Hear Me Read Free Page B

the glowing coals and yawned. Another year drawing to a close, and still she sat in her father’s flower shop, tending to the plants in the greenhouse and brewing tea for her neighbors. She was twenty years old, but aside from no longer going to high school, her life wasn’t noticeably different than it was at seventeen.  
    Wait, strike that. At seventeen, she was at least getting laid.
    The first year, it made sense to put off college. Her father had died, and someone needed to man the shop and make the tea for her neighbors. But why was she still here after all this time?
    Each autumn she’d resolved to create an exit strategy for the new year, and each Christmas she found herself right here, alone in her shop across from the forest and the barrier, thinking to herself that she stayed in this town not for the things that were here, but for the ones that were long gone.  
    How many seasons had she spent drifting as near to the barrier as she dared, peering through the jangling, twitching lattice of bells, hoping to learn what was happening in the forest beyond? She never saw anything, magic or otherwise, yet she couldn’t break the habit. She had no friends left her age. They’d all moved away, they all thought she was crazy to stick by the bells, like some pathetic victim from the old stories who wasted away when her forest folk lover abandoned her at summer’s end.  
    All the staring, all the waiting in the world wouldn’t change a thing. Archer was gone forever, and so was her father. If she was wise, she’d take the hint and leave town as well. If she stayed in the town much longer, she’d wither, sure as the trees planted at the barrier had.
    Ivy drank down the last dregs of her cup and nodded to no one in particular. It was settled: come the new year, she’d start making a plan to leave—find a way for her customers to get their tea without her. Maybe Jeb could take over duties in the greenhouse. He wasn’t doing much woodworking these days. It would be good for him to have an activity.
    And it would be good for her to get away, maybe go to some far off town where bells were forbidden and the forests were friendly. Somewhere where she could study the type of botany that had nothing to do with magic, where no one had ever heard of forest redbell or the tea one might make from it. Ivy used to get good grades in school. She could surely enroll in a college somewhere.
    Or maybe just take some time off. A vacation.  
    Ivy let her head fall back against the cushion of the couch, sighing as the tea dulled the ache winding through her brain. Another place. Tropical, maybe, where all she could hear was the soft whisper of waves against sand and the singing of strange-colored birds, where she could sip frozen drinks decorated with paper umbrellas instead of medicinal tea, where there were new people, maybe even a new man, who didn’t remind her of the one she’d lost…
    Archer was a vague, blunt emptiness in her chest most days, the twinge of old heartbreak. Rationally, Ivy knew hardly anyone stayed with their first love, and those chances were even more minuscule if your first love was a mercurial, half-wild forest boy. She only had to look at the example of her own family, at her forest mother, who’d rather range the depths of the wilderness than get stuck with anything so mundane as child rearing. Forest lovers weren’t for keeps, no matter what pretty promises they made you as they took off your clothes.  
    But, oh, those memories. Ivy stretched on the sofa, smoothing her hands down the length of her sweater and feeling her flesh tingle with sudden warmth. Yes, most days, Archer was nothing more than an old ache, but there were nights when her head filled with images and her body with sensations she couldn’t quell, even with all the redbell in her father’s greenhouse.  
    The first time they’d slept together, it had been high summer in the forest, and Archer had built her a bower of branches and