Chance to Bloom

by Dillon Hunter

  Offending his new employee and then hitting on him within five minutes of their first meeting was probably a little much.

  If anyone was going to throw stones about being gay, it wasn’t going to be Jack, though. And certainly not at Ethan, with the bright eyes and easy smile that looked as if he could become friends with anyone—even if at the moment those eyes happened to be shooting daggers in Jack’s direction as Ethan waited for an answer.

  “No,” Jack said as soon as he could get his mouth working again. “Hell, no. Look, I know we just met, but I’m not that kind of asshole. In my line of work, the only thing that matters is if the guy next to you is competent and trustworthy. I don’t give a shit about anything else. The only reason I asked about any of it was because you’re just so… different from what I expected.”

  Jack shoved a hand back through his close-cropped hair and exhaled a long breath. He’d planned on dealing with his dad’s shop without any emotion—without feeling one way or another about wrapping things up, but just staying focused and getting it done. From the moment he’d walked in, though, all he’d done was feel—first about his mom, then his dad… and now Ethan.

  And all those unwelcome feelings only served to make him aware of how much he’d lost over the years.

  He’d lost his parents, obviously, and thought he’d made peace with that. But now? Finding out about a whole new side of his dad that he’d thought had been extinguished when his mom had passed away? It almost felt like he’d lost both of them all over again.

  For a moment, when he’d first walked through that door and seen Ethan smiling at him, it had felt like he’d been gifted some long-forgotten warmth back into his life. But now that had been taken away, too.

  No, not just “taken away”—damaged… both by Jack’s thoughtless words and by his own conflicted thoughts and memories of his father.

  It had been wrong of Jack to put Ethan in the middle of all that, and he felt like a complete ass because of it. He should’ve just kept his mouth shut, the way he usually did. But he hadn’t, so… how in the hell was he supposed to fix it now?

  Ethan stared at him for several long seconds without replying to Jack’s fumbling attempt to undo the damage he’d caused, then finally seemed to relax a little. He sat down in the creaky office chair, and even though he didn’t seem to be mad, he still wasn’t smiling… or even looking in Jack’s direction.

  Obviously, Jack was going to have to choose his words a little more carefully now that he was out in the civilian world. He’d become accustomed to communicating with a bunch of loud, crude soldiers, but Jack could tell that Ethan was neither loud nor crude. He definitely didn’t have a problem sticking up for himself, though. Jack just hated that he’d made Ethan feel like he’d needed to be on the defensive.

  “What were you expecting, anyway?” Ethan asked after a minute, finally making eye contact again.

  Jack hesitated. He wanted—needed—to do a better job of choosing his words. He might not know how to make things better with Ethan, but he damn sure didn’t want to make them worse. “I don’t know. Someone who was older, I guess. And more… I don’t know. More like…”

  “More like your dad.”

  Ethan said the words flatly, arms crossed over his chest. It wasn’t really a question, but Jack nodded anyway. That was exactly the kind of person he would have thought Gary would’ve hired—someone who shared Gary’s beliefs, his opinions, someone who understood his gruff and grumpy demeanor. Not this cute, nice little wisp of a man whose personality and smile lit up the whole shop and made it feel welcoming and bright.

  Jack literally couldn’t picture the two men working together and getting along. His brain just couldn’t fit those pieces together in any way that made sense.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” Jack admitted. “But you seem about as different from him as a person could get.” He paused to give Ethan a tentative smile, a peace offering. “It’s at least one thing that we probably have in common.”

  “Maybe.” Ethan shrugged, clearly not convinced. “Maybe not so much. I got along with your dad really well, and I had—have—a tremendous amount of respect for him. He always had a way of knowing just what I needed to hear, even if I didn’t always like hearing it. He was like a fa—” Ethan looked away, swallowing back the word he’d been about to say. After a moment, he looked back at Jack and continued, “Gary was like family. As much a friend as a boss. And I miss him.”

  Now it was Jack’s turn to be surprised. It seemed like Ethan had admired—and now even missed—some of the very qualities about Gary that Jack had never been able to tolerate.

  He didn’t know how to respond to Ethan’s full-throated defense of Gary. It was almost mind-boggling.

  And maybe Jack was just biased by his own childhood experiences, but… how? How had this sharp, sexy, radiant man managed to be friends with the sour old guy that Jack remembered from his childhood? Even if Jack discounted the huge age difference, what on earth could the two of them have possibly had in common? Just… flowers?

  Really?

  “We are talking about the same Gary Davis, right?” Jack asked, a weak attempt to make light of the subject. “The same guy who told me to walk it off when I fell out of a tree and broke my arm? When I was seven years old? That’s the Gary who was your friend?”

  Ethan snorted a little, and the corners of his mouth turned up like he might have more to say on the subject, but much to Jack’s disappointment, Ethan just turned to face the blank computer screen on the cluttered old desk with a small nod.

  “Ethan?” Jack prompted.

  “I can only speak about the man that I knew,” Ethan said, quietly. “Maybe your dad mellowed a little as he got older.”

  Jack was pretty sure his dad had never mellowed—at least, not based on their stiff and infrequent conversations over the years—but then again, Ethan was the one who’d actually seen the guy every day.

