Page 22 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter Fourteen

I visit the garden the next night, and the one after that. I don’t tell Leo about my discovery of Olea. Nor do I mention the garden again, content to listen to his chatter and daydream about the evening to come.

At first I stay beside the gate for an hour, maybe two.

Three on the fourth night. Then I stay until Olea decides it is time for me to leave, when I return to my rooms and lie unsleeping in my bed until nearing dawn.

When I do sleep I am chased by winding dreams, of air thick with rain and the taste of fresh soil on my lips, and I wake up with my stomach clenching, ravenous.

Whatever these dreams are, they are better than the ones of burning.

Often Olea narrates to me as she picks her flowers; she teaches me how to spot Hyoscyamus niger —or black henbane, which I know from stories of old as the original devil’s eye, with its yellow-green leaves, purple veins, and scent so disagreeable that even Olea doesn’t enjoy it—and she explains how she wants to have blooms at all sizes and points in their growing cycle that she can press and dry for her catalogue.

Her passion is not just botany, but the plants that others have, often rightfully so, decided are dangerous.

“How did you know that’s what you wanted to do?” I ask one night, as Olea runs her finger along the moon-shadowed red of an opium poppy’s petals thoughtfully. I imagine the touch of her finger across my jaw, and I clench my teeth. “Dangerous plants aren’t exactly easy to come by.”

“I didn’t know,” Olea replied simply. “It just… happened.”

“What do you mean ‘it just happened’?”

Olea licks her lips and they glisten in the moonlight. When she swallows her throat bobs. The gate feels thick and heavy and ancient between us. “It’s… a long story.”

“We have time,” I say gently. Olea hovers just out of reach of the gate.

Her feet are bare as usual, but her nightgown is shorter than most, not far past her knees.

Her skin is so pale in the moonlight it’s almost translucent, and not for the first time I wonder why she dresses so plainly.

It doesn’t seem the kind of clothing somebody might choose for the work she does, which opens up the question: If she doesn’t choose it, who does?

“I’d like to hear the story. And—I mean…

I can help, if it’s not something you want to do. ”

“Help?” Olea wrinkles her nose. “It’s my life’s work, of course I want to do it. I was born for science whether I liked it or not. But if I’m doing something, I want to do it well, and the catalogue is my pride. That doesn’t mean I’m always happy with the cards I’ve been dealt, though.”

My lips twist in wry humour. It’s ironic that the very cards Olea was dealt would have been my dream, while I’m sure this strange, thoughtful girl would have loved being a daughter of Death instead.

“What about your parents?” I ask.

“What about them?”

“You’ve never mentioned them. Do they make you do this?” I lean harder against the gate and inhale deeply. Olea watches my inhale with that same tiger-like expression, always on guard. What is she frightened of?

“Did your parents make you come here?” Olea asks instead. “I didn’t know that was common.”

“My father would have wanted nothing more than for me to study here, but no. I came here because my husband died and they had nowhere else to put me. They didn’t want me clogging up the family home. You know, since I wasn’t family.”

“So they sent you away, like you’re some kind of inconvenience.” Olea steps closer to the gate, one hand drifting towards the bars—and then stops so abruptly she skids in the dirt.

“Yes, but it’s worked out well for me,” I say.

I’m aware, instantly, of the way my body curves towards the gate; the thickness of my tongue in my mouth; the way I want very badly to lean through and grasp Olea’s hand.

I want to touch her. Her presence is a spell, the tightness of my lungs, the tremble of my hands—it is all her.

“It has?” Olea breathes. I could swear I see the flutter of her pulse, just like mine.

“Yes. I met you.”

Our eyes meet. Hers are so dark I can’t see her pupils. They are dark gardens so deep I could lose myself in them, a bitter perfumed maze with no way out. And then Olea backs away, hurrying to pick up her basket, and the air swirls and all I can smell is green—and the moment is lost.

Another night I ask Olea, “How is it you can touch the plants when they’d be toxic to the likes of me? That one alone would give me palpitations something rotten, break me out in a cold sweat.”

The thought has been bothering me for a few days.

Once again, I woke up drenched in cool sweat, dreams of twisting vines haunting me as badly as my dreams of fire ever did.

Mornings always find me parched, hungover from our garden hours, and I’m starting to get suspicious that the plants might be partly to blame.

