25. Second Bloom
Second Bloom
~AMBER~
Bellamy Blooms at golden hour is the closest thing this town has to a cathedral.
I've stepped into August's greenhouse a hundred times over the years, and it has never once stopped doing this to me — the hush of it, the green weight of the air, the way the low sun comes slanting through the fogged glass and turns every bead of condensation into a little drop of fire.
It's warm in here. Humid in the good way, the kind that settles down into your lungs and loosens some knot you'd forgotten you were carrying.
Row on row of blooms in every stage of becoming, and the scent of all of them layered into one impossible perfume — wet earth, green stems, pollen, a hundred sweetnesses I couldn't name if my life depended on it.
August stands in the middle of it, and he hasn't noticed me yet.
That's the best way to watch him, if I'm honest with myself. Unobserved. He's bent over a long zinc worktable that runs the length of the center aisle, sleeves shoved up to the elbows, a pencil tucked behind one ear that he's clearly forgotten is there.
He's arranged the flowers into little clusters down the length of the table — the whole palette for the wedding, laid out like paint on a board — and he's frowning at them the way other men frown at engines or ledgers.
Completely, beautifully absorbed.
The setting sun catches the pale gold of his hair and the sharp, thoughtful line of his profile, and his scent drifts back to me on the humid air: blue iris, pear blossom, white musk, a cool green thread of sage running under all of it.
He always did look most like himself surrounded by things he was coaxing into bloom.
The greenhouse tips something loose in me, the way it always does. A memory I don't so much reach for as fall straight into — a field, years back, out past the far rows where the cutting flowers grow half-wild.
The two of us.
A sunset going down like the whole sky had caught fire. The crush of stems and warm petals beneath us, the reckless, laughing, wide-open freedom of it. It had felt frisky. It had also felt like being handed back a piece of myself I hadn't known was missing.
That's the thing about August the other two never quite had.
He has never once been afraid of beauty, or of wanting it out loud.
I remember the way he looked at me afterward in that field, petals caught in my hair, like I was the finest arrangement he'd ever built and he couldn't quite believe he got to keep it.
Nobody has looked at me like that since.
I've told myself, for five years running, that I didn't miss it.
I've always felt a particular pull toward him, and it isn't a secret to anyone.
Where Beckett offered me safety, and Cade offered me charm, August offered me this — the sense that being loved by him meant being seen as something worth arranging with great care, worth the good light and the good vase.
He appreciates beauty in the finest, smallest things. For a long stretch of my life, a while ago now, he appreciated it in me. Standing in the doorway of his cathedral this afternoon, I feel that old pull as sharp as I ever have.
He looks up then, as though he's felt me thinking about him, and the frown melts clean off his face.
"You came."
"You asked me to."
I let the door swing shut behind me, sealing us into the warm green quiet.
"Something about a color transition that apparently can't be decided without my divine input."
"It can't." He says it with total sincerity, which is the whole trouble with August — he means it, every time. "You have the final word here, Amber. I'm not sending a single stem to that wedding until you've put your hands on it and told me it's right."
He gestures me toward the table.
"Come. Help me choose."
So I cross to him, and we begin. It comes together the way it always did between us — easy, wordless at first, then not wordless at all.
I reach for the apricot roses first, because they're the heart of the entire thing: the exact warm blush of a peach with the sun behind it, their scent soft and old-fashioned.
They smell, embarrassingly, a little like me.
Blush cosmos come next, delicate as tissue paper, trembling on their thread-thin stems. Coral dahlias with their impossible geometry, petal stacked on petal stacked on petal.
Then the darker notes to give the whole thing weight and honesty — burgundy foliage, deep as spilled wine; sprigs of rosemary that release their sharp green scent the instant I bruise them between my fingers; fig branches still smelling faintly of their own fruit; and long, feathered plumes of gold grass to catch and hold the light.
It's a sunset in a vase, is what it is.
The palette moves the way an evening does — warm and open at the top, going deep and burnished and quiet toward the bottom.
The bride asked for "romantic autumn." What she's getting is the exact color of the hour I've started to love. I keep that part to myself.
"Apricot roses," August murmurs, approving, already reaching for the very same bunch I'm reaching for. Our fingers collide over the stems.
