Her gaze lifts when the bell chimes and her whole face opens.
"Callahan."
Six months and I'd almost convinced myself I'd exaggerated how beautiful she is. Built it up in my head into something bigger than it actually was. I hadn't.
"Hey," I manage. Thank God. "I didn't know you were in town."
"I moved in last week," she smiles, setting down the scissors. "Across the street." She points over my shoulder. "The apartment with the big window. Third floor."
"Right." I let the door close behind me. Take a step in. Normal steps. Regular human steps. "That's, uh. Great."
"Is it?"
The tilt of her head and the gleam in her eyes tells me she is enjoying my non-functioning brain a little too much. It's the same smile from the stairwell, the one that made me forget how to introduce myself.
I need to say something normal, something that won't make me sound like a stuttering idiot, which I am not.
"Flowers," I say. "For my dad."
"Sure." She comes around the counter, close enough now that I can smell her shampoo or soap or whatever it is. Clean and warm and something sweet underneath I can't name and am not going to try.
"What does he like?"
"Anything. He's not picky."
She pulls stems from different buckets. Yellow ones, white ones, something with small purple buds she holds up to the light and considers before adding. She takes her time, turns each stem, checks petals. She's careful with them in a way that makes me look at her hands. Then makes me stop looking at her hands.
"He keeps them in the kitchen," I offer, for no reason. She didn't ask, and I sure as hell didn't have to say a word.
"That's sweet."
She adds another stem, tucking it into the arrangement. "My mom used to keep flowers on every surface. Our houses or tents looked like a botanical garden."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. She'd bring back cuttings from whatever country she was in. Half of them died on the way back, but she didn't care."
She smiles at the memory, a little distant. "She'd stick them in water and hope for the best."
She considers the bouquet in her hands.
"Give me a sec to remember how to ring it up."
"Put it on my tab."
She stops, bouquet still in hand, smile different from the stairwell one. "You have a tab at a flower shop?"
"Erin keeps a running one for me. I'm here every week."
She files it away, the fact that I buy flowers every week, and I wish I'd said literally anything else.
I pull a ten from my wallet and drop it in the tip jar.
Her eyes move from the jar to me. "That tip is too big for what you got, Callahan."
"Inflation."
She leans against the counter. "That's not how inflation works."
