Chapter Seventeen
Emma
When I got up the morning after I’d called Stefan, I’d had a moment of hope that he had called me back while my phone had been in “Do Not Disturb” mode the night before, explaining why it had taken him so long to get back to me. No such luck; when I checked my phone, there was nothing at all from anyone—not even my friends. I tried not to be irritated by it, but it did bother me. You should have left a message, I thought, but then I rejected the idea: he should have at least seen that he’d missed a call, shouldn’t he?
I got ready to go to work and prepared myself for what I knew would be a dozen questions from Nora, Sabrina, and Ginger. I’d only just barely answered Sabrina and Ginger the morning before, and I was sure that they’d want more details about the night. They’d want to hear the “story” about the date, the nitty-gritty, and I wasn’t about to tell them that I’d slept with Stefan, or that we had sex more times than I could have even imagined in a single night. And I definitely wasn’t about to tell them that I’d called him, and nothing had come of it, even if I knew they’d be sympathetic. I didn’t want their sympathy.
“You’re looking chipper this morning,” Sabrina said as I came in through the back, headed for the computer to start everything up. Nora left that to me when I worked, since before me it had been her husband’s job, and she’d never learned how to really make the systems go. She could put in orders, she could do the basics of running them once they were up, but she didn’t know how to start everything.
“I’m feeling fine,” I said lightly.
“Oh, you’re here!” Ginger hurried to corner me at the desk. “You know you have to give us all more details than just ‘it was a regular old date’, right?”
“It really was, though,” I said, shrugging off the question. “He’s a nice guy, and his friends are decent people. One of his friends’ girlfriends wants to hang out with me.” The other girls laughed, and Nora came in. I had to repeat what was so funny.
“So, it was a good date?” I could see the hope in Nora’s eyes: she wanted me to have had a good date, so that I would have the prospect of starting a relationship, so that she could maybe see my happily-ever-after in progress a year or two down the line. It had worked out for her, so she wanted it to work out for me.
“It was a really good date, as those things go,” I said. “The best blind date I’ve ever been on.” That much was true, but I didn’t want to give too much away. “I’ve had worse Valentine’s Days with guys, so at least there’s that.”
Nora looked at me closely. “So, how did the night go after dinner?”
I shrugged, not quite able to fully meet Nora’s gaze. “It went fine. We had drinks with his friends, did some dancing, and decided to part as friends.” I didn’t want to outright lie to my boss, who I respected; but I also didn’t want to give anyone an opening to figure out how things had really gone down.
After a few more questions didn’t give any of them anything interesting, we all got busy opening the shop up for the day. After Valentine’s Day, things tended to slow down for a while, so I was looking forward to a fairly slow shift. I helped Nora get the system running and started prepping the ready-to-buy bouquets with her, while Ginger and Sabrina went to work on the first batch of deliveries to go out.
I’d told myself that I was resigned to Stefan’s apparent decision to let me slip away, but as customers came in—most of them men—I found myself bristling a bit at each one. “And who is this for?” I asked one of them, gathering up the bouquet he’d chosen and bringing it to the register. “We have complimentary cards you can add to the bouquet, you know.”
“They’re for my girlfriend,” the man replied. “I’m going to be giving them directly to her, so I shouldn’t need a card.”
“And one would hope that you can remember her name, anyway, right?” I smiled.
The man laughed. “Yeah, we would hope that I’d remember her name after two years.”
Another man came in after him and picked up a bouquet of pink and red roses. “Would this be good for my wife?”
I looked at the bouquet. “That depends. Are you getting her flowers because you messed up?” The man started slightly, and I caught myself. “Or is it a special occasion?”
“Her birthday is tomorrow,” the man said.
“They’d be perfect for that, then,” I said, taking a quick, deep breath to keep my composure. “And if you do ever make a mistake—forget to call her back, or something like that—we have the perfect bouquets for that, too.”
“Good to know,” the man said, smiling. I rang him up, and he actually did take a card. I watched him write up a fairly lengthy note. On an impulse, I grabbed beautiful, deep red rose and tucked it into the bouquet.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“This is my bonus to you, for being thoughtful,” I told him. “I hope she loves her flowers.”
By the time I was able to take my lunch break, I’d decided that for my own peace of mind, I would need to call Stefan again. I needed some kind of closure. I told Nora that I was going to head up the street to Soup Plantation and asked her if she wanted anything. She gave me a look like the one my mom used to give me when she knew I was up to something but didn’t know what it was. She asked me to pick her up some chicken soup and let me go.