South Plane Blooms

I closed the shop at six like I always did, which meant I swept the stems off the floor, flipped the sign, and stood in the doorway for a minute watching the parking lot empty out while the gas station across the street buzzed its quiet electric buzz. I'm Sera, I'm twenty-three, and I run the flower counter under the apartments on the south end of the strip mall, the kind of job where the highlight of a Tuesday is somebody buying a fern.

That Tuesday the highlight was a fern. A man bought a fern, said his wife liked ferns, and left, and I watered the roses and thought about how my whole week looked exactly like that Tuesday and would look exactly like that Friday too.

I went upstairs to my apartment, which is small and sits right over the shop so I can smell the wilted petals through the floor vents mixed with the exhaust drifting in from the road. The air was warm for October. I changed into shorts and a shirt I'd had since my first semester of college and sat on my secondhand couch with a plate of crackers, which is not dinner, but it was dinner.

My phone buzzed a little after eight. I almost didn't look, because it's usually my supplier or my mother, but the name on the screen was Kane Choi, and I sat up a little without meaning to.

We had a project together three years ago, back when I was twenty and he was twenty-one, some business class thing where he did the slides and I did the talking and we got an A and never hung out again except once, last year, when I ran into him at a coffee shop near campus and we got drinks and talked for three hours and then both got scared of it being a thing and let it die. That was the entire history. One class and one coffee.

The text said, Hey, random, I'm in town for a work thing this week, thought of you, are you around?

I stared at it for a while, chewing a cracker. I could say sure, coffee sometime, and let it die politely again. Or I could be honest, which for me mostly means being bored, so I typed back, I'm home above the flower shop, come by if you want, I have cheap wine and no plans.

He answered fast. That sounds perfect.

***

He showed up around nine with a bottle of wine that was definitely not cheap, which embarrassed my two-buck bottle sitting open on the counter, and he stood in my doorway in a button-down shirt with his sleeves rolled up looking taller than I remembered, or maybe I just remembered him sitting in a classroom chair.

"Okay, this is a real apartment," he said, looking around. "Above an actual flower shop. I thought you were joking."

"I never joke about the shop." I took the wine from him. "Come in before the hallway moths get in."

"There are moths?"

"There are always moths. It's the flowers. It's the price of the flowers."

He laughed at that, the same laugh from the coffee shop last year, easy and a little too loud for my small place, and he sat down on the couch while I hunted for a corkscrew, which turned out to be in the drawer where I keep batteries and takeout menus. I poured us each a glass and sat down at the other end of the couch with my legs folded under me, and we caught up the way people do when they haven't talked in a year and don't want to admit they noticed the gap.

He'd moved to a city about two hours away for a logistics job, which sounds boring when he says it but he seemed to like it, and he was in town for a training week at the regional office, staying at a hotel by the highway, eating dinner alone at the chain restaurants. I told him that was the saddest thing I'd heard all month and he said, "It's not sad, it's efficient," and I threw a couch pillow at him.

"And you're still flowers," he said, nodding toward the smell coming up through the floor.

"Still flowers. Weddings, funerals, and ferns. That's the whole industry." I sipped the good wine, which was actually good, annoyingly. "Three years of it now, almost. I started part-time in school and the owner liked me and then she wanted out and now it's mine, or mostly mine, I pay her slowly."

"Wait, you own it?"

"Ownish. Renting the space, buying the business. It's mine the way a car with payments is yours."

"That's serious, though. That's a real thing."

"It's a real thing that happens the same way every day," I said, and he looked at me over his glass, and I don't know why I said the next part except that it was true. "Honestly I've been bored lately. Like bored down to the bone. Work is fine, the apartment is fine, everything is fine, and I come home and eat crackers standing up and watch shows I don't even like. I keep waiting for something to be different and it never is."

"That's the wildest florist life I've ever heard," he said. "Truly wild. Crackers standing up. Nobody's ready for that lifestyle."

"Shut up." I laughed, and it came out louder than I meant, and I felt the spark of it in my chest, the little jolt you get when a joke lands with the right person. "You're one to talk. Dinner alone at the Applebee's by the highway. Write a memoir."

"It's a Chili's, actually. Get it right."

"Even worse."

We kept going like that, back and forth, and somewhere in the second glass we got around to the old project, and he admitted he'd only taken that class because it fit his schedule, and I admitted I'd only done the talking part because I hated making slides, and he said, "I remember thinking you were the only person in that group who actually read the assignment," and I said, "I remember thinking you had good handwriting, which is a stupid thing to remember," and he said, "It's not stupid, handwriting is underrated."

Then there was a small pause where neither of us said anything, the kind of pause that has weight to it, and he looked at his glass and I looked at the parking lot light outside the window turning everything below orange.

"So are you seeing anyone?" he asked, casual, too casual, the way people ask it when the answer matters more than they want it to.

"No. You?"

"No. I dated somebody for a few months last year but it didn't stick. She wanted more than I had to give." He turned the glass in his hand. "Which is fair. I didn't have much to give."

"Same, sort of. I went on some app dates. One guy brought a laminated list of his ex's faults to the second date."

"He did not."

"He did. It had bullet points. Laminated. I finished my drink and left."

Kane laughed so hard he had to set his glass down on the floor, and I was laughing too, and when it died down we were both sitting a little closer than we'd started, not on purpose, the couch just does that, it's old and the cushions slope toward the middle.

"Can I say something?" he said.

"You already are saying it."

He grinned. "I was nervous texting you. Last year at the coffee shop I chickened out, I meant to ask if I could text you and I just, didn't, and then I felt dumb about it for a month. So. There it is."

"You could have just texted me any time in the last year."

"I know. I kept thinking I'd do it when I had a reason, and then tonight I was sitting in the hotel and I thought, the reason is I want to, and that's the reason."

I looked at him, and he looked back, and the fridge hummed in the kitchen and a truck hissed past on the road below, and I thought about the bone boredom I'd been describing and how the evening had stopped being boring somewhere around the second glass without me noticing it happen.

"Well," I said, "you're here now!"

"I'm here now," he agreed.

I topped up both our glasses, mostly to give my hands something to do, and we settled in again, and the conversation got slower and warmer the way it does, and neither of us moved toward the middle of the couch, but neither of us moved away either.

He reached over to refill my glass before I noticed it was empty, and when he handed it back his fingers stayed on mine a second longer than the handoff required, warm and deliberate, and I didn't pull away. I looked at his hand instead, at the way his knuckles rested against the back of my fingers, and I thought, well, here's a decision, and I made it by not moving.

"You're not pulling your hand back," he said, quiet, like he was checking the math before he committed to the answer.

"No," I said. "I'm not."

"Okay," he said, and he didn't move it either, and we sat there like that with our hands touching on the slope of the bad cushion while the fridge hummed and the parking lot light did its orange thing, and the whole mood of the room shifted the way weather shifts, suddenly and all at once, so that the same couch and the same wine and the same window felt like a different room entirely. My heart picked up and I let it.

"So," I said.

"So," he said.

"Are we doing this, or are we going to sit here holding hands like it's a séance?"

He laughed, that surprised short laugh, and squeezed my fingers once. "I've been wondering how to ask that for about ten minutes."

"You could have just asked. You texted me out of nowhere, asking is clearly not hard for