6. Chapter 6
Maya
***
I am absolutely not thinking about last night.
I establish this at five-forty-five in the morning, elbow-deep in a bucket of pale dahlias, the shop still dark except for the work light above the zinc counter and the blue-grey of a Willow Creek dawn coming through the front glass.
I am thinking about the dahlia order and the Millar wedding prep and the fact that the wholesale delivery was short by two dozen stems again, which is a conversation I am going to have to have with the supplier for the third time this month.
I am not thinking about candlelight.
I am not thinking about eleven seconds, which is a very specific number that I definitely did not count myself on the drive home last night, sitting at the one red light on Main Street with both hands on the wheel and the feeling of someone who has left a room slightly different from how she entered it.
I am not thinking about yes, I am now.
The dahlias need deadheading. I focus on the dahlias.
Lily arrives at eight with coffee and that smile, the one she has been perfecting since approximately the seventh grade, the smile that means she already knows something and is giving me the opportunity to tell her first before she tells me.
She sets my coffee on the counter and leans against the cooler door and looks at me with the patience of a woman who has all morning.
"The committee meeting," she says eventually. "How was it?"
"Productive," I say. "We have the garland measurements for the east wall."
"Fourteen feet," she says.
I look up. "How do you know that?"
"Carl told Bette and Bette told me when I passed her on the way in." She picks up a dahlia stem and examines it with great interest. "She also mentioned the power went out."
"It did."
"For about an hour, apparently."
"About that."
"Just the two of you."
"Lily."
"I'm just establishing the facts."
"The dahlias," I say.
She starts on the dahlias. She is still smiling.
I can feel it from across the counter and I concentrate very hard on the order clipboard and the supplier discrepancy and the fourteen wedding centerpieces that need to be assembled by next Thursday and all the other entirely real and pressing concerns that have absolutely nothing to do with a man who asked me if I was okay in a candlelit room and then didn't say another word about it.
That was the part I couldn't stop turning over on the drive home.
Not the proximity, not the candlelight, not even the way the room seemed to get smaller every time I looked up and found him already looking at me.
It was the quiet. The way he didn't make a thing of it.
The way he asked one question and accepted one answer and then simply moved on, no follow-up, no probing, no attempt to use the moment for anything other than what it was.
I have met very few people in my life who know how to do that.
I file it in the same place I filed the torn receipt and the business card and the image of a man watching the space where my flowers had been, the collection of things I am not ready to examine but am apparently not ready to throw away either.
The morning passes. Orders filled, stems cut, the shop doing its steady Friday work. At half past ten the doorbell rings and I look up expecting Mrs. Calloway's weekly sweet peas or the postal delivery or anyone, truly anyone, other than the person standing inside my door.
Sawyer Ransome.
Different suit today. Navy, this time, with a white shirt open at the collar, no tie, which is such a small deviation from his usual precision that it registers like a shout.
He stands just inside the doorway with his hands in his trouser pockets and the stillness of a man who has decided something and is waiting to see if it was the right decision.
"Mr. Ransome," I say, in my pleasant professional voice, which I am aware is doing less work than usual this morning.
"Miss Finch," he says.
He crosses to the counter. He doesn't touch anything, same as before, but this time I notice something different in the way he moves through my shop, less like a man taking inventory and more like a man who has been here before and is aware of the difference.
He looks at the dahlias. Then at me.
"I came about the committee timeline," he says. "The garland installation schedule needs to be confirmed with the venue by end of week."
"I know," I say. "I was going to send the measurements to Bette this afternoon."
"Good," he says.
He doesn't leave.
I set down my stem cutter and look at him across the counter and wait, because I have learned enough about Sawyer Ransome by now to know that he says what he means and means what he says and the spaces between his words are not empty.
He reaches into his jacket pocket and sets something on the counter beside the dahlias.
A single stem of white ranunculus, wrapped loosely in brown paper, the kind from the wholesale suppliers, not the shop's tissue.
Not an arrangement. Not a gesture dressed up in presentation.
Just a stem, and a small card tucked into the paper that reads, in his precise handwriting: I looked it up. Three hours.
