The Sweetest Temptation After Hours

*This one came from a mood, not a plan, something about the quiet after a loud party and what four consenting adults might do with the leftover flowers. Hope you had as much fun reading it as I did imagining it. Thanks for sharing the night.*

The last wedding of the season was supposed to be my easy one, and by ten o'clock it was, because the band had cleared out, the guests had shuffled off to the hotel shuttle, and all that was left in the hall was me, the cleanup crew I couldn't afford, and about four hundred dollars of gorgeous flowers that were headed for the dumpster by morning. I was twenty-eight years old and I had been doing this for six years, and somewhere in those six years I had turned into the kind of person who alphabetizes the vendor parking assignments. So I stood at the head table, pulled the very last ranunculus stem out of the centerpiece, looked at it for a second, and then just threw it down onto the tablecloth like someone dropping her vegetables.

"That's it, I'm done," I announced, to nobody in particular. "I am officially done being the responsible one tonight."

Bette looked up from the box she was packing, a stem clip still in her hand, and gave me the look she gives me when she thinks I'm about to say something interesting, which she has perfected over the three years we've worked weddings together. She's twenty-nine, she runs the best flower operation in the county, and she has never once in her life thrown a flower on a table.

"Done being responsible," she repeated, in that tone that means she's testing the sentence for weight. "What does that even mean for you, Zelda? You gonna leave the chairs stacked?"

"I'm gonna leave the chairs stacked, I'm gonna leave the leftover champagne unguarded, and I might even sit down before midnight, which I have not done at a wedding since I started this business."

Colton came in from the kitchen area carrying two empty catering bins, and I swear that man has never walked into a room without looking like he's in a commercial for something. He's thirty-one, built like the college football player he used to be, and he set the bins down and did the thing where he plants his hands on his hips and just takes in a room before he commits to it.

"Unguarded champagne, you say," he said, already heading back toward the kitchen, because Bette's fiancé does not need to be told twice about a party forming. "There's got to be four bottles back here the couple never touched. They were too busy doing their little sparkler exit."

"See, this is why I like him," I told Bette. "He hears a bad idea and his first move is to go find it."

"He's always been like that," she said, and there was real fondness in it, the kind you can't fake after five years together. They met when he catered her sister's bridal shower back when she was twenty-four, and she still tells the story like it's the best joke the universe ever played on her. "I fought it for like two months and then I gave up, and it's been the easiest fight I ever lost."

Todd appeared from behind the DJ booth with his headphones around his neck, which is how he travels, a man who is permanently about ten seconds from a sound check. Todd is twenty-seven, funny in a dry way that takes a minute to land, and he had been mostly silent all night except for one moment during the father-daughter dance when I caught him actually wiping his eyes, which he would deny if you asked him.

"What's happening?" he asked, because he had clearly missed the announcement and did not like entering rooms without context.

"We're drinking the leftovers," Bette said. "Zelda has declared a moratorium on responsibility."

"I have," I confirmed.

Todd looked at the three of us, looked at the side door, which the custodian had locked from the outside an hour ago but which opened from the inside with a push bar like every fire exit, and which we were all pretending not to have noticed, and then shrugged one shoulder. "I mean, I've got nowhere to be. I literally live nowhere. I drove here from a gig in Dayton."

"That's sad, Todd," Colton called from the kitchen.

"That's freelance, Colton."

Then he paused, and he got a little quieter in a way that made me actually look at him, because Todd is never quiet. "Honestly? This is kind of a first for me. I've done like two hundred of these things and I've never once stayed after. I always pack the van and leave before the lights come up. It's like a rule I made for myself and never questioned."

"Well, tonight the rule is dead," Bette said, clapping her hands once like a judge striking a gavel. "New rule. Nobody leaves until the champagne is gone or somebody cries about their ex, whichever comes first."

Colton came back with four actual flutes, because of course he had flutes, he's a caterer, they live in his car the way Todd's headphones live around his neck. He poured with the practiced wrist of a guy who has opened ten thousand bottles, filled them all to the same exact line, and handed them around.

