Spikes and Tomatoes

Last night, mid-scream at my ex, I reached over without looking and plucked every spine off the cactus next to me. Then I rehomed them, one by one, in the little succulent beside it.

That cactus belonged to the single most feared guy on this entire campus. By morning, he'd put a manhunt for me in front of every student we've got.

Him: [WHO mutilated my plants.]

Two photos under it. One cactus, stripped completely bald. One succulent, bristling with the evidence.

I'd left a note. With my number. Offered to pay for the damage.

It must have blown away. Thank God it did, because that was how I found out whose balcony I'd just vandalized.

I sucked in a breath cold enough to hurt.

Chapter 1

Half-asleep, I caught his post and came up off the mattress so fast the blanket slid to the floor.

Damage control. I needed damage control, immediately.

Fingers shaking, I typed underneath it.

Me: [Just a random passerby here. But FYI, cactus spines shed naturally all the time? Could happen to anyone. My condolences. Total stranger, obviously.]

His reply came fast.

Him: [And the succulent next to it. The one stabbed full of those spines. Those grew in naturally too.]

He attached a photo of it. My handiwork, in crisp, loving focus.

The comments showed up like vultures.

Commenters: [the decline of western civilization, captured in two photos]

Commenters: [HELP why is this so tragic AND so funny]

Commenters: [who raised you. who hurt you.]

Commenters: [please god tell me this freak isn't in our department]

Commenters: [my succulent is RIGHT next to his. if mine's collateral damage I'm cursing this gremlin to fail every single final]

Something in me snapped.

Me: [Excuse me?? I watched the whole thing go down last night and there was ONE succulent. One. Singular.]

The thread, which had been stacking up by the second, went dead silent.

Right. I'd just confessed to a crime nobody had even pinned on me yet.

A friend request slid onto my screen.

Beckett Ashford.

Fine, I thought. Worst case, I grovel. I'll get on my knees if I have to. I had my thumb hovering over accept when the girl in the bunk under mine spoke up.

"You guys following the cactus saga? Somebody actually went after Beckett Ashford's plant. I heard he swore that when he tracks down whoever de-spined it, he's taking every one of those needles and putting them back. One at a time. Into the person." She wheezed. "I'm so dead."

The whole room lost it.

Then they turned and looked at me, confused.

"Why aren't you laughing?"

"I'm not a laugher," I said, dead inside. "Never have been. Whole personality thing."

Accept the friend request. Was I insane.

I slapped the phone face-down on the mattress and prayed to anyone listening: if I just don't accept, he can't find me.

He found me.

He took my account, walked it through the entire horticulture department, and matched it to a name and a class list. Mine. Wren Marsh, Horticulture 172.

I was in botany the next afternoon, mid-yawn, when something at the edge of my vision lifted every hair on my arms.

Beckett Ashford. Out in the hallway. Leaning on the wall with his arms crossed, that cold blade of a face aimed straight at me through the glass.

Watching me like he'd come to collect a debt in blood.

My whole body jolted. I snapped my eyes back down to my notebook. My palms went slick.

The bell rang before I could think.

"All right," the professor said. "We're done here."

No. No no no.

I shot to the front of the room. "Professor. I have a question. Something I really, really need to talk through with you."

His whole face warmed, moved by my sudden hunger for knowledge. "Of course. Come with me to my office."

I nodded hard enough to hurt myself.

I followed him out with my shoulder practically welded to his arm, openly, shamelessly cowering.

It didn't help.

Beckett came off that wall and followed. Classroom door to office door, never closing the gap, never once breaking the stare.

Still coming for me.

Chapter 2

I dragged a slow hand across the sweat on my forehead.

The professor sipped his tea. "So. What's this problem of yours. Out with it."

I sat there in silence for a full minute.

"If a walnut gets slammed in a door," I finally said, "is it still brain food?"

The professor looked at me.

His expression soured. "Miss Marsh. I'm going to need you to take this seriously."

I cut a look at the window.

Beckett Ashford raised one hand and waved. Slow. Patient. No expression at all.

Oh, for the love of God. He was still out there.

The professor started packing his bag for home, and the truth landed on me: the second I stepped out that door, I was a dead woman.

His phone lit up. He listened, thumbed back a voice memo. "Yes, yes, heading home for dinner now."

I latched onto his sleeve. "Professor. I'm also very hungry."

The professor stared at me for a long moment.

Which is how I wound up at his kitchen table, shamelessly demolishing a plate of his wife's pot roast, living to see another day.

I slunk into class the next morning braced for impact. No Beckett.

Had he actually let it go?

