4. Paolo
FOUR
Paolo
Inearly turned back once I reached the corner and heard the shop fall quiet inside. It was rash, pointless, and all the more proof I wouldn't be able to stay away.
Rosa looked up when I pushed the door. The light from the workbench haloed the tendrils of hair that had escaped her knot. She smelled of citrus and damp soil, the clean, stubborn scent that had lodged in my chest since the first time I'd walked in here.
"You again," she said, not surprised. A smile that was half accusation and half gladness. "Either you like being told off, or you have very poor taste in excuses."
"I have an excuse," I said, closing the door behind me and letting the evening settle. I held the small potted rose—Piccola, already named in my head—against my chest as if it were contraband. "I thought this belonged to you."
She accepted the pot with the casual, efficient care she gave all living things. Her fingers brushed mine. The contact was brief, ordinary. Electricity didn't consult with timing. It hummed.
"You keep bringing me rescued plants," she said. "Are you a black-market florist now?"
"If you'd prefer I stop rescuing things, tell me and I'll revoke my permit." My voice was flat where braver men crowed. She laughed, the sound like wind along a trellis, and I felt the corner of my mouth loosen.
We worked without ceremony, side by side at the bench. Rosa had a habit of tucking pencil-straight strands of hair behind her ear when she concentrated. Tonight, I watched that gesture like a map.
"Do you want tea?" she asked.
"Please."
She brewed it in a chipped pot. Steam curled between us and carried that clean scent—lemon peel and earth—closer. The air made my sleeves cling to my forearms. I kept my phone in my pocket; it vibrated three times in the first ten minutes. I ignored it. Let the world wait.
"You're quieter than last time," Rosa said, stirring honey into two small cups. "That wasn't you—the other night. You were…softer."
"I said something I didn't intend to," I admitted. My pulse thudded in my throat. "Words find me sometimes and I don't know where they come from."
Her eyes lifted, curious. "What did you say?"
"You make small things sacred." I couldn't rehearse the line without it losing weight. It was small and true and suddenly terrifying to say again.
She set the cups down and watched me as if trying to read the inside of a closed book. "That was a good thing to say."
"It might be something I remember," I said. Admitting it felt like stepping on ice. "Or a flash. Sensory—an aroma, a gesture. I don't know if the memory is me or a ghost."
She reached for the cup with both hands, warming the ceramic. Her knuckles had the same faint calluses from pruning I had noticed before. The sight of them grounded me and loosened me at once.
"Tell me," she said.
I considered lying. It would be easier. But the ledger of my life—the ledger I kept in my head—wasn’t balanced by lies.
"I keep finding a smell," I said. "Roses, yes, but not just roses.
Wet soil under them. And a woman—maybe—her laugh like rain.
Sometimes a phrase comes with it. I don't have faces properly.
I have fragments. I have a hurt I can't name and a voice I think—" I stopped.
I had been taught to protect what I could not control.
Here, she had a right to the small truth.
"Do you remember who said the words?" Rosa asked, gentle.
"No." My fingers found the rim of my cup. The porcelain was warm. "I remember the feel of fingers at a collarbone. I remember counting things—coins or beads—by the way someone taught me. The feeling lasts longer than the images."
She put her cup down and set both palms on the bench. "That's disorienting," she said. "You don't have to explain everything."
I wanted to tell her everything. The fear that any confession would prove me dangerous, irredeemable, was a thick thing in my chest. If I said the wrong name, saw the wrong face, admitted too much—maybe I'd hurt her all over again. Better to be cold and safe.
Instead I did something smaller. My hand moved without permission to a crooked photograph on the counter—a picture Lucia had pinned up, a silly thing of the staff at Carnival last year.
The frame leaned two degrees off. My fingers straightened it and paused.
When Rosa looked away to tie a bit of twine, I slipped a tiny scrap of paper behind the print and tucked it back into place.
On it I had scribbled a stupid joke—something about Piccola and the mafia of moles that would surely find the plant if left unguarded.
It was private and infantile and meant to make her smile later when she found it.
She glanced over and her expression softened. "Someone is being stealthy."
"Someone wants you to laugh at later." I kept my hand near the frame. My thumb brushed the edge of a photograph—someone's arm in mid-raise—and the action connected me to a small domestic treason: I wanted to be the person who left little things for her to find.
She moved closer under the pretext of reading a supplier list. Her shoulder bumped mine. The contact was minimal but disproportionate. My throat went dry.
"Tell me one more thing," she said. "About the flashes. Only one small thing."
"A phrase," I said. "Sometimes a phrase with the smell.
I heard it the night I first came—before I could place it.
It felt like an anchor and a weight." I lowered my voice.
"I don't trust my flashes. They accuse me.
I can't tell if they make me cruel or if they show me the cruelty I've already done. "
"You're accusing yourself," she said softly. "That's different from reality sometimes."
"It's cheaper," I murmured. "It's a currency I'm good at feeling."
She didn't argue. She only set both hands on the table and leaned in, closer than either of us probably should have. Her breath hit my cheek. The light hid the color of her lips but didn't hide the tension.
"You're here," she said. "You're not running to a car, to someone else's orders."
