Becca Ritchie - Hothouse Flower

He pulls his T-shirt over his head and grabs his bike jacket off the ground, shaking the dirt off it. And then he runs a hand through his hair, a giveaway that my question makes him a tad bit anxious. “I’m not like my little brother, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he says, putting his jacket on. “I do think alcohol may be an issue for whatever fucking kid I have, but this disease isn’t going to take anything away from me. I won’t let it.”

The answer almost makes me smile. I wish Lo felt the same way, but I think it’s different for him. He’s been battling his addiction for much longer and he had a much bumpier road than Ryke.

He fixes his hair, trying to comb through the disheveled strands with his fingers. “Look,” he suddenly says, his thoughts collected to form a whole response. “I can’t do to my kids what my parents did to me. The separation, the divorce, the fucking fighting. I want to be in a serious, committed relationship before I have a child.”

“You mean marriage,” I say.

“When you’re married, you can still get divorced. I don’t take that much stock in the word. I just need the emotional fucking commitment.” He motions with his head towards the path we came from. “Let’s start walking.”

I follow him, keeping up with his lengthy stride.

His eyes flicker to me a couple times while I stay silent and digest this information. “What do you want?”

I smile. “Look who’s curious now.”

He brushes a cornstalk out of my way. “Yeah, well when you joke around I have to read between the lines, and I don’t always read you right. It’s easier asking you.”

I’m glad he asked. It definitely means he cares. “I want to be fully committed to someone, to be married, probably earlier rather than later. And I do want babies. Maybe like three. I also want to travel and visit the great seven wonders and scuba dive and stand beneath a waterfall in Costa Rica, kissing you.”

He reaches out and holds my hand.

My heart swells.

“Not in that order,” he tells me.

My lips pull high because he didn’t discount a single one of my wants. In fact—I can see it in his eyes.

He wants all of it too.

RYKE MEADOWS

“Just take your time,” Connor tells me over the phone. “We stopped in Roswell because Lily and Lo wanted to see the aliens. They spent four hours in the museum—excuse me, I mean the propaganda shit hole.”

I hear Lo in the background. “And you made us spend three hours at a graveyard. Between us, who’s the super freaky one, love?”

“It was a war cemetery,” Connor tells me. “And Rose and I were searching for our ancestors.”

“I won,” Rose speaks up. “I have three more dead relatives than Connor.”

I shake my head. “You all are fucked up.”

I can hear his smile in his voice. “So we’ll meet in Utah in about four days. We’ve lost most of the paparazzi, but there’s a couple who always catch up to us.”

“We haven’t seen any paparazzi since we split up.”

“Good. By the way, Greg has been trying to reach Daisy to make sure she’s safe. Has she checked her phone?”

“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “But we’ve been getting shitty signal. I’ll make sure she calls him today.”

“Perfect.” We say our goodbyes and hang up. I return to a parking lot where Daisy sits on the curb. Our motorcycle is parked by our campsite, which isn’t hidden in thick woods like the Smoky Mountains. We made a detour to Wyoming, mostly grassy terrain, but a massive rock juts up behind us, trees surrounding it. Devils Tower. It’s shaped like a thimble, the peak flat.

I debated taking her to Yellowstone since she’s never been, but when I told her that I free-soloed Devils Tower—almost breaking the record for the fastest climb—she insisted we stop so she could see it. Now we’re going to hike around the base…and apparently color her fucking hair at the same time.

Boxes of dye lie open around her on the cement, and she has aluminum foil wrapped in different sections of her hair. Why I assumed she’d do it the normal way—with a mirror and a sink—I have no idea. She does things her crazy fucking way.

She rises to her feet, wrapping a yellow scarf around her foiled head and slipping on her plastic sunglasses. She wears a shirt that says wanderlust. I’ve never seen her smile so much than this past week.

I lower my dark green baseball cap and slide my backpack on. “Have you called your dad recently?” I ask her. “He’s been trying to get ahold of you.”

She tosses the plastic bag with hair dye into a trashcan on our way to the trail. “Yeah, I texted him back. It must not have sent. He likes when I check in.”

I adjust the strap on my backpack, that one statement putting pressure on my chest. Connor has told me numerous fucking times that Greg is protective of his youngest daughter, and it’s starting to get real for me. I’m with her, and some day, I may need his approval. I’m just not sure what I need to do in order to get it. But I’m realizing that for Daisy, I have to make a bigger fucking effort. She’s close to her parents. She loves them.

I would never fucking ask her to choose them over me. Severing a relationship with someone who undeniably cares for you—it untethers something in your soul. I think about my mom, and it’s a loss that I can’t quantify or calculate in words or fucking numbers. It’s just there, eating at me. I hate and love myself for it. But I hate and love her.

I don’t know how to go back to a woman who bulldozed all of my friends, my brother and me. How do I even begin to forgive her?

Daisy gasps. “Are those climbers?” She hops onto a gray boulder and peers up at the rock. From here, the harnessed climbers look like specs, barely visible. But they’re all over Devils Tower, ascending in pairs.

“It’s a popular climb,” I tell her. “If the weather’s good, there’ll always be people here.”

“How long did it take you to reach the top?” she asks, hopping down and joining me back on the path.

“Twenty fucking minutes.” Almost 900 feet of ascension. Two minutes shy of the record. I debated on trying it again, but I’d rather focus on the rocks at Yosemite.

“You say it so blasé,” she tells me. “Aren’t you proud?”

