TOPANGA CANYON

by Becca De La Rosa

Based on an idea by Maybell Marten

The place works. Tom snaps a few perfunctory photos, swipes a quick video from side to side, making sure to capture whatever the fuck her bosses meant by the vibes – to her, one patch of sagebrush is much like another, but she’s not the visionary – and then she sits down, irritated and overheated, to finish the last of her iced latte and swelter for a moment in peace before she has to make the trek back down to the car.

“Is that alcohol?”

For a moment she can’t place the direction the voice is coming from. She glances up towards the caravan, down towards the dirt trail, sees nothing but scrubby foliage. Annoyed, she shoves herself upright to peer behind her.

A man is perched up in a palo verde tree ten feet away. Tom does a double take, barely able to make him out against the glare of the sun. Only lines, angles. A paper cut-out of limbs and length. “What?” she says blankly.

The man shifts. “Alcohol,” he says. “What you’re drinking.”

He has a pleasant voice, soft and slightly husky, impossible to place as either young or old. Tom squints. “It’s coffee,” she tells the near-invisible figure up the tree. “I don’t usually spike mine.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, and I’m working?”

Seamlessly, almost bonelessly, the man drops out of the tree and moves towards her. Tom reflexively scrambles to her feet and moves away. She’s not afraid of much, but she’s heard stories about the canyon. Everyone has. “Chill out,” she warns. “I have pepper spray.”

The man stops, and a runaway cloud momentarily blocks the sun, and Tom sees him clearly for the first time: a sylph-like boy, tall and slender, with a river of pin-straight blue-black hair cascading down his back. He’s barefoot, and shirtless, and Tom is beginning to get a bad feeling about this. “If you bring me alcohol,” the boy says, smiling, “I can pay you.”

Tom raises one eyebrow. She knows the effect this look has, because she has borrowed it whole-cloth from her mother. “No, you’re good,” she says. “Thanks, though.” She starts down the path.

“Don’t you want to know what I would pay you?”

There, leaning against a live oak a few feet in front of her: the black-haired boy. Tom involuntarily glances behind herself, back towards the caravan, finds the place where he had been standing empty. She turns back to face him and crosses her arms over her chest. “Cute,” she says, unsmiling. “But no. I don’t care.”

“I have money.” The boy pushes himself off the tree. “If that’s what you’re interested in.” He has a curious tilt to his head, like a prowling cat, and large feline eyes, green-gold in the sun. “But I have other things, too.”

“Just no alcohol.” Tom steels herself and moves to push past him. She focuses on her feet, wary of the unstable ground, and stops when she reaches the point in the path where the boy should be. He isn’t there.

“I made manzanita wine.” His voice comes from behind her. Tom grits her teeth in frustration and turns. “It wasn’t very good.”

“Well, too bad. I tend not to carry the contents of my wet bar with me on scouting trips.” She aims herself squarely back towards her car. “Good luck on the liquor hunt,” she says over her shoulder, half expecting him to vanish and reappear further down the trail.

He doesn’t. She makes it back down to the road without incident, and locks herself up in her car, and drives back to the city, while the sun climbs up the sky behind her.

-

The next time she’s on location is for the shoot. She has had long practice with trying to make herself seem as aloof and unconcerned as possible on set, retaining an air of cool disinterest while her bosses do obscene things to one another. Right now she is composing a grocery list on her phone and studiously ignoring the moans of unbridled delight coming from the caravan. Tom isn’t puritanical, not by a long shot, but she’s made her peace with the fact that she doesn’t want to see the person who deposits her paycheck having his dick sucked.

Something happens. Her phone clatters to the ground. For a moment, her brain refuses to compute, because it seemed for all the world as though one of the branches of the nearby tree reached out and swiped the phone from her hands. Dazed by confusion, Tom bends to pick the phone up. The ground bucks, like a bedspread pulled at the corners, and her phone careens away, down a short, rocky cliff.

“For fuck’s sake,” Tom says out loud. No one answers.

One of the techs has a ladder, but he’s currently glued to his screen, making sure the sound of flesh hitting flesh is coming in at exactly the right frequency. Tom glances around herself. No one else is even close. She wrinkles up her nose, growls at the unfairness of the world, and edges herself down the cliff one painstaking step at a time towards her phone. 

Only: no. The ground crumples again. Tom loses her footing. Earthquake, her brain helpfully supplies, as she scrabbles for the straggly roots on the cliff wall. They rip loose in a shower of dry clay. Tom bashes her elbow against a rock, and finally, almost gratefully, lets herself fall.

Arms wrap around her waist. Someone drags her upwards. She is deposited in an unceremonious sprawl underneath the same tree that kicked the phone out of her hands, and she glares up at the boy with the shining black hair. “Of course,” she says. “Of course it’s you.”

He gives her a questioning look. Head tilted, curious corvid.  She’s closer to him now than she has been before, close enough to see the delicate angles of his cheekbones, the constellation of freckles sweeping over his cheeks. His mouth is full and sweet and far too pouty for anyone’s good. “I saved your life,” he says mildly. “You could have died.”

“I wasn’t going to die. You saved me from a sprained ankle, maybe.” Tom rubs her scraped elbow. “Let me guess,” she adds. “Since you have done me this enormous favor, now I’m in your debt. And you’d like that debt repaid in bottles of Smirnoff.”

“What’s Smirnoff?”

“Vodka for sorority girls.” She drags herself to her feet. “Pretty sure you’re the one who dropped my phone down that cliff, anyway. I don’t owe you anything.”

A strange stillness settles over the boy’s face. Tom shivers, thinking of predator animals poised in tall grass. “All debts must be repaid,” the boy says, coolly.

Tom finds herself remembering, unbidden, the stories her grandmother told her. Hands outstretched. Failures to fulfill vows. The unending consequences of one’s own actions. She shoves her hair behind her ears. Too long, at the moment. It always bothers her. “Fine,” she snaps. “Fine, whatever. I’ll buy you a bottle of liquor, you shut up about it. Deal?”

But the boy is looking away from her, up towards the caravan. “What are they doing?” he asks, clearly intrigued.

Tom brushes dirt and twigs from her cut-offs. Her elbow has started to throb. “Fucking,” she says shortly.

He nods, unperturbed by her answer. “Why aren’t you with them?”

“Because I don’t fuck them. I work for them.”

“Are you working now?”

“Technically.” Tom glances at her phone. It seems to be unscathed, and no one has messaged her from the shoot. “Come on,” she says. “We’ll go to the store now. Get it over with.”

The boy turns his full attention back to her. “Did you come by car?”

“I didn’t come by mule.”

“Then no,” he says. “You will go to the store. I’ll wait here.”

Tom stares at him, but he’s already refocused on the caravan, interest evident on his face. Of course he’s entranced by them: everyone loves her bosses. They’re stunningly beautiful, and endlessly creative, and watching them is like watching two archetypes fuck one another, like they could stop the heartless turning of the world. Tom slings her purse onto her arm with too much force and ends up whacking herself in the back. “Fine,” she says again. “Your wish is my command. I’m getting you the cheapest shit they have, though.”

“No, thank you. I will drink apple brandy.”

“Of course you will,” Tom mutters.

