5. Luna
LUNA
I smell like cedar and vodka and zero regrets, which is not how I expected to smell the morning after crashing my ex-fiancé’s wedding.
The shop is quiet when I unlock it. This is my favorite version of it—just me and the scent of wax and the particular morning light that comes through the front windows and lands across the display shelves in a way that still makes me feel, four years in, like I built something real.
I put Darya’s container in the back, start the coffee, and go to check on Hairy.
He is doing laps, which is his default state, and he pauses at the front of the tank when I lean down to look at him, which I choose to interpret as attentiveness.
“Hey, I have some things to tell you.”
He does another lap, and his golden orange scales reflect the light in such a pretty way that I think he’s doing it just for me.
“Okay, so. The wedding.” I lean my elbows on the counter. “Hugo looked incredible, which was annoying. Olga is twenty- one and very pretty, which is also annoying.” I pause. “But I didn’t give the speech.”
Hairy turns at the far end of the tank.
“I know. But before I could even get in there, I was accosted by a giant security guard, except he wasn’t a security guard. He’s Hugo’s stepbrother! I know! Crazy!”
Hairy is a good listener. Not that he has a ton of other things to do, being a goldfish and all that. But still. He pays attention better than most people do.
Could be because he’s waiting for his flake food, though.
I shake a little in and go on, “The thing is—okay, the thing is that I went in there with Ivan, and when Hugo saw us together, he—” I stop.
Start again. “You know that feeling when you’ve been waiting for something to matter and then it does, and it’s bigger than you expected?
That’s what it was. Standing there with Ivan while Hugo tried not to lose his composure in the middle of his own wedding reception. ”
I look at Hairy, gobbling the flakey stinky mess. “I felt powerful with Ivan. Like, actually powerful. Not just angry, not just hurt, not just going through the motions of revenge because I told Cherry I was going to do it and I couldn’t back out.”
Hairy does something with his fins.
“Yeah.” I straighten up. “He did that. Ivan, I mean. I was already going in there for myself, but with him—it was like he just handed me the thing I was looking for and said, here, use this. And it worked.”
I’m still mulling that over when the door opens. Cherry walks in with two coffees and a lot of curiosity.
Cherry Darling is six feet of impeccable presentation and supernatural perception in a vintage wrap dress, and she’s been able to read me like a book since her third week here. She sets a coffee in front of me, takes a long look at my face, and says, “Okay. Start talking.”
“Good morning to you, too.”
“Luna.” She sits on the stool behind the counter, crosses her legs, and wraps both hands around her cup. “You did not sleep in your own bed last night.”
To this day, I have no idea how she does it. I say nothing at first.
“Tell me you did not fuck Hugo. That man does not deserve?—”
“No. It wasn’t him.”
“Spill it all, love.”
Heat rises up my neck, and I know I’m blushing. “Last night was… it was incredible.”
She tilts her head. “How was Hugo?”
“Rattled.” I can’t help the smile. “Visibly, genuinely rattled.”
Cherry points at me. “There it is. Okay, so you walked in there, and he saw you and?—”
“I didn’t exactly walk in on my own.”
She goes very still. “But you said you didn’t have a date.”
So, I tell her. I start with the coat closet and Ivan’s hand on my elbow and his voice in the dark saying he knows who I am, and Cherry’s eyes get incrementally wider, and by the time I get to the deal—play my date tonight, we’ll show Hugo what it means to regret—she’s put her coffee down and is giving me her complete and undivided attention, which from Cherry is a significant gesture.
“His stepbrother,” she says.
“Stepbrother.”
“Who owns the hotel.”
“Correct.”
“And he just—pulled you into a coat closet and offered you a revenge alliance.”
“That’s an accurate summary, yes.”
She’s quiet for a moment, which with Cherry means she’s assembling something. “What does he look like?”
“That’s your follow-up question?”
“It’s relevant context. What does he look like?”
“Tall. Silver at the temples. Scars. Tattoos.” I pick up my coffee. “Very—” I make a gesture that doesn’t fully convey it but is the best I have. “A lot.”
“A lot,” Cherry repeats. “And the reception. You went in together and Hugo saw you and?—”
“He went pale. Right away. Tried to pretend he hadn’t, but I know his tells.”
“And then?”
“We danced. Ivan introduced me to some people. We danced again, slower—” I watch Cherry’s expression do something incremental. “And then we left.”
She picks her coffee back up. Looks at me over the rim. “And then?”
There goes my neck again. Hot. “And then nothing. He put me in a car and I came home.”
Cherry says nothing. She’s patient.
I take a breath. “Eventually, he sent me home.”
She nods. “How eventually?”
“This morning.”
She makes a sound that is not quite a shriek and not quite a sigh but lives somewhere between them, and she reaches across the counter and grabs my wrist. “Luna Ambrose. You crashed your ex’s wedding and went home with his stepbrother.”
