16
Now
I blink at Bridget. The rejection smarts. So much so that it renders me speechless.
“It’s not because I don’t trust you, Bee,” she says.
I swallow. “Sure.”
She sighs, then kisses my cheek. “I’m going to go up to bed.”
I stare at her back as she climbs the stairs, stunned. After she’s disappeared, I rise.
“I’m going to clean the kitchen.” I’ll scrub my hurt away.
Felix stands, too. “I’m going to talk to her.”
Zach joins me at the sink. Bridget’s and Felix’s voices are loud enough that we can hear them arguing upstairs, but they’re muffled, so we can only
make out a few words here and there.
Felix: “You’re kidding.”
Bridget: “I wish I was.”
It doesn’t take long for the Clark family feud to go quiet again, but neither sibling returns. I rinse the last of the dishes, looking out the window at the silver streak of moonlight on the water.
“The silence is slightly unsettling,” Zach says. “You think Bridget’s bleaching her crime scene?”
“I’ve never heard them fight. Felix is so even-keeled. Nothing seems to
bother him.”
Zach looks at me.
“What?”
“You called him Felix. No one calls him that.”
I don’t reply.
“Huh,” Zach says. He squeezes his bottom lip between his thumb and index finger. And then, “He’s not as easygoing as you think, Lucy. He has
feelings.”
I frown. “I know that.”
Zach stares at me for a long moment, but all he says is, “Good.”
Felix’s voice, gruff, interrupts us. “I’m taking a walk.”
He’s already out the sliding door by the time I turn around.
“I think he swiped the bottle of rye,” Zach says.
I look out the window and watch Felix make his way to the water until he disappears.
Twenty minutes later, when he still hasn’t returned and Zach is arranging the living room for bed, I throw on my cardigan and grab the nearest warm thing, a blanket from the steamer trunk, and head into the night.
The beach is empty, but the sky is full of stars, a glittering cloak of diamonds over a shimmering black sea. I walk along the shore. The air is thick, but it’s cooler than I expected, and I fold my arms against the chill.
I’m thinking of turning around, but then I see him in the distance, his white T-shirt glowing under the moon. As I get near, Felix takes a sip from the bottle, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and without looking at
me, says, “Hey.” His voice is ragged.
“You still have four limbs,” I say.
He huffs out a dry laugh. “Barely.”
When I edge closer, I can see that his jaw is rigid. He takes another drink.
“Here.” I hand him the blanket. “It’s cold out.”
He takes it from me, but instead of wrapping it around his shoulders, he passes me the bottle of rye and lays the blanket on the sand, straightening it until he’s satisfied with the edges.
He’s kneeling on one side, looking up at me. We watch each other, unblinking, and then Felix holds out a hand. Time hangs suspended as I stand before him, staring at his palm. My pulse ricochets, faster, then faster still.
“Sit down, Lucy.” His voice is rough, worn from arguing with Bridget. I know how much effort it takes to go into battle against her.
With hesitance, I take his hand in mine, and when his fingertips fall on my wrist, I’m certain he can feel my heartbeat. It’s a heavy, ceaseless thud.
He tugs me a step closer.
“I think we can handle sharing a blanket,” he says.
So I sit, knees drawn up, next to Felix.
We look out at the inky gulf in silence, the bottle between us. Felix is warm beside me, and the cool air doesn’t feel so chilly anymore. The breeze feels like whispered sweet nothings against my cheek.
Eventually Felix holds the whiskey out to me. I meet his sideways gaze as I reach for it and take a sip. When I hand it back to him, he does the same. It feels strangely intimate.
“Did you get anywhere with Bridget?” I ask after we’ve passed the whiskey back and forth a few more times.
Felix doesn’t answer for such an expansive stretch that I wonder if I articulated the question. “She really was homesick,” he says finally.
“You must have been talking for almost an hour. What about the text from Miles? She didn’t give you anything more?”
There’s enough light that I can see his eyes moving around my face, catching on my nose, my lips. “She’s worried about you.”
“She’s always worried about me.”
He shakes his head. “No. I don’t think she’s ever worried about you much
until now.”
