I wake up to the harsh slap of my own arm hitting my face.
“Ow.”
“Keep your hands to yourself,” Trevor mumbles. “You keep flinging your arm over me. Ro, if you fall in love with me this is going to be so awkward.”
“Shh!” I sit up in bed, one eye open, panning the couch. It’s empty. Alex must have left, or maybe he’s in the bathroom.
I plant a foot on Trevor’s lower back and kick, propelling him onto the floor. He takes the blanket with him, howling. “Turn around! Don’t look.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s first thing in the morning, and I’m wearing nothing but a robe. It’s the Apollo Thirteen launch over here.”
This is all the motivation I need to scramble out of bed. The bathroom’s dark, door open. When I’m finished doing my business, I find that my notebook has been returned to the top of my bookstack.
“Oh, thank goodness. He’s gone,” I tell Trevor, body flooding with relief.
“Who’s gone?”
Alex’s face pops up on the other side of the open window. I scream.
“Sorry, was I interrupting your cozy couple time?” Alex leans against the ivy-clad exterior of the house, tranquil as a rose. “Y’all sleep in late.”
I check my clock. “It’s not even six.”
“Six a.m.?” Trevor exclaims. “That’s not a real number.” He dives back into bed, yanking the covers up over his head, feet sticking out. “Nobody talk to me until noon.”
I scuttle outside to meet Alex, closing the door behind me. “I’m a morning person, for your information.”
“Not as much as I am. I’ve been awake since five.”
“I actually woke up at four, but kept my eyes closed.”
“I’ve been awake since five o’clock, yesterday.”
“Well, I haven’t slept in eighty years. I’m a vampire.”
Laughing, he sits down to pet a chicken. “Roxanne is my favorite.”
I run my fingers through her downy white feathers. “This is Suki.”
“Why’d you name her that? She clearly looks like a Roxanne.”
I take in his change of clothes (jeans and a plain T-shirt—naturally, he refuses to wear anything fun), a plate sitting nearby with the remains of his breakfast (toast and an orange). A thermos of coffee. The coffeemaker is near the bed, which means he’s been bustling around me while I slept. The thought is jarring. “Don’t you have a job you should be heading off to?”
“I’m on vacation. Why are you trying to get rid of me?”
“Stop answering questions with questions, it’s annoying,” I reply. He’s got bruise-like circles under his eyes, I notice. “Late night all alone with the darkness of your thoughts?”
“Wasn’t alone. Hard to sleep, with the racket you made tossing and turning. I bet you were torturing yourself thinking about me. Oooh, that Alex, so sexy right out of the shower. Oooh, he’s got such nice biceps.”
He isn’t far off the mark.
I rear back. “What’s with the southern belle voice? Is that supposed to be me? You don’t sound anything like me.” I only have a hint of twang going on, as does he—comes with growing up in the boondocks—but I’m not full Gone With the Wind.
He keeps at it. “Oh, Alex King, you’ve got the prettiest eyes on this earth, makes my legs just tremble.” He laughs to himself. “That’s why you’re flustered this morning.”
“Nobody would say that about you except yourself.” I leave him behind, trotting into the store’s sunroom. I try to shut the door behind me, but he squeezes inside too fast. This room quite literally isn’t big enough for the two of us—he bumps into everything. “You did not come close to entering the sanctity of my fantasies last night, and my legs are stiff as a corpse’s, thank you.”
“Liar.”
“If that’s what your massive ego needs to believe.” I sit down primly on my workbench, conscious that I should be changing out of my caftan pajamas, applying deodorant, eating breakfast, that sort of thing. But the idea of Alex watching me eat is oddly disconcerting. I wish he’d pin his attention somewhere else. “Try to keep it in your pants, will you? You’re in town for a wedding, for goodness’ sake. Weddings are sacred.” I begin assembling my florist’s wire in neat rows, wire cutters and sharp scissors at the ready. “You don’t have any biceps, either.”
He lifts an arm to inspect himself. “More lies.”
“I want you to know,” I say in my sweetest voice, “that I forgive you.”
“For what, exactly?”
“It was harder to get Trevor to come around, but he forgives you, too.”
“I’d simply love to know what I did to Trevor. I hope I do it again, whatever it was.”
“You once shattered his girlfriend’s heart.” I lift a stalk of silk roses out of a container, pairing pink with myrtle and yellow with ivy.
“Do you think I’m an idiot?”
“Couldn’t say.” Snip, snip. I weave together flowers first, then wrap them to wire with tape. “Don’t know you well enough to be sure, but I have a hunch leaning in that direction.”
He laughs as if he’s so unbothered when he obviously is, tugging on the bill of his red Ohio State ball cap so that it slides around backward. I think I’ve just discovered one of his tells.
I smile to myself.
