The Conference Florist

The fluorescent lights in the ballroom of the Marriott Grand hummed the way they always do at these things, and I sat there in the third row watching my husband Barry take notes about bulk ribbon pricing like it was the most fascinating subject in the world. My name is Elly Stanton, I'm twenty-nine years old, and I've been married to Barry for four years. I should also say right up front that I'm a florist, I own a little shop on Lyndale with exactly one employee who is my neighbor Mrs. Dorsey when she feels like it, and I had come to this conference fully intending to screw my husband's brains out at least once before Sunday.

That was the plan, anyway. The plan was not going well.

Barry is thirty, he works in procurement for a garden center chain, and he is the least confrontational man God ever put on this earth. Two years ago we had a sex life. I remember it vaguely, the way you remember a vacation from when you were in your early twenties, and since then things had slid so gradually that neither of us ever actually said anything about it. We just stopped. He'd come to bed after me, get up before me, and somewhere in the middle there was a lot of both of us lying very still and pretending to be asleep.

I'd tried. I want you to believe that, because I tried. I bought the nice lingerie, I initiated things maybe six times over two years and got the tired sigh six times, I suggested a weekend away and he booked us a B and B where the owner talked the whole time about her zoning dispute. At some point a woman starts to internalize it, you know? You start thinking maybe you've got something growing on your face, or maybe you smell bad, or maybe there's some fundamental flaw in you that only your husband can see and he's too polite to mention it.

"Elly, look at the projected numbers on this slide," Barry whispered to me, because he's the kind of man who whispers in conference halls.

"Thrilling," I said.

"There's a real opportunity here on the bulk ribbon contracts." He said it the way other men talk about fantasy football. "If you ordered through the co-op instead of direct, you could save maybe four hundred a year."

"Barry, we came here so we could spend some time together. Downtown. Nice hotel. Remember?"

"Right, right, and we will, after the afternoon sessions." He patted my knee like I was a dog. "This one's important, El. This is the supply chain panel."

The supply chain panel. Two years without my husband touching me and he was prioritizing the supply chain panel. I looked at the ceiling, which had one water stain shaped sort of like Minnesota, and I decided right there that if the universe handed me so much as an interesting conversation this weekend, I was going to take it.

***

The evening mixer was in a smaller ballroom, the kind with heavy drapes and a cash bar and name tags nobody read. I'd changed into the black dress, the good one, the one I'd packed with exactly this kind of evening in mind, and Barry looked at me when I came out of the bathroom and said "nice" in the tone you'd use for a new stapler.

I gave it twenty minutes at the mixer, standing next to Barry while he talked to a man from Duluth about shipping pallets, and then I went and got a glass of wine and stood by the drapes like a wallflower at my own funeral.

That's when I heard the voice behind me.

"Well, well. If it isn't the flower lady."

I turned around and there was Gino Meyers, and I have to explain who Gino is before anything else happens, because Gino matters to this story. Gino is thirty-one, he's a sales rep for Floral Direct Supply, which is the competition to Barry's whole world, and he met Barry at a trade show three years ago and they took an instant dislike to each other that has only deepened with age. Gino is the kind of good looking that's almost annoying, dark hair, big shoulders under a suit jacket, and he knows exactly what he looks like, which should be a flaw but mostly isn't.

I met him last year at the company dinner, the one where Barry got food poisoning from the oysters and I ended up sitting next to Gino for three hours, and we talked the whole time, actual talking, about the shop and about Lisbon, where he'd lived for two years, and when Barry came back from the bathroom Gino had made me laugh four times and I hadn't laughed at a dinner in months.

"Elly," I said. "Elly Stanton. You remember my name."

"I remember everything about that dinner," he said, and he got me another wine without asking if I wanted one, which I did want, and he looked at the black dress. "That dress is doing a lot of work for the floral supply industry."

"Barry's over there discussing pallets."

"I can see that. He hasn't looked over here once, has he." It wasn't a question. Gino had this way of saying things that were observations but landed like little knives. "Stanton, I've known the man three years and he's never once looked at anything he should've been looking at."

"You two really don't like each other, huh."

"I respect your husband tremendously," Gino said, grinning. "He beat me on the Greenway contract and I've never forgiven him."

"That was Barry's proudest moment. He has a plaque."

"Does he have a plaque for the woman he's married to? Because he's standing across a ballroom ignoring the best looking person in this building, and I include myself, and I look great tonight."

I laughed, and I felt it in my whole chest, that feeling of being seen by somebody, and I realized I'd been starved for it for two years without letting myself know. "You're laying it on thick, Gino."

"I'm not laying anything on thick. I'm being honest with you because you seem like the kind of woman who gets lied to by omission every single day, and it's making you smaller. Nobody should get smaller." He clinked his glass against mine. "Tell me about the shop. Is old Mrs. Dorsey still terrorizing your customers?"

"She made a bride cry in March."

"Bless her heart. That's incredible." He leaned against the drape next to me, close but not crowding, and he asked me real questions and listened to the answers, and somewhere in there his hand came to rest on the small of my back, light, just resting there like it belonged, and I did not move away from it.

Across the room Barry laughed at something the Duluth man said and reached for a little sausage on a toothpick.