“I know.”
“His older, silver fox, apparently very large and very scarred?—”
“And very tattooed.”
“Stepbrother who owns the hotel.”
“I’m aware of what happened, Cherry, I was there?—”
“Was it good?”
I look at her. I don’t know where to begin. “It was… you know how I thought I might be into kink?”
Her eyes go wide as her mouth gapes. “What?”
“Turns out I was right.”
She shakes her head, laughing. “This is the most unhinged meet-cute in recorded history. You know that, right?”
“You’ve mentioned.”
“I’m going to keep mentioning it.”
The bell above the door announces Mike, who comes in carrying a box of inventory he picked up from the supplier. He sets the box down, looks between us, and says, “Did something happen? Why does Cherry look like that?”
“I’m perfect. What are you talking about?” Cherry asks.
“You look like you did when you found out they were making another Scream movie.”
“Luna had an adventure last night,” Cherry says.
Mike looks at me with genuine interest. “Did the revenge work?”
“Oh, it worked.”
“Nice.” He picks up the box again. “I’ll put these in the back.” He disappears, and Cherry and I listen to him moving things around, and then Cherry leans forward again.
“Call him,” she says.
“I don’t have his number.”
“Get his number and call him.”
“I don’t think that’s—Cherry, it was one night. He was very clear that it was a mutually beneficial arrangement?—”
“And then he took you back to his penthouse and kept you until morning.”
I open my mouth. Then close it. She does have a point.
“Call him,” she says again, and picks up her coffee with the air of a woman who has rendered her verdict and considers the matter settled.
I do not call him. I reorganize the wax inventory, which needed doing anyway, and I rearrange the front display, which did not need doing but gives my hands something to do.
I help a customer who wants something for her bathroom and ends up leaving with three candles and a room spray, and I eat the borscht-adjacent contents of Darya’s container for lunch.
I actively try not to think about the fact that I’m eating food sent by the housekeeper of a man I slept with and will probably not see again. Which is fine. It was a one-night stand. My first one ever. Not seeing him after is a part of the protocol, isn’t it?
At two-fifteen, there’s a ringing sound I can’t find the source of. We’re all hunting it down, until Mike asks, “Is that the landline?”
“We have a landline?” Cherry asks.
I blink at her and run for the phone on the back counter. It’s buried beneath tissue paper and price tag rolls, but I get to it in time. “Ambrose Candles, Luna speaking.”
“Luna.” The voice is low and even, and at this point, I’d recognize it anywhere. My entire nervous system does something it has no business doing in the middle of a Saturday afternoon shift. “This is Ivan Fedorov.”
Cherry, across the shop, mouths something at me.
I turn my back to her, focusing on the conversation. “I know. There aren’t many people who call the landline.”
“Well, I didn’t get a number.”
“You looked up my work number.”
“I did.”
I’m not sure why I find that charming. “That’s very?—”
“I have a business event next Friday. An evening gala. My usual associate is unavailable, and I would like your company.”
I’m aware of Cherry behind me with the force of a small weather system. “Tell him yes. Whatever it is.”
I ignore her again. “Is this another Hugo situation?”
“Hugo will be there. But this isn’t about him.”
I wait.
“I would like your company,” he says again, simply, like the sentence is complete, like it requires nothing further, like it’s a perfectly sufficient explanation on its own.
He simply wants my company.
Here is the thing about Ivan Fedorov. He makes me want to say yes.
Not in the way that people make you feel obligated to say yes, or in the way that circumstances back you into a corner until yes is the only available option. Just—yes. Clean and uncomplicated.
I have told myself no about so many things. No to the sister who never wanted me around. No to the college that couldn’t educate me. No to the jobs that would have made me smaller.
I have a very specific script for my own life, and normally I follow it carefully.
I wake up, eat my egg white sandwich with sausage and Colby Jack cheese, take a shower, braid my hair so I don’t have to dry it.
I don’t do daily makeup. I come to the shop, get the ball rolling, order my Italian beef from Gino’s for lunch, and move through my day.
Then I come home, eat a bowl of fruit, unbraid my hair, read or watch some dark romance, and go to bed. If I’m feeling like I need a change, I get a coffee from the donut shop next door.
This has been a reliable routine for four years. I don’t do change.
Which is why it took me too many speech rehearsals just to talk myself into walking into that wedding. It was off book. Last night was so far off book that I didn’t have a script for it. That’s why I consulted Cherry and Mike on it, and even that didn’t help.
But I embraced the chaos, and I just existed in the moment and said yes like it was the improv class I took a few years ago. It was exhilarating.
I trace one finger along the edge of Hairy’s tank. He does a lap as I feel the word bubbling out of me.
“Yes.”