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After finishing work for the day, she came home and changed into a sundress, usually with nothing on underneath, then checked up on the plants in her own greenhouse.
The house's original owners put a shower outside to rinse off before or after a swim, and Darci absolutely adored it. Its plumbing needed some work when they bought the place as the previous owner neglected it, but Derrik was able to get it repaired with his meager plumbing skills and a lot of cursing.
The first time she stripped her sundress off and took a shower outside was a magical experience for her. She got so worked up that she marched inside without toweling off and attacked her husband on the couch. Wet, naked, and very horny, she popped the button off his pants in her haste to get his cock in her mouth. It was one of her favorite memories.
Now she took a shower each time she finished working in her greenhouse, and at least once a week ended with her coming quietly as she played with herself beneath the spray. The tall privacy fence around their property hid her from the neighbors, but there were still a few second-story windows that someone could see her from. Darci often got turned on just by being naked outside. The chance she was being watched only turned her on more. As her sex life dwindled, she sometimes fantasized about a handsome young man seeing her masturbating and coming over to ravish her. With Mary back in her life, it was no longer just handsome young men, but occasionally a beautiful young woman showed up to 'help.'
Since Mary began spending the night, Darci tried to time her showers for when her lover arrived. The idea of getting caught outside, naked, under the shower turned her on even more than when she tried similar things with Derrik.
However, Mary also appreciated her body more than Derrik ever did. By the time they purchased the house, they'd been married for almost nine years, and while the internet might say that men still loved seeing their woman's tits for the eighty-billionth time, Derrik had become the exception. She walked around in sheer sundresses that left her nipples easily visible and stopped wearing panties altogether. She even began shaving her pussy because he said he preferred it nice and smooth. The first couple of weeks was an itchy hassle, but now she enjoyed the feel, especially on windy days. Sure, a few times she got him worked up enough to bend her over right then and there, but that happened far less than she expected for her efforts.
Darci felt like a goddess the way Mary worshipped her body. When they were dormmates in college, the blonde had been just as attentive. With another ten years of experience, Mary seemed to know all Darci's buttons, as well as when and how hard to push them. At times, she felt guilty because she knew her skills making love to another woman were nowhere near Mary's level. Sure, she did her best to give with as much passion as she received, and could get Mary off with her mouth, fingers, or a toy, but she always felt clumsy and almost brutish by comparison. If her friend had any concerns about it, she never let it show.
The only thing that really bugged Darci was Mary's insistence on remaining friends. Friends who slept together and loved one another, but still just friends. She knew she shouldn't be complaining. Aside from her and Mary's relationship, Darci wasn't very interested in other women.
Most of Darci's day was still taken up tending to the plants at the greenhouse. She loved the tiny blooms of the Lantanas, the wiry Butterfly Bushes, and the pudgy leaves of the Succulents. Of the jobs she had over the past ten years, this was the only one she looked forward to, even if it didn't pay the most.
It wasn't that Carla, her boss and the owner of the "The Petal Peddler," didn't want to pay her more. Darci had become indispensable and ran the greenhouse portion of the business with no supervision. Carla approached Darci multiple times about buying the greenhouse part of the business from her. The florist built the large greenhouse hoping to expand her business but soon found out she didn't have nearly the passion for plants she thought he did. If Darci bought the greenhouse, then she wouldn't need to worry about it anymore and could focus on the gift shop and floral arrangements.
Darci didn't want to deal with the headache of running her own business. But now that she was single again, Carla's offer kept running through her head. She had no doubt Derrik would try to get out of paying alimony at some point and felt it might be wise to get some steady and substantial income going before that happened.
Also, if he tried to buy the house out from under her, she wanted to see the look on his face when she told him she was doing just fine without him and wasn't selling. She didn't have any reason to think he would do such a thing, except maybe out of spite, but it was fun to play over and over in her head.
A month had passed since the hearing, and Darci stood in front of a flat of red and white, cone-shaped flowers called candy-cane oxalis. Humming to herself, she was thinking about just that situation and wiping the smug look off Derrik's face when one of the glass panes above her shattered.