The trip is excruciating. She hits unexpected traffic near Mulholland Drive, and the radio only plays her least favorite songs, and at the liquor store the shelf where the Calvados ought to be is empty, and the sullen cashier has to trudge off to the back room to look for more. She drives as quickly as she can, but the last of the tech vans is still leaving by the time she makes it back to the caravan. A text on her phone from the video guy reads: wtf Tom????? Frustrated and exhausted, Tom carries the bottle back up the trail and slumps down on a rock.

The boy kneels easily beside her. “You look unhappy,” he observes.

Tom shoves the bottle at him. “It’s been an annoying day. No thanks to you.”

“You could drink with me.”

Right at this precise moment, Tom can’t think of a single reason why she shouldn’t. She snatches the Calvados from him and takes a long, sickly swallow. “Department store perfume,” she says hoarsely. “Air freshener. My First Paint Thinner.”

The boy drinks, studies the bottle intently. “You don’t like it?”

“I like Mexican beer and margaritas. I don’t have the most refined taste.” She leans back against the rock. “So what’s your name, anyway?”

He drinks again before he passes the liquor to her. “You can call me Row,” he says.

“Like a line?”

“Like a rowan tree.”

“Tom,” she says, pointing at herself.

Row tips his head, again birdlike. “Like Thomas?”

“Thomasina, actually. My mom hates me.”

“Why does she hate you?”

Tom drinks again. The Calvados has started to taste – if not actually good, then at least less terrible. “What’s a rowan tree,” she says, swinging the bottle back and forth between two fingers.

The boy stands, fluid and easy, and holds out his hand to her. Tom stares at it suspiciously. “I’ll show you,” he says.

Tom takes the boy’s hand. He pulls her upright. She follows him, barely stumbling at all, down the hill towards the sun. Row stops beneath a tree with supple, slender branches and two-tiered strips of thin leaves. “Rowan,” he says, looking strangely proud.

Tom chooses not to find this adorable. She settles on the ground under the tree and passes the bottle to Row. “Very pretty.”

“Why does your mother hate you? You never answered.”

“She doesn’t need a reason,” Tom says.

He’s staring at her, all serene curiosity. The intensity of his gaze makes her mildly uncomfortable. “This has an interesting flavor,” he says, shaking the bottle of apple brandy. A few drops spill onto the dry earth. “Have you ever had champagne?”

“Of course I have.”

“What does it taste like?”

Tom wrinkles up her nose. “Kind of bitter,” she says. “In a good way. Like an unripe fruit, a little bit? Not sour, just tart. But sweet, too. Dry, like – if you were thirsty it wouldn’t really help. And bubbly. You can taste the bubbles. They pop on your tongue.”

Row stares at her, patently fascinated. He has begun to look ever so slightly drunk. His eyes are heavier, his graceful collapse to sit beside her looser of limb. “You can bring me champagne next time,” he says.

This startles a laugh out of her. “Can I? That’s lucky for me.”

“I told you I could pay.”

“You did tell me that. Okay, how much is a bottle of champagne worth to you?”

Row rolls his head against the tree trunk to gaze at her. “It depends on whether I like it or not,” he says, smiling lazily.

Tom is not exactly sober herself. She resists the nearly unbearable impulse to walk her fingers up his chest. What would his hair feel like, wrapped around her fist? A handful of silk? “The value of a free market,” she says, “is that I don’t give a shit whether or not you like your purchase. You owe me anyway.”

“Do you like diamonds?”

“Do you have diamonds?”

Row lifts and drops one shoulder. They are sitting absurdly close to one another. He smells botanical, earthy. New-dug dirt. Tom has a sudden and vivid memory of helping her grandmother in the garden, her palms creased with potting soil. “Do you ever leave Topanga?” she asks. To change the subject, or break the tension.

“Sometimes.”

“Do you ever go downtown?”

Row smiles. His freckles shift like falling stars. “Are you inviting me to visit your home?”

By some mysterious betrayal of biology, Tom is blushing. She rolls her eyes. “No,” she says. “Just curious. How’d you know I live in downtown?”

“I can smell it on you.”

Of course he can. “What does it smell like?”

He leans towards her. His hair falls over her shoulder. She tries to repress a shiver. “Thunderstorms,” he says carefully. As though she’s going to quiz him on his answer. “Car exhaust. Wet concrete. Human sweat. And magnolia flowers.” Row dips closer still, so close she can feel his breath on the side of her neck, an electrified awareness that shimmers all down the length of her body. “Or maybe that’s just you.”

“I don’t even know what a magnolia flower looks like.”

“If you bring me champagne,” he says, “I’ll show you.”

The bottle is empty. Tom orders an Uber, before she can do anything stupid. Row laughs as he says goodbye to her, his hair moving in the wind like a shape of liquid obsidian.

-

The next day Tom meets her friend Sky for coffee. “I have a question,” she says, before they’ve even said hello.

Sky has never in her life been anything but chill. “Shoot,” she says, draping herself over the expensive leather couch in Tom’s favorite trendy coffee shop downtown. No matter where she is, Sky always manages to look right at home. 

“Would it be a bad idea to fuck someone who lives in Topanga Canyon?”

“Like, geographically?” Sky swirls the ice in her coconut caramel iced latte, looking pensive. “I don’t know, man, traffic on the 101 can be kind of rough.”

Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if Sky is being heartbreakingly earnest or if she’s making some elaborate deadpan joke for the benefit of no one but herself. “No,” Tom says, irritated regardless. “I mean like – one of the – people – from Topanga Canyon.”

“Oh!” Sky’s eyes widen. “One of the – got it. Is this a rhetorical question?”

Tom scrunches up her face. “Technically?”

“Chisme!” Sky shrieks, to the distress of the doe-eyed influencers trying to film their reels at the next table over. Even Tom winces. “Tom,” Sky goes on, at a more indoor-voice volume. “You have to tell me what happened. Spare no detail.”

“I met this – boy.”

“A boy!” Sky echoes, clasping her hands together like a Disney princess.

“He made me buy him alcohol.”

“And then?”

Tom shakes her head. “We got kinda drunk, I guess,” she says. “He said if I bring him a bottle of champagne he’d pay me back.”

“Pay you back, like. With his mouth?”

“He didn’t elaborate,” Tom says, with dignity. 

Sky resettles herself on the sofa. Her hair puffs up behind her in a red cloud. “But you think he’d be down for it,” she says. “There were vibes.”

“I thought so, anyway.”

“You know Shawna? Liam’s ex-girlfriend with the amazing tattoos on her neck?”

“Sure,” says Tom, who almost never knows anyone Sky talks about.

“Well,” Sky says confidentially. “Shawna has a thing with one of the guys from Laurel Canyon. She’s been fucking him off and on for most of the year.”

“And?”

“Says it’s the best sex of her life.”

“Hmm.”

“You should bring him champagne,” Sky tells her. “See what happens. Why not?”

It’s a valid question, and it haunts Tom as she goes about her work week, arranging her bosses’ schedule, answering their emails, and beginning prep work for the next shoot, about which she was only told flowers and graffiti, whatever that means. On Friday afternoon she finds herself in the BevMo, glaring at the wall of champagnes. On Friday evening she slams the car door and steps out onto the trail in Topanga.

Row is waiting for her by the caravan, leaning against a tree trunk with his legs stretched out, his hands folded behind his head. “Why do you want all this alcohol, anyway?” Tom asks him.

