Another oddity traipsing about in the unfinished pile. Includes the recommended daily allowance of fruit...
Adhering to Gravity
The orange grove is ever changing, a metaphor for life that Dani Reese cannot believe she's blown a Saturday to ponder. While sitting on damp grass. With a hangover.
But the trees are ripening, branches beginning to bow from the weight of offspring,. Adhering to gravity. It's reassuring that some things obey the laws of physics, though she's so far removed from high school that she can't recall what the rest of the principles are. But she knows about gravity, can feel it pressing against her shoulders. The fruit will soon fall and her partner will be there to catch what belongs to him.
He's good at that.
It's fitting that he should own these vibrant grounds, which exhale life in the form of something he holds precious. There's no fruit in prison, he'd explained when one too many odd varieties had been presented and consumed before her questioning gaze. Though he often offers, she rarely accepts a sample of whatever he stashes in cups or pockets; depriving him of the fullness of pleasure seems cruel. It annoys her, the way he allows juice to travel like rain drops down fingers, across palms. It annoys her that she finds the sticky trail fascinating.
Dani can remember Crews being led away, the willing lamb and had wanted to remind him that there's no fruit in captivity either. But he treads nowhere without a plan, intending to soak pale hands in something that didn't qualify as nectar.
He cleans up well, she thinks when she realizes that the day is no longer hers alone. Which was the reason for choosing this place over the bar she'd normally crawl into. He approaches, grass blades cleaving to his boots, sun lighting his face. Beneath her, the ground cannot dry in the shade of trees and moisture saturates into her jeans. It would take energy to care. She remains seated, making him travel the distance to reach her. This is her spot of meditation that he must now enter, to understand. And he will, but not through the bright of enlightenment. Though the sun glares on its worshipers, he arrives in darkness. Around him, in him.
What he won is intangible. What he lost seems more so.
Crouching beside her, Crews keeps his attention on the oranges that share his coloring. The citrus holds its secret sweetness and tang within a thick skin and she wonders what sort of peeler she'd need to divest him of his own shell. It won't look like sunshine under there, she knows.
"Why are you here?" His voice lays out a cautious concern, but what she notices is how, despite the warmth of the morning, he looks cold.
"How did you do it?" When his expression doesn't change, Dani clarifies, "how did you kill Roman?"
"You read the statement. The bodyguards killed him."
The part of her that considers taking his hand is quelled by the part that wants to beat him with it. The reports had been eight stages of succinct and nine levels of wrong.
"Not accepting lies today, Crews."
"Then don't ask."
It's a glass of harsh with a twist of apology and she has no taste for it. For a time she simply watches the oranges striving to break from the branches that hold them and wonders if there's significance in this too. Which is exhibit A that she's spent too much time slashing through the overgrowth of his Zen. Because, damn the Armani Buddhist, Dani wants to both eat the fruit and contemplate it. Exhibit B shows that she's rubbing off on him too, because Crews has begun speaking with detached concision.
"You should go home."
"This is me," she says, "reminding you that confession's good for the soul. Laughable but possibly true."
He's on the field but clearly not playing. "I've never mistaken you for a priest."
"No, just for an angel." She remembers being compared to the little winged trinket and the bliss of sending it sailing. She remembers wearing the cross and feeling it burn. She remembers the industrial glue and knows he might need some to reattach the splintered pieces of his heart. But she'll trod on them a bit first.
"Did you crush his windpipe? Did he gasp for air? Did he beg?"
"You should go home," he repeats, staring at the oranges in either hunger or hope that they'll fly off their limbs to pummel her.
"What, am I trespassing?"
When Crews finally looks at her, Dani wishes he hadn't. Yesterday those eyes reminded her of clear skies. Today they are burdened ice. And she wonders whether it's his land she's guilty of trespassing on or something more. Sometimes the string between them pulls tightly with opposing intents and other times there's miles of slack dangling between them because they're standing so damned close. It's a noose that can hang them, if they let it.
Something is severing and her hands reach for the edge of it.
Whether she eats them or contemplates them, the oranges have no significance. Nor does this place. Nor the experience. Only the moment. There are times when he leaves the moment and that's when she sees who he is. And because he's stepped away from the moment, Dani recognizes a teaspoon of guilt and a heaping cup of lack of direction. Has he regained life only to forget how to live it? Was he defined by the hunt?
The headache has crept down to her neck, gripping between her shoulder blades and the odds of standing unassisted have plummeted. But there is little incentive to rise. It was wrong to seek anything here, the first place on earth that had convinced her that she's lacked all the answers. When the hood had surrounded her, she knew. When Roman hit her, she knew. When she'd exited that vehicle, she knew. But she'd watched that same vehicle speed away with all she'd known trapped inside.
Another glance to her left and she knows something new. He has his answers.
"What did you learn, Crews?"
"What we learned as children, that one plus one equals two, is false."
For novices, it's a riddle to be chewed in vacant repetition. But she'd come here to divest herself of the emptiness that consumes her energies. And after all this time, she's no novice.
"It equals one," she tells him and the surprise drain him of the frost.
"How did you know that?"
She shrugs, enjoying the mix of awe and tease in his voice. "The oranges told me. The common fruit, it turns out, is strangely wise."
"What else did they tell you?"
Rubbing a hand across her rear, Dani groans at the dampness. "That wet asses will do damage to your interior. But you won't care. Not today." It's presumptuous, but there's a strange tang of victory on her tongue and she's not ready to swallow it away just yet.
"Not today," he agrees as he angles pale eyes toward the sky. Seeking the sun as though it may have relocated with the absence of his optimism. "I don't regret it."
Which might refer to a thousand different things but Dani's done asking. Instead, she leaves him standing by the grove, opens his car door and settles herself in the driver's seat. And knows exactly where she's going.
"You were right," she announces into the void between doubt and possibility. "There really is no future. Or past. There's just now."
As oranges fall to earth, Crews tosses her the keys. And she takes them to now.