25. Second Bloom #2
"Ranunculus," he echoes, and I know without a doubt it's going into the same vault as red and orange.
"Favorite season," he says next, threading a plume of gold grass into the arrangement without looking up. "And don't tell me you don't have one. Everybody in the flower business has one."
"Autumn." It comes out faster than I expect, and surprises me. "It used to be spring. All that hopeful new-green everything." I run my thumb down the spine of a burgundy leaf. "But autumn's honest. It knows things end, and it decides to be beautiful about it anyway. I respect that in a season."
His hands go still for a moment over the flowers.
"Autumn," he echoes, quiet, like the word cost him something to hear. "You really have changed, Amber Rose."
"Five years will do that."
"It suits you," he says simply. "The change. It suits you."
"One more." He tilts his head. "Your favorite sweet. It used to be lemon tarts. And that key lime pie from the Salt and Honey you'd swear up and down you weren't ordering a second slice of."
"You remember the second slice."
"I remember everything, Amber." He says it with no weight at all, which is exactly the thing that gives it weight.
I have to drop my eyes to the flowers for a second.
"Cupcakes," I admit. "These days. Vanilla icing, specifically — the plain kind everybody overlooks in the case." I lift a shoulder. "I got tired of complicated. Turns out the simplest sweet thing is the one I want now."
I don't miss the way his mouth curves at that, like I've just told him something far larger than a dessert order.
We drift back toward the work, because the work is safe, and because there's a genuine wedding to build here.
The centerpiece takes shape between our four hands, apricot deepening into coral deepening into burgundy and gold, the whole arrangement transitioning like a sky at dusk.
As we work, August talks.
He tells me about a project he's been quietly dreaming up.
A book, of all things. He wants to work with Elodie — the botanical illustrator, the one who does those impossible watercolors where you can practically smell the paper — on a book documenting every flower in Honeybell Harbor, season by season, through the whole turning year.
"That sounds like an artist's project," I say, and I mean it as the highest compliment I own.
"It is." He trims a fig branch, thoughtful.
"I've spent my entire life making beauty that disappears, Amber.
That's the job, when you get down to it.
You build something breathtaking. It's perfect for exactly one day.
Then it wilts. It's gone. Everyone moves right along to the next perfect thing.
" He sets the branch down. "I think I've grown tired of only making things that die.
I want to make something that lasts. Something that teaches the people who come after us how to keep it going, once we're not here to arrange it for them anymore. "
"A legacy," I say softly. "You want to leave a legacy."
"I want to leave proof." He says the word carefully, like it's fragile. "Proof that the beautiful thing was here. That it was tended. That somebody loved it enough to write the whole of it down, so it wouldn't be lost the second the season turned cold."
He glances up at me, and the flowers aren't entirely what he's talking about now.
"That means reminiscing, some," he says, lower. "Going back through what was, and finding what's still worth keeping. It means reaching for the opportunities that could turn into a second chance — before those wilt too."
I keep my eyes on the coral dahlia turning in my hands. "And what," I ask, just as quietly, "if the person is afraid? To open their heart to someone who already shattered it once."
He doesn't flinch from it.
That's the thing about August. He's never once flinched from the hard, true things — only from his own guilt.
"Then it's normal to be afraid," he says. "It should be frightening. Terrifying, even. Because the last time that heart got handed over, the person holding it didn't treat it with the care something so precious deserved. They dropped it."
He sets down his shears entirely and gives me his whole, undivided attention.
"But that fear isn't weakness, Amber. It's wisdom. It's the heart learning."
His voice goes low and certain, and it doesn't waver.
"So here's what I'd tell that person. You don't have to hand your heart back over the second someone asks for it.
You don't put something that fragile into unproven hands.
You make them earn it first — make them show you, slowly, in a hundred small and patient ways, over as long as it takes, exactly how careful they've learned to be.
Let them prove they're worthy of you, long before you ever open that final vault and let anyone all the way inside.
" A pause. "The power to grant that access was always yours to begin with. It never once stopped being yours."
He has no idea he's just described, nearly word for word, the exact thing Marlowe and Juniper made me swear to on my living room floor last night. Or maybe he does. Maybe he's known me long enough to know precisely what I needed to hear.
We hold the look a beat too long.
Then August reaches across the small distance left between us — slow enough that I could stop him, if I wanted to, and I find that I don't — and tucks a few loose strands of hair back behind my ear.
His fingertips barely graze my cheek on the way.
"You really do look stunning with your hair down," he murmurs. "I've been thinking it since the moment you walked in." His hand lingers at my jaw. "Wear it down for our date."
I arch an eyebrow, my pulse doing something entirely undignified.
"Date?"
"Date."
He nods, like the matter's already settled, like it's the most natural thing on earth.
"You and me. Next week."
I search his face for the catch — the angle, the too-good-to-be-true. I find nothing but August, open as a thrown window, looking back at me with five years of regret and a fresh, careful, terrifying hope. My oldest instinct is to hedge. So I hedge.
"I'll make sure I'm free," I say slowly, "as long as it doesn't interfere with anything on the—"
"I already checked."
I blink.
"You what?"
"I already checked." He says it so simply it takes a second to land.
"You'll have Friday off next week. Sloane's out of the country — some benefit concert — and Nolan is performing the same night, so there's nothing on the wedding calendar that needs you.
Every other arrangement for that day is already handled.
" He ticks it off, gentle and thorough, the way he ticks off a stem count.
"I spoke with Marlowe. And Juniper. And Paloma.
They're each covering a piece. You're free, Amber. Morning to night."
I stare at him, my mouth actually falling open.
"You handled all of that. Already."
"This morning."
"This morning," I repeat, faintly.
It undoes me a little, the sheer thoroughness of it.
Not a grand gesture — no roses by the dozen, no speech rehearsed in a mirror. Just a man who noticed the exact shape of my life and quietly went and cleared a path straight through it, so that I wouldn't have one single excuse left to tell him no.
That's the whole trick of him, and it always was. He doesn't sweep you off your feet. He removes, one by careful one, every reason you had for keeping them on the ground.
He lifts my hand again and presses another kiss to my knuckles, softer than the first.
When he looks up at me over it, the low red sun catches his eyes, and there is nothing in them but the truth.
"Let me prove to you," he whispers, "that I'll never shatter your heart again."
In the warm, gold-red hush — my hand cradled in his, his promise hanging sweet and heavy in the air between us — something in me that has been clenched shut for five long years finally, quietly, begins to give.
I dare let my heart quiver at the tempting promise.