Round Eighteen
ROSE
Ollie works in his kitchen with smooth efficiency, pulling fresh ingredients from his well-stocked fridge and laying them out on the expansive stone counter in a way that reminds me of the hospital.
He opens drawers and selects the things he wants without having to search, more proof of his impeccable organizational skills, and laying his tools in a row—spatula, knife, spoons, forks—he provides me insight into what I suppose he looks like in the operating room.
“Which is the largest country in the world?”
Surprised out of my reverie, I blink-blink-blink, and bringing my focus up from his preparations, I stop on his playful expression instead. “What?”
“I consider my question appropriately clear.” Turning his back to me and opening a cupboard, he takes out a large pot and sets it on the stove. “Which country is the largest in the world? Do you know the answer?”
“Er…” I cross one leg over the other and perch high on a tall stool on the opposite side of the counter from where he works. “Russia?”
“Excellent.” He peels a packet of ground beef open and plops it into the pot. “Who is James Cameron?”
“A filmmaker. Why are you quizzing me?”
“Brain training. It’s good for you.” He snags a chopping board from somewhere beneath the counter on his side, then a fat carrot and a knife. “And correct. He’s an American filmmaker who directed movies like…?”
“Titanic.” I exhale. “Also, he’s Canadian.”
“He’s…” He stops and snaps his mouth closed.
Open. Closed. Narrowing his eyes, he takes out his phone and taps at the screen…
waiting… reading. Then he nods, locks the screen, and sets the device aside.
“Touché.” Flashing a wide smile, he turns to the sink and re-washes his hands.
“And this is called maintaining the sterile field. Store that away somewhere in your hippocampus.” He flips the tap off and dries his hands.
“I’ll ask you when you least expect it.”
“If you insist.” I look down at my half-empty glass of water and turn it on the counter.
Turn. Turn. And in my peripherals, I study the bright, cascading blooms happily bursting from their vase, their explosive beauty a direct, brutal contrast to the dying fiddle leaf by the dining table. “So, he’s Canadian, right?”
He chuckles. “Confirmed. Santa Claus; North Pole or South Pole?”
“North, obviously. Which seems almost counterintuitive, considering he delivers gifts to the Southern Hemisphere first.” I pick up my water and tilt my head toward the vase. “How’d you get those?”
Curious, he glances across and looks the display up and down. He chops the carrot with minimal mental effort, driving the sharp blade through the vegetable and snap-snap-snapping the steel against the chopping board beneath. “My next-door neighbor. She keeps me in constant supply.”
“But how?” I push off the stool and walk to the blooms, trailing my fingertips over the soft, colorful petals.
“It’s out of season, Oliver.” I gesture toward the wide glass sliding doors leading out to a deck with one more nail in it now than it had before my arrival, and past that, to a white-covered view.
“Nothing is growing in that weather, least of all agapanthuses as strong as these.”
He sets his knife down with a snap and presses his hands to the counter. “What?”
“They won’t survive the winter. The gypsophila should’ve wilted a long time ago.
The impatiens, too.” I point to each new flower, inspecting the strong stems and stroking the petals I can touch without worrying about destroying their delicate beauty.
“The hippeastrum is beautiful, but they won’t touch the earth until the spring.
So either your neighbor has a fat, fat wallet and a desire to charm you with flowers shipped in from across the globe, or she has—”
“An amazing greenhouse.” He comes around the counter with slow, deliberate steps, watchful eyes, and just enough dirt and wood and him wafting in the air to draw me closer even when I don’t intend to lean.
Considering the vase and all its offerings, he selects a soft pink daisy, carefully tugging it free of the rest. Finally, with an intoxicating smile and a dancing stare, he extends his hand.
“She has a greenhouse, Rose, and a dictionary in her head with all of those words you just said. Flowers are just flowers to me. They’re pretty and smell good and make my kitchen fun to walk into.
But they’re not just flowers to you, are they?
They’re hippe…” He wrinkles his nose. “Hippa… Hippopotamus.”
“Hippeastrum.”
“Exactly! And you say those names like they’ve been a part of you all along.
” He tucks a lock of hair behind my ear, following it with the daisy until the stem touches the warm skin high on my neck and the delicate petals kiss my temple.
Goosebumps break out from the top of my hair all the way to the tips of my toes, his gentleness intensely sweet.
But it’s the heel of his palm, just barely brushing my cheek while he positions the flower perfectly, that feels like electricity in my veins.
“I think you were a florist,” he murmurs, a warm grittiness clinging to each word. “Or a landscaper. Or maybe you worked in a nursery.” He drops his hand and leaves me wanting. Because even without knowing who I am or how I got into this mess, I feel like I’ve been without touch for far too long.
I don’t even mean intimate touch. I don’t mean sexual.
I just mean one human being near enough to the other that their pulses sync and their breathing evens out again.
He takes my hand and carefully turns it over, grinning as he trails his fingertips over my palm.
“I would expect calluses if you worked manual labor, hauling logs and rocks, and creating beautiful gardens for rich people. But it’s entirely possible you sold plants. Or maybe you worked in a consultant capacity, telling rich people what to plant, and where to plant it.”
“Why must everyone be rich?”
He chuckles. “Because regular people head on down to the local garden center on Sundays, around noon, and harass the poor, underpaid workers carrying the pricing stickers around. Normal, non-rich folks know plants can’t sit on a shelf forever, and Sunday afternoon is a good time to clear old stock out.
Or at least—” He brings his gaze up and searches mine.
“—that’s what I used to do, anyway. But Mrs. Gunderson said I’m not allowed to buy plants anymore, ‘cos I keep killing them.”
