10. Lavinia
LAVINIA
When I wake in the gray light before dawn, my head is still resting against his chest, and his arm curves gently around my shoulders. The world feels different from this angle, closer and somehow more possible.
If Death ever comes for you looking like this, you will know him by the tenderness of his touch.
I wake properly to the smell of coffee. The living room is empty, but I can hear Grim muttering in the kitchen and quietly cursing my French press, which, to be fair, deserves every unkind word he gives it.
I shuffle toward him with my hair wild around my face and find him pouring coffee with the exaggerated care of a man attempting to disarm an explosive.
He looks up and immediately straightens. “Bad dreams?”
“Only nightmares about a man who reorganizes my entire refrigerator by color.”
“I was bored,” he admits, almost sheepishly. “And the beet juice was leaking.”
He hands me a mug, and our fingers brush briefly around the handle. The contact sends an unexpected current up my arm, a warning shot across an otherwise ordinary morning.
We eat more of the funeral cake for breakfast, though by now it is approaching sentience and may technically qualify as another resident of the apartment.
We share the newspaper at the little kitchen table, a ritual so commonplace that I am startled by how intimate it feels.
I read the obituaries aloud while Grim offers tart commentary on the best-written entries.
“Lived for her garden and died pulling weeds,” he reads. “The circle closes.”
I slide the next one across the table.
“Devoted to family and crossword puzzles,” he continues. His eyebrow lifts. “Brushed her teeth with bourbon.”
“That explains the longevity.”
“It may explain the crossword puzzles.”
I laugh and look at him over the edge of my mug, grateful for the easy silence that follows.
There is no mystery waiting to be solved between us now, no secret looming over every conversation.
For this morning, at least, I can simply sit across from him and enjoy the strange little life taking shape around us.
After breakfast, Grim folds the newspaper neatly and rises from the table. “I should go. I have somewhere to be, if you understand my meaning.”
Unfortunately, I do.
“You could come back,” I say lightly, though it is not quite a joke.
He studies me for a long moment, his eyes the pale, melancholy blue of deep water. “I will. I’m simply not accustomed to being wanted.”
I reach for his arm, touching him just above the wrist. “There’s a first time for everything.”
“Is there?”
His smile is so uncertain that I want to capture it somehow and save it for the bleakest of my future days.
“I’d like to see you again,” he says.
“Tomorrow?”
His quiet laugh fills the kitchen. “I don’t think I can wait that long.”
So this is what ordinary people do, I realize. They make plans. They leave with the expectation of returning.
I walk him to the door, resisting every urge to draw out the goodbye until it curdles into awkwardness. He pauses on the threshold, tall enough that he must duck slightly beneath the lintel, and looks down at me as though weighing his chances of surviving whatever comes next.
I rise onto my toes and kiss him.
Not because I feel sorry for him or because I am trying to prove that his confession changed nothing. I kiss him because I want to, because somewhere along the way the rules shifted beneath my feet, and I am as helpless against desire and entropy as anyone else in Blackthorn Bay.
He kisses me back, tentative at first, then slower and deeper as one hand settles at my waist. For a brief moment, the careful restraint slips and something fiercer moves through him, something that makes my fingers tighten around the front of his shirt.
It is not a promise of forever, but it is honest, and for now honesty feels like more than enough.
“Text me if you want lunch,” I say when we finally separate. “Or if you happen to run out of souls to collect.”
He hesitates, then smiles. “You’ll be first on my list.”
“That sounded less threatening in your head, didn’t it?”
“Considerably.”
Then he is gone, leaving the space behind him curiously brighter than it had been before.
The rest of the morning unspools inside Belladonna Blooms with such quiet ease that I might almost mistake it for happiness.
The air remains cold enough to fog the windows, and everything beyond the glass wears the pale, faintly bruised look of fruit forgotten too long in the bottom of a refrigerator drawer.
Inside, color presses against every available surface, brilliant and temporary, with just enough mortality to keep it honest.
I lose myself in the work, and for once that is not a metaphor.
Somewhere along the way, I have become dependent on the ritual of it: the steady weight of a mason jar in my palm, the wet velvet of lamb’s ear beneath my fingers, the quick sting of rose thorns finding the skin beside my nails.
My hands understand what to do even when my thoughts refuse to settle. Wrap, snip, tuck, repeat.