Looking downward and covering her neck with her hands, Darci jumped to the side as shards of glass rained down on her. It wasn't the first time a roof pane had broken, but it was the first time it had happened directly above her.
As the last few shards fell, Carla ran into the room to see Darci standing there. "Darci! What happened? Oh my goodness!" she yelled, covering her mouth with her hands.
"I think... I think I'm okay," she replied, cautiously pulling her hands away from her neck. There were several cuts on her hands and arms, but nothing looked serious.
"No, you aren't!" said Carla pointing at her leg.
Darci looked behind her and muttered, "Oh, that's not good."
A shard of glass had buried itself in the back of her calf. The blood from the wound had already run down her leg and begun soaking into her sock. Pulling the shard free caused another gush of blood that overflowed the blood-saturated the sock, and ran down the back of her workboot to drip onto the floor.
As Darci stared at the small puddle forming, Carla set the shop's first-aid kit next to her and began tending to the wound.
"I told you you should be wearing pants," her boss grumbled as she placed a wad of gauze over the wound and began wrapping it with a bandage to apply pressure.
"This was a freak accident, Carla. Make me wear pants, and you'll find me in here dead of heatstroke one of these summers."
"Whatever. Let's get you to the hospital," she said, pulling Darci's arm over her shoulder and helping her limp out to her car. Darci reached out and grabbed one of the plastic bags from the gift shop counter as they passed by.
At Carla's quiestioning look she said, "So I don't bleed all over your car."
Her boss just shook her head and set the "Will Return at" sign for two hours before turning off the "Open" sign and locking the door behind her.
Back in the greenhouse, a soft scraping noise broke the silence. From between the plastic flats stored beneath the display tables, a small vine reached out and touched the pool of blood. The vine's vibrant green turned brown as the puddle shrank. Within a few seconds, only a stain on the greenhouse's concrete floor remained. The vine took a moment to search around for more before slipping back into the shadows.
------
A small intruder lay hidden among the plants and flowers of the greenhouse. Its small bud at the top of the plant's main stalk possessed two dark spots that followed the bipedal creature's movements as it tended the other plants. Though the flora around it could not communicate, it could tell the others of its kind were well taken care of.
The newcomer's first meal gave it enough sustenance to uproot one of the other plants in the room, drain it of its nutrients, and commandeer its soil-filled plastic container. It then stayed hidden for the next few days as something in the red liquid made it very sick. Each day since recovering, the lifeform watched the two-legged creature to determine its patterns and movements. At night it unburied the six vines near the base of its stalk and moved, picking its container up with two vines while walking with the other four. It tucked itself among the plants the creature looked after the previous day, as they were the least likely to draw her attention.
Ancestral memories began flooding into the lifeform as it absorbed the last nutrients from its seed. It was a traveler from beyond the stars sent here to look for suitable planets to colonize. Its home was part of a double planet system with a moon almost two-thirds the size of the planet, which filled the night sky.
Tidal forces made most of the planet unlivable, but its kind managed to hunker down in an ecological niche. They developed a symbiotic relationship with a quickly developing quadrupedal animal with an upright torso and two manipulator arms. Together, they constructed a civilization that not only took advantage of the sparse land but built cities out on the tidal oceans. Centuries, then millennias passed, and the creatures began looking toward the stars.
They had to. The moon was slowly falling into the planet.
It would be thousands or even tens of thousands of years before the actual impact, but they were already seeing the effects of the eventual collision. Tectonic activity increased every year, and the tides kept getting bigger. The increments were tiny but growing.
Four hundred years passed from the time the quadrupeds first went to space until they invented the means to travel faster than light. Colony ships were built and launched toward star systems scouted out during the ships' construction. Each contained a compartment filled with seeds of the lifeform's ancestors.
The planet his predecessors landed upon wasn't quite idyllic because of the massive electrical storms that moved across the planet's surface every three years. The storms often caused brush and forest fires, but the plants had all developed a natural flame retardant that forced them to burn out in just a few days. But for the new plant species lacking these natural defenses, the storms were often fatal.
