I scowled at the wall, scrubbing with more force than was necessary.
“Oh, come on, Tess. This shop is my home. Who wants to stay home forever?”
“Me. I love living at home, and I love living here.”
“But don’t you miss that … I don’t know. Adventure?”
“I’m not interested in adventure. I’m interested in stability. Comfort.”
He stopped scrubbing, turning to face me as he leaned on the handle again.
I studiously ignored him.
“You mean to say, you don’t do anything that makes you uncomfortable? When was the last time you did something that scared you?”
“This morning, when I came here to help you.”
A chuckle. I still wouldn’t look at him.
“I don’t know, Luke. I’m too busy to run off on adventures. I have my job here to think about, your mom to help. I take care of my dad. I like to take pretty pictures of flowers. And by the time I’m done with all that, there’s not a lot of time left to thrill-seek.” Or have a life.
He stilled. “I forgot you took care of your dad.”
“Yeah, well, you forget a lot of things,” I snapped at the wall.
But he didn’t notice. He’d already started scrubbing again. “It’s true. I have the memory of a goldfish—by the time I swim around the bowl, I forget everything I saw, heard, or tasted.”
Flake. Unreliable. Undependable. Unaware flake with too many muscles for his own good.
“How long do you think it’ll take us to finish painting?” I asked, annoyed at my annoyance and desperate to change the subject. Luke inspired that in me—the irrational urge to fight. I hated that urge.
Worse—I was beginning to realize that it was me who was the problem, not him.
“We should finish tomorrow, if we play it right. Man, I can’t wait for Mom to see this. Oh, and? I found a bunch of stuff in storage. I’ll show you when we finish for the day. Maybe you can use something for the installation.” He paused, and the sound of music and brushes on brick filled the space between us. “Have any ideas?”
“I was thinking something with succulents,” I said. “It’s so hot and sunny, I thought maybe passersby would find it fitting.”
“I like it.” The genuine enthusiasm in his voice disarmed me.
“We’ll see. Maybe there’s something in storage we can use. I’ve got some sketches, but I want to see what we find back there before committing.”
“Tess? With a plan at the ready? Never.”
I huffed a laugh.
“I have a good feeling about this,” he started. “I’ve been thinking … you know how Mom always talks about the old magazine feature Home and Garden did on my grandma?”
“I’ve stared at that framed magazine cover in the shop for ten years. It’s one of her proudest memories of her mother, I think.”
“I know. And I was thinking that maybe once we get things on track with the shop and find a groove with the window installations, we could approach some magazines.”
A smile spread as I imagined it. “Oh my God. She’d die. Like, you might actually give her a heart attack.”
He laughed. “Laney thinks it’s possible to land a feature, depending on how the window displays go.”
“No pressure,” I joked.
“If anyone can do it, it’s you,” he said, stripping me of the last of my armor. “Just say the word, and we can do whatever you want. Your wish is my command.”
I wish I hated you. I wish you’d be an ass. I wish you remembered kissing me.
I rolled my eyes at myself. I’d had a dozen boyfriends and a thousand kisses in the last ten years, but I couldn’t seem to remember a single one, except the one he didn’t.
Maybe the torch still burned because my wound had festered for so long, buried in my heart. Maybe it was because it had happened in a moment when I was vulnerable and lost. Or because I’d trusted him with words too raw and real to utter aloud. Or because he’d promised me something he never acknowledged again, leaving me feeling nothing but betrayal and pain in a time when I was already shattered.
I hadn’t been lying when I told Ivy I hadn’t thought about it in years. But the second I’d seen his face, I’d been transported back to that day when I’d stood almost exactly in that spot, waiting for him. And he’d promptly ignored me, making his way to Ivy for a kiss right there, right in front of me.
Ten years. Really, I needed to let it go. But the wound was the sort that never healed, the kind that flared when the seasons changed or a storm blew in. And the season was changing.
I wondered if it already had.
Luke lived by laws that offended the very foundation of what I believed in. He spoke of adventure like it was nirvana. My nirvana was security. And security was not found in risk, but in consistency.
But we could be different, and just because he was different didn’t mean he was wrong, no matter how much it felt like it was. The truth was that Luke was leading the charge in revamping the store, lending his generous muscles to the task. Even today, he’d come prepared, and that earned my respect even if it was tarnished a bit by my terrible attitude.
All you can control is your reaction, I told myself, an adage my mother had imposed on me.
And so I spent the next hours appreciating the view and reminding myself that good manners were made of small sacrifices.
By the time I finished caulking the second wall, Luke was right behind me, touching up my work, which was both annoying and thorough, the feelings negating each other.
I climbed off the ladder and stretched my back out, twisting against the ache. “All right, ready to prime?”
“Can’t prime, not until tomorrow. Brick’s gotta dry. But we should definitely have the whole space painted tomorrow.”
“Oh, good. I can help again, if you want.” I shuddered to think what I’d wear after the dramatics this morning and mourned the use of my cutest painting outfit on caulk.
“Hey, I’ll take all the help I can get,” he said with a sidelong smile, setting his caulk gun on a ladder step. “Come on—let me show you what I found in storage.”
Luke looked like a kid on his birthday, full of possibility and excitement, and when he passed, he snagged my hand as if it were the most natural thing, towing me toward the greenhouse.
My hand disappeared in his fist, and his wide back obstructed my view, but I followed him like I had the option not to, nearly two of my steps to his one. He pushed open the swinging double doors to the greenhouse and turned to head down the main aisle.
The greenhouse inhabited the space behind five buildings, an oasis teeming with flowers begging to be cut. Every morning, I walked into this place empty-handed and walked out with my arms full of an almost unimaginable bounty of fresh-cut flowers.
This was my happy place. The smell of soil and leaves and blooming flowers. The blanket of humidity. The sunlight filtering in through the glass roof and walls, bathing everything it touched. Mr. Bennet’s head popped up between vertical planters of lavender delphinium, offering a knowing smile and a flick of his eyes to where Luke had a hold of me. Kash jerked his chin at us in greeting as he pushed a wheelbarrow full of dirt down one of the side aisles, a similar smile on his face, though his was less innocent.