"Sorry—"
"Take them." He draws his hand back, smiling. "You always did have the better eye for roses."
He trims while I arrange.
That's how it settles between us, unspoken and immediate — he takes up his shears and cuts each stem to the length I need, I build the thing in my hands, and we pass flowers back and forth across the zinc table in a rhythm that feels rehearsed even though it's been five years since we last danced it.
Our hands keep finding the same blooms at the same moment.
The fourth time it happens — both of us lunging for the last coral dahlia — he lifts an eyebrow.
"We've got to stop meeting like this," he says, dead serious. "People will talk."
"The cosmos are already gossiping." I nod at the trembling pink things. "Terrible little gossips, cosmos. No discretion whatsoever."
"It's the rosemary I don't trust. Sharp-tongued herb. Always has been."
A laugh gets out of me before I can stop it — a real one, startled loose — and his whole face lights at the sound like I've handed him a gift he wasn't expecting.
I hold up two stems, weighing them against the arrangement.
"It needs more of the burgundy. It's too sweet as it stands — it needs something to argue with."
"It's a wedding, Amber. Not a debate club."
"Every good arrangement needs a little conflict. A little something dark to make the sweet parts mean anything at all." I tuck the burgundy foliage deep, right into the heart of it, and step back. "There. Now it has a spine."
August studies the arrangement, then me, and something soft moves through his eyes.
"You're not wrong. You never were, about this." He settles a second dark stem in beside mine, careful. "A little something dark to make the sweet parts mean something. I'm going to remember you said that."
We work like that as the light goes molten and low.
At some point I couldn't name, I notice our scents have done the thing they always used to do. His iris and pear blossom, my apricot and rose, braided together in the warm air until it's one single perfume and I can't pull the threads back apart.
It smells like a version of my life I stopped letting myself remember.
The words come out of me before I've decided to say them, soft, nearly lost in the hush.
"We were a good thing, weren't we?"
August goes still.
He sets down his shears. He looks at me across the half-built centerpiece, across five whole years, and he doesn't rush it, because he has never once rushed a thing worth doing.
"We were," he says quietly. Then, softer, with a weight that settles right in the center of my chest, he adds, "We were a good thing, Amber. And I think…if you let it…we could be one again."
I stare at him.
The sincerity in his face is almost too much to look at head-on, like the low sun through the glass. He smiles, that slow and careful August smile, and reaches across the table with his palm turned up.
An offering.
I arch an eyebrow at him. Then I put my hand in his anyway.
He turns it over gently, like he's handling one of his own fragile blooms, and lifts it to his mouth. He presses a soft kiss to my knuckles, and against my skin, low and warm, he whispers his own name.
"August Elias Bellamy."
Like he's introducing himself. Like we're two strangers meeting for the very first time in a greenhouse full of flowers, like everything that came before this never happened, like we get to start the whole thing clean.
My heart does something traitorous and slow. I decide to play along.
"Amber Rose Whitlock," I offer, matching his gravity, and I watch his eyes crinkle at the Rose.
"Rose," he repeats, delighted down to his boots. "All these years, and you never once told me your middle name was Rose. In a room full of them, no less."
"A girl keeps some mystery."
"Then let me solve a little of it." He hasn't let go of my hand, and he makes no move to. "Amber Rose Whitlock. Is your favorite color still pink?"
I laugh.
"God, no. Not for years." I turn it over, considering. "Red, actually. And…oddly enough…orange. The two of them together, especially." I glance toward the fogged windows, where the sky has gone the exact shade I mean. "Sunset colors. I never used to be a sunset person. Somehow I am now."
Something flickers across his face.
I watch him file it away, careful, the way he files the difference between two shades of the same rose.
"Noted," he murmurs. "And the flowers? I remember the combinations you loved, back when you talked about your own—" he stops himself, redirects, gentle as anything "—the ones you used to love. But tell me about now. What's the one flower you never get tired of looking at?"
I twirl a sprig of rosemary between my fingers, thinking.
"Ranunculus," I decide. "The way they fold in on themselves, layer after layer after layer, like they're keeping a secret they'll only tell you if you're patient enough to wait for it. I never tire of those."