  Actually worked with him.

  Who’d actually known him.

  Jack’s throat tightened as he thought of the possibility—no, the certainty—that this man, this radiant, seemingly sweet and perfectly honest stranger had known that other side of Gary, a side that Jack would’ve said had been buried for nearly twenty years.

  Had Ethan’s smile brought it back out in the old man? Was it his open, friendly, welcoming personality that had made Gary feel close to him in a way that he’d forgotten how to feel with his own son?

  Jack blinked hard, determined not to get choked up. Ethan didn’t have the answers Jack was looking for.

  Nobody did, really.

  And anyway, neither of them was likely to change their opinion on Gary anytime soon.

  Regardless of the pull he felt toward Ethan, there was really only one thing left for Jack to do. He needed to get the hell out of there before he could find a way to fit more of his foot into his mouth. Before all these unwelcome emotions that had blindsided him got the best of him.

  “I guess anything is possible,” Jack said brusquely, straightening up from where he’d been leaning against the doorjamb. “Look, I should probably get going. I don’t want to be in your way. I just thought I’d introduce myself before I went up to my dad’s apartment. I’ll probably be up there for most of the day if you need anything.”

  “No worries,” Ethan said, nodding and giving him a look of sympathy that stirred up even more of those emotions Jack wasn’t equipped to handle. “I’ll be down here if you want any company. Whenever you’re ready, we can start going over the paperwork and day-to-day stuff with the shop.”

  If Ethan was holding a grudge over their awkward first meeting, at least he was being professional about it. They’d had their little misunderstanding, followed by a couple of minor disagreements, and now… hopefully they were good? The warmth in Ethan’s gaze said yes, and Jack was just going to assume that was the case unless Ethan told him otherwise.

  He was going to hope that was the case.

  Jack might not
really know Ethan, but he liked the way Ethan had made him feel—at least before Jack had opened his mouth and ruined it. Calm. Relaxed. Peaceful. They were new feelings for Jack, and he wanted more of them. And honestly, he respected a man who could speak his mind but still be open enough to other opinions that he didn’t get too worked up about it.

  Maybe that was the kind of personality it took to work with Gary for so many years.

  Or maybe Ethan was just a good actor.

  Maybe he was a damn saint.

  Jack couldn’t tell, and for a first meeting—despite the pull he felt to earn more of Ethan’s sunshine—he didn’t really need to know the depths of the other man’s soul. It wasn’t like they were going to be spending that much time together, and even if the thought came with a pang of disappointment, Jack had to remember that he was just there to figure out how to unload the flower shop as quickly as humanly possible so he could get on with the rest of his uncertain future.

  Jack looked around the small living room of his dad’s old apartment. The beige recliner that he was pretty sure was at least fifteen years old. The plaid couch that even Jack—who had lived in a barracks for years—could objectively say was hideous.

  It was all very 1980s, and all very Gary Davis.

  Everywhere Jack looked, every detail of the apartment reminded him that he was intruding on his dad’s space, that he wasn’t supposed to be there.

  And he wasn’t, really.

  Jack’s life was supposed to be in Quantico, in the Marines. Gary was the one who was supposed to be here—in his shabby old apartment with the ugly, threadbare furniture.

  Jack took a few steps to the kitchen table and picked up the stack of unopened mail his father’s accountant had been bringing in. Even without opening any of it, it was easy to recognize that most of the envelopes in his hand contained bills. He shuffled through the envelopes. Bills from the hospital, from the funeral home, from credit card companies.

  Jesus.

  With a heavy sigh, he tossed the stack of bills—still unopened—back where he’d found them. There was no way he was up to going through all of that at the moment.

  He glanced back at the door, half-expecting the old man to come barging through and demanding to know what Jack was doing there; telling Jack to keep his mouth shut and mind his own business, like he’d done so many times in the past.

  But of course that wasn’t going to happen. Gary was dead.

  The reality was that he wasn’t intruding in his father’s space right now. The furniture that he didn’t want to sit on and the mail that he didn’t want to open—the desk in the corner and everything in it, the clothes in the closet—all of it was his.

  The apartment.

  The shop downstairs.

  Ethan, the cute-as-fuck employee.

  All Jack’s now.

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. How hard could it possibly be to go and sort through his dad’s old stuff? When he’d been deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, he’d seen awful things—things that had made him angry and sick to his stomach, things that had made him cry, things that had made him question everything he’d ever known. He would have thought that those years of training would come in handy for dealing with the tough shit in life, that nothing could compare to the feeling of being in a war zone.

  He’d naively thought that it might take a couple of hours to get rid of the things he didn’t want, and then he’d spend the rest of his time living rent-free in the little apartment… at least until he sold the place and moved on.

  Now, though? Looking around and seeing it all first-hand was a little overwhelming. The feeling that his dad was actually watching him—judging Jack, like he always had—was palpable. And the thought of spending the night in his dad’s bed, with his dad’s old sheets?

  A shiver went up Jack’s spine and his knees buckled, causing him to reach out for the doorframe in support.

  “Jesus Christ, could you at least give me a couple of days before you start in, Dad?”

