thirty-eight.
“Okay, what’s this one?” Marsden held out the flower, unable to keep from laughing at Jude’s blank expression as he struggled to come up with the name. “Seriously, shouldn’t you know?”
He grinned at her. “But you don’t know, either.”
“I also don’t work here.”
His grin wasn’t even a bit sheepish. “It’s a daisy?”
“Jude!”
The bellow came from across the display floor, and Jude winced, laughing, as a man strode up to them. “Damn, guess that was the wrong answer.”
She’d known what Roadie looked like, but only in the same way she knew what all the locals in town looked like when she’d never met them. Seen from across the street, while on her bike, through a store window.
Up close, he looked like he could run any business except a plant shop—personal bodyguard, home security, slick casino dealer.
Beard a broad smear of peppered stubble, head shaven clean as a whistle, build as solid as a truck. Tattoos peeked out from his T-shirt sleeves, dragons and hearts and women, all meandering about his arms in shades of smoke and teal and ruby. His eyes were a warm brown, his scowl full of bluster, and he was balancing a honey cruller on top of the coffee Jude had left for him on his desk in the staff room.
Marsden liked him immediately.
“You work in a garden center!” Roadie yelled, inches away from Jude’s face. “With plants and flowers! You should at least know the items on the display floor!”
His voice was a sonic boom in volume, each word explosive, and she barely managed to keep from instinctively covering her ears.
“Sorry, I forgot to warn you about him going deaf,” Jude said to her in an exaggerated whisper, smiling even as he pointed to his ear, cupping it with a hand. “He insists he just likes being so obnoxiously loud, but really it’s because he’s getting old. He can’t hear so well anymore.”
Roadie smacked him on the back of his head. The gesture was affectionate, careful not to hurt.
Jude rubbed the back of his head, turning to his boss with his own mock scowl. “Is that for the daisy answer or the deaf remark?”
“Both, kid. Didn’t hear me coming, did you?”
“I was distracted.”
“And if I can’t hear, then how’d I know you messed up?” He took a bite of the cruller. “It’s a gerbera, kid! Gerbera. Be a good boy, write it on a piece of paper, and put it under your pillow for tonight!” He took a sip of what had to be ice-cold coffee and nearly spit it out. “Jesus, how far did you have to go to get this? You cross state lines or something?”
“Or something. And daisy, got it.” Jude grabbed Marsden by the hand and gently pulled her to stand right in front of him. Her face warmed as Roadie’s expression turned scrutinizing, as Jude tugged her even closer, her back resting right against his chest. “Roadie, this is Marsden. I wanted you to meet her and see why I was distracted.”
She watched Jude’s boss’s eyes flicker as he realized who she was—Marsden Eldridge, daughter of Shine, the boardinghouse’s delightfully exotic prostitute, and Grant, the man who drowned under mysterious circumstances eight years ago. Even if her name hadn’t given her away, her looks would have.
Roadie did a little bow that somehow wasn’t absurd, given his size and that he was still carefully balancing his doughnut on top of his coffee. Neither was it, she sensed, condescending or scornful, given what he must have known about her family.
The vise that had been closing tighter and tighter around her chest ever since Jude asked her to meet Roadie loosened a bit.
“It’s good to meet you, Marsden!” Roadie bellowed.
“Same here. Um, Jude talks about you a lot.”
He barked out a laugh. “Too much, I bet. The kid never shuts up at work, either. Too bad it’s usually him complaining about something.”
Jude snorted. “Roadie knows I barely say jack at work. Because, catch his attention, he sends you out on food runs—he likes to call it ‘volunteering.’”
Roadie smacked him on the back of the head again. Then he ruffled Jude’s hair as though he were three years old. Marsden watched him turn serious, how he was full of love for the boy who’d once asked him to be his father. “I tell you, he’s a pain in the ass, but it seems I’m stuck with him.” His voice was at nearly normal volume—rock-concert level instead of an airplane taking off.
“So, all it took was coffee—and cold coffee at that—to make you quit trying to smash apart everyone’s ear drums for a few moments?” Jude sighed. “Even shoveling manure wasn’t good enough for you.”
“No, it was the doughnuts that did it. And I had to order those in myself.” Roadie crammed a huge bite of cruller into his mouth and started talking around it. “Okay, I sent Kelly out on delivery, the others are wheeling in inventory, and I can cover the floor. Why don’t you take a few minutes and show Marsden the rest of the place?”
The “rest of the place” was the back entrance and the large, semi-secluded workroom off to the side. Jude told her it was where all the flowers and plants came through for inspection before hitting the display floor—domestic, imported, “whatever happened to catch Roadie’s eye that he wanted for the center.” Not the hard inventory, things like the giant potted trees and hedges and planters that came into the place on wheeled dollies, but the soft merchandise, what Roadie assumed a girl would like most. “Because deep down, the guy is a total romantic.” Everything was already neatly labeled from the supplier, saving Jude from messing up that task. She drank in rockets of color, the feel of velvet against her fingertips: hydrangeas, orchids, and tulips; snapdragons and tea roses; catkin and cherry tree and magnolia cuttings.
“It’s incredible in here.” Unable to keep her hands to herself, she stroked open boxes of blooms, caressed fat stands of bouquets, all of it the very opposite of Glory’s hidden prickliness, the town’s layered darkness. “I think if I worked for Roadie, I’d never want to leave this room.”
“You work with food, Marsden. Bacon. Cake. Cheeseburgers.”
Jude’s voice was surprisingly terse, and she looked over to see him shoving bunches of chrysanthemums across the long butcher’s block of a table, making room to toss down bundles of wildflowers to be cut. He seemed set on not meeting her gaze, at concentrating on his hands and his work and being too busy to notice her.
And she wondered if it was because it was the same for him—what she couldn’t ignore, had come to accept.
That despite the hundreds if not thousands of flowers in the room, all he could really smell was her.
She went to stand next to him and waited. Her skin felt too alive, overly sensitive, run through with an electric current, needing to be touched. It made her brave; it made her stupid. “Hey.”
“Yeah?” He finally looked up, and Marsden thought of how much of himself he’d already entrusted to her, and she nearly pulled back.
Nearly.
“I . . . Thanks for bringing me here,” she started. “For showing me this amazing room. And . . . for not freaking out about my mother, and all the things I haven’t really been able to tell you yet.” She knew it sounded more like a confession than anything to do with gratitude, and she knew that was right, too.
“Don’t thank me.” His voice bordered on ragged. “You don’t need to. It’s just baggage, what you’re talking about, and I have that, too.”
She nodded. Baggage. Together they both had ghosts, a paralyzing need for closure, guilt—what would he say when he saw she had lies on top of all that?
“Do two wrongs ever make a right?” She grasped for words to best shape the ache in her chest, to paint how she wanted him even as she knew she shouldn’t. “When it comes to people?”
“Depends.” His eyes were midnight, full of raw nerves, as he slowly set the flowers aside. “On whether or not they’re making it worse by being together.”
“Worse for others, or for themselves?”
“Either.”
“And if it’s neither?” Marsden slid her hand along the side of his face. Her heart drummed; she saw the echo of its beat in his pulse along his neck.
“Then it’s right.”
Jude drew her to him, and she pressed her mouth to his, letting herself slowly fracture into pieces