.
“Exactly.”
Lucia hugged her knees to her bare chest. Being naked in this field with this man—she could do this all day long. “It’s not crazy.”
“But it’s impossible,” Ben said.
“Suppose it isn’t.” Lucia stood up before him, and he darted his eyes away from her body but then immediately looked back.
Ben threw his hands in the air. “So they want you to have sex, that’s what you think?”
“They’re not perverted.” Lucia put her hands on his chest. “It’s not like that.”
“They won’t procreate unless you do?” His face turned from tight disapproval to a state of shock.
Lucia hugged him, let her ear fall against his chest, and listened to his breath. She laughed once and then again, and more, until she couldn’t control herself. “That’s exactly it, I think.”
“No way,” Ben said softly, as if he’d just found out he was having twins. “They’re not flowers. They look like flowers and smell like flowers, but they’re not flowers at all.”
Lucia held him for fear that he might start running.
“Like they’re your biological clock or something.”
“People still use that phrase?”
“I don’t know.” Ben finally let his arms relax around her.
Lucia said, “Mom needs to retire, and soon, and Mya and I, well, we’re just not in that part of our lives. I thought I was, but it didn’t happen with Jonah and I never thought I’d come back anyway, even if I had kids. Figured Mya would have the babies my mother wanted. My mother and her mother and her mother’s mother, they all had daughters before they were thirty. Why didn’t I think about this? I don’t know.”
Ben was listening carefully, she could tell, but he wouldn’t look at Lucia. He stared at his bare feet buried in the grass. Finally he crossed his arms and went into professor mode: “Let me, just for a moment, let me straighten this out, okay? You’re telling me that I have to go see your mother, who’s expecting a reason and a solution for these acres of dying plants, the very bedrock of your family’s money, and I have to tell her the only way I can save the flower is to fuck her daughter?”
“ ‘Fuck’ might not be the best word.” Lucia put her clothes back on. “I can tell her, don’t worry. I’ll just say I have to find someone and fall in love and have a baby. Or Mya does. But maybe just me, who knows?” She took a deep breath and felt a flash of heat in her body from all the responsibility that thought entailed. “Just those small things. No need for you to confirm it.”
Ben didn’t respond at first, and then he said, “You think it takes love to make the flowers move like that?”
“Did I say that?”
“You did,” he said.
A baby alone could save the flowers. Maybe. But the past usually held the answers, and if the past was anything to go by, then Lucia knew she had to be inexplicably, vulnerably in love to fulfill the expectation. She had to love like Great-Grandmother Serena had loved her husband. Love the way Grandmother Lily had loved her husband. The way Willow must’ve loved Lucia’s father at some point, but definitely the way she loved Mya and Lucia. To risk for love. And to sacrifice. Serena couldn’t have foreseen this loveless, childless generation of Lenore women; she probably never considered that rotting fruit can hang on a healthy vine.
Lucia reached out her hand for Ben to hold. “I think I did say that.”
“I can’t see your mother now,” Ben said, gesturing to his rumpled, grass-stained clothes.
“I understand.”
“Can we go to my house? And talk about this over dinner?”
“Are you upset?” Lucia dropped his hand to give him space, but then he took it back and pulled her close.
“Terrified,” Ben said, and he kissed her like fear was a necessary evil.