“You need a bigger space. It’s way too crowded in here.”
“If you think it looks bad, imagine how it feels. All the magic going haywire.” But even as I say it, I notice the magic has taken up a different attitude today. Today, every plant’s energy has turned toward Alex, inspecting him curiously. It feels like low, breathy chatter, appreciative murmurs, raised eyebrows, and devilish grins. I kick that energy out of my way and refuse to pay attention to it.
Alex fingers the crown I just finished. “Who’s this for?”
“A tourist, most likely.” I don’t glance up, feeling my forehead pinch in concentration. Second crown of the day finished, on to the third. My fingers will give out after twenty, and I’ll take a break for a couple of hours to go mash up some herbs.
“You get a lot of tourists here?”
“Yes, but I’ll have more than usual next Monday. People flock in from all over on May Day.” Saying the words May Day, ironically, brings the appropriate surge of panic. Magickal night market opening May first flashes across my mind. How hopeful we’d been when we printed those fliers and paid for ad space in the newspaper.
“What’s wrong?”
It takes me a moment to realize my feelings must be showing on my face. I wave my hand dismissively but explain the situation anyway.
When I’m finished telling him everything, his focus moves to the wall, as if he can see the lot next door through it. “Ah.”
“I don’t want to think about that right now, though.”
“Okay.” His attention zips back to me. He leans forward. “Prove you’re magic.”
“What? No.”
“Because you can’t.” He sounds so sure of himself, so exacting. But just a smidge disappointed, as if he’d prefer to be wrong.
“Because I don’t have to.” He’s right, though: I can’t prove it. I smell my great-aunt’s spaghetti Bolognese when I mix stems correctly is not concrete evidence.
I look at him now, and this time my smile is genuine. I can tell it frustrates him. “Anyway, it’s obvious. In a garden where tea roses bloom with the snowdrops, there must live a witch. That’s common knowledge.” I gesture to my tea roses, then my snowdrops, both in full bloom. “You see?”
“Anyone can make up anything, that doesn’t make it so,” he counters. “I could say that if you sit in a yellow chair at the exact coordinates of the South Pole, it will start raining licorice.”
“That’s absurd,” I reply amiably. “There’s no such thing as the South Pole.”
“What?”
When I don’t reply, he lays a hand over my crown-in-progress and slides it toward himself, to get my attention. “What did you say?”
“The earth is flat. There is no South Pole.”
I watch horror dawn in his (variegated tulip, I can’t help but think) eyes, and it’s excellent. I hold his stare for a full ten seconds before laughter bubbles out. “Kidding.”
He mops his forehead, arching backward. “Don’t scare me like that.”
“I had you, didn’t I?”
“How could I have known you were kidding? By the way, you control when your snowdrops and tea roses bloom. You have them in pots on your porch, circumventing their natural life cycle.”
“Go outside and check the rest of the garden. You’ll find all sorts of plants that aren’t supposed to bloom until late summer, and they’ll be bigger and prettier than any you’ve ever seen. Explain that.”
“Illegal fertilizers.” He lays yellow roses together with ivy, and pink roses with myrtle, like I’m doing, to help me along. I push a wire and tape toward him. He begins to assemble. “Tell me how your magic works, at least.”
“Witchcraft is a mix of respecting basic cornerstones and intuitive improvisation.”
He laughs again. “That is some vague word salad you’re trying to get me to eat, there, Mother Nature.”
“This right here?” I point to my Wonder Wall, which is loaded with Polaroids of customers holding up the flora fortunes that changed their lives. “When I finished that talisman right there, it felt like a kitten on a tree stump, pouncing on a butterfly.” I indicate a woman and her posy. “This one felt like the last page of a dark fairytale.” I gesture to other bouquets. “Solving a mystery. The first lick of ice cream in summer. The strike of midnight on New Year’s, when the person you want to kiss suddenly appears, backlit by fireworks. And that is how I know magic is real.”
His expression is exactly what I would have guessed. It’s impossible to convey the sensation of magic flowing through my hands without sounding bananas.
“You mean you don’t even have any magical amulets that light up when you chant at them? Spooky spells that shake the ground? You’re giving me nothing.”
“There’re plenty of places to sit,” I say, plucking a spotted leaf and flicking it playfully in his direction. He closes his fist around the leaf just before it makes contact, scrunching his nose with a smile. “You don’t have to stand directly on my nerves.”
“Hey, just trying to understand you.”
Why bother? I think. I glance sidelong at him again, catching him staring. “What is it?”
“You’re so calm here. This is your happy place.”
“Yes, it is.” I wind a finger. “And the rest?”
“The rest of what?”
“I can tell you want to say something else. Other words are hiding in there for me.”
His smile is a flare of genuine wonder, pleased that I pegged him so accurately, but then he softens. “That something else is . . . the way you . . .”
