Twenty-Four
“What do you think: sapphic flower farmers, or second-chance holiday book with surprise baby?” Poppy holds up two cheerful paperbacks.
“My instinct is flower farmers, but the holidays are approaching, and that one could be a nice little gateway drug to all the holiday movies starting to trickle onto the streaming platforms.”
Poppy frowns, pulling out a notebook and starting a good old-fashioned pros and cons list.
God, I love her.I take a sip of a disgusting latte that Ash clearly did not make. (Sloane, bless their heart.) Darcy perches in my lap, his bulk wobbling as he kneads biscuits into my knees. I give him a little scritch behind the ears as Poppy lists things like pro: would like to learn more about flowers. And lesbianism. Cons: might not be in the mood for fighting.
“How’s that latte?” Sloane walks up, looking like a proud parent watching their children start to stumble around. They lean over, nodding at Poppy’s list. “Yes to the bickering, but the slow burn is worth it, and no third-act breakup.”
Poppy lights up, gay gardens steadily moving into the lead.
Sloane pulls up a chair and shines their how-are-you-my-poor-lamb smile at me. “Speaking of third-act breakups, how are you holding up?”
“Very funny,” I say. Darcy bites me for not patting his head correctly.
“You haven’t happened to mention to Ash that you’re not even interested in Josh anymore?”
“And how would that work, Obi-Wan? Any books on the shelves back there about a girl realizing she was chasing the wrong guy too late, and then asking her unwilling helper to just slide into his place instead?”
“Actually—” Sloane leans back, craning their head to look out at the room.
“I want that one,” Poppy says.
Sloane spins back around. “It’s not rocket science, right? You can’t just tell him that over the past few months, you fell out of love with Josh?”
“No, I can’t.” I push my feline companion to the floor and suppress the urge to down an entire bottle of Tums. “Because he wouldn’t believe it. I barely realized it myself until the last minute.”
Sloane slides my mug closer to me, their primary method of comforting. I let it warm my hands and thaw the block inside my chest.
“And at the core of it, there was no devastating sadness or sense of betrayal. It was… relief.” The words bubble to the surface and pop out of me in a rush. A pressurized release that’s been building inside since Josh looked at me and told me that not everyone’s built for it.
Sloane raises their coffee mug. “A toast then. To growth. To realizing we deserve more. To wanting more out of the people we let love us.”
I weakly raise mine, and they crack theirs against my mug and Poppy’s juice until I can feel the reverberations in my bones.
“I guess I just don’t know why it took me so long.”
“You got there in the end,” Poppy says.
“You’ve read the scriptures,” Sloane says, waving a lazy hand at the shelves. “Anyone who always knows exactly what they want, and makes the healthy choice at page one, is probably fictional.” They evaluate me over the rim of their cup. “That is not most of our journeys.”
“I thought I was a smart person who’s supposed to have at least one brain cell working.”
“You’re a real-life human who’s barely through the first act of her own story and hit a bit of a rough patch. That doesn’t mean you just throw away everything good in your life.”
The acid bubbles up again and I push away the cup. “This isn’t about Ash,” I say, settling for the simplest truth.
“I’m not attributing transformative life experiences to anyone but you,” Sloane says with a scoff.
“But you’re the one who keeps bringing him up,” Poppy says in a stage whisper that rattles through me.
“I can’t just trade guys,” I argue, feeling like the worst caricature.
Sloane laughs, and I press my sweaty face into the tabletop.
“Again, who said anything about trades? You’re here wilting in my café because you miss someone who’s become important to you. You want to spend more time with him. You want to kiss his grumpy face again—”
“I should not have told you that.”
“The point is, sometimes we believe things—relationships, moments—are all or nothing. You’ve spent months planning everything out to the nth degree with only one possible end point. Why don’t you try just seeing where things go this time? See if Ash wants to hang out in more graveyards? Maybe you’ll even hate the next kiss—”
“If you keep bringing up kissing, I will not be able to come back in here.”
They gasp, clutching their jean jacket. “But kissing is what ninety percent of my conversations are about!”
“Sloane.”
“Fine,” they say, standing up, their smile spreading from dimple to dimple. “I will let you wallow all you want, but when you want recs on books with big romantic gestures, I will be over there restacking the hockey romances.”
Poppy’s eyes are wide, and I can see this coming from a mile away. “No,” I warn, heading her off.
“A grand romantic gesture!”
“Nope.”
“It’s perfect.”
“It’s impossible, and I’m going to do both me and Ash a favor and just lie low.”
Then the bell jangles and a winter rush blows cold air and a tall, raven-haired, sullen boy inside the store.
Poppy’s face lights up like it’s Christmas, and I wish for the ability to melt into linoleum.
Ash pauses, frozen under the fluorescent lights, and I can see it play across his face. The quick calculation when he wonders what would happen if he just… didn’t come over here. That moment, that consideration hiding in the twist of his lips and the bunching of his eyebrows, hits me harder than anything Josh could have done in that guest room. I want to rise up out of my chair and lecture him until he sees the picture crystal clear. My TED talk about how I was blinded by my own hyperfixation, and how I have never felt more unraveled.
He rolls back on his heels before slowly making his way over to us. Each step feels like an accusation, slow and reluctant and pointed.