“Shouting about it won’t change anything.” I’m not Connor Cobalt. After I left for college, every achievement has been an internal one, where I remember the road I took to get there. The labor, the time, the practice. My records don’t tell that story. They’re just numbers.

We walk past a couple of intense hikers in their Adidas running shoes, capris and reflecting sunglasses. I only now realize how fast my pace is, and Daisy hasn’t complained. But I can tell she’s struggling to keep up, her breathing heavier than when we started. A streak of purple dye starts to run down her forehead.

“Well if you’re not going to boast, then I’ll do it for you,” she says, reminding me of Sully. She darts to another large boulder, the hike littered with them, and she climbs on it, using her knees to hoist her body on top. Then she throws up her arms. “I have an announcement to make! Birds, people, trees, please listen up!”

I cross my arms. The more I watch, the more my lips rise.

Some people glance over, but most just keep on walking. The birds actually seem more interested in Daisy, squawking and flying above us as she speaks.

I just shake my head but I can’t ignore the fucking feeling in my chest. It’s pride. But not for climbing Devils Tower. I’m so fucking proud that I have her in my life.

“My boyfriend right there.” She points at me. “He climbed that mountain.” She jabs her finger behind her. “And hey, he did it in twenty fucking minutes. Not just twenty minutes. Twenty fucking minutes! Rejoice!” She throws up both her arms, and I catch a couple park rangers walking up the path.

I motion for her. “K, celebration fucking over.”

She jumps off the boulder and places her hands on her hips, panting for a second. “How’d I do?”

“The birds enjoyed it.” I wipe the trail of hair dye off her forehead, staining my finger and smearing purple onto her skin. “You’re about to turn into a fucking purple dinosaur.”

“Aww,” she says with a smile. “Barney. And Littlefoot! Is Littlefoot purple?”

I shake my head at her. “I have no fucking clue what you’re talking about.”

She gasps. “You don’t know who Barney is? How did you cope as a child?”

I roll my eyes. “I fucking know who Barney is. Not the other one, Calloway.”

She smiles. “The Land Before Time.”

We walk towards a secluded part of the woods, off the path and behind large rocks and trees. She unpacks her water bottles from her backpack and sets them along a boulder.

“Lean over,” I tell her after she removes the foils from her hair. I uncap the water bottle, put a hand over her eyes, and then douse her head. I try to run my fingers through the strands, but they’re knotted from being twisted in the foil. “You pack a brush, Dais?”

“Nope.” She smiles deviously, turning her face towards me. “It’s okay. I’ll just finger it.”

I force her head back down. “You finger yourself a lot?” I ask, pouring a second bottle onto her hair.

“Not as much as you finger me.”

Fuck. My cock stirs. That turned very literal. My fucking fault. I don’t feel as guilty as I would have before we were together. I just draw her ass back towards me while I finish washing her hair. She tries to look at me again, a full-blown smile lighting up her face.

“Stay fucking still,” I say. “Or dye is going to get in your eyes.” She complies, and when I finish, I take off my shirt and she dries her hair, splotching the white fabric with purple, green and pink. Then she runs her hands through it and watches my reaction since she doesn’t have a mirror.

She has bigger pink highlights, a couple green ones, and a few purple scattered around her head. Still mostly blonde, but the color reflects her erratic personality. I know she’ll love it when she sees it, which is why I begin to smile.

“That ugly, huh?” she jokes.

“So fucking ugly,” I say, wrapping my arm around her shoulder.

We finish the rest of the hike, and her silence starts to concern me. This is about the time she’d be bubbling with happiness. She just dyed her hair, something she’s wanted to do for a while.

“What’s wrong?” I ask.

“When we get to Utah, is this going to end? You and me, together out in the open. For the first time, I feel like a real couple, like we’re moving forward somewhere, and I don’t want that feeling to just fly away, you know?”

Yeah, I fucking do. I don’t want to hide any part of my life. I did that for so long, and starting it all over again feels like a regression. “So we tell them in Utah,” I say, holding the strap of my backpack. “Big fucking deal.” I want to be able to handle the backlash. And the closer we are to each other, the more I believe our relationship can withstand the criticism. But I wonder if I’m just fucking fooling myself. Maybe that’s just fear talking though. The fear of losing her… and my brother.

“You sure?” she frowns. “Because Lo—”

“He’ll get over it.” I have to believe this or else I’ll never take the fucking leap. I stop in the middle of the path and hold her face, my fingers stained different colors already. “I want to be with you, Dais. No more hiding.”

I lean down and kiss her, cementing my decision.

DAISY CALLOWAY

The woods have been replaced by desert. Red rock and endless roads with no one around. Much different than the congested streets in Wyoming, where cars slow at the sight of a deer, snapping pictures as though it’s the most fascinating creature in the wild.

That would be the buffalo.

Or the black bears.

Ooh, and the wolves. I saw two gray ones, out grazing or maybe playing by the antelopes, but Ryke didn’t believe me.

The closer to Utah, the closer we are to California, a destination that I haven’t forgotten. Ryke will ascend El Capitan and two other rock faces in Yosemite, the summit much higher than Devils Tower. I love that I have the opportunity to watch him at his best, but I’ve Googled the statistics before.

A good majority of people who free-solo die while climbing.

I mean, there is a tab at the top of Rock Climbing Nation Information’s website with the word DEATHS. They catalogue all of the climbers who fall and meet their end. I’ve always tried not to think about the risk, even when I tagged along with him to Yosemite while he practiced with a harness and rope.