After losing one home planet and finding the second barely habitable without underground facilities to house them, the lifeform's ancestors decided to look for more worlds to potentially colonize. The lifeform was one of the scouts. The last thing in the ancestral memories were blueprints and coordinates to build a transmitter and send home whether or not the planet was a good match. Seeing the computer device used by many of the bipeds, it felt that getting a transmission out was the least of its worries. Given the planet's level of civilization, it was more concerned with being discovered too soon. It wouldn't be much use to its brethren if it ended up on the dissection table of a biped scientist.
With this new knowledge, the bipeds fascinated the creature. The quadrupeds communicated in a variety of clicks, trills, and chirps focused through portions of their carapace to direct and amplify the sound. These bipedal creatures produced harmonics from their eating orifice and sang to one another in short stanzas. Even more curious, it often saw the biped who spent most of the day in this room singing to the plants around it.
When it came time to communicate, would it even be able to?
The lifeform gleaned much from the first few days on this planet by watching the interactions between the biped and the facility's overseer. It discovered the species contained two sexes based upon body types but had yet to discover which was male or female. Confusing it even more were the creatures who acted more like the facility's two resident bipeds but had the body of the opposite sex.
More importantly, it learned the meaning of various tonal shifts in the creatures' singing and picked up on what moods corresponded with its different expressions. When it spoke to the plants, it used caring, concerned, and another tone it had yet to identify but always accompanied significant happiness in its expression.
The lifeform needed to touch her. Its kind communicated telepathically with the quadrupeds and could sense the thoughts of most semi-sentient creatures, but it required physical touch. If it could touch her for an extended period of time, it may be able to gather more than just surface thoughts and put all of this data into perspective. After absorbing her blood, the creature's body developed some natural weapons to make that easier, but the events currently unfolding may have made them unnecessary.
---
Darci picked up the sad-looking dianthus and walked over to the gift shop counter. "I think I'm going to take this one home," she told Carla.
Her boss looked at the plant and cringed, "Are you sure it's worth your time? It's looking pretty rough, there."
"I know. It's going to take a lot of love, but I think I can save it."
"Well, let me know. I may not have your green thumb, but I do like hearing about the ones you bring back from the edge. Giving them to you is more fun than throwing them in the trash. I am going to talk to our suppliers, though. We shouldn't be paying for anything that looks like that."
"Already done, Carla, I sent them a picture, and we're getting credit for this one next week."
"So basically, that's a freebie? Then why did you bother letting me know?"
"Because I don't want you to think I'm stealing your plants."
"You know, you wouldn't need to worry about it if you just bought the greenhouse."
Darci sighed. "Yes, I know, and I've been giving it some serious thought since the divorce," she said while putting the pathetic-looking dianthus into a plastic bag. "It's going to take me some time to build up my money again. Down payments are expensive."
"I thought your ex had to pay alimony?"
"He does, but I only took what I absolutely needed and let Mary have the rest to work her investment magic on. I wish I had half her brains. She tried to explain what she does once, and I felt like I was back in statistics class in college."
"She does seem pretty smart. And pretty handsy, too," said Carla, lifting an eyebrow.
Darci blushed. "We've become a little more than friends since the divorce. It's not anything new, though. We had a similar relationship back in college."
"Well, whatever you do, don't tell my daughter."
"Why?" Carla's daughter was in her mid-twenties and seemed easygoing if a bit introverted.
"Because she's very bi, and has mentioned how pretty she thinks you are many times after watching the store for me. If she knows you are into women, it might be hard to keep her hands off you."
"I'm not sure if I would say I'm into women. I've only been with Mary, and I still feel more drawn towards men."
"Be sure to mention that to her that the week after next when she's here. I'm flying out to stay with my son and his wife, meet my new grandbaby, and spoil Alli rotten for the week. That and let my daughter-in-law take a breather."
"Alli is the other granddaughter, right?" Darci asked.
