Don't tell her I said that. She'll take it as confirmation of the horse themed landscaping idea she's been pitching. Olivia laughed. It's a strong concept. It's chaos.
It's creative chaos. He looked at her sideways. You've been listening to her pitch. She presented it to me with a diagram. A pause.
It was a good diagram. He shook his head, but he was already smiling. The kind of smile that comes without deciding to the kind that arrives because something in your life is right and your face doesn't know how to pretend otherwise. He turned back to the flowers, started the water running, and then because life has a sense of humor, or because the universe is constructed to occasionally provide perfect symmetry, or because the coupling that had been checked twice still had a weak point that physics found before Marcus did, the hose jumped not as dramatically as the first time, not a full wall. Soaking, but enough.
A wide arc of water left the garden completely crossed the fence line and landed squarely on the side of Olivia's house. The freshly painted, painstakingly maintained, better than the original house that Marcus had repainted with his own hands on the second and third and fourth Saturday of the month. He moved from neighbor to something that had no smaller word. The silence lasted exactly 3 seconds. Then Marcus turned.
Olivia was standing with her coffee cup held very still, looking at the water running down her wall with an expression he recognized from the first morning, the controlled one, the deciding one. Then she looked at him. He opened his mouth. She held up one hand, set her coffee cup down on the fence post, picked up the hose where it had fallen, and before Marcus could move, speak, react, or form a complete thought, she turned the full pressure directly on him. He got completely, thoroughly, absolutely drenched.
She held it for a full 5 seconds. He stood there soaking, staring at her. She set the hose down, picked up her coffee, took a sip. I've been waiting a year to do that, she said. He wiped water off his face with one hand.
A year? Since approximately the second Saturday, she tilted her head. Consider us even. He looked at her. This woman who had walked out her door to smile at a ruined wall, who had handed him coffee before he asked who had fought three times to build something that deserved to exist, and had won on the third, who had told him she loved him in a room full of their people.
With the same directness, she applied to everything, who had let Ava hold her hand on a sidewalk and accepted it as simply as breathing. He started laughing, real full, helpless. The kind of laugh that starts in the chest and takes over completely. The kind he had not been capable of for three years and had been getting better at for one. The kind that Olivia was now apparently committed to drawing out of him on a regular basis.