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“Smut with a timeline,” I said with a grin.
“I swear, behind those glasses of yours lies a nasty little freak waiting to be set free.”
“Now I could’ve told you that.”
“All right, got the flower arrangement done. What time is it?” she asked.
“Fifteen ‘til. I gotta get out of here if I’m going to make the delivery on time. Which means you’ll have to take over the front counter. You good with that?”
“Believe it or not, I know how to take an order and press buttons, reminder I do own the place,” she said.
“Just making sure. Sometimes I don’t know if your fingers work properly anymore, you know since you took some time off.” Her billionaire boy toy had taken her around Europe for two months right after she hired me. I had gotten used to working on my own in the shop. Between that trip and all the weddings she handled, I was usually on my own.
“It was one bad input.”
“That made it look as if we’d made seven thousand dollars worth of profit in one day!”
“I said I was sorry!”
“Yeah, with a flower arrangement you made me make.”
“It’s the thought that counts?”
“I’ll be back in a little bit, Emilia.”
Grabbing the flowers and the address, I started for my car. I made sure to set the arrangement in the stabilization canister in back, then I plugged the address into my phone. I was twelve minutes away, which meant I didn’t have a lot of time to account for red lights.
I would have to be quick on the road if I wanted to make it on time.
As I drove through the streets of the city, my mind began to wander. I had graduated from nursing school a month ago, but I was finding it hard to leave the flower shop. Emilia had given me a part-time job to give me some sanity through my schooling, and there were days during my rotations where the flower shop was my only reprieve. I could throw my creative energies that weren’t being nurtured in school into growing our flowers and the arrangements and the decorating for wedding ceremonies. And even though I was now licensed to be a nurse, I wasn’t sure if it was what I wanted to do any longer.
I still had a passion for helping people, but I was burned out on the hospital scene.
My parents supported me in anything I wanted to do, but my mother was worried about my ability to take care of myself on the measly pay from the florist. And it wasn’t necessarily measly. I had a roof over my head and food to eat. But health insurance was hard to come by and my car wasn’t in the best of shape. My parents knew I’d make better money as a nurse, so they were slowly pushing me towards applying for those kinds of positions.
But I didn’t want to leave the shop. Or Emilia, for that matter.
My eyes came into focus with the thick fog of the city broke. Instead of passing homeless men urinating on the sidewalk and people running after their children down the street, I was rolling down a road with lush greenery on either side. Cars were floating by as if they weren’t quite touching the pavement and there was blocks of yard in between houses.
Massive, humongous houses.
Where in the world was I delivering these flowers?
I looked at my GPS and realized my last turn was coming up on the right. I watched the thick foliage on the side of the road break into a rolling hill. I saw the turn in for a concrete driveway, but I didn’t see a house.
It wasn’t until I began to drive back across the hill that a house emerged.
Rising from the beauty of the land it sat on, a beautiful brick house sat on top of the careful incline. The winding driveway was lined with blooming apple trees and I rolled down my windows to take in the smell. There was a six-car garage I pulled up in front of and a beautiful backyard landscaped with all sorts of flowers. Tulips and rose bushes and anemones and freesias. Hydrangeas and carnations and massive cherry blossom trees. There was a weeping willow way out on the edge of the property with what looked like a gazebo underneath it.
And there was steam rising from beyond a wall of daffodils.
Was there a hot tub back there?
It would make sense.
Daffodils loved a consistent mist.
I forced myself out of the car and wrapped around to get the flower arrangement. It was perfectly intact, and I smiled as I pulled it out of the trunk. I walked up the concrete walkway and ascended the steps onto the porch of the most gorgeous house I’d ever seen in my life.