"No." The word felt honest. "That's a choice."
Her fingers reached up before I could think: a slow motion, practiced move of clarification.
She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear and didn't pull away.
My hand rose without asking permission. I drew my thumb along the soft skin at the base of her ear and then rested my palm there, cupping the small hollow where hair met neck.
The contact was an electric thing that was also a promise: deliberate, slow, and intimate.
I kept my hand there a beat too long. Her pulse fluttered under my thumb.
My body answered in ways my words would not.
Warmth pooled low and bright. I thought then of how terrible a man I might have been—what my hands had ordered others to do—and how desperately I wanted these hands to be used only for gentleness.
"You shouldn't—" she began, then stopped, her voice a soft, uncertain surrender.
"Stop me?" I asked, though my voice was too low to be teasing. "I could, but I won't. Not unless you want me to."
She closed her eyes and I heard her inhale.
Heat threaded through me. I considered leaning forward until our mouths met.
My lips hovered an inch from hers. I could feel the shape of her breath, small and quick.
The room narrowed to the curve of her jaw, the slope of her collarbone, the soft rise of her breath.
Instead of closing the distance, I tried honesty again—smaller this time, safer. "I had a memory of a woman with roses in her hair, laughing. I think the roses were dead at the base. I woke with dirt under my nails like I’d been digging. I don't know what to do with that."
Silence stretched. I let it be a test.
Rosa opened her eyes slowly. "My father taught me to graft roses when I was a child," she said.
"I killed one once trying to make it bloom a different color than its nature.
I buried it in the garden and cried for three days.
I thought I could change things. Maybe that's what I kept with me—the guilt about not knowing how to tend what I loved. "
The confession was simple and pure. It wasn't about me, but it folded into what I had told her. Her voice, when it split open, sounded like a door not yet secured. There was no accusation, only the soft, heavy truth that loving wrong is not always malice.
"I don't think your flashes make you a monster," she said. "Maybe they make you a man who needs a patient person."
"Patient people are dangerous to me," I said, because the truth tasted better with bitterness. "They make me want to be better, and a man who wants to be better is liable to break for different reasons."
She reached for my hand then and found my fingers with her own. The contact was steadying. My breath caught.
"Then we'll test you," she said, with a spark of the mischief I'd seen before. "I'll be the test. I'll be unkind if you prove unworthy."
There was humor in her threat and a tenderness that uncoiled some of my reserve. "That's cruel," I said, but my mouth smiled.
"Maybe," she admitted. "But I will warn you when I am about to be cruel."
I swallowed and leaned a fraction closer.
The world contracted again. I could smell the lemon and soil on her skin and it sent a small, naked ache between my legs.
I thought of the scar at the base of my neck, the bullet that had stolen whole libraries of who I had been.
I thought of the ledger and the accounts I kept of harms. I also thought of this—of this tight, honest space where a man could be allowed to do small things right.
"I don't want to hurt you," I said, quietly. I wanted to say more I am trying to be someone else, I am trying to remember how to stay. Instead I asked, "Will you let me be here tonight?"
She looked at me as if measuring a wind. "You want to stay?"
"I do." The answer came out simpler than the knot inside me. "Until you tell me to leave."
Her smile was small, dangerous in its permission. She stood, and for a moment our faces were inches apart. I could count the freckles along her nose, the tiny line where a healed nick bent her upper lip. I wanted to map them.
"Then stay," she said.
I did. I stayed until the delivery arrived.
It wasn't a person at first—just the rattle of crates outside, a sudden mechanic thunder that rolled under the window and up my spine. We both jumped.
"Probably the florist supply," Rosa said, bright and distracted, and moved to the back to check.
I followed, my hand still buzzing from the way she had let me touch her ear. The shop door was shut but unlocked; her back was to me and the warm silhouette of her shoulders held a promise.
I took a breath to tell her something more—something riskier than keeping my hand on her neck—and then the world answered with a crash. A stack of wooden crates outside toppled with a clatter like a gunshot. The sound kicked through the floorboards and into my chest.
Rosa spun. The air between us fractured. I heard the question in her eyes before she said it.
"What was that?"
"Delivery," I began, reflexive and lying, because my phone had buzzed all evening and the timing—too neat—felt like coincidence and not.
She moved toward the window, peered through the glass. Her hand stayed at the latch. Her other hand—maybe because of the earlier permission, because of the joke tucked behind the photo—found my fingers again and squeezed.
I stepped forward to stand beside her, ready to tell her the truth, to tell her I had been avoiding calls and someone was probably watching the door, to tell her I would choose her over a message—anything but the ledger. My mouth parted.
Before I could finish, the door at the front of the shop swung open from the outside with a sharp bang. A shout—indistinct—carried in on the air. The light flicked as if someone had shoved a hand over a lamp.
Rosa's hand tightened on mine. I could smell the citrus and panic and, underneath, the faint trace of a rose from Piccola between us.
I opened my mouth to tell her to step back. To tell her everything. To tell her I had chosen this moment for honesty.
Then the crash of the crates echoed again, and someone called her name—sharp, not friendly.
The words died on my tongue.