He peers up at her. The last of the sunlight catches the blue tones of his hair. Everything else is butter-yellow. “I am in search of pleasure,” he tells her, very seriously. “I am currently exploring human drugs.”

“Well, we have some good ones.” She sits, stretches out her own legs. She’s worn what she considers her least fuckable outfit, paint-splattered jeans and an ancient t-shirt with a smiling cactus on it. This is a test, though even she isn’t exactly sure what the parameters are, and what would constitute a pass or a fail. “I’ve heard good things about opium, for example.”

Row raises one dark eyebrow. “Can you bring me opium?”

“I really, really doubt it, but I’ll ask my friend Sky. She knows everyone in LA.”

He accepts the bottle of champagne. The cork seems to perplex him. “What are your favorite sources of physical pleasure?” he asks her, frowning at the metal cage holding the cork in place.

Tom isn’t sure why she finds the question so astonishing. But Row asked it earnestly, and so he deserves an earnest answer. “Food,” she says. “A big one. There’s a taco truck that parks under my apartment on Thursday and Fridays. They make the best huaraches I’ve ever eaten.” She bites her lip. “Little things, too, like when you’re cold inside and you go out into the sun. Or the feeling of being in bed when you don’t have to get up at any time, and you’re awake but you could go back to sleep and you’re aware of just how comfortable you are. Orgasms, obviously. Are you having trouble with that?”

Row, in the middle of attempting to pick open the wire with his teeth, glances across at her with the champagne cork still in his mouth. “No,” he says gravely.

Tom snatches the bottle back from him. Twists the cage off, tucks it in her pocket. “Push it open with your thumbs,” she says, showing him. “It’s going to make a noise.”

The cork pops. Champagne spills into Row’s hands, and on impulse Tom bends to lap at it. Laughing, Row tastes the champagne from his own wrist. “I have never eaten huaraches,” he says, pronouncing the word fluently. “Will you bring me some?”

“They’d be cold by the time I got here. Much better fresh.”

“You’re inviting me to your home again.”

“Am I?”

He passes her the bottle. “I have something for you,” he says, his eyes heavy-lidded, cats’ eyes, watching her. 

Tom is debating how she’ll respond if he strips his pants off and points to his cock. With initial indignation, she decides, giving herself room for potential later enthusiasm. But Row stands, gestures for her to follow him. After a moment she does.

They walk for five minutes in silence. The sunset is golden now, hinting at other pastels, the pinks and purples and soft robins-egg blues of summer evenings in Los Angeles. Row leads Tom along a dirt path, but at the last moment he grabs her by the hand and drags her sideways through a wall of scrub brush, into a place so glossy-green and so heady with fragrance that for a moment Tom can’t even register what’s happening. “This is a garden,” she says, stupid with astonishment, spinning around to take it all in.

It is. Flowers bloom everywhere: not just the wildflowers Tom recognizes from the rest of Topanga but roses, too, hanging folds of jasmine, unexpected, out-of-season daffodils, carpets of alyssum, bird of paradise in prehistoric phalanxes. The air is full of drifting petals from the blossomed fruit trees standing in a circle around them.

Row watches her carefully. “It’s my garden,” he says. “You like it.”

Not quite a question, though it contains a hint of uncertainty. “It’s beautiful,” Tom admits, still staring. “It smells like what heaven is supposed to smell like.”

“Here.” He tugs her gently across the moss-soft ground to a tree with gnarled limbs and bursting, luscious flowers, pointed white petals stained pink near the center. “Magnolia,” Row says, grinning down at her.

Tom stands on tiptoe to smell one. It smells more green than floral to her, earthy and redolent. “You just happen to have one of these growing in your garden?”

“No,” he says. “I grew it for you. I made a promise.”

Tom is not a woman who does well with big gestures, even if they are geared primarily towards the procurement of alcohol. She takes three huge swallows of champagne. “Pretty,” she says, when she’s determined that she won’t choke.

“What else?”

“What else about the flowers?” Doubtfully, Tom looks back up at the tree, wondering what more she’s supposed to say.

“No. What other physical pleasures do you enjoy?”

She raises an eyebrow. “Very focused on this,” she remarks. “All right, fine.” Tom sits on a soft patch of grass, settles herself cross-legged. “Sitting beside a pool with my feet in the water on a cool night after it’s been a hot day, so the water’s still warm,” she says. The champagne is already fizzing in her blood. “That crunch when you first bite into a chocolate-covered ice cream bar. The smell of coffee brewing. Sometimes it’s better than the taste.” Tom passes the bottle back to Row. Their fingers tangle together on the neck. “When I was a kid,” she says slowly, a little bit dazzled by the physical contact and the way it sends shimmers of electricity up her arm, “I used to ride my bike through this forest where the path was overgrown with brambles. The thorns would catch at my arms, sometimes. I always thought it felt – so good. I never got, like, actually hurt hurt, just these little papercut-type scratches.”

Row wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “You enjoyed that?” he asks with evident curiosity.

“Sometimes.”

He holds out his arm. “Show me.”

It’s possible this might be taking things a little bit too far. It’s possible this might be too far even for Sky, or Sky’s well-fucked friend Shawna. The fact that Tom is suddenly desperate to claw at Row's skin like some kind of demon means nothing. “No,” she says, annoyed at herself, and by proxy at Row.

“Show me,” he says, his voice soft, “and I’ll show you something in return.”

“If I say no again, are you going to push me down another cliff?”

He purses his absurd lips together. “I didn’t push you,” he says disdainfully. “And you didn’t fall all the way down. I caught you.”

“My elbow is still bothering me, by the way.”

Row takes her arms and turns it, gentle yet forceful, so he can see her elbow, the fading bruise in its sad rainbow colors, the half-healed scrape. His fingers trace the edges of her torn skin. Tom forces herself not to react. “I’m sorry,” Row tells her, and somehow they’ve ended up close together again, sitting nearly on top of one another, her shoulder pressed against his.

Tom considers but is not currently capable of pulling her arm away. “It’s whatever. It’s not actually a big deal.”

“It was a mistake. How can I make it up to you?”

He looks so beautifully, sweetly contrite in the fading sunlight. Tom chews her bottom lip and tries not to think about dangerous things. Like just how sorry she could make him, and what that would sound like, taste like. “What were you going to show me?”

They don’t leave the garden. He brings her to a patch of calla lilies, stark white in their soft folds, growing from a froth of lush greenery. In the middle of each flower is a thick stamen, gold-yellow and almost erotically erect. “They need to be pollinated,” Row tells her, his head tipped to one side again, like he’s gauging her reaction.

Tom is not a botanist. “Okay.”

“Would you like to watch?”

“Sure,” she says, more because she feels like it would be impolite if she declined than out of any horticultural interest.

Row gives her a smile that looks nearly vicious in its delight. Then, to her surprise, he sinks to his knees before the patch of calla lilies. He tucks his hair behind one ear. Slowly, gracefully, he dips his head.

Tom understands what’s going to happen only a fraction of a second before it actually does. Row takes the stamen of the calla lily delicately in his mouth, like a cock. His pink tongue traces the underside of the protrusion, his hands unmoving in the dark earth at the base of the flowers.

