Carterhaugh Rose

The gardens started with a gatehouse, refurbished from the ruins of an old manor. The building itself was gone, the estate scattered with marquee markets and toilet blocks, but the gardens remained, carefully curated into patches of ladies tresses and heather, forests of oak and alder, a cold stream winding under freshly painted bridges. Jenny knew the route better than the guides, but it had become harder to lose the guides on their route. She had been visiting for months before she noticed the roses, briary and blue, tucked among the thicket of ash trees. She had left the path without thought, and by the time she turned to ask the guide, the party had already disappeared. She hadn’t followed after them, looking through the giant blue bushes to the shaded clearing and the well that sat quiet and still in the centre. She had stepped through, cupping the head of the largest rose, the petals heavy and soft, spilling over her palm and threading through her fingers. 

The first time she heard his quiet voice, her flinch almost tore rose from stem, and drew blood from fingertips to thorns. When she turned, she met eyes every bit as blue as the roses, and a smile every bit as beautiful. She had left that day, the sunlight long and golden on the gardens, and had never quite lost the scent of the blue flowers. It clung to her skin, weaved into her hair, so that everywhere she went, it followed. She returned to the clearing, here and there at first, then monthly, weekly, daily. Now even an hour away from the glen seemed like an eternity. The soft light of the forest never faltered among the flowers, the wind never rose beyond a tickle, the heat never grew, so that when she finally left, it felt all of an hour had passed, even if it had been days.

Then she would return, slipping from the tour, through the blue rose bushes, and as soon as she had a flower in hand, he would appear behind her, hands curling beneath her own. 

“I have missed you.” His voice was a whisper, the words sweet. It wound within her, around her brain, deep in her chest. His grip was strong, his skin soft against hers, and when he kissed her, she was consumed. “I have thought of you with every heartbeat.”

“My friends want to meet you,” Jenny said, cradled against his chest. “They’re worried; they think you’re not real.”

“I am real,” he promised. He smelt like his roses, his blue shirt fastened from their petals, woven together into the softest fabric. “I am for you. Everything, all you wish, you will gain it from me.”

“I never want to leave,” Jenny admitted, shutting her eyes as her fingers traced his jaw, curled across his ear, rounded the sharp point at the top. “I’ve already failed my classes. It won’t matter if I don’t go back.”

“It won’t.”

“Mum’s been on me though. She wants me home for the holidays, wants you to come.”

“I cannot leave.”

“You’ll still be here,” Jenny asked, panicked when he smiled sadly. “You’ll still — you’ll be here. When I come back.”

“I cannot promise that. Only that I will miss you.”

“I don’t have to go. If you need me here. I can — I can stay. They’ll understand.”

“They will worry,” he corrected her, his hand carding through her hair, warm fingers against her throat. “So long as you return to them, they will blame me for your absence.”

 “I don’t need their worry. I just need to be here. With you. You — you are everything. Everything I’ve ever wanted, everything I need.”

“I have waited here forever, for you,” he promised, kissing her thorn pricked fingertips. “I just wish…”

“Yes?”

“It is too much to ask.”

“Ask,” Jenny breathed, lost in the scent of roses, the touch of his warm hands on her back. “Anything.”

“What would you give to stay?”

“Everything.”

He smiled gently, pleased, and it curled in her body in ways she couldn’t describe. Beyond nerves, beyond bone and muscle and blood. 

“The roses.” His breath was a whisper, his eyes terribly blue. He turned her in his arms and when she held a rose in her palm, his fingers sat beneath hers. “Take one, and you will have me.”

“They’re so lovely,” Jenny sighed. “It would be a shame to–“

His hands tightened, thorns digging against her fingers, the flower straining on the stem.

“Take one,” he said again, drawing his lips from her throat to her ear. “You said you would do anything. What use is everything out there, when you could have my everything in here? Take three or seven or ten, and worry will never drive you away.”

The smell of the roses was thick, heady, and in his arms, the flower blooming over her palm, she could feel nothing but roses curling in her lungs, their thorns digging into her brain. Blood rushed from her head to her fingers, turning the petals — as soft as his touch, as blue as his eyes — purple and dark. Fly, her body whispered, but her heart was floating, tethered only by his arms. 

The stem broke with the softest sigh, and as it sat dying in her hand, she couldn’t recall if it had been her will that moved her hand, or his.