“Well, right back at her,” I say.
Felix takes another sip, then says, “Do I need to worry about you?”
It catches me off guard. Does he want to worry about me? Do I need to be worried about?
“After that fight with Bridget, I should ask you the same thing,” I say.
“What were you two arguing about?”
Felix stares at me for a moment before answering. “Her secret keeping.”
I reach for the bottle and take a drink, though I already feel the rye buzzing in my limbs.
“Tell me how you’re doing,” Felix says.
I peer at him. “I’m fine.”
“Lucy.” His gaze travels my face, and I feel like he’s drinking me up.
“Really tell me. Tell me what’s happening at the store. Tell me about Farah and what poetry she’s working on. Tell me about flowers.” He sounds a little desperate, and his words run together.
“Felix Clark, are you drunk?” I don’t even think I’ve seen him tipsy before—he holds his liquor well.
“Maybe a little,” he says with a half smile that’s definitely intoxicated.
“But I also want to know, Lucy. Talk to me.”
I study the beautiful planes of his face, the way the moon refracts off his cheekbones and hides in the hollows below, and even though I know talking to Felix could get me into more trouble than pressing my lips to his, I say, “Farah’s writing elegies.”
The dimple fires. “Poems about the dead.”
“Yeah, but I think they’re kind of sexy. I’ve heard her reciting lines about unyielding flesh and honeyed nectar.”
Felix lies back on the blanket, hands under his head, biceps popping.
“What else?”
“Hmm.” I lie beside him, and we stare up at the stars. “I think she’s sick of me. I’ve been spending a lot of time either at the store or doing event
installs.”
“How much time?”
“All of it.”
He tilts his head to me. “Do you still love it?”
I gaze at the galaxy, and my throat goes tight. It’s both the question and the moment—being here, in my favorite place, with one of my favorite people. I wish I didn’t like him so much.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “I love so much of it. I love the creative parts. I love working with flowers, but I don’t love everything that comes with it.
Managing people, business strategy, more emails than you would think. I became a florist because I hated my desk job, but I’m finding myself behind
one more and more.” I watch a satellite blinking its way toward the Big Dipper.
“Sometimes I worry that as I’ve got older, I’ve shrunk my world instead of making it grow,” I admit. “Picking flowers, making floral crowns, mucking in my aunt’s garden—those things used to be my hobby, but now my aunt is gone, and my hobby is my job, and work is my entire life.”
I feel his fingers twine around mine, and for a moment, my whole heart is held between our palms. He squeezes once, then lets go. I want it back
immediately.
More, my heart says. Felix.
“Tell me about your farm.”
Your farm. Felix is the only person who knows about it, and I like how he makes it sound—like a real thing.
“There’s no farm,” I say, tipping my head to him. I haven’t fantasized about it in such a long time. It’s no use dreaming about things that will never be—there’s too much reality to contend with.
“Not yet. Describe it to me, Lucy.”
Felix can say my name a thousand different ways. A Lucy that vibrates in the back of his throat, gritty with desire. A Lucy that sounds like sun showers.
A Lucy of smug amusement. A Lucy that’s more a sigh of relief than a name.
A Lucy that’s all awe and wonder. This Lucy is a gentle command.
In one breath, it all comes back to me. The thing I’ve secretly wanted for so long—a cut flower farm.
“I don’t think about it much these days,” I tell Felix. “But I always
pictured a greenhouse.”
“What else?”
I first imagined having a small garden, but it grew every time I envisioned it. It became a rectangular plot of nutrient-rich soil somewhere outside the city with enough flora to stock a farmer’s market stand through summer.
Then a flourishing farm, with blossoms as far as the eye could see.
Sunflowers following the light. Rivers of blue salvia. Delicate pink cosmos, swaying in the breeze.
I turn my face back to the stars, smiling up at them. “A field with rich soil. Sunflowers. Salvia. Cosmos.”
“Dahlias,” he says. It’s not a question. Felix knows.
“Dahlias,” I repeat.
“Tell me more, Lucy,” he says. “Tell me everything.”
