Chapter Twelve
Darcy
The trick to making a bouquet is picking a focal flower, then filling in the space around it with complimentary ones.” Frank peers over his glasses at the abomination in front of me. “Hm,” he says.
I poke at one of the daisies hanging lopsided. “No need to mince words.”
“I’m not mincing them—I’m finding them.” His eyes narrow. “I’ve never seen anyone use sage palm like that before.”
“Which one is the sage palm?”
He points at the thick clump of leafy greens I thought might add some much-needed texture. Instead, it looks like my bouquet has an incurable disease. Which is sort of fitting, but—
“Oh.”
I’ve been working steadily on my arrangement for the past forty-five minutes while Frank moves around his store, pruning and organizing and whipping up flawless-looking bouquets with a few quick flicks of his fingers. I’m convinced he might be part woodland fairy or nature nymph.
“I feel like I should compensate you for the flowers I’ve wasted.” I pull out an oversize sunflower and replace it with a bunch of lavender. It doesn’t help. “I’m not sure this one will sell. You don’t have to put it in your display case if you don’t want to.”
Frank laughs. “Oh, honey. Of course I’m not going to put it in the display case. It’s awful.”
A surprised laugh shakes my shoulders. “Fine. I’ll keep it, then. I’m going to take it home and put it in a place of honor.” I shove the sunflower back in the middle. “It’s going on my nightstand, so I can look at it every morning when I wake up, and every night before I go to sleep.”
Though I haven’t been indulging in that mortal habit lately. Instead of sleeping, I’ve been making contingency plans. Drafting exit strategies. Meditating in the middle of the living room with Tater Tot’s head in my lap, trying to dissect the pieces of the vision I have.
Wet asphalt. Cracked glasses. Music coming from somewhere far away. A flickering neon sign, glowing orange in the melting light.
When, when, when.
Frank takes off his glasses, still chuckling, and wipes his wrist across his forehead. He leaves a smudge of dirt behind, and I smile fondly at him.
He slides his glasses back up his nose and reaches for my flower disaster, plucking things at random.
“Replace these with, ah—” He reaches behind him for one of the massive buckets on the wall. “Try gypsophila.”
At my blank look, he grins.
“Baby’s breath,” he explains. “And then—” He limps his way over to a massive bucket tucked under the workbench, bending at his waist.
“I keep thistle in here,” he calls, his top half hidden by the container.
“Most florists don’t use it in their bouquets on account of the sharp spikes, but I like the texture.
” He stands back up, his fist clenched around a few twisted stalks of thin, spidery-looking flowers.
Each has a small purple bud on the end, the leaves curling up, almost as if it’s protecting itself.
Frank extends one to me, and I hold it carefully, examining it. “They’re beautiful.”
“Some think they’re prickly, but I have a fondness for them.” His lips quirk up. “We can add some of these to your bouquet. With the lavender, they’ll look lovely.”
He dismantles my arrangement efficiently, laying out all the flowers on the worktable while humming a disjointed tune. I drop my hip against the counter and watch him.
“Have you always loved flowers?”
His hands still for a moment. A half-second pause before he resumes.
“My wife did.” He places the thistle back into the mason jar I’ve been using as a vase, then the lavender in front of it.
“I started making bouquets for her with the wildflowers I found along the road on my way home from work. Kept at it enough that she got it in her head I should open my own shop. She said—” He blows out a blustery sigh.
“Well. She said if I loved flowers so much, maybe I should spend more of my time with them. But I don’t think she realized the only reason I ever loved flowers is because she did. ”
He adds the baby’s breath, then rotates the jar to show me.
“I love it,” I tell him. “Much better than my sunflower.”
My sunflower, which Tater Tot is now holding clamped in his mouth, his head on his paws as he stares out the window.
There’s a pair of cardinals on the bike rack just outside, taunting him.
He’s been tracking their progress as they hop back and forth between the ledge and the pot of wildflowers, chirping happily.
“She was right, though, wasn’t she? You love your shop.”
His smile flickers and then fades. “I didn’t open it until after she passed.” He shakes his head. “I waited too long. She should have been able to see me do it.”
I hesitate, then reach out and press my palm over the back of his hand. I don’t have much experience with comfort, but my heart is in my throat and I need to try. “I think she’d like that you’re doing the thing you love most. What a beautiful way to honor her memory.”
“She’d probably just be happy I proved her right.”
“Maybe a little bit of that, too.”
