“She does.”
“Well, regular roses only last about a week. If you buy four-dozen roses, the amount that comes in that large hatbox you sent, you’d have to spend a minimum of two-hundred-and-fifty dollars. In a year, that’s thirteen-thousand dollars for weekly roses. So six hundred is actually a bargain.”
Max grinned. “Why do I have a feeling you’ve said that a few hundred times before?”
I laughed. “I definitely have.”
“How did you get into that line of work?”
“I always knew I wanted to own my own business. I just didn’t know what kind. During college and grad school, I worked at a florist. One of my favorite customers was Mr. Benson, an eighty-year-old man. He came in every single Monday to buy his wife flowers during the first year I worked there. He’d been giving her fresh roses every week for their entire fifty-year marriage. Most of that time, he’d grown the flowers himself in a small greenhouse in their yard. But after his wife had a stroke, they’d moved to a retirement home because she needed more help than he could handle alone. After that, he started buying her weekly flowers at the store. One day he came in and mentioned he was going to have to cut back and only bring her flowers once a month because the co-payments on his wife’s new medicines were so expensive. He said it would be the first time in more than half a century that she didn’t have fresh roses on her bedside. So I started researching how I could extend the life of cut flowers, hoping I could find a way for Mr. Benson’s wife’s roses to last longer between his trips to the florist. I wound up learning a lot about the preservation process, and things just sort of took off from there. Eventually I opened an online store and started selling arrangements out of my house. It was a slow start until a celebrity with twelve-million followers on Instagram placed an order and posted about how much she loved them. Things snowballed from there. Within a month, I’d moved production from my living room and kitchen to a small shop, and now, a few years later, we have three production facilities and eight boutique showrooms. We’ve also just started to franchise the brand in Europe.”
“Damn.” Max lifted his brows. “You did that all by yourself?”
I nodded proudly. “I did. Well, with my best friend, Maggie. She helped me get it off the ground. Now she owns a piece of the company, too. I couldn’t have done it without her.”
He looked over his shoulder and glanced around the room. “Beauty and brains? There’s got to be a line of guys around here somewhere that want to kick my ass for getting to sit with you right now.”
He’d meant it as a compliment and to be funny, yet my smile wilted for the first time. The reality of why I was out on a date tonight hit me smack in the face. I’d gotten caught up in the excitement of the evening and hadn’t stopped to think that I’d have to tell Max about Gabriel. Frannie had filled my blind date in on my situation, so I hadn’t needed to consider how or when I would bring it up there. But I suppose the how or when with Max had just presented itself to me on a silver platter, so there was no time like the present.
I smiled pensively. “Well…to be completely honest, I am sort of seeing someone.”
Max dropped his head and lifted one hand to cover his heart. “And here I thought the arrow through my heart was Cupid’s. You’ve wounded me, Georgia.”
I laughed at his dramatics. “Sorry. It feels odd to bring it up, but I thought I should be upfront about my situation.”
He sighed. “Lay it on me. What’s the deal with this other dude whose heart I’m going to break?”
“Well, I…uh…” Damn, this wasn’t easy to explain. “I guess you could say I’m in an open relationship.”
Max’s brows rose. “You guess?”
“Sorry…no.” I nodded. “I am. I’m in an open relationship.”
“Why does it sound like there’s more to it than just you’re dating someone without a commitment?”
I chewed on my bottom lip. “We were actually engaged.”
“But you’re not now?”
I shook my head. “It’s kind of a complicated story, but I feel like I should share it.”
“Okay…”
“Gabriel and I met when I was working on my MBA. He was an undergrad English professor at NYU, and I went to Stern Business School there. At the time, he had just begun working on a novel. Gabriel taught to pay the bills, but he wanted to be a writer. Eventually he sold his book to a publisher, along with a deal for a second one he’d write someday, and we got engaged. Everything was going well until about a year ago when his book was published. It didn’t do well. In fact, it pretty much flopped—low sales and terrible reviews. Gabriel got pretty down about it. Not long after, he found out that the parents he’d thought were his biological parents were actually his adoptive parents. Then his best friend since childhood died in a car accident.” I sighed. “Anyway…long story short, Gabriel felt really lost and decided to take a visiting-professor position in England for sixteen months. He never even discussed it with me before accepting the job. He said he needed to find himself. With everything he’d been through, I understood. But then a few days before he left, I got another surprise: He told me he wanted to have an open relationship while he was gone.”
“And everything between the two of you was fine before that?”
“I had thought so. I work a lot—more than I need to or really should—and sometimes Gabriel thought it was too much and complained. That was probably our biggest issue. But we weren’t a couple who fought all the time, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Max rubbed his bottom lip with his thumb. “How long’s he been gone?”
“Eight months.”
“Have you seen each other during that time?”
“Just once. About six weeks ago. My company opened a franchise boutique in Paris. I went for the grand opening, and he met me there for the weekend.”
“And you’ve both been seeing other people since he left?”
I shook my head. “Apparently he has been, but I haven’t been too much.” I bit my lip again. “Adam was actually only my second date in many years. The first was a guy I met on Tinder two weeks ago, which lasted for coffee only. To be honest, I didn’t even want to go out tonight. But I’m trying really hard to make some much-needed changes in my life, now that I’m on my own. So I made a list of things I’d been putting off, and since dating was at the top of that list, I sort of forced myself to show up.”
Max’s eyes jumped back and forth between mine. “Did you have to force yourself to come to the Garden?”
“No, just the opposite. I was trying to force myself not to come.”
“Why would you do that?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
He stared at me some more. “When are you seeing him again?”
“We don’t have any more plans to reconnect in person until after he’s finished in London and moves back to New York. So I guess December, when he gets back.”
“Are you just looking to get even with this guy because he’s dating? Or are you really looking to see what else is out there for yourself?”