Hopefully I can take it off his hands at the end of the three years, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.Ifwe get there. The shop could flop entirely, forcing me to shut the doors on this dream long before my lease is up.
Focus, Elsie. I don’t have the time to beat myself down with what-ifs when I’ve got a business to get up and running.
The other night, I sat down with my dad to make a list of everything that has to be done before I can open. Spoiler: it’s a lot. It turns out that a big dream comes with an even bigger to-do list. I don’t mind, though. The possibilities are exciting, at least right now, before we’ve attached a price tag to the tasks that need completing. Check back in once I have a mile-long list of necessary renovations and the exorbitant cost to make them happen.
“I’m so excited to finally see it,” Olivia says, glancing up at the redbrick building with an iced coffee in hand, per usual.
“Am I going to get tetanus if I touch anything? I don’t know if I’m up-to-date on my shots,” Grace quips.
“It’s notthatbad,” I assure her. “Mostly just dusty, and there’s one spot on the floor you probably shouldn’t walk on.”
Grace glances down at her heels, bright pink and high enough that I’d snap an ankle on my first step if I dared to wear them. “These might not have been my best choice.”
“Are they ever?” Olivia teases. We live by the water and regularly have to walk along docks, broken sidewalks and the beach. Somehow, Grace manages to do it all in heels.
Before she can make one of her usual smartass responses, the contractor pulls up along the sidewalk next to us in his pickup truck. The side of the gray truck says M & M Contracting, the same one I’ve seen driving around town or parked in driveways no less than four hundred times over the years. Matt, who we graduated high school with, started the business with his older brother, Mike, right out of school. They’ve been successful enough that they’re still at it nearly a decade later.
“Hey, ladies,” Matt calls through the open passenger window. We say hello as he hops out and slams the door, rounding the front ofthe cab to join us on the sidewalk. We weren’t particularly close in high school, but he gives each of us a quick hug anyway.
“So this is it, huh?” He gestures to the building with one hand and fishes a small notepad out of his back pocket with the other. I glance at the pages as he flips through, but all I see is a bunch of chicken scratch I can’t make sense of. When he finds an empty page, he tugs a pen from behind his ear and clicks it, then looks at me. “You ready?”
“As I’ll ever be.”
For the next hour we wander through the old studio space, the portion of the building that’s going to be mine. We talk about the big changes I want to make, like ripping up the old wood floors and laying tile, adding a door to the enclosed backyard, doubling the size of the small office so I can make half of it a break room, and adding big windows to the two street-facing exterior walls so people walking by can see inside.
Then we get into the nitty gritty of all the things I don’t fully understand – plumbing, HVAC, rewiring to bring the electric up to code, and so on. Matt scribbles pages upon pages of notes, which makes me nervous. I might not be able to read his handwriting, but I do see lots of dollar signs.
Despite the long road ahead, as I follow Matt through the building and we talk logistics, I see all of those possibilities that roped me in the first time. The big windows I’m going to fill with flowers, enticing people to stop in off the street. The black-and-white tiled floors to contrast all the colors of the blooms. The big, rectangular work table I’m going to put right in the middle of the shop so I can put together arrangements while I chat with customers.
This time, the possibilities are something more tangible – real plans with chicken scratch notes and dollar signs, instead of dreams that may or may not come to fruition.
This is really happening.
“Maybe you can put a door on both street-facing sides,” Olivia suggests. “People are fickle. Even having to walk around the corner could deter them when there are so many other things downtown meant to distract them. If there’s a door on each side, they might be more likely to pop in when they see something in the window that they like.”
I grin at Olivia. “Genius. I want this place to be as open and welcoming as possible. Did you catch that?” I ask Matt, who’s crouched in the corner nearby, crunching numbers and taking notes while he chews on his pen cap.
“Got it,” he calls back, voice muffled around the plastic wedged between his teeth.
We all chat for a while longer, tossing ideas back and forth and working out the details so Matt can put together a supply and labor list, along with a timeline and the money needed to bring these dreams of mine to life. I’m happy to have Olivia and Grace here, offering up their own ideas to make the space unique. We finally finish up around noon, more than two hours after we arrived.
I follow my friends through the old lobby and out onto the sidewalk, stopping to lock up behind me. First on Matt’s to-do list will be adding a door – or two, I really do love Oliva’s idea – so we don’t have to keep going through the side that technically doesn’t belong to me. Is it considered trespassing if there’s no other way for me to get in and out?
“This is going to be so much fun,” Grace declares excitedly. “I can’t wait to see…”
Her voice trails off, a very un-Grace-like thing to do, and I look up as I pocket the keys, curious to see what’s distracted her. My stomach bottoms out when I seehimheaded our way, a strange reaction that I’d rather not examine too closely.
“Who isthat?” Olivia asks, and even my very happily engaged friend sounds a little bit in awe of the six-foot-plus, heavily tattooed, stupidly attractive man headed our way. He’s wearing all black again, this time a fitted T-shirt that shows off ink-covered arms all the way up to where the short sleeves cling to his biceps. He’s somehow bigger than I remembered, all dark and muscled and towering over us. When he stops on the sidewalk in front of me, I have to tip my head back to look him in the eye.
The back of my neck prickles when our eyes meet, and he gives me that same crooked smirk that slithered its way under my skin a few weeks ago.
“You again,” he says simply.
“What areyoudoing here?”
Declan looks over his shoulder at the building, scratching at the stubble on the side of his jaw. “Probably the same thing you are,” he points out.
My cheeks flame, becauseduh. I’ll probably be seeing a lot more of him around here.