I didn't even get the exhale out. My roommate texted: get on the campus feed. Right now.

Bad feeling. Full sprint. And there it was, sitting at the top of the page. A selfie. Beckett Ashford, scissors in hand, the open blades hovering over the throat of my final-project tomato seedling.

Him: [Wren Marsh, Horticulture 172. You've got thirty minutes to save your final.]

Posted twenty-five minutes ago.

I have never moved like that in my life. I ran so hard, so publicly, that I trended on the campus gossip page. Somebody started a rumor I was running toward love.

I was not. I was running toward a hostage situation. A life for a life. My worthless one in exchange for my tomato's.

I came skidding up to find him crouched over my seedling, one finger already extended toward its single fragile blossom.

I flung out a hand like a soap-opera heroine. "Don't you dare touch it."

He glanced up, unbothered. "Not running today?"

I pressed my palms together in prayer. "I was wrong. I'm sorry."

He scoffed. "If sorry worked, what would we need cops for? I'm a petty man. You killed my Mimi, so I'm going to kill your kid."

Two students passing by gave us a look I will be hearing about for the rest of my natural life.

What is wrong with him. Who looks at a cactus and decides its name is Mimi.

He reached for the scissors again.

"Wait!" My voice cracked up an octave. "I can fix it. I can fix it."

He went still.

"Your cactus was already dropping spines. It's sick, anyone could see that. This is literally my entire major. Let me treat it."

He weighed me. Then he set the scissors down, and my stomach climbed back out of my throat and into its proper place.

I opened my mouth to speak to him like one reasonable adult to another.

Then Beckett stood, lost his footing, and brought the full weight of his body down onto my tomato seedling.

Beckett said nothing.

"You know," I said, "it turns out you and I have a lot in common."

"What."

I smiled at him. "I'm a petty woman, too."

In the campus health center, the doctor frowned at the deep purple blooming across the top of Beckett's foot.

"And you're telling me," he said slowly, "that he was just born with his foot like this."

I beamed at him, harmless as a glass of milk. "Mm-hm. Sure was."

Beckett's face went a shade greener than his foot.

Chapter 3

Outside the health center, Beckett threw it out, breezy as anything. "I stepped on your project, you stepped on my foot. Call it even. But my Mimi and my Teddy, those are on you, so you're going to"

"Responsible for what, exactly?" I said.

"I said my Mimi"

"Whose Mimi?"

"My"

"Your what?"

He stopped.

We stood there staring into each other's eyes, saying absolutely nothing.

Between the two of us there were maybe two hundred functioning brain cells, every last one of them devious, and neither one of us was about to con the other.

Because here's the thing. Yes, I'd been mid-meltdown that night, screaming into my phone. But I'd also gotten a real good look at those two plants, and they were already half-dead. The cactus was shedding spines on its own. Rot creeping visibly up the root. The succulent didn't even merit discussion: limp, gray, two days from a funeral.

Which left exactly two possibilities. Either Beckett had let them rot on purpose.

Or this man was a plant killer.

And also. I cannot stress this part enough.

Who, in the year of our lord, looks at a cactus and a succulent and names them Mimi and Teddy? Those aren't plant names. Those are names you coo at some girl you're soft on.

I filed that away somewhere and made a point of not asking myself why.

Anyway. This guy had stomped my final into paste, my credits were now dangling by a thread, and he had the audacity to stand here and try to shake me down.

Absolutely not.

I don't care if you're the scariest name on this campus or god's own golden boy. I am one failed final away from the abyss, and a girl with nothing left to lose is the most dangerous thing in any room. Try me.

Something in my chest had gone cold and flat and done with it all. Burn it down. Burn the whole thing down.

My face must have been broadcasting every word, because Beckett took one look and wisely decided to drop it.

That night I lay in bed and could not stop thinking about my tomato.

I'd replanted the trampled little thing that afternoon, tucked the roots back in, but I had no idea if it had taken. The longer I lay there, the worse it got. Sleep was clearly not happening.

So I got dressed and walked out to my plot.

You are not going to believe this.

I wasn't even close yet when I spotted it. A figure crouched over my tomato in the dark, one hand reaching out, about to do something to it.

My pupils detonated.

"DIE," I roared, and launched a flying kick across the dirt.

The same familiar health center.

The doctor studied Beckett's freshly twisted leg and went quiet all over again. "This leg. Was he also born with it bent like this."

I made it halfway through a nod, caught Beckett's eyes, converted it to a head shake, and mumbled, "That one was me."

The doctor looked me up and down, entertained. "Wow. You've got some hands on you."

"It's more that I kicked him, and he lost his balance, and then I sort of sat down on the leg."