"Yup, she'll be three this year and is a complete brat, it's a good thing she's cute, or nobody would put up with her." Carla glanced a the clock on the wall, "Go try to revive your poor dianthus. I'll lock up. Oh! Before you go, how is your leg doing?"
"Fine," said Darci, turning and showing her the four stitches where the glass cut her. "I'm supposed to go back in a few days to get them cut out, but I may just snip them instead of wasting my time at the clinic."
"Good to hear, off with you now."
---
Darci came in the next day, set her phone and morning coffee on the greenhouse's workbench, and tossed her purse in the locker below. After checking the itinerary she set up at the beginning of the week, she took a few sips of coffee and got started on her workday.
Mary spent last night with the James, which meant she would probably be at the house tonight. It was so strange to think that the woman she was sleeping with spent the night getting fucked by a man, and yet, she didn't feel jealous at all. Well, she did feel a little jealous, not of James's time with Mary but the other way around. She hadn't had a man since Derrik. Though Mary's strap-ons sated her when she wanted her pussy filled and even had a few that did things no man could, it wasn't quite the same. Maybe Mary understood this about her and despite how much they loved each other, insisted on remaining friends with benefits.
Darci once brought up the idea of inviting James over to her place one night at dinner.
---
"I already ran it past him," said Mary. "He didn't say no. He said not now. Another of his rules that came about from his job is that he doesn't mess around with women right after a divorce. Too much risk of her catching feels and wanting more than a weekend fling. Give it a few more months, and I'll ask again."
"Will you really?"
Mary held up a finger. "One, He has a nice cock and knows how to use it. Two, I want to lick both of you while you fuck. Three, I want to eat you out while he fucks your ass. Four, I want to lick your pussy after he cums inside you. Five... five is just thinking about all that has me fucking soaked."
Darci wiped her face with her napkin and set it down next to her half-eaten plate. Standing up, she got two more plates from the cupboard. "I spent two hours on this, and now it's going to get cold," she said while flipping a plate upside-down and placing it over her food.
"What? Why?"
Darci covered Mary's plate and pulled her up out of her chair. "Because I need you in the bedroom, now," she growled. Mary giggled like a teenager as Darci dragged her out of the kitchen.
---
The call of a bird outside startled Darci out of her memory, and she looked around sheepishly, thankful nobody caught her daydreaming. After looking over her list, she went over to the next flat in line but was stopped by an odd plant sitting in the front of the plastic tray she was about to work on.
"Carla!" she called out since her boss would be over in the gift shop
"What is it, Dar?" After hearing Mary call her by her nickname, Carla picked up on it and started doing the same.
"Did you or someone drop off a new plant since yesterday?"
"No, we haven't had any customers yet," her boss replied, sticking her head around the corner.
"I know this wasn't here yesterday," said Darci, pointing at the mysterious plant.
Carla frowned. "Well... it isn't looking very healthy. Do you know what it is?"
"Not a clue," she replied.
"That's saying a lot right there."
She tried to imagine the pitiful-looking plant as it might have looked completely healthy. The bud at the top of the stalk looked odd for its smoothness. There didn't appear to be any overlapping leaves. The six offshoots that spread out radially from the bottom of the stalk didn't match anything she knew of. Now the main stalk bent over until the tip of its bud nearly touched the dirt in its small container. The ends of the offshoots were wrinkled, brown, and nearly flat.
"FEED ME, SEYMOUR!" Carla bellowed.
Darci nearly jumped out of her skin and then smacked her boss's arm as the older woman laughed uncontrollably. "Dammit, Carla! You scared the piss out of me!"
Wiping the tears from her eyes, she said, "Since we don't know what it is or where it came from, take the thing home and see if you can save it."
Picking up the strange plant's plastic container, she turned it from side to side. "I think I'll do that."
The remainder of her day, Darci mostly spent at her workbench with the strange plant, flipping through various plant identification websites. At one point, she lifted one of the offshoots to look for any distinctive marks but accidentally pulled it off. The severed end left a clear yellow liquid on her fingers that thankfully didn't smell rotten or even bad, but was still concerning all the same.