There’s no sound. Tom has forgotten how to breathe. Some analytical part of her brain informs her, in its helpful way, that Row is spreading the golden pollen from one end of the stamen to the other. The rest of her brain has careened to a drunken stillness. It shouldn’t be so devastating to watch Row move from flower to flower, tending each with his mouth, his hair hanging in a blue-black sheet. Watching this scene shouldn’t feel so voyeuristic. But it does, and Tom is stunned, and breathless, and intrigued, and wet. 

When Row has finished pollinating the flowers he swings easily to his feet and rejoins Tom. Wordless, she passes him the bottle. They drink in silence. “That,” she says at last. Her voice sounds strange. “Was like a flower orgy, wasn’t it?”

“Not technically, no,” says Row, with the thoughtful modesty of an artist. “It was one rhizome.”

“But you were – ” she makes a stupid little gesture she immediately regrets. “Fucking it.”

“I was,” he agreed.

“And you let me watch.”

“I thought you would enjoy it.”

“What about them?” she demands, feeling slightly hysterical at the prospect of questioning the sexual consent of a flower. Or a rhizome. Or whatever it is.

“I asked,” he says. “They didn’t mind.”

The champagne is nearly gone, which might be an issue for Tom. She runs her hands through her hair, gestures at the bottle. “Do you like it, or what?” she says, too brusquely.

Row is watching her. He always seems to be watching her. There’s a dusting of bright pollen on the swell of his lower lip. Is this the most obscene thing Tom has ever seen? Or, alternatively, is she having a nervous breakdown? “I like it,” he says.

“How much is it worth to you?”

The boy shifts. His shoulder knocks Tom’s. “I don’t have huaraches,” he says, grave and calm again. “I don’t have coffee, or a swimming pool, or an ice cream bar. But I can give you an orgasm.”

Tom laughs. It bursts out of her, like a bird. “That’s awfully, awfully presumptuous,” she remarks, still grinning.

Row doesn’t look affronted, only mildly bewildered. “You don't want one?”

“I mean that you’re so positive you could make me come.”

He smiles. His two canine teeth are slightly pointed, and Tom can’t help imagining what they’d feel like, sunk into her lower lip. “A bet, then,” he says, tracing his thumb down the length of the bottle in a manner Tom classifies as unfairly suggestive. “I bet I can make you come. You bet I can’t. What do I get when I win?”

“The pride of righteousness.”

“I don’t need that.”

Are they really having this conversation? Is she really even considering this? Yes, she realizes. It’s a surprisingly easy idea to surrender to. Isn’t it why she came out here, champagne in hand? To see what Row could do with his pretty, pretty mouth? “Fine,” she says, leaning back on one fist. “You win, I’ll make you come. But I get to choose how.”

After a moment’s solemn consideration, Row offers her his hand to shake. “Stand up,” he says. “Take off your clothes.”

He doesn’t seem to have any intention of moving himself. Without meaning to, Tom glances over her shoulder at the calla lilies. If they had an objection to watching, probably Row would have mentioned it. She shrugs, climbs to her feet, and begins to undress.

Working in the porn industry – or, more accurately, working for one porn-producing couple – has inured Tom to almost everything, including casual nudity. She has hang-ups about a lot of things, but her body isn’t one of them, and she strips quickly and without shame, until she’s standing in front of Row naked. The humid, sweet-scented air of the garden drifts across her bare skin.

For a moment Row does nothing, just looks at her. Then he reaches out, pulls her close, and presses his face to her cunt.

Tom gasps softly. His hair glides against her legs. Row breathes her in, his hands flattening against the back of her thighs, sliding up her ass, up to the small of her back. “Magnolia flowers,” he says, seemingly to himself. His words thrum against Tom’s skin. She wavers on her feet.

Half a bottle of champagne is just the right level of drunk to enhance this moment without destroying it. The garden hums and blurs, leaving only Tom and Row clear. Tom is heart-thuddingly, skin-shiveringly aware. When Row tilts his chin slightly so he can run his tongue against Tom’s clit, she feels everything.

It’s barely even a lick at all. His tongue eases over her, like air. Tom hisses. “That’s not,” she says breathlessly. “Just so you know. That’s not going to make me – ” But before she finishes, Row opens his mouth and sucks her clit into his mouth like a fruit. Tom cries out, astonished, her fingers knotted into his hair. It feels like strands of liquid glass. Her vision wavers.

Row pulls back, licking his lips, and Tom cries out again, this time in frustration. “What was that?” he asks innocently.

She swears. She considers violence. “If you don’t keep going, I’m going to – ”

“I thought I heard you say I couldn’t make you come like that.”

Tom tugs at his hair, not at all gently. “Shut up and fuck me,” she orders.

Laughing, Row does. He parts her legs, dips his head again, and Tom – not usually a poetic person – is struck by the angle of his neck, his golden throat, like a medieval painting of a wild beast bowing to a maiden. His mouth opens against her cunt. Wet heat, the pressure of his tongue teasing at her, the grip of his fingers against the backs of her thighs. Tom folds her hands through and through and through his beautiful hair. She hears the ragged hum of her breath.

Something brushes against her bare ankle. Tom ignores it, too inebriated by the moment, by the perfection of Row’s mouth. A sliding sensation, feathery. Up her calf. Around her knee. She flutters her eyes open to see a snaking vine climbing up her thigh. Green-brown, ridged with rough striations, thick as two fingers put together. Here and there it sports vivid, glossy leaves. Like ivy leaves, though smaller. Made idiotic by hedonistic delight, for a moment she only stares at it. “Hey,” she gasps. “Row, what – ”

He pulls away from her, a heartbreaking separation, and blinks at the vine wrapped around her leg. “That’s mine,” he says. As if that explains anything.

“Your – ?”

“You’ll like it,” he tells her, his hands still gripping into her flesh. “If you don’t, I’ll stop.”

She stares at him, too desperate to shove his face back between her legs to possibly make coherent sense of whatever the fuck he’s talking about. But she’s not really here to make sense, is she? None of this is an exercise in making sense.  It’s an exercise in something else. Carelessness. Heedlessness. Gleeful abandon. “Okay,” she says finally.

Row presses himself back into her. Tom breathes a sigh of relief that turns into something other than relief when the vine snakes up and up to gently brush her vulva, cool and light. When the vine pushes into her cunt she makes some wordless sound, startled, overwhelmed by sensation, but Row just tightens his grip on her, and licks her faster. The vine moves inside her. Curling. Twisting. Not at all like either a cock or a finger, not at all like anything she’s ever felt before. Tom thinks, absurdly, that she can detect patterns to the vine’s movements. Sibilations of ins and outs, like fucking a snake, an eel, a long lashing tongue, perfectly articulated. Its delicate leaves fold and unfold against her labia. A particular curve of the vine inside her cunt presses against some sensitive corner of flesh, and the sensation arches her back like a cat. So much too much; nowhere, nowhere near enough. Its maddening deliciousness almost drives her to tears. “What the fuck,” Tom whispers, desperate, close to begging, though she has no idea what for,  “what the fuck,” and Row laughs again, laughter humming against her clit, and she comes suddenly, violently, her voice cutting through the silence of the garden as she screams, everything lost to waves of agonized pleasure, velvetine and brilliant and never, neverending. 

Row pulls back. His mouth looks swollen. “I think,” he says, gazing up at her, his eyes darker in the twilight, “I made you come.”