"Elly." Gino said my name quieter now. "I'm going to say something and you can tell me to go to hell and I'll buy you dinner anyway and leave you alone, how about that."

"Okay," I said, and my heart was doing something I couldn't name.

"You looked bored at that conference this morning, and you look starved right now, and I remember what it felt like talking to you last year, three hours went by like ten minutes. I'd like to spend some real time with you this weekend. That's it. That is the entire matter. Say no and it never happened."

I looked at Barry's back. He was getting another sausage. I looked at the wine in my hand, and I thought about the black dress, the good one, packed for a man who'd called it nice like a stapler.

"That's a terrible idea," I said.

"Probably," Gino agreed.

"My husband is right there."

"He is. He's also not here at all, and we both know the difference." He finished his wine. "Think about it. No pressure. I'm in room 1112, and I'm going to be at the hotel bar at ten, whether you show up or not. If you do, I'm buying you a drink."

Before I could answer, there was a commotion by the elevators, a woman in a lanyard waving her arms, and it was the conference organizer, Alexia something, her name tag said Swenson, telling everyone the main elevators were down for service and to please use the east bank. Gino raised his glass to me across the noise.

"Ten o'clock," he said. "Elly Stanton. Think about it."

And I stood there by the drapes holding my wine, married woman, shop owner, four hundred dollars a year of ribbon savings away from a happy life, thinking about absolutely nothing else for the rest of the night.

I told Barry I was going up to the room to get out of the heels, and he said sure, hon, without fully turning his head away from the Duluth man, so I walked out of the mixer with my wine still half finished and my heart doing something reckless and no plan at all except that it was ten minutes to ten and the east bank of elevators was right there.

Gino was in the lobby. I don't know if he'd been waiting since he slipped out of the mixer or if he just materialized, because the man had a gift for being exactly where he said he'd be, leaning against the marble counter by the elevator bank in his suit jacket with his sleeves rolled up. "Elly Stanton," he said. "You thought about it."

"I thought about nothing else, which annoys me."

"Come have that drink then."

"The bar's down here and my husband is up there, and I'm standing in a lobby at ten at night with a man who isn't my husband, and I've already done the math on how bad this looks." I pressed the elevator button anyway. "I'm going up to my room, Gino."

"I know. I'm going up to mine." He stepped into the car with me when the doors opened, and I told myself it was because we were both going up, which was technically true, and pressed fourteen for me and eleven for him. "I want it noted, I had no idea the main elevators were out. Alexia Swenson just handed me a gift and I'm not even going to question it."

"You're smooth, and I keep noticing how smooth you are, and somehow that's not helping."

"Elly." He was quieter then, and the smugness dropped off his face. "I get out at eleven, and I'll say goodnight and mean it. I'm not trying to trap you into anything. I just like being in a room with you, and I think you like being in a room with me, and there's no shame in that."

"I'm married."

"Four years to a man who let you walk out of a party alone in that dress. I know. I'm not arguing with the marriage. I'm just standing in an elevator."

The car jolted.

It wasn't a big jolt, more of a shudder, like the building cleared its throat, and then the lights went out and we were in the dark, just the dim orange of the emergency panel, and the car sat there not moving between nine and ten, suspended and silent. I grabbed the rail. "Oh, that's great. That's just great!"

"Elevator's stalled," Gino said, unnecessarily, and hit the alarm button, and somewhere far off a bell rang and rang with nobody answering it. "Well. We might be here a while. You okay?"

"I'm fine, I just don't love small dark spaces, apparently, which is news to me."

"Sit down if you need to. There's a rail. There's also me, and I've been told I'm good company in a crisis." His voice was easy in the dark, and it steadied me more than the rail did, and we stood there maybe two minutes while the alarm bell rang and stopped and rang again. Then my phone had no signal, which of course it didn't, and Gino's had one bar and he texted the front desk and got nothing back. "Alexia Swenson is going to have a very bad night," he said. "Somebody will find us. They always do."

"The lighting in here is very romantic, I have to say. Emergency orange. Very flattering on you."

"Everything's flattering on me, that's just a fact." But he said it soft, and then he wasn't joking anymore, and I could feel him closer, feel the warmth of him through his shirt, and the elevator was four feet wide and the dark took up all the rest of the world. "Elly. I'm going to ask you something and you can say no and we'll stand here and talk about Lisbon until they pry the doors open."

"Ask it," I said, and my voice came out lower than I meant it to.

"Can I kiss you?"

Every sane answer I owned lined up in a row and none of them moved. Two years of tired sighs. Six times I'd asked and six times I'd been made to feel like a chore. A black dress packed for a man who rated it next to office supplies. "Yes," I said. "Yes, okay, yes!"

His hand came up to my jaw first, slow, giving me every chance in the world to pull back, and his mouth met mine and it was not polite. It was warm and sure and it had been three hours at a dinner last year and three years of a plaque and it tasted like the wine we'd been drinking, and I made a noise against his mouth that I'd never made in my life and grabbed the front of his jacket with both hands because my knees had their own intentions. He kissed me against the wall of that dead elevator for what felt like an eternity, one hand at my jaw and one at my waist, and I kissed him back like I was making up for something