Battle lines drawn.
“Tyler?” Micah scowled. “Who’s that?”
“You remember, my friend Tyler? From The Hive, that first night? The night when you felt so sorry for my pitiful ass that you—”
“Pitiful!”
“Yes, piti—”
“Oh, for the love of fuck.” Micah scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Speaking of people whoactuallyneed their asses kicked. Who thehellwould ever pity you? Huh? You are the hottest, most intelligent, most capable person—”
“Bullshit!”
“No!” He took a single step forward, and his long stride eliminated the distance between us, so he was standing way too close. “What’s bullshit is that your own opinion of yourself is so fucked, you can’t see what I see. I have jumped to conclusions about you, I have been unkind to you, I have overstepped your boundaries, but I have never fuckingpitiedyou, and it’s insane you would think that.”
He stared at me for a second, his chest heaving, then asked in a softer voice, “How do you pity someone you think can do anything, Constantine? Huh?” He shook his head. “You don’t. You try to clear obstacles out of their path. You try to show them that you believe in them. You try to stand close enough to bask in their light without holding them down. You try to love them, and hope someday, once they’ve achieved what they need to achieve, they’ll love you back.”
He swallowed hard, like he was as shocked as I was to hear that word coming out of his mouth, and he stepped back to his original spot, not looking at me anymore. “You know, this is counterproductive. When you said you wanted to talk, I thought…” He shook his head again. “Maybe you should go.”
There are these moments in life when your brain finally grabs hold of a truth—when you learn the world isnotalways a fair place, for example, and that people die way too young, or when you find out that beingsorrydoesn’t magically right all the wrongs you’ve done. And then there’s the moment when you realize you’ve been looking at the world through the lens of your own fuckingguiltfor so fucking long, you’ve managed to distort the brightest and most beautiful thing in your life into something small and ugly, and you’ve turned someone’s gift into a stick to beat them with.
Spoiler: it was not a comfortable feeling. Grabbing hold of that truth burned like holding a hot coal and snatched the breath away from me. It was so tempting to retreat from it. But Micah—Micah, who could do anything—looked so fucking bewildered and beaten down, I couldn’t do it.
He needed me.Micahneeded me. Possibly even as much as I needed him. And it wasn’t weakness to lean on him or to let him help me.
Adversity was like a fire that could meld two metals into an alloy stronger than either component was on its own—I’d learnedthaton a science show, too, so maybe educational television wasn’tallbad.
“So that’s it?” I said softly. “You’re just going to give up? On us? On Blooms?”
Micah threw his hands in the air. “Give up? I haven’tgivenanything up. I’ve been an idiot, clearly. About you andus.About fuckingHG Supply.” He spat the words like they were the worst curse he could think of. “But I don’t know where to go from here, Constantine. You don’t want to talk to me or hear my apology. I can’t find another supplier on this short notice.” He made a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a sob. “I’ve contemplated driving around to every grocery store in the area to find the flowers I need. Hell, at this point I would take just aboutany fucking flowers in the universe.I’d make an arrangement ofdandelions.But even if I took the time to do that, it’d be too late for me to assemble the arrangements.” He leaned against the counter again, defeat in his posture. “I’m out of ideas.”
I jumped down from my perch and crossed the small space, laying a hand on his chest, as my mind whirled with an actual, honest-to-God, save-the-day plan.
“Well, guess what?” I said. “I’m not.”
* * *
An hour and a half later, after meeting with Tyler atFanailleto get his approval as “man of honor” for the wedding and Marissa’s official representative, and after a long, detailed phone call with my mother, Micah and I stood across the shiny, metal table in the back room of Blooms.
“Let me understand, because I suddenly feel like I’ve been plopped down into an alternate reality,” Micah said. It should be noted that he sounded really calm and lookedincredibly sexyfor a guy suddenly finding himself in an alternate reality. The little crinkles on the sides of his eyes justdid itfor me, and I knew they always would. “Your mother is on her way here right now.”
“Yep.” I leaned my elbows on the table.
“With a metric shit ton of red and pink flowers she just happened to have lying around your greenhouse–”
“Tulips,” I clarified. “Yeah.”
“And your brothers havecalled infavorswith a bunch of florists in surrounding towns, like your mom is the head of some backwoods floralmafia–”
“I’m going to start a band,” I mused, stacking my fists together and leaning my chin on them. “Even though I can’t sing for shit. Just so I can call us Backwoods Floral Mafia.”
“And you’d still be better than Pete Daley,” he grumbled. “But seriously, Julian and Theo are going around to ten different places, collecting their unused stock.”
“Yep.”
“And bringing it here.”
“Unless they get hijacked by a rival floral gang on the way, yes.” I eyed him speculatively. “Youwerethere when we discussed all this with Tyler, right?”
