“Okay.”
He hangs up, and I lock my phone and return to my cold dinner.
(He didn’t say he loves me.)
Tracy’s shop is in chaos, and it’s only one in the afternoon. My shift has just begun, with five hours left on the clock, and our flowery world is falling apart. (Just like everything else. Go figure.)
I check the clock for the billionth time since arriving an hour ago. One-oh-five. Great. It’s only been two minutes since I last checked, and it feels like an eternity.
“Beeeeeee,” Tracy sings from the back of the shop.
I drop the calculator and receipts I’m holding and bend to her will. “Yes, ma’am?”
She is frazzled, her hair tied back with a loose ribbon (probably from the ribbon rack). She nearly drops a bubble vase as she tries to carry three to the sink with one hand. “Oh, Bee,” she says again.
(Did I mention she’s crazy?)
“Yes?” I repeat, a little more hesitant.
“I think I’ve made a grave mistake.”
“What?” I ask drily. (The number of times she says this to me every week is innumerable. And it’s always grave.)
“You remember that funeral I had you book for this week?”
I squint. “Was it the Jameson funeral or the Carlos funeral?”
“Jameson.” She sighs. “Well. I forgot that Ludwig is out of the country this week and he won’t be back until Saturday. The funeral is Friday.”
“We…can’t take it?”
Tracy grunts, scrubbing away at the vase she nearly broke. “It has to be there at seven in the morning, my dear, and we all know what I’m doing at seven in the morning.”
I rub my forehead. “Right. Perusing the flower market.”
“And on top of that, I have a wedding on Saturday, which means I can’t miss the flower market because they have the dahlias I need or so help me God this bride will ruin me.”
She’s exhausting me just talking about it. “What do you want me to do?”
“Can you take it?” She looks up from the sink and smiles a fake, cheesy smile at me. “I’ll pay you overtime. And you’ll need someone else to help you because the order is huge. I’ll pay an army overtime to get this done.”
“I, erm…” I don’t know anyone who would possibly be able to help me except Levi. Fortunately for me, Tracy answers my next question before I have to (awkwardly) ask it.
“If it’s your boyfriend you need to bring, that’s fine with me. So long as you’re not…you know…with him on the job.”
I blush. “I don’t think that will be a problem.”
“Good. He’s hired.”
“Um. I’ll have to ask him, first.”
She waves me away, so I pull out my phone and text him. His response is almost immediate, but it’s a phone call instead. “What’s up early Friday morning?”
I sink back behind the counter and whisper, “Aren’t you at work?”
“Yeah, but it’s okay. I was missing you anyway.” The sounds of the shop around him are loud and metallic, a stark contrast to his soft tone.
“It’s work,” I say. “Tracy needs me to take an early delivery, but she said I’ll need help. She wants to pay you.”
“Nah. I’ll help for free, as long as I can hang out for an hour after and eat breakfast with you before you open shop.”
“That should be fine.” I rest my head back against the wall, closing my eyes. “Thanks, Levi.”
“Duh, you’re welcome.”
He sounds a bit more like himself today, which pushes me into a smile. “I love you,” I whisper.
“Who, me?”
This time, I full-out laugh. “Yeah, idiot. You.”
“Not to be mushy, but I love you more.” Somebody at the shop yells his name and laughs like he’s making a joke. Levi laughs, too, shouting something back that I can’t make out. “Sorry,” he says, chuckling. “Are we still on for a phone call tonight?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Call me when you leave the hospital. I won’t wait a moment longer.”
That night I sit on my bed, legs crossed and my phone to my ear, listening to Levi list off the new applicants he met today. There’s a single mom in her thirties who just lost her job but wants to send her son to a good college. Another cancer patient. A woman in her early thirties trying to find her biological father—a long and expensive task. “It’s like we’re expanding but we’re not ready yet, you know?” Levi says at the end, huffing as if he’s out of breath.
“Yeah. But what about the new place?”
“It’s almost ready. Almost. We’ve had to slow down a bit, but we’ll be ready for a soft opening in a week or so. I can’t wait for you to visit.”
I want to see it, but I have no idea when I can muster up the time or energy to drive over, plaster on a smile, take a tour, and talk to people—not when every evening is devoted to hospital visits and sleeping off what has now become a recurring headache. (I don’t tell Levi this.) “I can’t wait to see it. I bet it’s amazing.”
“Yeah, but only because of all the work we put into it together.”
I hear the sound of his keys jangling and his car starting. “Where are you going?” I ask.
“Home. I worked late tonight.”
“You been working a lot of late nights lately?” I ask, remembering his drowsy eyes.
“Yeah, but it’s going to stop soon. Just have to finish up with this load of applications I got behind on.”
“I’m sorry,” I say immediately.
I can just see him rolling his eyes. “Why are you sorry?”
“I haven’t been there.” I scoot down so my legs are under my covers and I turn, facing the wall, phone pressed to my ear.
“I’m going to pretend like you didn’t just apologize for something as stupid as that.”
“Levi…”
“No, come on, Bee. You’ve been a little preoccupied. You think I can’t understand that?”