I dig deep and produce a smile that hopefully hides all the feelings I’m worried my face is shouting at him. I beam up at him like a sunflower.
“Hey, stranger.”
He nods at me, and smiles at Poppy. “Hey, Pops.”
“Good to see you, Ash.” She’s gone stock-still in her seat, her eyes looking everywhere but at us, then finally pushes back in her chair and shoots over to the YA section.
I pull my smile wider. Something happy and carefree, and with teeth. Teeth that say I’m doing just fine, and I am extremely fond of that peacoat. I know he’s not going to sit down, that he’s moments from devising a hasty exit, but I give my lungs a second to expand and, for the first time since I started spending time with him, I give myself a moment.
To look.
To marvel.
To recognize that my chest tightens when he looks at me, and it’s not anxiety or indigestion, or a misfire in my brain. It’s because the idea of him not looking at me causes such a rush of unhappiness that it nearly brings me to my knees.
I dwell on the curve of his neck, the divot of his upper lip, and the cowlick with several unruly strands spinning off in a different direction along his hairline. Everything stills and all I can say is:
“I feel like I haven’t seen you much.” I sink everything into that one sentence.
His mouth tightens, and he sidesteps it. “I’m almost done with the paper. How is the presentation coming along?”
I can talk business first. It’s important. The presentation is practically on our doorstep. “It’s good,” I say, my voice uneven. “It’s good,” I try again, hoping to sound like someone who has thought about this for more than five seconds in the past few days.
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“And ruin the surprise? Never.”
“Marlowe.” My name sounds like it’s being pulled out of him kicking and screaming.
“Don’t worry, Ash,” I say. “Don’t you trust me?”
He takes a deep breath in through his nose, and his throat bobs with words I know he would prefer to spill at my feet than swallow. “I would like to not be steamrolled in front of the entire class.”
“No steamrolling,” I say, my voice softening. “It’ll be great, and I’ll send it over to you the night before.”
He nods and walks back behind the café counter without another word. I can feel my pulse in my toes, and my heart lodged in my esophagus. He’s upset and I don’t even know where to begin to fix it.
Poppy walks back over with two more books for the pros and cons list, and I hope my face has returned to some semblance of normal. The door swings wide, and another gust rattles through the aisles. Two bundled-up figures wedge through the door, and that coat… I know that coat. I rise out of my chair as Momma and Blue make a beeline for me.
“I told you that was her car.” Blue is victorious, piling her pom-pom hat and pink wool mittens in the middle of the table. “Hey, Pops,” she says, before leaning over and taking a swig of my latte. I feel a little less annoyed at the ripple of disgust that flashes across her face.
“What are y’all doing here?”
Momma pulls off her cream cashmere duster and drapes it across my chair. “We were down the street at the dry cleaner and Blue said this is the bookstore you’ve been raving about.” She looks around in wonder, and I feel a twinge of guilt for not bringing her here sooner. She spins back around to me. “This is all romance?”
Her expression has me producing my first real smile in days. “Every. Single. Last. One.”
She takes off for the closest display table, and Blue heads straight for Sloane and more zombie cheerleaders. I watch their progress and can’t help feeling the heavy presence at my back. I don’t even know if I should march them up to the counter and introduce them to Ashton Hayes—the one responsible for all of this. I don’t know if he wants to meet my people or if he’s too busy trying to make space and extricate himself from my life.
But I want to. I want him to know me, and I want the people I love to know him.
Momma stops at every single shelf, and the stack in her arms grows as she waltzes throughs genres and displays. Blue heads back first, her microscopic attention span already ready for the next sparkling thing to snag her interest. Momma’s slower to return, only stopping with her inability to carry anything else. She spreads her books out on the table and marvels at them.
“This one,” she says, holding up a cover with a woman in a purple Victorian ball gown smiling mysteriously out at us. “This was the first romance I ever read, and I can’t believe it’s here.” She traces the cover with her finger. “God knows, this book got me through a lot.”
Her smile, soft and secret, is the same as mine when I look at my Lady Jessica collector’s edition. You never forget your first.
I clear my throat, jumping all the way in. “I’d like to introduce you to someone.”
She looks up, slightly dazed. I nudge her toward the counter, where Ash is trying to rub another nonexistent stain off the Formica.
I hold her by the elbow and pull her in front of him. “Momma, this is Ash. Ash, this is my momma, Bunny Thompson.”
He doesn’t even blink over her name. He just nods, gravely. “Nice to meet you.”
Momma smiles perfectly, a whirlwind of manners and questions about school and the bookstore.
He answers thoughtfully, matching her manner for manner, although glancing at me more than once. I can taste his confusion in the air. I beam, feeling my heart grow a little just by putting them in each other’s orbit.
Ash asks Blue if she’d like a coffee, and her nose wrinkles as she sneaks a look back at my cup. “Hard pass.”
His lip twitches, but he doesn’t press her.
Momma eventually exhausts all her questions, and I walk her, Blue, and two new tote bags stuffed to the brim all the way to the car. I help her put her bags in the trunk, and when I slam the door, she’s looking at me with a twist of her perfectly peony lips.
“So, Ash, is it?”
I flush head to toe, and don’t bother to conjure up a defense.
She shrugs, the movement fluid as she opens the driver’s-side door. “The eyeliner looks good on him.”