There’s that…but I prefer memory loss.
Khloe was right. I can’t work at a flower shop, if at all ever, because I can’t stop sneezing. Especially when my Aunt Sharon keeps shoving daisies in my face, asking me if they smell fresh or not.
“Aunt Sharon, I swear to God, they’re fine.” She examines the baby pink flowers meticulously as if she doesn’t fully believe me but wants to keep asking for my opinion anyway. “I’m going to leave if you don’t stop staring at them.”
Hazel eyes encased in wrinkles of stress and too many decades of running this business herself flick up to me. “I’m very picky on what goes out. This is—”
“My income. My business. My future.” I bob my head, hearing it a million times. “I know. Did you hire that new girl yet?”
She tsks, wrinkling her nose as she does. “No. The girl’s a pinhead. She didn’t know the difference between a zinnia and a dahlia.”
“Aren’t those similar looking?” I’m answered with a heavy glare. “Okay…”
“I said I needed someone with experience,” she grumbles back, shaking the poor—I think they’re daisies—flowers and causing a rain of petals to rain to the tiled floors.
“Couldn’t you just of trained her? Was she good at anything else?”
She shrugs nonchalantly and pivots, heading back to her long metal table filled with mountains of pink florets that all need to be neatly organized centerpieces. Something that will take twice as long because my Aunt Sharon is painstakingly precise about anything she sends out of her shop. Which has definitely kept her in business but with technology and people getting lazy as a whole, no one calls orders in. They want it at their fingertips and delivered.
Sighing at my aunt’s lack of hires, I come to her side and begin splitting the ends. “Who’s helping you take these to the venue on Friday?”
“I dunno,” she grumbles. “I was thinking about asking that sweet sandwich boy who brings me lunch every day.”
My brows knit, because again, she needs to hire someone to assist her with the day-to-day. “Who?”
“Lorenzo. His father owns the grinder shop on Fifth.”
“Is he strong enough to—”
“Honey, that boy has muscles that’ll lift this whole table up,” she muses with the first smile I’ve seen from her all day. “Don’t worry about him picking up these flower arrangements.”
“Did he at least agree? I’ll get someone to—”
“Don’t you dare waste your money on some swindling asswipes that are going to toss my flowers in a truck and drive away like a bunch of maniacs.” She pats my bicep as the bell to the front door rings, alluding that a customer has come in. “Go see who that is, will ya?”
“Sure.” I do what I’m told, heading out from the back to the register and feening for another plan to get Aunt Sharon some well-needed assistance.
All the women that apply are dainty and sweet, deeming flowers to just make themselves look beautiful and not in need of a lot of care and work. Aunt Sharon built this business with her own two hands, and I’ll be damned if the twenty-first century and technology bring her down.
Breeching through the door frame to the front of the flower shop, I glance up to the suit and the broad shoulders that fill it out. My sight falls into focus, and that’s when all the air in my lungs abandons my chest in one quick and merciless second.
No.
There’s no fucking way…
I rapidly blink a few times at the supernatural being dressed in a navy-blue suit and matching tie. The dark brown hair that is impeccably styled and cut in place. The moss-green eyes that gape back at me like he’s just as stunned as I am that we’re facing each other again after about a decade.
His lips descend into a deep-seated frown that I’ve imagined a million times looking over the other side of my phone.
But not this.
This can’t be right.
How did I not know he lived in the same city?
Because he half-ass answers your questions.
“Well, she does live in and breathe, after all,” Cal deadpans with zero amusement, humor, or even fucks to give in his tone.