Chapter Eight
Brent
#letsmakethisviral
March was my least favorite month weather-wise. I never knew if I was going to be freezing or forgetting my jacket at the planetarium because it was so gorgeous when I left for the day. Which was exactly why I was running from my car to my mom’s shop, hoping to stay warm. Damn jacket was at work.
“Where’s your coat, young man?” My cousin imitated my mother as I walked through the door. Fine, I ran.
“At work. You got a spare around here?”
Bastard threw me an apron.
“No, but I’ve got a large order I’m working on, and your mom is who knows where.”
He handed me a bucket of roses to take the lower leaves off. That I could handle.
“It’s Wednesday.” I rolled my eyes. Everyone in town knew where Vivian was on Wednesdays. She was kind of a legend for her, shall we say, intense, method of playing. “She’s at bingo.”
“So, important meeting?”
I slapped him on the back of the head because, really? He thought meeting?
“Was bingo. How do you not know this?”
“I’m a bit sleep-deprived.” His eyes were a bit sunken in, his face a bit drawn, which was unusual for my pretty-much-always perfect cousin, which meant I needed to razz his sorry butt.
“I thought your perfect little Rose slept like a dream.” She truly was perfect, though, with her pinchable cheeks and her button nose.
“Oh she does, but the new puppy—not so much.”
“You got a puppy? What on this earth would make you think that was a good idea?” I liked dogs well enough, but full-grown, already trained, not-at-all-jumpy dogs who slept a lot and bothered you little. Dogs that acted more like cats. Cats. I liked cats.
“I found him out back, and no one seemed to know whose he was. A week later, I conceded, and Giggles became ours.”
I had already finished about half the bucket and pointed to the rest. Kayson nodded. More leaf removal it was.
“You named your puppy Giggles?” Which was better than a person name, like Al, but still.
“No, my daughter did.” The way his face beamed every time he mentioned his daughter was both endearing and heart-wrenching. Endearing because I loved to see Kayson enjoying every second of her life. Heart wrenching because my desire for children had been growing by leaps and bounds since my trip to NOLA.
Which was dumb. A one-night stand doesn’t make you instantly want to settle down, except it didn’t feel like a one-night stand. Not that I was an expert in them, but still it felt like more. We knotted face-to-face, for goodness’ sake. That isn’t a fuck-and-go kind of thing. Not to me, anyway. Not that dwelling on it or randomly posting pathetic selfies with the hashtags #wheresmysexynurse and #IfYouSeeMyJSendHimMyWay were helpful.
“Your daughter doesn’t talk,” I countered as I finished up the last rose and placed it back in the bucket, only to have him hand me another. He wasn’t kidding about an unexpectedly large order.
“No. But she giggles every time she sees the puppy, so the name fits.”
“I can’t even wait to see how you spoil her once she can use words to give her commands.” It was going to be bad. I saw a car for her sixteenth birthday and fancy smartphones in her future, or whatever teens wanted these days.
“You’ll understand one day.”
“I hope so.”
“You still hung up on that nurse?”
Hung up didn’t even begin to describe it. I was probably turning him into someone far better than he really was. Good memories took on lives of their own. But yeah, I wanted to see him again, to talk to him again, to hold his hand again. I was a lovesick fool.
“How do you—oh.” He held his phone out to me. Of course, my cousin would look at the crap I posted, although, to be fair, I loved every one of the four bazillion pictures of Rose he posted. “Yeah kind of.”
“Well if it makes you feel any better, a lot of people are trying to help.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you not look at your social media?”
I kind of didn’t. I looked at his profile for baby pictures and that was about it.
“I kind of do drive-bys.” I shrugged. “So spill. What do you mean?”
“Well, #IfYouSeeMyJSendHimMyWay is now trending.”
Trending? Even with my far too frequent postings, trending meant a ton of people were using it. That was just plain crazy.
“Looks like some college kids picked it up and paired it with #makethisgoviral and #FindBrentHisMan.”
“Let me see that.” I yanked his phone from him and began to scroll through. Sure as shit, it was trending. “Holy shit. Seven hundred shares.”
Back when I was in charge of the planetarium’s social media account, before they gave up on that venture, I’d be lucky to get one retweet, and I was trying. Seven hundred was unbelievable.
“Oh, that’s not one of the good ones.” He took the phone back, tapped on the screen a few times before handing it back. “Here, this is the one you took of the coffee.”
“That can’t be right.” There was my blurry picture, one I didn’t even have that hashtag on, and people were sharing it with my J hashtag. Un-freaking-believable, and they weren’t even mocking me. They legit wanted me to find my sexy nurse. If only that could be enough. “There are five digits in shares alone.”
“Which is why I don’t know how you missed it.” He slapped me on the back of the head just as I had done to him earlier. In so many ways, we were more like brothers than cousins, which made him a thousand times better than my soon-to-be stepbrother who had yet to apologize to me. Not that I was bitter or anything.
“I drive by, remember.”
“Well quit driving by, and let’s do this right. Here hold this.” He handed me a vase of flowers. “Perfect. Now look to my left—chin up—and I got it.” He must’ve snapped a thousand pictures.
“What are you typing?” I had a pretty good guess.
“If we are going to get this to work, we need to be a little bit creative.”
I grabbed the phone from him. Oh, yeah, he got creative all right, adding Vivian’s Roses to the hashtags but that didn’t stop people from sharing it. I had five shares before handing it back to him, and it wasn’t even posted on my account—it was on his. My silly hash tagging had taken on a life of its own. Fingers crossed it worked. Well, worked and didn’t have Jay thinking I was a stalker.
“So, who are all these flowers for? Some spouse with a naughty husband?” I handed him back the second bucket, completely ready.
“No. Mrs. Harrison died, and her husband made me promise that if he went first I would regale her with flowers when her time came.” His voice cracked as he spoke. I didn’t know her or her husband, for that matter, well, but I knew they were loved by my mom and cousin, and my heart hurt for him.
She had come in every week to get flowers for his grave, and from what I heard, he had come in every week before that to get flowers for her table. They were that once-in-a-lifetime love, the stuff of movies.
“I am so sorry.”
“It pretty much sucks. But you know what? It makes me more determined to help you find your man because I know what it is like to have what they had, and I want that for you, Brent. I want that for you.” He pulled me into a hug, and I hugged him back his tears dampened my shoulder.
I wanted it, too.