“It doesn’t change the fact that I’m sorry about it. I want to be there and I can’t.”
The road around him goes quiet for a second, like he’s at a stoplight. “Maybe you need to get a different perspective on everything, Bee.”
“What do you mean?”
He pauses, his car turning off, the door shutting behind him. It sounds like he’s walking up the path to his house as he says, “Hey, can you hold on one second?”
“Sure.”
There’s the sound of him knocking on his door (I wonder briefly why he doesn’t use his keys) and it swinging open and shutting behind him. Except…at the same moment, my own front door opens and shuts. And then there are his footsteps in the hallway outside my door, and his gentle knock, nudging it open a few inches. “Everyone decent?” he asks, and then lets himself in.
I hang up, turn, and set my phone on the nightstand. A second later he’s there, wrapping his arms around my waist and pulling me in for a kiss. It’s slow and warm and exactly the love I need, but also a distraction I don’t need.
“Bad, bad,” I say, with one last kiss, and pull back. “Very dangerous,” I whisper, my hand hovering between our mouths.
He kisses my fingers instead. “I’m sorry, I just couldn’t resist the opportunity.”
“Who let you in?”
“Millie.”
“That brat is going to die.”
“What?” he asks. “Don’t want to see me?”
“I do—I do want to see you.” I run my finger along the contours of his jawline and stare at his mouth a little too long. “Okay, I saw you, now you have to leave.”
“Oh, no. Not like that.” He stands and nudges me over, then rolls onto his stomach next to me, arms under his head, facing me. “This is n
ice, actually. Great mattress.”
“Levi. You could get so busted.”
“For doing literally nothing?”
I shrug, and I can’t resist rolling into him a little bit more. My arm stretches across his back and my hand fiddles with the side of his shirt. “Levi.”
“Yes?”
“What did you mean about a different perspective?”
He makes an O with his mouth. “Oh, right. Yeah—I mean that you need to let people do things for you sometimes.”
I bite my nails, looking at him closely. “I don’t want people to do things for me when I can’t do anything in return.”
“That’s not what we’re about.”
“But it’s not fair.”
“Life’s not fair.” He shrugs. “We move on.”
I don’t think I can. I close my eyes briefly. “Why did you ask if I loved you, then?”
I know it’s not fair to ask this, but I want to bring my point home. He questioned it then, which means he has even more of a right to question it now.
“Are you still hung up over that?” he asks, eyes wandering my face, searching for the answer. “That was weeks ago and I apologized.”
“I know you did. But it was the principle of it,” I say, using his own words against him. “I already felt like I was doing nothing.” I draw my eyebrows together. “That solidified everything I was worried about. I can’t be here for you and my dad. I just can’t.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I need to, in order for this to work.”
He must understand the gravity of what I’ve just said, what I’m implying, because he doesn’t respond right away. Instead, he moves to his side and captures my face in his hands, using a thumb on my chin to make me look at him. (I am caught; I have nowhere else to turn.) His eyebrows are raised a fraction and his hair flops over my pillow and I just want to tell him it will be okay.
Instead, I let him speak. “You aren’t just a summer fling, you know? You’re not a one-summer girlfriend who I’ll forget in a month.”
I close my eyes.
“You have to know that, Bee.”
I nod. “Yes,” I whisper, voice cracked.
With my eyes closed, his kiss is unexpected, but I sink into it without question. His lips are slow and tender and I want to cry because I love him so much and we’re breaking apart and I can’t fix it.
I’m so sorry, Levi.
“I love you,” he whispers, kissing the top of my lips one more time, and then my nose, and then my forehead as he tucks me against him.
“I love you most,” I say.
With those words, I prepare for the moment when I will walk away so he doesn’t have to.
Chapter 43
Friday morning dawns too soon for Levi and me, but at least we get our first taste of fall weather. (After the insane heat of August, everyone is thankful for a few rainclouds hovering on the horizon.)
He meets me at the shop at six-fifteen sharp, grabbing me from behind as I’m unlocking the front door, kissing my cheek. I instantly feel the scruff on his cheek, where I am used to very smooth skin. I raise my hand to brush against his face. “What the heck is this?”
“Five ‘o clock shadow, duh.” He lets me go into the shop first and then closes the door behind me. I flip on the lights and turn to look at him. He catches me by surprise, because while he looks mostly the same (wild hair, beige pants, bright red sweater), he is different in two ways: the stubble around his mouth and along his jaw, and the glasses that sit on his nose.
“I’m soooo not used to this,” I say, raising an eyebrow. (But gosh-darn-it, he’s still so beautiful.)
“Dude, you’ve never seen these before?” He seems incredulous.
I shake my head. “When, exactly, did you get them?”
“I’ve had them forever.”
“So, you wear contacts?” I ask. I turn and head for the computer, not wanting to show him that I’m feeling ridiculous. With the weight of everything, with the decision I am slowly inching toward making every single day, missing a detail like this (as small as it is) feels catastrophic.
“Yeah. My eyes are actually blue.”