I wait for him to finish, but he changes the subject instead. Traces one of my flower tattoos, half of its buds closed, just beginning to bloom. He swallows. “What kind of flower is this?”
“Lily of the valley.”
He thinks. Return to happiness. Alex’s thumb brushes the pink outline of another flower that grows on my arm, one of its petals in an everlasting process of falling away. “And this one?”
“Carnation.”
His mouth pulls, flattening.
“Would you like a flora fortune, Alex?”
“Huh?” He’s still puzzling over the pink carnation, which symbolizes a mother’s love. He’s probably thinking about my relationship with my mother, whom I’ve never been close with. Wondering if that’s changed. (It hasn’t.)
“You’re awfully curious.”
“I like to know things.” He returns to his crown, which is coming together clumsily, half the quantity of flora I’d typically use taking up twice the space. Painfully visible gaps of wire. “I like the tattoos, too.”
Our heads are bent close together as I loop ribbons along his effort. “The fern is a reminder that I can always start over. That I can let go of a life that isn’t working and begin anew.”
His attention is so keen, it’s a brand. “Is that what you did?”
I nod.
A pregnant pause follows.
“Is that what we did?”
He absorbs my surprise, which appears to satisfy him in some strange way. I hate that I keep telling him things without meaning to. He’s good at reading between the lines. I have no clue what Alex is playing at—outwardly, it might look like he’s interested in me, but this could be explained by his deep-seated need to solve for X. He likes riddles, puzzles. He likes to be proven right. Whatever it is that he’s searching for right now, it’s because he’s got a question in his mind, a strong guess as to what the answer might be, and is working to confirm his accuracy.
Thankfully, I’m spared when Luna appears. She does her best to not make it apparent she’s been eavesdropping, but I know better. She keeps trying to catch my eye, her expression significant. I ignore it. “Morning, Luna.”
“Morning.” She nods coolly at Alex, not quite rude, but certainly not rolling out a red carpet. “Hello.”
His reply is warm. “Hello, Luna.”
“Where’s Trevor? Out getting breakfast for you again?”
Before I can say “Hm?” her eyes flash. “He spoils you rotten. So doting.”
Alex slowly pushes his crown aside, then crosses his arms over his chest. Tips his chin down, trying not to smile.
“He’s sleeping in,” I tell Luna robustly. “But I think he has a date planned for later. Knowing him, it’ll be somewhere special.”
“The corner table at Mozzi’s,” Alex adds. He gestures his arm in a wide arc, admiring an invisible corner table. “You’ll gaze into each other’s eyes over the shaker of chili flakes, elbows sticky. Share a breadstick like the spaghetti from Lady and the Tramp.”
“A picnic in a meadow,” I retort lightly. “He’ll have a rose between his teeth, and I’ll wear nothing but a dreamy smile.”
“Naked in a meadow. Just you, Trevor, and a thousand brown recluse spiders.”
I stick out my tongue. He narrows his eyes, but there isn’t any heat in it. I don’t know how we got to a place where we can tease each other in good fun like this so quickly.
It’s alarming.
“Trevor give you that necklace?” Luna interjects, motioning at my throat. “Looks new.”
My necklace is at least four years old. Luna bought it for me herself. Just look at this meddler, Miss I’m Not Getting Involved.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” I preen.
“He knows your taste.”
“Oh, yes. He’s unparalleled.”
Alex stands to his feet. “Thanks for letting me crash at your place,” he tells me, then runs a finger across the rim of a pot of black dahlias. Considers it for a moment before pushing it an inch in my direction. “See you tonight.”
Luna eagle-eyes his trip from the Garden through the shop, front bell chiming as he leaves. Then she pops her hands on her hips. “You’re welcome.”
“For what?” I’m still staring at the black dahlias, which symbolize dishonesty. It was too marked an action to be coincidental. The man is toying with me.
“For reminding you of what you’re supposed to be doing.”
I pick up Alex’s clumsy crown, settling it over my head. Even though his hands didn’t infuse it with magic, a fuzzy vision appears in my mind, wiping out Luna, the shop. In someone else’s body, I see myself, and I’m wearing white orchids in my hair and smiling up. It feels like five-petaled blossoms of vervain, a forest of them, blooming simultaneously. Like the purest adoration. The vision fades away, but the adoration lingers, and now it is my heartbeat that thumps wildly.
What is it, exactly, that I’m supposed to be doing? I can’t seem to remember anymore—with these flowers on my head, all I can think about is Alex’s dimple, his thumb caressing the petals of my tattoos, his gentle strokes through Suki’s fuzzy feathers. His wavering line left unfinished: “The way you . . .”
It’ll come to me, I’m sure. What I’m supposed to be doing.