Tom shudders as the vine pulls out of her. It slithers away through the grass, still slick and shining with her fluids. “Yeah,” she says, “I can’t argue with that.”

The boy preens, visibly. “I will have my reward now, please.”

“You’re going to have to give me a minute.” She hasn’t yet let go of his hair. It fists in her fingers like beautiful black ink. She feels slack and warm, as though her orgasm was a sun that melted her like chocolate. “I may need to sit down.”

“Oh?” says Row, smiling an angelic smile. “Do you?”

“Don’t be smug.”

“I deserve to be smug.” He offers his hand. “I could feel it when you came.”

Tom sits gingerly. Blood rushes in her ears. “Feel it how?” she asks, curious despite herself. “You mean you felt – like – through the vine?”

He studies her. His cheeks, she notices, are slightly flushed. “I told you it was mine,” he says mildly.

“What does it feel like? I mean, how do you experience it?” She tries and fails to imagine vines looping out of her, separate and yet somehow connected. “Like it’s another cock?”

“No. More like a limb.”

She shifts. Wetness drips onto the soft moss beneath her when she moves. Why shouldn’t she have fucked a plant that is also somehow a part of a beautiful boy? Stranger things have happened. “Sure,” she says, closing her eyes to enjoy the last of the sunset against her overheated skin. “Well, it was – new.”

He sits back, draws up one knee so he can lean on it, so easy and so lovely that Tom feels momentarily heartbroken for no reason she can name. “Did you like it?” Row asks, curiously.

There is a meter inside Tom that will never let her be too earnest for too long. Her instinct is to say something sarcastic and not very pleasant, but she bites down on it, as hard as she can. “Yeah,” she says. The simple truth. “I fucking loved it.” 

After a moment of silence, some pathetic impulse leads her to ask irritably, “Did you?”

Row is looking away from her, out past the circle of fruit trees to a middle distance she can’t see. “You make beautiful sounds when you come,” he says. “I wished I could have seen your face.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He turns to gaze at her. His smile looks oddly uneven. “Yes, I did like it,” he says. “You taste delicious.”

Tom rakes at her hair, all at once self-conscious in a way she hadn’t been when he had his face shoved into her cunt. “Quick question,” she says. “If I was to cut a flower, would you be angry at me?”

“Don’t cut a flower.”

“I need one. I have an idea.”

Row tips his head slightly. “Tell me which one you want. I will see what I can do.”

Tom points at the peach-colored roses spilling their heady scent into the air. Row reaches out one hand, lazily, looking for all the world like a boy reaching out to entice his lover back to bed. Tom is so busy cataloguing each lovely angle of him that for a moment she doesn’t hear the rustling of leaves. Then, a slither of movement. The rose bush is growing towards them, spilling out leaves, and vines, and perfect, fat roses as it trips along the ground. She makes a soft sound. A feeling she hasn’t experienced in a long, long time: wonder. The rose bush eases to a stop beside them, so Tom and Row are all at once sitting in a bank of scented flowers. Tom clears her throat. “Lie down,” she orders.

Row gives her a quizzical look, but he obeys. After a moment’s hesitation Tom plucks lightly at the nearest branch of rose-vine. Quickly, almost cheerfully, it unspools towards her, like a line of rope. “Why not,” she says, under her breath. She bends to guide the vine around Row’s right wrist, fingers picking their way between thorns. The vine tightens. Row gasps, suddenly wide-eyed.

“You said you wanted me to show you,” Tom says. Her heart thuds in her throat. “The brambles. But I’ll stop, if you – ”

“Don’t,” he says. Somehow strained, yet perfectly languid.

Tom grins, a grin that bites into her lips. “Then stay still.”

She loops another thorned vine around Row’s left wrist, then sits back to study him, pinned to the soft, sweet ground by armfuls of roses, his hair a shining fan around his head. Tom catches her breath. Dark is falling, but she can still pick out his features perfectly; after a moment she realizes it’s because every flower in his garden is emitting a dreamy, hazy glow. They sit within a petal-lit world. For the first time Tom wonders if this is real. If any of this, any of it is real. Then she pushes the thought out of her head.

Row’s wearing loose black trousers, soft linen or rough raw silk, and Tom unceremoniously strips them off him, making him huff a quiet laugh. She stares. He’s gorgeous, of course, unsurprisingly and obviously, the lean muscles in his legs, the angles of his hip-bones, the absurdly fucking delicious length of his cock, but. Rather than hair, the base of his cock rests against a tangle of pointed green leaves. Rowan, Tom thinks. She looks up to find him watching her with his eyes narrowed. “What is it,” he says, and if he were anyone else, he might even sound defensive.

“I’ve never seen anyone as beautiful as you,” Tom says honestly. “I’ve never – I haven’t fucked someone like you before. You’re just. Too good to look at.”

It’s ridiculous how comfortable he looks, naked and pinned by rose thorns. “Oh,” he says. Serene and self-composed again. “Thank you.”

“Have you fucked someone like me before?”

“A girl named Tom? No.”

Tom leans on one of his bound wrists, just enough to make him groan. “I mean a person.”

Row licks his lower lip. “No, I haven’t.”

Maybe Tom is more like a man than she ever thought, because the pride of being first paints her pink and gold and silver all over. She tries and fails to hide her smile. “Okay,” she says. “Great. Good.”

“Is it?”

She’s blushing again. How can she possibly be blushing again? “I – ” 

“Is it great,” Row says thoughtfully, “or is it good?”

“Oh, shut the fuck up,” she mutters, and grabs for his cock. He hisses, tries to sit upright by some unshakable reflex, is caught on the thorns, moans softly. The sound etches itself into Tom’s consciousness. She moves to straddle him, guides his cock into her cunt, tips her head back at the sudden stretch, the feeling of him inside her. Row angles his hips, forcing himself deeper. Tom can’t help humming in pleasure. “Stop moving,” she says, with all the wherewithal she can muster, which isn’t much. “I told you I’d make you come. You have to let me.”

The boy gazes up at her in patent astonishment. His hair is tangling in the crabgrass. There’s a glimmer of sweat on his forehead. A very thin trickle of blood runs from his left wrist to the moss below. He’s starting to look slightly undone, his lips parted, his fists clenched, and the sight is even more arresting than Tom would have expected. Like seeing a flawless Greek statue panting and disheveled. Tom moves on him, gliding over his length. Row’s eyes flutter shut, and softly she says, “No. Look at me.”

He does, half-agonized, and Tom drinks him in, his desperation, the way he winces when the rose-vines tighten around his arms, and she moves again, begins to ride him, slowly, slowly, only picking up speed when he whispers please, his voice cracked. She doesn’t think she’ll be able to come like this – has never actually been able to come like this – but the roses, unbidden, twist over Row’s thigh, making him cry out in anguish and apparent appalled pleasure, and Tom watches as a beautiful peach-pink blossom blooms from one thornless offshoot, and it twists until it’s brushing against her clit, pressing against her clit as she moves, as she fucks him, where she’s already so fucking sensitive. She digs her fingers into Row’s arms.

Row comes silently, the muscles in his stomach clenching, his head thrown back against the grass. Tom laughs; not from humor but from sheer delight, so close herself that the look of him pushes her over the edge, and she comes on his cock, on the delicate pink rose, a shattering orgasm, pulling her apart piece by piece like a stained glass window broken in a great explosion.

