17. Fran
— ? —
Fran
The flower cooler is my favorite place on the farm.
It’s not glamorous, just a walk-in refrigeration unit tacked onto the processing shed, stacked floor to ceiling with buckets of cut stems waiting to be arranged.
But the air is cool and humid and honest, and the rows of color do something to my brain that people have never managed.
When everything else is too loud, I come here and sort flowers until the noise shuts up.
This morning I need it.
The Henderson order has ballooned again (mother of the bride, round three, God help us), and I still have two other weddings to pull for. Junie’s got the crew in the south field. Cooler duty falls to me.
And, apparently, to Logan.
“You don’t have to help with this,” I tell him at the entrance, already reaching for the first bucket. “It’s just stems.”
“I want to help.” He peers into the dim like it might bite. Then he glances at the buckets by the door, the way my hand goes to the handle, the way my belly has started to change my center of gravity whether I like it or not. “Those look awkward. Point, I’ll carry.”
“I’ve been lifting heavy things my whole pregnancy.”
“I know. I’m not saying you can’t.” He holds up both hands, a full surrender. “Offering, not prescribing. You tell me which ones. Otherwise I’ll just sort and stay out of your way.”
I sigh. Gesture at the nearest rack. “Fine. All the blush ranunculus, the white dahlias, anything in the coral family. Sort by stem length - tall left, short right.”
“Blush. White. Coral.” He nods like he’s taking an exam. “What’s the difference between blush and coral?”
“Blush is pink with a slight warmth. Coral has more orange in it.” I pull two stems and hold them up. “This is blush. This is coral.”
He squints. Concentrates so hard a line appears between his brows. “They look the same to me.”
I hold the two stems up to his face. “They’re completely different.”
He looks from one to the other, genuinely lost. “They’re both pink.”
“One is pink-pink and one is orange-pink. Look. Side by side.” I angle them toward the light. “See how the coral has that sunset quality?”
“I think I see it?” The upward lilt gives him away completely.
“You don’t see it,” I say, and it comes out fonder than I mean it to.
“I’m trying to see it.” He sounds so earnest that I turn back to the buckets before I do something embarrassing, like smile.
I laugh despite myself, which is infuriating, because I did not invite him in here to be charmed. “You’re hopeless. Sort by height. I’ll check your work.”
We go in. The door sighs shut behind us the way it always does, heavy, magnetic, a thick thunk I have heard a thousand times and never thought twice about.
The cooler hums. The air hits, cold enough to tighten my skin, not cold enough to kill anyone.
My nipples go traitorously precise inside my bra. I ignore them. I have flowers to save.
We settle into a rhythm. Buckets. Stems. The quiet wet sound of cut ends hitting water. He’s careful with them, which I should have expected and which I refuse to find attractive. Huge hands, ridiculous hands, handling ranunculus like they might bruise.
“This is kind of nice,” he says after a while. “The quiet. The colors.”
“It’s my thinking space.” I’m bent over dahlias, picking the best of them, trying not to notice that he’s drifted closer. Heat comes off him in a way the cooler can’t touch. “When everything gets too loud I come in here and just… exist. With the flowers.”
“I do that with the workshop.” He’s got a bucket of ranunculus and he’s examining them one by one, earnest as a priest. “Sawdust. Tools. Only place my brain slows down.”
“We’re both hiding in boxes, then.”
“At least yours has better scenery.” He holds up a stem like a question. “Coral or blush?”
“That’s peach.”
“There’s a peach?” He looks personally betrayed. “How many pinks are there?”
“Dozens. Blush, coral, peach, salmon, rose, hot pink, baby pink-”
“Stop. Please.” He’s grinning. I hate the grin. I do not hate the grin. “I thought furniture was complicated. Wood only comes in like six colors.”
“Wood comes in hundreds of colors.”
“Fine. But they’re all variations on brown. Brown is manageable. Pink is anarchy.”
I’m laughing again, and it echoes off the steel, and I realize with a nasty little lurch that this is the most fun I’ve had in months. Standing in a cold box arguing about pink with a man who is finally, finally letting me laugh at him.
The cold is doing its work. I can see it on him too, the way he keeps rolling his shoulders, the way his long sleeves are not quite enough.
When I reach past him for a bucket on the high rack, my arm brushes his chest. When he passes me stems, his fingers linger a second too long on the handoff, and I tell myself it’s because he’s cold and contact is warmth and that is all.