I have no idea if I’m saying the right things, but maybe that doesn’t matter so much. Maybe I just need to be here in the space next to him, listening.
Frank flips his hand in mine and squeezes back.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
Pressure burns across the bridge of my nose. I shake my head. “Please don’t thank me, I—”
The rest of my sentence is swallowed up by the bang of the front door.
It swings open so fast the handle makes a dent against the wall, the arrangements stacked neatly in the bay window rattling on impact.
Tater Tot lifts his head, growling, the sunflower still clenched between his teeth.
He looks like some demonic character from the Hundred Acre Woods.
The door closes behind Gabriel with a snap, some leaves from the street blowing in with him.
“Good to see you as always, Spud,” he tells the dog, then his eyes lift to mine.
Three days and unfortunately the shock of seeing him hasn’t worn thin.
I feel like I’m jumping into that river all over again.
His mouth twitches down, and a line forms between his brows. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“Have you?”
He nods and steps closer, leaning up against the edge of the table I’m working on. My stomach does something diabolical. “Well, here I am.”
“Here you are,” he says, his voice low. Almost to himself. I force a smile and busy my hands with some of the thistle.
I haven’t been avoiding him. I’ve just been …
occupying myself elsewhere. Wandering the streets with Tater Tot.
Making arrangements with Frank. Carving lopsided pumpkins and sampling the various muffins at the bakery down the street.
Trying to force my undead body into a sleep it doesn’t need, only to have vague dreams I don’t want of calloused hands and ink-stained skin.
I wake up winded and wanting, twisted in my borrowed blankets.
It’s one of the trickier aspects of being immortal. How humanity clings to us in the quiet moments. I don’t need to sleep, but I crave it. The same way I crave cigarettes and slices of cake and the attention of the man standing across from me.
Dangerous. All of it.
“Would you like to do an arrangement as well?” Frank asks Gabriel as he pulls an empty vase from one of the top shelves. “It’s been a while since you put together something pretty.”
Gabriel’s rough voice in my ear, his hands firm at my hips. So fucking pretty. That’s what he said, his voice curved around it like a curse. Like the very idea of it pissed him off. Like he could barely stand it.
I’ve done my best not to think about it, but when he doesn’t bother to look at Frank and keeps staring at me instead—
My hands start to shake. Look away, I want to say. You’ll see too much. I trail my fingers restlessly across the tops of the baby’s breath, but I can’t feel the petals.
Beneath the workbench, Tater Tot nudges me with his nose.
“It’s a nice bouquet,” Gabriel offers. I only look at him briefly before my gaze darts away again. The sinking sensation hasn’t vanished. It’s only gotten worse. I’m caught in a vortex of my own making.
“Thanks,” I manage. My mouth feels too dry. “Frank fixed it.”
“He’s good at that.”
I glance around the shop. Gabriel is standing too close. The trembling in my hands has gotten worse. I could use a Frank-shaped buffer, but he’s nowhere to be found. “Where did he go?”
Gabriel rubs at the back of his neck, squinting at the open door that leads to a storage cellar.
Frank has been creaking up and down those old stairs all afternoon, fetching various terra-cotta pots, brass watering cans, and mysterious bags of bulbs.
He said he’s in his seasonal transition, and apparently that means more mums.
“I asked him if he had any yellow mums,” Gabriel says, apparently familiar with this routine. “Said I wanted to put them on the stoop of the bar.”
“Did you lie to an octogenarian so you could get me alone?”
“Technically, he’s only seventy-eight.”
“Did you send a seventy-eight-year-old man down a set of narrow stairs in the near dark to fetch imaginary mums you have no intention of actually using?”
Gabriel looks offended. “I plan on using them.”
“I doubt that.” I duck under the worktable. Tater Tot is plucking the petals off the sunflower with his teeth. I jerk my head toward the open cellar door. I can’t shake this buzzy, anxious feeling. “Go check on him for me, would you?”
Tater Tot bounds to his feet, trotting happily across the room and slinking through the narrow crack in the door. I listen to his paws clunk down the steps, and then Frank’s raspy laugh when he gets to the bottom.
“I want the mums,” Gabriel insists. “They’re very festive.”
“Maybe you should have gone down there and gotten them yourself, then,” I mumble, flexing my hands open and then closed, distracted. The buzzing feels more like a burning now. Like I’m passing my palms directly over an open flame. “Why were you looking for me?”
“Your list,” he answers. “I need a copy.”