She doesn’t remember climbing off of Row. Somehow they’re lying on the ground together, limbs tangled, both breathing hard. The roses unpick themselves from their bodies with fastidious care. Tom rouses herself enough to lift Row’s arm and peer at the pinprick marks circling it. “Pretty,” she says.

He laughs. It’s a slightly breathless sound. “Did you like that better than huaraches?”

“Because it just has to be a competition?”

“Because I am selfish, and enjoy hearing about my prowess.”

Tom rolls away from him, so he can wrap her in his arms. “You and every other man in the world,” she says. “But fine. Much better than huaraches.”

Row presses his face into her shoulder and makes a contented sound. “I prefer fucking you to champagne, too.”

“So glad I spent the sixty dollars,” she says snidely, but she’s smiling.

-

Sometime during the night Tom wakes. She stares around herself, moss, flowers, and moves to climb to her feet, but Row only tightens his grip on her. “Stay,” he says sleepily. “You don’t have to get up. You don’t have to go anywhere.” The moss is pillowy and dense. The air is cool and sweet. She stays.

-

In the morning Row grumbles when she sits up. “I have to work,” she tells him. Daylight: none of this a beautiful dream. Just a beautiful, dream-addled reality. She can’t quite force her brain back to lucidity. When a thought occurs to her, it does so at a drunken angle. “Hey,” she says, feeling for her t-shirt. “Flowers and graffiti.”

The boy frowns up at her. “What?”

“Do you want to make some money you could use to buy drugs?”

“You could buy me drugs,” he mutters, shoving his face into the crook of his arm.

“Not if I get fired, I couldn’t.”

“What would I have to do?”

“You wouldn’t have to do anything, other than come with me to downtown.”

“In the car?” His sullen pout has the dual effect of being undeniably adorable, and making Tom want to wipe it clean off his face. Possibly with more rose thorns. “I don’t like your car.”

“Lucky for you, I took an Uber.”

“I will come with you to downtown,” he says, with grave dignity, “if you fuck my mouth again while we are there.”

Tom snorts. “One,” she says, stepping into her jeans, “you really don’t have to use that as a bargaining chip. I’d do that again for free, because it was – ” she hops to pull her jeans up. “ – really fucking spectacular. Two, you don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to. I think you’ll actually enjoy it, though. I need help setting up my bosses’ next shoot.”

“Your bosses who fuck one another.”

“Yes, my bosses the porn stars.”

Row tucks one arm behind his head, displaying no actual sign of getting up. “Show me your home,” he says, smiling at her.

Tom, momentarily dazzled by the sweetness of his smile, forgets how to tie her shoelace. “Say please,” she counters.

“Please, then.”

“Get up. I’m calling a car.”

He does, and procures, while she’s tapping at her phone, not only his pants but a similar black shirt, though he refuses to put on shoes. The Uber driver looks at him askance, heaves a sigh, and remains pointedly silent for the entirety of the ride.

Driving into DTLA always lifts her spirits. It surprises her every time, that a typically bitter, sarcastic person like Tom can feel something so light. She watches its approach out the window, silvery skyscrapers and historic buildings, and turns to Row and finds him watching her, his expression unreadable. It’s strange to see him in a car. Like seeing a mountain lion riding a city bus. He sits still, though, doesn’t sulk or complain, just gazes at her, solemn, unreachable. Tom finds herself thinking of him writhing under her, alive and begging. The same boy. A different boy?

The Uber takes them to the location Tom scouted: the ground floor of an empty building in the fashion district. A large company had purchased it with the intention of turning it into live-work lofts. It’s been cleared out, but construction hasn’t yet begun, and the development company is owned by a fan of Tom’s bosses. He’s been surprisingly willing to work with her. She ushers Row out of the car and unlocks the building. “What do you think?” she asks him.

He pads into the space in his bare feet. Split wires spill out over naked concrete, still covered with pieces of colorful graffiti. One says KING below a disjointed crown. One says FOLLOW IT. Row studies each word like a man reading scripture. “I like downtown,” he says.

“My brief was ‘flowers and graffiti’. I was going to go to the flower market, but I thought maybe you could help with that part instead.”

Row reaches out to touch an exposed wire. For just a moment it transforms into a froth of peonies growing out of the wall. “For a shoot,” he says, as though he’s testing the words out.

“For a shoot. That’s what they do. They fuck each other on film. People pay them to watch the movies.”

He turns to stare at her. “Why?” he asks curiously.

Tom shrugs. “Because they’re really hot and really, really strange,” she says.

“Can I talk to them?”

“Why would you want to?”

“To see what they want. For their shoot.”

If Tom introduces Row to her bosses, something terrible will happen. Some awful and then unstoppable collusion. She flounders for a moment, tries to hide it, can’t think of a reasonable way to refuse, so instead, angry and unsure why, she turns her back on Row and digs out her phone.

Levi happens to be in the area, and he agrees to meet them. Tom is suddenly aware of herself. Yesterday’s clothes. Hair moderately full of twigs and leaves. Potential neon marquee hanging over her head that reads I fucked a boy from Topanga Canyon and now I’m bringing him to work with me. Is this a fireable offense? Her bosses are freaks, but they are also rigorously professional, at least with her. She digs in her bag for a brush, doesn’t find one. Tom needs this job. If she loses it, she doesn’t have anywhere else to go.

“Are you all right?”

Row is standing, suddenly, directly in front of her. Tom remembers his trick on the caravan trail, the first day she met him. He looks concerned, head tipped to one side. “Yes,” she says. “Yeah. It’s just. Work stuff.”

“Like what?”

She waves one hand. “Forget it.”

“How can I – ”

The door creaks open, and there is Levi, the second most beautiful man Tom has ever seen naked, and he’s looking around himself in thoughtful appreciation, then turning his bright smile on Tom. “Hey,” he says cheerfully. “I like the vibes. It’s got good light, too.”

“Levi, Row,” Tom says. “Row, Levi. Row’s my consultant. For the floral aspect of the shoot.”

“Hey, man.” Levi offers Row his hand, seemingly unaware of the boy’s bare feet and general otherworldly demeanor. Then again, maybe he’s just used to it. “You wanted to talk out the set design?”

Row and Levi speak for half an hour. Three minutes and seven thousand plant names in, Tom stops paying attention. She finds a text from Sky on her phone, nothing but an emoji of a bottle of champagne, an emoji of a panting tongue, an emoji of water droplets, and a question mark. Tom rolls her eyes at her screen. Across the room Levi shakes Row’s hand again, gives Tom a cheery wave, and saunters off. “The shoot is tomorrow,” Row says to her. Serious. Beautiful. “I have to get some things ready.”

She gazes up at him. “Rain check on seeing my place, then,” she says. “And rain check on the mouth-fucking, too. I’ll get you a car back to Topanga, and I’ll pick you up tomorrow. They like to start early.”

In a way, it’s better. Nothing lasts, not really; they’re just playing pretend, elongating this the way they are. But Row has the audacity to look confused. “I could stay,” he says quietly.

“I thought you said you have to get some things ready.”

“I can do that from your home.”

“Can you,” she says, her voice flat.

“If you invite me.”

