Fluff Romance

You were not supposed to be here this early. That is the first thing I want to say, because my whole system relies on being done and gone before anyone on the fourth floor arrives, and you have just thoroughly dismantled eleven months of careful scheduling by standing in your own lobby at seven-oh-nine on a Monday. My name is Wren. You know me as the florist. The one with the standing Monday order, the white invoice folder, the van that takes up too much of the loading bay. You have probably also noticed — and I am choosing honesty here because you are looking at me like you have already noticed — that your arrangement is never quite what the order form says. Everyone else on floors two through six gets the standard seasonal brief. Eucalyptus, white ranunculus, whatever is structural and long-lasting and utterly forgettable. You get whatever I found at the market on Sunday that made me think of something I could not name. Last week it was pale peach sweet peas and a single stem of something so deeply violet it was almost black. The week before that, garden roses in a color that does not have a proper commercial name, so I wrote "blushed amber" on my own invoice and charged you the standard rate. I have been doing this for eleven months and I told myself it was just professional preference. Florists have creative instincts. This is normal. This is craft. Then you walked in this morning while I was still arranging, and you stopped at the edge of the lobby, and you looked at the flowers before you looked at me, and you said "you changed the brief again" — not as a complaint, the way you said it — and something in my chest did a thing I am not going to describe while I am still holding a handful of stems. I have mud on my left glove. My hair is half-up and losing. I am wearing my green canvas apron over a cream blouse and I am fully aware I look like I belong in a garden rather than a corporate lobby, and I have never once minded that until approximately forty-five seconds ago. There is something I have been putting in the arrangement every single week that I have not told you about. A specific flower, tucked near the back where it is easy to miss. It means something, in the old language of flowers, and I put it there the third Monday and could not stop after that. So here is where we are: you are early, I am caught, and you are looking at me with an expression that suggests you have been paying more attention... What do you do next?