Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Paul
The roses are a sunshine yellow.
Rosa × hybrida, a cultivar I don’t know the name of but should, with petals that open wide and flat the way old garden roses do, none of that tight, closed-fist quality of modern florist varieties.
They smell how roses are supposed to smell and rarely do anymore, with a slightly spiced undertone beneath the sweetness.
I stood in the shop two towns over longer than I’ll admit, running my thumb along a stem.
Red was too much. White was too formal. Pink felt presumptuous.
Yellow felt like her.
I also bought a vase because Rosa × hybrida in a glass of water with no support is a slow death I wasn’t willing to be responsible for.
I’m aware that’s a strange thing to care about, given everything else I’m carrying into this afternoon.
I’m able to sleep again.
The last few days, I set my alarm for six, closed my eyes, and the next thing I knew, it was going off, and the room was bright, and my heart was beating at a perfectly ordinary rate.
No dream. No wet road, no headlights, no horrible sounds I can’t unhear. No paralysis pinning me to the mattress while the shadows arranged themselves into whatever he felt like being that night. Just sleep. And I stood in a flower shop running my thumb along a rose stem, thinking, she did that.
I knock at exactly three o’clock. The door swings open, and it isn’t her, but the Shaw boy opening it for me. Tall, freckled, standing there with the loose ease of someone who has been here long enough to feel entitled to open her door.
Interesting.
“Hey, Paul.”
“Nevan. Good to see you.”
His eyes drop to the vase in my hands, then lift back to mine.
“Lemon,” he calls over his shoulder, not breaking eye contact with me.
I turn the nickname over once. It suits her, which is the irritating part.
“Paul is here. And he brought you flowers for your date.” Nevan lands the last word deliberately, like a test.
I’m not sure what he thinks he’s protecting.
I’m less sure why he’s in her apartment.
She shoves past him with a whispered shut up that he absorbs with complete serenity, but when she sees the flowers, her whole face softens.
“Oh wow.” She reaches for a rose petal, touching it with the careful reverence of someone who handles beautiful things gently on instinct.
I will handle you so gently, Lennon.
“They’re beautiful.” Her eyes close as she breathes them in, small, private pleasure moving across her face—the slight parting of her lips, her lashes fanning against her cheeks, dark and long enough that they cast the faintest shadow.
When she opens her eyes, they’re half lidded, dreamy, and fixed on me.
“Thank you. And the vase is so pretty. This is perfect. I don’t have one here. ”
“I thought you might not.”
The abrasion on her temple catches the hallway light when she turns, still faintly pink at the edges.
“How are you feeling?” I ask, gesturing to her head. “The temple.”
Her hand goes to it automatically. “Oh. Much better, actually.” She looks up at me. “I barely notice it anymore.”
Something in my chest loosens that I hadn’t realized was tight.
“Good.”
“I’ll bring them inside.” Her fingers brush mine when she takes the vase from me, a little clumsy with nerves. When she disappears inside, I’m left in the hallway staring at the space she just occupied.
Nevan steps out with me and leans against the wall beside the door, arms crossing slowly. I haven’t really seen more than a glimpse of him in over a decade. The boy I remember was quiet, the social withdrawal of someone who learned that speaking up doesn’t help.
The Nevan in front of me now, with his easy grin and loose posture, doesn’t fool me. If I were meeting him for the first time like Lennon did, I might read it exactly as he intends. Unbothered. Uncomplicated.
But I know he works two jobs. I know about the neglect in his childhood. I know what it costs a person to survive that kind of negligence, and I know that the ones who come out of it smiling as if nothing touches them are almost always the ones it touched the most.
He’s still carrying it. He simply learned to carry it lightly enough that most people don’t notice the weight.
I notice.
And that’s precisely the problem because Lennon is not in a position to be someone’s steadying force right now.
They may not be aware of it, but both of them are holding themselves together with something that looks like cheerfulness but isn’t, not quite.
I’ve sat across from enough people in that state to recognize it.
She needs someone with bandwidth to spare, and this boy is running on fumes he’s too proud to name.
“Okay,” Lennon comes back, her cheeks looking flushed. “I’m ready.”
“Great.” I step back to give her space.
“Have fun, you guys,” Nevan says, pulling her into a side hug. “On your date.”