He doesn’t seem unhappy. He doesn’t seem as though he’s trying to trick her. He seems – what? Tom stares at him for too long. “Excuse me,” she says with unthinking civility, “I have to make a call.” She ducks out of the complex onto the corner of 11th and Maple, scrabbles her phone from her pocket, and calls Sky.

“Yellow,” Sky says, her mouth full.

“He won’t leave,” Tom hisses. “He’s here and he wants to come to my apartment and he won’t leave.”

“Oh, shit.” Sound of movement. “He’s, like, being super pushy?”

“Not – not really.”

“Did you fuck him? Was it bad?”

“No,” Tom snaps, so loudly that a man in an immaculate suit turns to peer at her from his electric scooter. She clears her throat. “It wasn’t bad at all. It was incredible.”

“And now he’s – where are you?”

“Downtown. I took him to work with me.”

“Oh,” Sky says, her voice expressive even over the phone. “You fucked him and you liked it and now you’re freaking out.”

“I’m not freaking out!” Tom shouts.

“You’re definitely freaking out. Take a second. Breathe, or whatever. You said he was into drugs?”

“Human drugs. Apparently.”

“Okay,” Sky says, with the patient rationality of the perpetually stoned. “Take him back to your place, and we’ll get him crazy high.”

Maybe a buffer is what Tom needs. She just needs space, air to breathe, so she doesn’t get so caught up in – whatever this is. Terrible things happen when you get caught up. Whirlpools. Tsunamis. She has to stay anchored. “Yeah,” she says faintly. “All right. Thanks.”

“There in an hour,” Sky sings, and hangs up.

Row is kneeling to examine a crack in the concrete foundations when she lets herself back into the building. “If you want to see my place, we’re going now,” she says. He nods, rises fluidly, not speaking. They leave together.

It’s only a ten-minute walk to Tom’s apartment. She lives in one of the old historic buildings, repurposed and retrofitted for a community of good-looking thirty-something residents, all of whom seem to either work for record labels or to own boutique clothing and lifestyle stores. Tom, with her ragged hair and her impatient expression and her lack of a friendly city dog, is an outlier, but everyone nods and smiles to her in the elevators just the same. Today the doorman glances up, clocks Row, shakes his head, and goes back to his book of crosswords, grinning. Tom drags Row up to her unit.

Always so strange to see the familiar through the eyes of someone new. She watches Row take in her little studio, the bookshelves and Mucha prints and the sari-silk curtains she hemmed by hand, painstakingly and with a great deal of swearing. “What do you think?” she demands.

He glances over his shoulder at her. “You need more plants.”

“Thanks for the tip. I’m going to take a shower. My friend Sky is coming over in a bit. She’s going to get you, in her words, crazy high.”

Row brightens. “She is?”

“You’re welcome.” Some strange impulse keeps her standing in the living room. “Have you ever taken a shower?” she asks at last. “Like, in a building with hot water?”

He's gone back to gazing out the floor-to-ceiling window at the streets below. “No.”

“It’s a pretty decent physical pleasure.”

He looks at her. She looks at him. Almost against her own better judgment, she offers him her hand. He takes it.

They don’t fuck in the shower. They move around each other delicately, silently, his hair a shining wet ribbon, and when they’re out of the water and wrapped in towels Tom feels even stranger than before, looking up at him. She finds herself picking out her clothes with more than usual care. The whole thing is frankly absurd.

Luckily, Sky arrives before long, bringing with her an enormous bag from Canter’s and a packet of pineapple-flavored edibles she guarantees will ‘blow their minds’. They throw open Tom’s window and listen to the music from the farmer’s market below, and when they get hungry they eat black and white cookies and cherry turnovers, and the edibles, if they don’t actively blow Tom’s mind, certainly hit her like a freight train, until she’s draped in a lazy puddle over her window seat, while Row lounges with his head in her lap. Sky leaves the pastries and the edibles when she goes. “Who is she?” Row asks, languid, languid, his head rolled back to gaze up at her.

Tom brushes silky hair from his forehead. “Sky? She’s my friend. I met her years ago. She knows everyone.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he says, but he laughs, lets it go.

-

They fall asleep halfway through the afternoon. Tom wakes hours later, disoriented, the window dark behind her, everyone’s apartments lit from within; the couple across the way are arguing, their arms waving in the air, while the dapper gray-haired gentleman in the Mills Act building a little down the street is entertaining a man with close-cropped hair and expensive Italian clothing, both of them drinking martinis, leaning together. The city moves in its endless hum. Tom shakes Row’s shoulder, lightly. He wakes like a cat, drowsy and graceful. Tom pushes herself upright. She’s wearing a short black dress, and it’s easy to kick off her underwear, toe them across the floor. Row moves between her legs. “No more rain check?” he asks, inquiringly.

Tom reaches out to touch the curve of his lower lip. “I made a deal with you.”

“You did,” he agrees, hands resting on her thighs, easy as an animal, as a creature with enough grace to belong anywhere.

Tom is both desperate to feel his mouth against her cunt and oddly reluctant to look away from him. “Why are you so dedicated to your search for physical pleasure, anyway?” she asks.

He traces one finger lightly between her legs. Tom feels herself tremble. “The drought,” he says, not looking up, seemingly intent and absorbed. “Destroyed a lot of the canyon. I was tired of feeling grief.”

This, at least, is a sentiment Tom can empathize with. She lets out her breath. “I’m sorry.”

He smiles up at her. His smile is no less dazzling, no less luminous. “Can I taste you now?” he asks, one dark eyebrow raised.

Tom laughs, and nods, unable to speak, and he dips delicately to her cunt the way he dipped his head to the calla lilies, which would make her no different than a flower, really, something perfectly made, something that belongs, and the first gentle touch of his tongue makes her shiver, and he laps at her with diligent attention, his breath hot against her inner thighs, and Tom presses herself against his mouth, closer to his mouth, then leans back on her hands to catch her breath. “Stop,” she says, hoarse.

Row pulls away slowly, an expression of slightly wounded confusion on his face. “You don’t like it?”

“I love it. But I just – ” she shakes her head. “Watch me,” she says intently.

Touching herself is nowhere near as satisfying as Row’s mouth on her, but the way he stares at her, the singular focus of his attention, the clench of his fists against her floorboards, makes it more than worthwhile. Tom strokes her clit until she almost can’t bear it, then grabs Row’s arm, thinking of calla lilies in the near-darkness, thinking of rose thorns wrapped around wrists, throats, blood like jewels, flower petals like jewels, Topanga as a garden, lasciviously in bloom. When she comes she thinks she sees dahlias blossoming along the white line of her baseboard.

Row leans forward. He doesn’t kiss her, only runs his thumb down the angle of her jaw, a gesture so tender she almost screams, but he just says, deliberately, “My turn?”

Tom flops back onto the window seat. “I don’t know,” she says, up to the ceiling. “That wasn’t part of the deal,” and then she has to run, screaming, when Row lunges for her, until the evening dissolves into laughter and heat and the smell of roses. His cock in her mouth. The sweet, lovely arch of his back. His fists in the bedsheets, near-helpless. Her body poised over his, a clear snapshot, as though the shape of the two of them, together, is something solid, something with edges and angles of its own. Like a root. Like a bulb, in the palm of her hand.