I whirl on him. “WHAT?”
He laughs so hard that it’s silent and has him bent at the waist. He heaves. “I’m kidding, my God, I’m kidding. My eyes are most certainly brown. But I do wear contacts.”
I pull away when he reaches for me. “You’re mean,” I pout. (I’m only half-joking.)
“Bee,” he growls. “I’ll make up for it.”
“Shut up.” I grab the trip sheets and list Tracy left for me on the desk and wave them in his face. “You’re not allowed to kiss me until we’ve finished this task. Tracy said no making out on the job.”
“One kiss is not…making out,” he huffs.
I shrug. “Rules are rules.” It’s a rule I’m making right now, because I feel funny, a little sick to my stomach. God. I’m running so hard and so far away, and he can’t see it, which means that he can’t and won’t stop me, which means that I’ll just keep running. Fear is at large. My heart hammers and my throat closes off and my ears only hear rushing blood.
Then he’s kissing me, and I whimper.
Levi leans his head back, no trace of joy or teasing left in his eyes (that are covered by glasses and look so foreign to me now). “What’s wrong with you today?”
I bite my lip, my brain scrambling for something to say. “Um.”
He shakes his head, takes a step away from me. “Is there something going on?” He gestures at me, then at himself.
And then I surprise myself. “There has been something going on,” I answer. Honesty, for once. It’s angry honesty.
“For how long?”
Now it’s my turn to be incredulous. “That’s not an actual question, is it? Like, you haven’t seen everything that’s been going on for the last few weeks?”
Great. Now I’m angry at him for not noticing the things I’ve been deliberately hiding. Another reason to feel like shit. My stomach twists. Today was not supposed to begin like this.
He shakes his head and draws his eyebrows together. “I’m sorry—” (he’s not really sorry at all) “—but you’re the one who said ‘I don’t know’ to all my questions last week.”
“Can we just—” I realize my hands are raised defensively, and I drop them. “Can we just get to work? We have to be there in thirty minutes, and we have to take separate cars. Yay, we don’t have to fight the whole way there.”
His expression turns—I see it the second the word fight comes out of my mouth. Now he looks angry. Now he looks ready to put up some walls. Good, I think. I’ll hurt him less this way.
Levi curses, a word I don’t like and definitely have never heard him say before. Then he rubs his eyes under his glasses and shrugs abruptly. “Fine. What do you want me to do?”
I give him a job (my fingers shake, making the trip sheet bend in my hand) and start grabbing vases from the cooler. He takes the biggest funeral spray and carries it outside, leaving me to stare at the empty space where he was just standing. Then I shake my head and think, Work, Bee. Focus.
When I pass him on the way out, he doesn’t even look at me.
The church is a ten minute car ride away. Normally I’d need loud music or coffee to keep me awake at this hour, but my blood is still boiling, so I grind my teeth and grip the steering wheel too hard. I feel incredibly alone, because it’s me and a stand for the sprays and a few sloshing vases in the back, and Levi is somewhere else, and I can’t believe what I’ve done.
I take a last turn into the church parking lot and park in the loading zone. The building is new, almost modern, but a traditional-looking chapel is built into the back. That’s where we’re directed to take the sprays, and wi
thin a few minutes we’ve dropped off the first of two trips into a quiet, near-empty hall.
Once we get back to the shop, we load the second half of the vases. It takes longer because they’re bigger pieces, and I still don’t say a word to him. I’m pretty sure I hear him call my name as I shut the car door, but I pretend I don’t hear and start the engine.
We park in the same place as last time and unload in silence. I walk in front of him, my feet hurrying to keep ahead because my legs are so much shorter than his. This time when the doors to the chapel are quietly opened to let us in, however, I’m forced to forget everything for a few seconds, because I hear something completely unexpected.
Singing.
It’s as light and beautiful as anything I’ve ever heard in my life. It echoes perfectly in the stone-walled building, making me want to stand still and bask in it. I hurriedly put down the vases I’m holding and face the stage.
The singer looks to be about fourteen years old, if I’m comparing him to the only other boy I know in his age bracket (Albert). He’s a bit pudgy around the middle and his face is round, as if his body is just waiting to grow in height. He’s wearing his Sunday best, but his hair is ruffled, out of place amidst all the clean-cut beauty of this chapel. His mouth is wide open in a note that catches my breath right out of me.
“Pie Jesu,” he sings. “Pie Jesu.”
A little old woman standing in the pews leaves her place to stand beside me. She’s frail in a sweet grandmotherly way, a way that makes me want to tuck my arm around hers. She smiles up at me, but her face is sad.
That’s when I remember where I am. I come back to earth, pulled into reality with shattering clarity, and I start to see things. The names on the pamphlet the old woman holds, the picture that’s set up next to the largest basket of flowers I put on the stage during the first trip.
The way the young, singing boy looks almost exactly like the man in the photograph.
The way the man in the photograph looks like he’s nearing forty.
I feel bile in my throat and an ache that tears my heart into shreds. I’d like to never feel my heart again.
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