I do not step away. That is also, I tell myself, about the cold.
“You’re different than I remembered,” I say when the laughter thins.
“Different how?”
“Lighter, somehow. More-” I cast around for it. “Playful, maybe. You used to be so serious all the time.”
“I was terrified all the time,” he corrects, quiet. “Serious was just how it came out.” He sets the bucket down. “I’m still terrified, honestly. I’m trying not to let it run the show.”
“What are you terrified of now?”
“Right now?” He meets my eyes. Amber-gold. Too much. “That you’ll realize I’m not worth the effort. That I’ll do something to push you away again. That I’ll wake up tomorrow and you’ll be gone, and this time I won’t be able to find you.”
The honesty lands like a slap. I’m used to him hiding. I’m not used to him laying his fear out on the wet concrete like an offering I didn’t ask for.
“I’m not going to disappear again,” I say. “Whatever happens between us - I won’t just vanish.”
“You promise?”
“I promise.”
We stand there in the flower-scented cold, and the charge that’s been building since we walked in finally stops pretending it’s about ranunculus. Same pull as the workshop. Same stupid gravity. I am so tired of pretending I don’t feel it.
He takes a step closer. Warmth. I could lean into it and call it survival.
“Fran,” he says, and his voice has dropped into that register that does unspeakable things to my spine.
“Don’t.” I hold up a hand. It does not make him farther away. “Whatever you’re about to say, it’s going to complicate this.”
“It’s already complicated. Everything about us has always been complicated.”
“That’s not a reason to make it worse.”
“What if it wouldn’t be worse?” Closer. I can see the pulse in his throat. “What if it would just be honest?”
I should step back. I have been so careful. I have built such reasonable walls. His mouth is right there, and I am only human, and the baby gives a slow unhelpful roll like even it is tired of my principles.
“If you kiss me,” I say, “it doesn’t mean we’re okay.”
“I know.” He doesn’t move closer. He’s letting me set every term, and somehow that undoes me more than if he’d reached for me.
“It doesn’t mean I’ve forgiven you.” My voice isn’t as steady as I want it.
“I know that too,” he says quietly.
“It would just mean I wanted you to kiss me. And that’s all it would mean.” Which is a lie, and we both know it, and he still doesn’t move.
I turn to grab another bucket because I need my hands busy and I need him not to see my face, and I turn too close.
Chest to chest. My belly against the hard line of him.
His heat punching through the cold like a dare.
We both freeze. His hands hover, then land at my waist like they were always going to.
I can feel him breathing. I can feel that he’s already hard, because of course he is, because we have always been like this, even when we hated it.
“Fran,” he says again, wrecked on the way in.
“Oh, fuck it,” I say, and kiss him.
There is nothing careful about it, nothing tentative in it.
It’s months of not touching, detonating in a refrigerated box that smells like ranunculus.
His mouth opens on a sound I feel in my cunt, and then those huge hands are in my hair and my back hits the shelving and a bucket rattles and neither of us cares.
He kisses like he’s been starving with a full pantry.
I kiss like I am going to deny this the second it’s over, so I had better take everything now.
“Cold,” I gasp against his mouth, which is a lie; I am burning.
“I know. I’ve got you.” His thigh slots between mine, and I rock down on it without permission from my brain, and he swears into my throat. “Fuck. You - come here. Closer.”
“This doesn’t mean anything.”
“I know.” He’s got his hands under my dress now, up the backs of my thighs, calluses scraping, and I’m already wet, embarrassingly, obviously, the kind of wet you can’t blame on the weather. His breath stutters out of him when his fingers find it. “Jesus Christ. You’re - Fran.”
“Don’t fish. Your hand is on my ass in a flower cooler.”
He huffs a laugh that’s mostly a groan, and then he kisses me again, hungrier, and I fist his shirt and drag him in until my belly is smashed between us and I can feel his cock against my hip through his jeans, thick and rude and not even a little sorry.
“We don’t have to-” he starts.
“Say we don’t have to one more time and I will put you on blush-coral duty until you die.” I bite his lower lip. “I want you. That’s the whole speech. Clothes stay on. We are not doing a production. Someone could come looking.”
His eyes go dark. “Quiet, then.”
“Can you keep quiet, Davis?” I breathe it against his jaw, half a challenge.
His thumb drags a slow line over my hip. “Guess you’re about to find out how much you trust me.”
I set my teeth into his shoulder instead of answering, which is answer enough.
He sinks straight down to the concrete.