-

Tom has never spent two consecutive nights with the same person. It’s a depressing kind of novelty. Depressing because of the way her hands reach for Row before she’s even quite awake, before her alarm has gone off, shattering everything. Today is the day of the shoot. Afterwards Row will go back to his garden in Topanga Canyon. That will be that.

They grab breakfast tacos from Guisados on the way to the Fashion District. Row eats his in four delighted bites, then insists that Tom buy him a coffee, which he takes one sip of and declares to be repulsive. Tom listens to him complain for an entire block. Too irritated to admit how adorable she finds him – or maybe too charmed to be properly irritated – she throws his coffee away and ducks into a ramen shop to buy him jasmine milk tea with brown sugar boba. Row drinks it thoughtfully, the cartoon-covered boba cup incongruous against his rough-woven shirt, his fall of hair. “Well?” Tom asks him, annoyed, charmed, something. He only nods, serene as a monk, and sucks the last of the boba through the straw.

They arrive before the rest of the crew. Tom sets up a makeshift work station in the corner, intending to answer emails and leave Row to whatever it is he has to do, but she ends up mesmerized, watching him. He draws flowers out of the walls like an artist, like they were there all along, just waiting for him. For all she knows, maybe they were. Ivy spills along window frames. Bougainvillea unfolds in papery red-pinks over the torn-out AC vent. A profusion of jasmine falls from the ceiling to the floor. Around all of these, roses. Pink roses. Yellow roses. Bloody wine-red roses. Roses so dark purple they might as well be black, and peach-colored roses, hundreds of them, like the ones in Row’s garden in Topanga. The peonies yesterday had been an illusion, she’s almost positive, but these flowers are real. She can smell them. She can taste them, so rich and heady.

In the midst of her enchanted staring, the crew arrives, with her bosses in tow. Levi is wheeling Amra in her glass tub. Amra refuses to be wheeled by anyone but Levi. This morning she’s leaning over the tub’s edge, her hair frothing down her shoulders as she peers around the place in evident delight. “You can’t have done this,” she says to Tom, in that innocent yet devastatingly insulting way of hers.

Tom swallows her laugh. “I didn’t. My friend Row did.”

Amra looks in the direction of Tom’s nod, sees Row kneeling beside a blue-black tulip, and raises one delicate eyebrow. “Row,” she echoes.

“He’s from Topanga.”

“I can see that.” Amra glances up at Levi, her lips pursed. “Well,” she says, and leaves it at that. From Amra, this could mean anything.

Chaos is ingrained into Tom’s understanding of the world, and she predicts some catastrophe, but Row and Amra end up getting along well. Stupidly, unhelpfully, not-quite-nauseatingly well. The boy grins down at the mermaid. She laughs up at him, her fingers tip-tapping along the rim of the glass tub. Tom drinks the last of her own coffee, now cold and bitter. “He’s cool,” Levi says from behind her, startling her so much that she yelps, and then, somewhat shamefully, tries to turn the yelp into a cough. Levi just raises his eyebrows, unruffled. “You guys together?”

“No,” Tom says crossly. “Or. I don’t know. No.”

“I get you,” he says. “The place looks great. How much am I paying him?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

Levi peers at her. “You okay, Tom?”

“I’m fine,” Tom says, smiling her most professional smile. He gives her an odd look, but at least he doesn’t question her any further.

Across the room, Row and Amra are talking now about some shared acquaintance, someone called Hera who, apparently, did something stupid. Or something ill-advised. Or maybe she didn’t. Tom can’t quite tell. She’s getting restless, all her nerve endings itching, and as soon as they actually start shooting she can bow out, go somewhere else, anywhere else, but everyone’s getting along so well, why wouldn’t they just pause forever here in this strange floral island amidst the noise and heat of downtown LA? She twists her clicky pen until it breaks, glares at her own hands like they’re somehow unconnected to her, clears her throat. “We’re on a deadline,” she mentions to one of the video guys, who’s ogling Row with unabashed interest. He snaps to attention. Cameras move into position. Lighting rigs tilt Amra’s way.

A moment later Row is settling on the ground beside Tom. “Well?” he asks expectantly, only to be shushed by the man wielding the boom mic. Tom gazes down at him. Grabs her day planner, flicks to a date far in the future, scribbles out: everything looks amazing. Thank you.

Row peers at the page, back up at her. His expression stays the same. Mild, unaltered bemusement. Tom impatiently underlines her words, shoves the day planner back under his nose. Row tips his bird-like head.

Comprehension dawns. Tom flounders. After a moment she grabs Row by the collar of his shirt and drags him out of the building, eliciting a glare from the sound tech. “Can’t you read?” she demands, when they’re out in the thrum of the street. “You can, right?”

He gazes down at her. There are tooth-marks, Tom notices, on his shoulder, a ring of violet bruises. “I never learned,” he says. “Who would have taught me?”

“The flowers?” she says doubtfully, not trying to be cruel, only bewildered out of all rationality.

Luckily, Row laughs. “Why would they know?”

“I guess they wouldn’t.” She watches a turtle dove alight with gentle grace on a traffic bollard. “If you’re interested I could teach you,” she adds, to the bird, to the wild city, to the wild boy, barefoot on the sidewalk. Can boys from Topanga get hepatitis? She’ll have to ask. “I was just saying that everything looks beautiful.”

“It does,” Row agrees. In this he is feline, too, this serene certainty, nothing at all like arrogance. An animal confidence in his presence, his skill. What must that feel like?

With a jolt Tom realizes that she felt it, the other night in the canyon. Movement beyond thought; trust in the body’s wisdom. Rightness. Instinct. Joy. She bites her lip, hard. “Let’s go back in,” she says.

They do. For once Tom actually watches the proceedings, and it’s strangely beautiful, both her bosses balletic and graceful and endlessly, endlessly in tune with one another, each in perfect alignment with the other’s body and pleasure. At one point Levi flips Amra over so he can lick stray flower petals from her cunt as she coils over him like a sea-serpent, and Row gives Tom a speculative look, as though he’s fitting her shape into those permutations, imagining how she would look. Tom remembers the sensation of his mouth, and grips his arm.

The shoot ends. They always do. Team members filter away. Levi and Tom argue about the best sushi restaurants in the city while Row and Amra whisper together, laughing and delighted with themselves. Then Levi and Amra disappear, too, back to their apartment by the beach, and Tom looks at Row, lovely against the flowers he coaxed from city infrastructure.

Nothing is ever certain. Tom knows this. There is nothing safe, nothing sacred and secure. She shoulders her bag. “What now?” she asks, casual as she can be.

Row is looking away, his hair hanging. He clears his throat. A rare awkward gesture. “I need to go to my garden. I can’t be gone for too long.”

“I get it.”

“You could come with me,” he says softly.

Out of  all this uncertainty, terrible things are born. Disaster, death. Cruelty. Wildfire. Tom smiles. “I could,” she says.

“Or.” He lifts and drops one hand, as though he doesn’t know how to use it. “I could come back.”

“You don’t like cars.”

“I could learn to like them.”

In the face of unkindness, of chaos, Tom thinks, what else is there but pleasure? Isn’t it the only honest thing left? “Actually,” she says, taking him by the hand and pulling him gently out of the building, into the pastel shades and cool wind of twilight in the city, the roar of traffic and machinery and madness and dirt and sky and chaos, “I was thinking we could get you a bike.”