Page 9 of Tangled Up with the Firefighter

They’re at the table for twenty minutes before Dean looks up and sees me watching. He lifts his hand—a small wave—and then he leans toward his mother and says something. She turns in her chair and looks at my shop, then smiles. Dean stands, and they’re both coming across the courtyard.

I wipe my hands on my apron and meet them at the door.

“Laurelle, this is my mother, Karen. Mom, this is Laurelle. She made your arrangement.”

Karen takes both of my hands in hers, which I wasn’t expecting. Her grip is warm and firm, and she smells like the kind of lotion that comes in a pink tube.

“Those flowers were the most beautiful thing I’ve ever received,” she says. “I told Dean, you have to take me to meet this woman. The ranunculus alone. I’ve never seen that shade of purple outside of my own garden.”

“Your son told me about your zinnias,” I say. “I wanted the arrangement to feel like something you’d grow yourself.”

“Well, you nailed it.” She squeezes my hands and lets go, then turns to look around the shop. “Oh, this is lovely. Dean, isn’t this lovely?”

“It is,” Dean says, and he’s looking at me when he says it.

Karen walks deeper into the shop, examining the flower buckets, the cooler case, the dried lavender hanging above the register. She touches things gently, checking the stems and reading the leaves. I like her immediately and completely, and that raises the stakes significantly.

“Dean tells me you moved here from Raleigh,” she says, pausing at a bucket of sunflowers.

“I did. Three years ago.”

“All by yourself?”

“All by myself.”

She shakes her head with a kind of admiring disbelief. “That takes courage. Starting over in a place where nobody knows you.” She looks back at Dean, who’s standing by the register with his hands in his pockets, watching us both. “Dean’s the same way. Has been since he was fifteen. He just handles things. His father had back surgery that year and Dean ran the house for six months. Groceries, bills, drove his sisters to school before he even had a license. Never complained. Never asked for help.”

She turns back to me with a look of such uncomplicated pride that it makes my throat tight.

“He’s my rock,” she says. “He’s everyone’s rock. I don’t know what any of us would do without him.”

Karen’s face is so open when she says it. So proud. Her voice doesn’t carry any of the weight the words hold for me, because she’s not thinking the way I am. She’s not connecting the fifteen-year-old boy who drove his sisters to school to the man who orders birthday flowers because nobody else thinks to. She’s not connecting the ladder drills he runs alone on Saturday mornings to the fact that repetition is the only way he knows how to empty himself out.

She sees her son. I see a hero.

She doesn’t know that yesterday I watched him hold me with the same steady hands he uses for everything, and I couldn’t tell if I was a person he chose or a weight he absorbed.

Dean is watching me. I can feel it. His eyes on my face, reading me the way he reads gauges and valve settings, precise and constant. He knows something just shifted. He’s too attentive to miss it.

I smile. I tell Karen it was wonderful to meet her. I wrap a small bundle of sunflowers in brown paper and hand them to her as a gift because she’s a woman who grows things and I recognize my own. She hugs me, which I wasn’t ready for. Dean holds the door for her on the way out, and when he looks back at me over his shoulder, I hold the smile until they’re across the courtyard and out of sight. Then I turn back to my workbench, put my hands in the water, and grip the stems until my fingers hurt.

I knew this. I knew this about him before Karen said a single word. I knew it from the coffee he brought me with honey, from the boxes he moved without being asked, from the lemon scone and the way he learned every flower name and the way he checked the courtyard drain before a rainstorm I didn’t even know was coming.

Every beautiful thing he’s done for me, he’s been doing for people his entire life. I’m the florist on his list, somewhere between his mother’s birthday and the courtyard drain. He’ll take care of me the same way he takes care of everything—steady, constant, and invisible—and one day, the weight of me will be just another thing he doesn’t complain about.

I can’t do that to him. And I can’t survive being someone’s habit—the thing he does because stopping would feel like failure.

I close the shop early. Lea knocks on the courtyard door with a latte and a question on her face. I take the coffee, tell her I’m fine, and close the door before she can see that I’m not. I go home to my apartment above the Trading Post and sit on my bed with my hands in my lap, still smelling like stems and cold water, and I let the wall go up.

Monday, the bell rings at nine in the morning and I keep my voice even and my hands busy. I tell him I’m behind on a wedding order. I tell him the shop is slammed. He stands at the counter, and I watch him register what’s happening—watch his jaw set and his eyes narrow—but he doesn’t push. He nods and he leaves and the bell rings behind him and I grip the counter until my knuckles go white.

Tuesday he doesn’t come.

Wednesday he doesn’t come.

Thursday, the door opens at four in the afternoon and the bell rings. I look up from the workbench with my hands full of eucalyptus, and Dean is standing in the doorway.

His hands are empty.