“Mrs. Gunderson is…” I swallow the lump in my throat. “She’s—”
“My neighbor. You should meet her sometime and check out her greenhouse. It might wiggle something free in your mind.” Quick as a flash, he releases my hand and strides back to the stove, stirring the contents of the pot as the smell of beef pushes through the room and destroys the far superior smell of flowers.
“I think we’re closer to figuring you out.
And to think, if I let you go to Barlespy and you didn’t see Mrs. Gunderson’s pretty flowers, we might not have figured that out.
” He peeks over his shoulder and tips his chin toward the potted plant across the room.
“Do you know how to fix that? Because I’m too scared to ask Mrs. Gunderson.
She gives me advice, and I swear, Rose, I listen.
I write notes. I go onto the internet and beg folks to help me out.
But these plants come into this house and commit suicide. It’s not my fault.”
“You’ve got it sitting in a dark corner, for starters. In winter.”
“It used to be by the door, but then she burned.” He gets back to work chopping the carrot. Onion. Zucchini. Tossing the lot into the pot, he happily stirs. “I read it shouldn’t sit in too much light, because it suffers.”
“You put it in front of glass in the summer, and in a cold, dark corner in the winter, and expect it to thrive?” I roll my eyes and start across the room, but with my back to him, I press my palm to my belly and smile as my stomach does nervous cartwheels.
I feel the flower pressed to my skin, and fight everything in me demanding I run to a mirror and take a peek.
Arriving at the plant, I find it mercifully already on wheels, so I push its thirty pounds over smooth hardwood and park it at the door, then I slip my finger into the dirt—without thinking, without even stopping to wonder if I should—and find the soil damp.
Too damp.
“Don’t water it again until I say you can. Leave it by the door in the winter, and put it in the corner in the summer. And if you tell me you haven’t fertilized it since you bought it, I might smack you.”
He grabs a second, much smaller pot and plops it on the stove, then he moves to the fridge and takes out more ingredients.
Butter. Milk. “So I won’t tell you. But for absolutely no reason at all, perhaps you could accompany me to the local plant store sometime this week?
It’s definitely not because I want to buy fertilizer, though. ”
“Mmhm.” I set my hands on my hips and stare down at the fig’s drooping, sad brown leaves, and then behind it, to the deck with a shiny new nail, front and center. I’ve changed his home already. Simply by being here. Simply by existing.
“You take care of the plants,” he decides. “I’ll take care of dinner. We’re having lasagna, and I don’t know if you know, but my lasagna is fan-fucking-tastic. Not that I’m bragging or anything.”
“Right.” A rosy blush warms my cheeks and leaves my fingers tingling. It’s so silly. So girlish. But for every word he speaks, every joke he tells, and plant he kills, all I know is how thankful, so immeasurably, impossibly grateful I am that I’m here and not at The Wallflower.
Drawing a long breath and expanding my chest, I turn from the fig and study Oliver’s broad, strong back. “Do you have any other victims in your home?”
He chuckles. But he points toward the hall with the glistening spatula. “I got some stuff all over. Go on an adventure and see what you find. I’ll be right here.”
“It felt good, didn’t it?” Liam crosses Oliver’s backyard with his hands in his pockets and an easy smile folded across his face. There’s no snow. No freezing wind. In fact, every time I’ve dreamed of him, we’ve been surrounded by lush gardens and perfect, warm weather.
Is it he who brings the sunlight? Or am I just that desperate for refuge from a brutal winter?
“It felt good when he realized you possess a special kind of magic in the garden. When he looked straight into your eyes and said your name like he’s known you all along.”
“Yes. It felt good.” I sit on the finished porch and study the elaborately designed railings. The smooth, sanded finish. I trail my hand over the wood and relish the pleasure of knowing he got there in the end. He finished it. And then I feel it—my nail—under my fingers.
It doesn’t have the same smooth flushness as the other nails do. Its head sits just above the surface, high enough to be found by touch. Bent enough to make it impossible to sink all the way without making a mess of things.
A bit like me, I suppose. Rough and out of place. I don’t quite fit in with the rest, but he allows me a safe place to stay, anyway.
“You’re strangers, Rose. You and Ollie.” Stopping mere feet from the porch, he meets my gaze. “But you’re not. He knows you better than anyone else. Better than even me.”
“But you’re my best friend. No one knows me as well as you do.”
“That’s not true anymore.” He tilts his head to the side and presses his lips into a sad smile. “It used to be. But you’re there and I’m here, and you’ve changed since we were last together.”
“I-I didn’t mean to.” Dark storm clouds roll closer behind him, stealing the spring-like warmth and casting Ollie’s yard in shadows. “I woke up like this. I don’t even know how I’m changing, because I don’t remember who I was before.”
“It’s okay that you’ve changed.” He wanders just a little closer and rests his arms on the porch surface, his feet remaining five feet below on the grass.
“Change is good,” he murmurs. “It means you’re growing and evolving.
It means you’re trusting the people around you.
But it’s coming now.” A lightning bolt bursts from the sky in the distance, the booming crack loud enough to make me jump.
“Get up, Rose. Go inside and lock the door.”
“No, I…” My heart thunders painfully out of control as a cold wind whips across the yard, tearing through the trees and bending their powerful trunks.
I crawl onto my hands and knees as panic bubbles in my blood, then to my feet.
And all along, Liam remains where he is, his shirt flapping in the breeze and his glasses fogging from the chill in the air. “Why don’t you come inside with me?”
“You know I would if I could.” He wiggles his fingers, a wave goodbye. “Run, Rose.” His eyes turn dangerously ominous. “Run.”
“Liam—”
“Now!”