I stare at it.
Three hours. The ranunculus. He went home last night and looked up conditioning times and came back this morning to tell me, without quite saying it, that he was wrong. He told me two hours when the answer is three, and more than that, it mattered to him enough to do something about it.
Sawyer Ransome does not say I was wrong. I understood that about him almost immediately. But he found another way to say it, and that, I think, is more honest than the words would have been.
I look up from the card and find him watching me with that careful, guarded expression he wears when he is waiting for a reaction he hasn't been able to predict, and something in my chest does a thing I am not prepared to examine in the middle of a Friday morning.
"Three hours," I say.
"Three hours," he confirms.
"You looked it up."
"I did."
"At what time?"
The smallest pause. "Late."
I pick up the ranunculus stem and turn it slowly in my fingers. It is a good stem. He chose well, which means he was paying attention in my shop on Thursday morning when I was trying very hard to appear as though I wasn't paying attention to him, and the symmetry of that is not lost on me.
He moves around the end of the counter, which no one does without being invited, and I don't stop him, which is its own kind of answer.
He stops close enough that I can see the fine grain of his jacket and the careful set of his jaw and the way he is looking at me like I am something he has been trying to find the right words for and has finally given up on words entirely.
He reaches up slowly and brushes a loose curl from my cheek, so unhurried it barely feels like a decision, more like something that was always going to happen and has simply finally arrived.
And then he kisses me.
Tentative at first, a question more than a statement, and then I answer it by not stepping back, by leaning into him and letting my fingers find the lapel of his jacket and hold on, and the question becomes something else entirely, something quieter and more certain, and the shop smells like dahlias and morning and the brown paper wrapping of a single white ranunculus still in my other hand, and I am aware, distantly and without panic, that I have just crossed a line I drew very carefully and crossed it anyway.
He pulls back first.
His breath is uneven in a way I find unreasonably satisfying. He looks at me with an expression I have not seen on his face before, something open and uncertain and almost young, and he says quietly, "I didn't plan this. I'm sorry, I shouldn't have."
I look straight at him.
"I could have stopped you," I say. "I didn't."
Something moves through his expression then, surprise first, and then something quieter settling in behind it, careful and attentive, like a man recalibrating around new information he didn't know he needed.
He steps back to his side of the counter.
I set the ranunculus stem down on the zinc surface between us.
We stand there, not touching, the width of the worktable between us and the morning light coming through the front glass and the shop entirely ordinary around us, and everything is exactly as it was an hour ago except that it isn't, and we both know it isn't, and neither of us is pretending otherwise.
"The timeline," he says finally.
"End of week," I say. "I'll send it to Bette."
He nods. He straightens his jacket, the one whose lapel I was holding approximately two minutes ago. I catch myself watching him do it, the same way I seem to catch everything about him now, quietly and completely and without knowing quite what to do with any of it.
At the door he pauses, same as last time, just long enough to be a choice.
He doesn't say anything this time.
He doesn't need to.
He opens the door and walks out. The bell above it chimes once as it closes behind him, and just like that, the shop is quiet again.
Lily appears from the back room approximately thirty seconds later, arms full of deadheaded dahlias, and looks at the front door and then at me.
"Did I hear the doorbell? Did someone just leave?"
"Hmm?" I say, turning back to the worktable. "Haven't noticed. Been quite busy."
Lily looks at me for a moment with the expression of a woman who notices everything and has decided, for reasons of her own, not to press it. She shrugs one shoulder and disappears back through the workroom door.
I wait until I can no longer hear her footsteps.
Then I stand at the counter and look at the ranunculus stem on the zinc surface and the small brown card beside it.
I think about Sawyer going home, looking up conditioning times for ranunculus, and coming back to apologize the only way he apparently knows how. A quiet gesture that somehow led to the most unexpected kiss I can remember.
Somewhere between the ranunculus and the candlelight and eleven seconds of thunder, he stopped being a problem I was managing and became something I don't quite have a name for yet.
And I have never once been good at leaving things unnamed.
***