Of course, that’s a ridiculous thought—but that doesn’t stop it from coming.

“I told you,” Olea says. “They grew to like me. You’d be surprised how you’ll feel when they like you too. I promise I won’t put you in any danger.”

“How will you protect me?” I press my face to the bars of the gate, inhaling the garden’s scent. Olea, as always, is just out of reach—though if I stretch my arm I might be able to snag the edge of her hem.

“The gate protects you.”

“But how will you protect me?” I urge. I push my hands through the bars and make to brush my finger against one of the plants—some kind of stinging nettle. I’m not really sure what’s come over me, only that I do want to touch it. To see what she would do.

Olea’s dark eyes meet mine. Her cheeks grow flushed. What would she do if it wasn’t the plant beneath my fingers?

“Don’t,” she breathes. Her feet don’t move but her body leans, ever so gently, closer.

If she moved her hand, just an inch, she could brush mine.

I imagine the meeting of our skin, a jolt like lightning.

Olea’s lips are parted, her breath coming fast, and I wonder if she’s thinking the same thing.

“Not yet. The garden doesn’t know you yet. ”

“What will it do to me if I touch it?”

“It’ll hurt.”

I glance down at the plant, which almost seems to stretch itself towards my fingers.

Olea lets out a gasp that ripples through me, right into my core.

For a moment I’m adrift, lost in the sensation of the balmy night air, the sharp, green garden, the moon on my skin—and Olea, so close I could touch her.

And why shouldn’t I?

I meet her gaze again, can see the pink in her cheeks like a flame of recognition. Her throat bobs. She leans a little closer—tantalising. Her perfume overwhelms me. I breathe deep, press a little harder against the bars of the gate. It creaks, like the clang of a gong.

It shocks me as much as it does Olea. I curl my fingers away from the plant and yank my arm back through the gate as she jerks backwards, gathering the skirt of her nightgown in tense, pale fingers. She’s trembling.

“I wasn’t going to touch,” I say shakily.

I don’t know if I mean the plant or Olea; I’m not sure she knows either. She lifts her hand to her chest and breathes slowly.

“I’m sorry,” I say softly. Olea’s lips part as she starts to speak and then stops. She glances at the nettle-like plant, which still twists towards the gate, almost as if it’s looking for me, and she smiles.

“I will protect you.”

“Will you let me come through?” I ask. Perhaps a silly question, but I am burning to know the answer.

Olea’s hand is still at her chest when she laughs, that same rippling liquid laugh tearing through me, and says, “Maybe.”

Questions and answers are never so confused as when I’m with Olea, but I’m often so tired and foggy-minded from my days of lectures that I don’t truly consider her responses strange until I’m back in my rooms dozing before dawn.

I do not mention the garden, or Olea, to Petaccia, and I don’t mention Olea to Leo either, though I come close more than once.

I want to know if he’s ever seen her, spoken to her—if he knows who she is, or how she came to her little paradise.

But I also want to keep her all to myself, and this is the instinct that wins.

When my dreams aren’t filled with the coil of vines or the lick of flames, I find they feature Olea more and more.

These dreams are just as dark and unsettling, but I prefer every inch of them.

I dream of her knuckles whitening as she grips my thighs, my lips against the pulse in her neck, her mouth twisted in expressions of ecstasy—or agony.

More than once I wake panting, heat building between my legs, blood on the sheets from the shallow cuts my own nails have left imprinted on my skin.

It isn’t long before the nights seem more real to me than my days, dream and waking irreparably intertwined.

Some nights we abandon the gate and I follow Olea along the wall of the garden, although we can’t see each other, and call back and forth through the stone. The sound of her voice is like an echo, a ghost—a reminder that she is always out of reach.

“Will you ever come join me out here?” I ask her more than once.

The answer is always different, though a variation on the same theme: I have too much work to do; I don’t like it outside; I can’t.

Or won’t? It cannot be that simple, though.

I’ve seen the way her gaze falls to the low buttons on my shirt, the way she licks her lips whenever she says my name.

I can see the race of her pulse, the agonising hesitation whenever she drifts just too close to the iron bars that separate us.

“I’ll cut the lock,” I joke after weeks of these nights. “If that’s what it will take for you to let me in. I’ll pretend you’re some maiden in need of a knightly rescue.”