The town grapevine is especially active this morning. At nine-thirty, Mrs. Finch calls to request something “not too extravagant, but not too pitiful either, Lavinia, dear,” for Eleanor’s injured knee. By noon, I am ankle-deep in peony shrapnel, and the telephone is still ringing.
Jasper arrives late, as usual, compensating with his standard sheepish smile and a peace offering from the gas station bakery.
Today it is a cupcake with frosting in a shade of blue never witnessed in nature.
He slides behind the counter with the practiced ease of a gremlin squeezing into a crawlspace, then stops and stares at me with enough intensity to crack the nearest vase.
“You look awful,” he says by way of greeting, the cupcake hovering uncertainly between us.
“I’m radiant,” I reply. “I’m a spring goddess. I am the second coming of floriculture.”
He gives me the look that always seems to find the cracks beneath whatever performance I am putting on. “Seriously, are you okay? You’re pale, and you’re never pale. Your hair looks like you forgot to finish having hair.”
“I’m fine.”
I snatch the cupcake from his hand and take an unnecessarily large bite to prove the point. Whatever flavor it once aspired to has been buried beneath layers of red dye and industrial sugar.
“It’s been busy,” I continue around the frosting. “People keep dying. You’d swear there was a pandemic.”
Jasper takes the cupcake back and examines me with the grim concentration of someone who has spent too much time searching medical symptoms online.
“You need to see a doctor.”
I roll my eyes, but the movement lands strangely inside my head. The room shifts half an inch to the left before slowly righting itself, and the dizziness lingers like the aftermath of spinning too quickly at a child’s birthday party.
“Everyone has something this time of year,” I tell him. “I’m just tired.”
“You’re never tired. You’re the last person on earth who gets tired first thing in the morning, and no one who consumes that much caffeine should be capable of fatigue.”
I try to laugh, but the sound catches somewhere behind my ribs and refuses to come out properly.
“Is this an intervention? Because you’re supposed to bring more than one dessert.”
“I brought two cupcakes, but I ate the other one.” He shrugs, though his expression remains serious. “Stress carbohydrates.”
Then his voice softens.
“I’m worried about you, Lav.”
The persistence should irritate me. Instead, I feel the warmth behind it, a small light offered freely in the chilly shop. I let out a slow breath and allow some of the performance to leave with it.
“I’ll make a doctor’s appointment,” I promise. “Just to appease you and the concerned citizens of the Blackthorn Bay grapevine.”
He brightens immediately, and for a moment it is easy to pretend that is all there is to it.
The ache beneath my ribs is surely the result of too much standing.
The bruises scattered across my legs are ordinary evidence of floral buckets, sharp counter corners, and my lifelong inability to navigate furniture.
The headaches and occasional fevers must be the consequences of too little sleep, too much coffee, and the emotional burden of making room for other people’s grief.
They are not signs of something hollow working its way through me, one quiet cell at a time.
I do not tell Grim. It is not exactly a secret, because I cannot imagine the symptoms are important enough to qualify as one.
More than that, I want to protect the fragile peace we have found, that improbable little pocket of happiness that now contains pancakes, terrible dish drying, and obituaries read over coffee.
I do not want to contaminate it with worry before I have to.
For once, I want to be ordinary.
That afternoon, while the shop is flooded with the honeyed light of four o’clock, the dizziness returns.
I catch myself against a stack of vases before they can topple, and for several seconds the room flickers around me like a faulty film reel.
Loose petals drift across the floor, reminding me of the way my father used to shake seeds from dried pods and call the mess renewal.
My vision clears.
I finish Mrs. Finch’s bouquet.
I tape a card to the handle that reads Get Well Soon, and for one foolish moment, I almost believe it was written for me.
Outside, the wind presses against the windows, threatening to drive winter back into a spring that has barely begun. I steady myself against the counter and watch scraps of paper and fallen blossoms gather along the curb before forcing myself to stand upright.
Slowly, petal by petal, I gather myself for the walk home.
I lock the shop and leave the keys inside the ceramic frog beside the stoop. The sky overhead is bruise-blue and aching, but I step beneath it as though I still belong to the living world.
Tomorrow, I will call the doctor. Tomorrow, I will let someone else carry part of the weight.
For tonight, I am still here.