  He wasn’t sure why he was feeling so uneasy, or if it was particularly healthy to be talking out loud to his dead father, but sane or not, it made him feel a little better to at least acknowledge the feeling, to gain a little space and perspective from the memory-or-spirit-or-aura-or-whatever that the apartment held.

  Two things were for certain, though.

  First, he was going to need a little more time than he’d anticipated to go through everything—hell, he was going to need time just to psych himself up for the task.

  And second, there was no way in hell he was spending the night in this apartment. Not this night, anyway. Maybe he’d manage it in a day or two… or three. But right now?

  Hell-to-the-no.

  The place was dark and confining enough in the daylight, and while Jack didn’t really believe in ghosts or think that his dad was actually watching him, he also wasn’t in any rush to put those beliefs to the test.

  No, better to just stay at a hotel for a day or two—maybe even a week. That way, he could take his time getting the place organized and cleaned out. He’d burn some fucking sage if he needed to—whatever it took—but he’d get through it somehow.

  Hopefully.

  Starting tomorrow, though. Tomorrow, he could deal with all of it. The apartment, the flower shop, whatever Ethan wanted to show him—although, God, maybe he could keep his fucking foot out of his mouth the next time?

  Maybe not give Ethan the impression that he was a raging asshole?

  Maybe?

  All of that shit could wait until tomorrow, though. For the moment, for today, he just wanted out.

  Out of the apartment.

  Out of the unwanted obligations his dad’s death had thrust upon him.

  Out of Bridgewater.

  Chapter 5

  Ethan

  Ethan didn’t normally waste time sitting in his car before work, but there had been nothing normal about the past twenty-four hours. Now, rather than rush in to unlock the door and get a head start on his day like he usually did, he found himself hesitating.

  Even though he’d been mentally preparing for Jack to arrive ever since Gary passed away, it had still come as a shock to actually see him there, up close, in person. In the blink of an eye, Jack’s presence had changed the whole comforting dynamic of running the shop, disrupting a routine that had finally started to feel familiar to him and Frankie even though Jack hadn’t set foot back in the shop for the rest of the day.

  Now, working with—working for—someone new wasn’t just a thought, or a hypothetical, one-of-these-days kind of thing. It was reality. It was fact.

  It was happening, and Ethan wasn’t sure that he was completely ready.

  And he certainly hadn’t been prepared for Jack to be so… hot. To have the sort of primal magnetism that had immediately sent a jolt straight to Ethan’s cock. To be stuck in Ethan’s head ever since the moment they’d met.

  Then again, he hadn’t really been prepared for anything that had happened over the previous few weeks.

  Somehow, though, he’d managed to keep going anyway.

  And now, just when Ethan had started to feel like he was maybe finding his balance again, Jack had come along and thrown him for a loop.

  There was no denying that there had been some kind of… spark or chemistry or something that had passed between them when Jack had first walked into the shop. Ethan hadn’t imagined that hot look in Jack’s eyes… had he?

  He was pretty sure Jack was straight, but… that look.

  No, that had happened.

  Almost certainly.

  Well… probably.

  But then there had been Jack’s awkward gay comment, and—while Ethan was pretty sure Jack hadn’t been trying to offend him—for him, at least, it had certainly cooled down all the heat that had come before. Not to mention the fact that the whole incident weighed heavily on the Jack-is-straight side of the scale, which—private fantasies aside—was another heat dampener.
>
  Probably for the best. Especially since the way Jack had fallen all over himself to backtrack and reassure Ethan had been at least a little endearing.

  Maybe more than a little, actually.

  But no matter how unbelievably and undeniably sexy his new boss was, Ethan had to stay focused. Getting Jack up to speed with the business had to be his number one priority. Jack was his boss, for God’s sake, and no doubt doing his best to deal with his own grief.

  The little fantasies Ethan had been letting himself indulge in for the last twenty-four hours were really going to have to stop.

  Soon.

  For now, waking up in the morning, going to work, and making the best of the situation was what he needed to do—it was all he could do, really. He just needed to stay focused on settling down into a normal routine again.

  It was just unnerving not knowing what the new normal would be, or exactly how Jack would fit in with Ethan and Frankie’s comfortable little world.

  For all the little similarities Ethan had immediately spotted between Jack and Gary—the intense look; the quiet determination; the dry, almost dark, sense of humor—there were apparently some pretty big differences, too. Jack had made it seem so, anyway.

  Ethan just hoped the differences wouldn’t be too much for him to handle.

  He’d spent nearly every minute since Jack had left the shop the morning before thinking about it—how to handle things, what to do, what to say—but by the end of the day, he still didn’t have any clear answers. He’d kept himself up for most of the night worrying, too.

  And then Ethan had spent a little extra time thinking of… other things with Jack.

  When his alarm had gone off that morning, though, he’d reminded himself that he would get through this new transition. He might even—as hard as it was to imagine—like Jack’s way of managing things, just as much as he had with Gary. And if Ethan was feeling really ambitious, he might even be able to push aside his hormones and get over the distraction of Jack’s chiseled, sculpted looks and mouthwatering body for long enough to get some work done.