There it is again. That deliberate weight on the word, and this time paired with a look aimed at me over her head, is perfectly clear.
Say it.
“Thanks, Nevan. I’m sure we will have fun on our date.”
His expression settles. Test passed, apparently.
He looks down at her, and my gaze follows. She’s gone even pinker. The pink of someone who wasn’t entirely certain this was a date and has now had it confirmed twice in her own doorway inside thirty seconds.
I make a mental note. Again. My soulmate, apparently, requires direct confirmation of things that are self-evident to me. I’ve already noticed that she defaults to the least generous interpretation of anything that involves herself, finding reasons why things don’t mean what they clearly mean.
I’ll work on that.
The difficulty is the method. Because what I want to say and what I’m able to say are separated by a distance I have to navigate carefully. We have known each other for only a few days, and she is already skittish about whether this is a date.
So there’s a line I have to tread, somewhere between saying nothing and saying everything, between the man who knows with absolute certainty and the man she’s still deciding whether to trust. I have to be enough without being too much, present without being suffocating, sure of myself without making her feel like the conclusion was reached before she had a chance to participate in it.
I’ve never been particularly good at half measures.
I’ll work on that too.
Nevan wraps her in a real hug that she disappears into, his chin dropping toward the top of her head, and her arms go around him with ease.
She’s not for you.
I’m aware that’s not my decision to make, but I’m doing it anyway.
“Call me when you get home,” he murmurs into her hair, quiet enough that it’s private and loud enough that I can absolutely hear it, before he presses a kiss to her temple.
My fingers tighten.
I might need to have a conversation with that boy.
I reach out without fully deciding to and encircle Lennon’s wrist, drawing her toward me and away from him. He makes a sound that is definitely a chuckle, grabs a skateboard from against the wall, and heads for the stairs without looking back.
A skateboard.
I’m standing here being quietly unsettled by a twenty-something-year-old who travels via skateboard.
When he’s gone, the smile Lennon offers is so completely and entirely aimed at me that anything else ceases to matter.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Ready,” she says.
Two hours later, I’m holding four bags and a quietly escalating internal crisis.
The plan was simple. Take her shopping and have a conversation over coffee. Low pressure. An afternoon that gives two people who have known each other for only a short time enough room to actually learn about each other without anyone feeling overwhelmed.
She walks ahead of me up the path to my front door, a small bag dangling from her fingers with three shades of yellow tucked inside.
Three, because she stood there with different yellows in each hand, looking back and forth between them like she couldn’t choose.
She scrunched her nose and bit her lower lip before she started putting one back, so I told her I’d buy her both.
She looked at me with big, light blue eyes and said she only needed one, which she would buy for herself.
So I grabbed them and added a third to the basket, a deeper yellow that had been sitting beside the others that she was glancing at too. She let me buy them for her, wearing the expression of someone who has been outmaneuvered and hasn’t fully decided whether to object or enjoy it.
She isn’t used to being treated, or at least encouraged in what she likes, which tells me more about her dating life than anything she’s said out loud.
But then she found the delicacy shop.
And that’s where the bags in my hands came from. She asked if she could cook for me, as if she were already planning it before the question was even finished. I said yes because apparently, I am incapable of saying no to her.
This is not how the afternoon was supposed to go.
“You okay?” she asks, turning at the top of my doorstep to look at me. “You went quiet.”
“I’m fine.” I rearrange the bags in my hands to find the key in my pocket. “Just thinking.” About how you’re about to walk into my kitchen and cook in it, and I’m going to have to sit at my own table and be a person who eats dinner as if it’s simple.
I know the internal negotiation required to get through a meal that didn’t come from my own controlled preparation. I do it at Renée’s twice a week. I can do it here.
I can probably do it here.
“Oh, okay,” she says softly, worrying her lip.
Perfect, now you made her insecure again, Paul.
She steps inside the house ahead of me and slips off her shoes, setting them neatly beside the door without being asked. Her feet in stockings make soft sounds as she steps farther inside, looking around. “Where’s your kitchen?”
“This way.” I lead her through the living room, then push open the kitchen door, and she freezes in the doorway.
She doesn’t say anything for a full three seconds.
“I don’t know if you—”