The doctor said nothing.

In the end he gave Beckett's shoulder a complicated little pat, splinted the leg, and handed him a crutch.

I asked, helpfully, "Doctor, anything we should watch out for with this leg?"

He looked at me with deep sincerity. "Just watch yourself."

I had nothing.

Some bedside manner on this man.

It was nearly curfew by the time I was walking Beckett out, and looking at that leg, the last surviving scrap of my conscience cleared its throat. "So. Why don't you just give me Mimi. Let me see if I can bring it back."

Beckett acted like he hadn't heard. "Sorry, what was that?"

"I said, why don't you give me Mi"

"Give Mimi to who?"

"I"

"Give what to you?"

He gave the busted leg a slow, pointed little shake.

I caved. "Mimi. And Teddy."

"Sure. Tomorrow, after my last morning class. Meet me outside Hartley Hall and you can take them."

And then, with the serene confidence of a man collecting on a debt, he draped half his body across me and let me carry him back toward the dorms.

If this guy weighed a buck-forty, a buck-thirty-nine of it was pure scheming.

His shoulder was warm against mine. His weight tipped me a half-step off balance with every stride, close enough that I could hear him breathing, and all at once I couldn't come up with a single thing to say.

Chapter 4

The next morning Beckett was already posted up outside the building, early.

I'd packed the half-dead Mimi and Teddy into my bag, careful as a bomb squad, and was about to head out when the sky just opened. Fat drops, then a solid sheet of water in seconds.

No umbrella. I was bracing to make a run for it when I caught him in the corner of my eye. Beckett, propped on his crutch, scowling at the downpour.

Everyone else had either sprinted for it or doubled up under somebody's umbrella. And there he was, that whole don't-come-near-me forcefield of his, looking, for once, a little bit alone.

I have no idea what possessed me to feel anything for this short-fuse, fight-picking menace of a man.

But my brain short-circuited, and I went and borrowed the giant golf umbrella from the mini-mart next door, hauled it over, and planted myself in front of him. "Come on. Walking you back."

For one shining moment, I was the main event of the entire courtyard.

Beckett looked at me for a few seconds, something complicated moving behind his eyes, and then, without a word, ducked under the umbrella and started walking with me.

The rain came down harder. He limped along beside me and said something I didn't catch.

"What'd you say?" I asked.

"I said you're special."

The word just sat there in the air between us.

Something in my stomach did a slow, stupid little flip before I could shut it down.

I cleared my throat. Edged a careful few inches away from him, eyes down. "Okay. Putting this out there early. Don't go getting any ideas about me. You're really not my type."

Beckett went quiet.

Then, through his teeth, with the bearing of a man at the absolute end of his rope, "Do I have to call you a freak to your face before it lands?"

Oh.

I looked over at him. His whole left side was soaked through now, dark and dripping, because I'd shifted out from under the center of the umbrella.

He didn't move to fix it. Didn't reach for the umbrella, didn't crowd back under. Just let the rain have half of him and kept walking.

I tipped the umbrella an inch back toward him and found I couldn't quite look at his shoulder.

Back in the dorm I checked the plants. The cactus root really was rotting.

To get the full picture, I caved and saved Beckett's number, then texted him.

Me: [Have you actually been taking care of your Mimi?]

The reply was instant.

Beckett: [Are you questioning me?]

Which, given the state of the patient, he had no business being this confident about.

Beckett: [I water it eight times a DAY.]

I had to put the phone down for a second.

Me: [I can tell you're very proud of that. Don't be.]

Eight times a day. The only thing that man was drowning was whatever was left of his own brain.

It was a hard case. Not a hopeless one. I cut away the rot, repotted, and after that it was in God's hands.

The entire time Mimi and Teddy were in recovery, Beckett texted me roughly eight hundred times a day for updates. He even tried to make me pin his chat to the top so I'd never miss one.

I muted him.

Once the cactus pushed out new roots, I nursed it another full week before I handed them both back.

And with that, we were finally even.

He didn't say a word that day. The next morning I walked into class and found a banner.

Strung across the entire front wall of the lecture hall, in letters you could read from orbit:

TO WREN MARSH, WHOSE HEALING HANDS SAVED MY PRECIOUS CROWN JEWELS. WITH ETERNAL GRATITUDE.

I stood in front of it and turned to stone.

Forty heads bent to read it. Then, slowly, forty heads turned to find me.

His crown jewels.

Somewhere behind me a phone camera clicked. Someone read the words out loud, slow.

I forgot how to move.

How was this any different from him dropping his pants in the middle of the lecture hall