"To Zelda," he said, raising his glass, "for throwing a flower on the ground like a rebel."

"To the moratorium," Bette added.

"To staying past the lights," Todd said, and he said it quieter than the others, and I noticed that too.

We drank, and the champagne was actually good, which is rare, because couples usually go cheap on the bubbles and splurge on the cake. Somebody had gotten this couple a real deal on a case of something dry and decent, and the bride had been too busy being the center of the universe to drink more than one glass, so there we were, four adults between twenty-seven and thirty-one, standing in a dim event hall at a community college surrounded by loose petals and empty chairs, drinking a newlywed couple's champagne.

The hall lights were mostly off, just the dim ones over the kitchen pass-through and a strip of gold can light along the wall, and it made the whole room feel smaller and warmer than it had an hour ago when it was full of folding money and rented linens. Bette had kicked her shoes off somewhere and was standing there in bare feet on a dance floor that still smelled faintly of cocktail hour, and Colton had his arm around her waist the way he always does, easy, like it's just where the arm goes.

Bette held her flute up and looked at it instead of us, the way she does when she's winding up for something, and then she said, "You know, people think the flowers are the easy part of a wedding. They see a bouquet and they think, oh, pretty, done. But there's so much trial and error behind a good bouquet. I have thrown out entire arrangements at two in the morning because the proportions were wrong, and nobody ever knows, and that's the point. A good bouquet looks like it took no effort at all. So does a good night. The effort is the secret."

"Is that florist wisdom or drunk wisdom?" Todd asked.

"It's five years of charging people four thousand dollars for centerpieces, so it's both," she said, and Colton laughed and kissed the side of her head, and I felt that little pull in my chest that I get at weddings sometimes, the one where I want whatever's in the room to be mine for a night.

"You okay over there, Zelda?" Colton asked. "You've got a look."

"I've got a plan," I said, and I drained my glass and held it out to him for a refill, because the moratorium was in effect and I intended to honor it.

Colton refilled my glass and then Bette's, and while he was doing it she turned under his arm and put both hands flat on his chest, and he looked down at her with that patient expression he has, the one of a man who knows his fiancée is about to do something and has decided a long time ago to just enjoy watching it happen. She kissed him, and it was not a peck, it was slow, her fingers curling into his shirt, his free hand coming up to hold the back of her neck, and I looked away out of six years of professional habit and then looked back because the moratorium was in effect and nobody was grading me.

Todd was standing next to me by then, close enough that when I shifted my weight his hand brushed the back of mine, just knuckles, an accident or maybe not, and I did not pull away. He did not move his hand either. We stood there like two people holding a live wire between us, both pretending to watch Colton and Bette, and after a second Todd said, very quietly, "Sorry. Or not sorry. I haven't decided."

"Don't apologize," I said. "It's fine."

"Fine like fine, or fine like you're not moving your hand either?"

"Fine like the second one."

"Then have one," Bette said, and she crossed the floor, took my face in both hands, and kissed me. She tastes like champagne and her mouth is soft and she kisses the way she arranges flowers, deliberate, everything placed on purpose. I heard Todd exhale behind me and I heard Colton set the bottle down on a table with a click, and then Todd's hand was on my hip, then my waist, then flat against my stomach, and I leaned back into him and he was hard already, I could feel it through his pants against my ass.

Bette broke the kiss and looked at me, her hands still on my face, with an expression I have seen her use on brides who are about to make a terrible centerpiece decision, the one that says I am going to let you talk yourself into this. "Zelda," she said. "You said you had a plan. So say it. What kind of night do you actually want? Because I've watched you work forty weddings with me and you have never once stayed past the lights, and tonight you stayed past the lights on purpose, so."

"I want something different," I said, and it came out steadier than I expected.

"Different how, exactly?" Bette asked, and she was not teasing, she was genuinely asking, the way she asks a client what they mean by rustic, because she has