I want this color tour badly.
He takes me inside the little shop, where a big orange tabby sleeps lazily in a sunbeam on the floor. An elegant, older woman with Black braids gives a warm nod from the counter.
I smile back, then look around. There are kelly green, emerald green, and forest green plants hanging from shelves or sitting on little tables with mosaiced tiles on them. Corbin guides me to one in the corner. Like foreign words he’s practicing for the first time, he says, “That’s robin’s-egg blue.”
“It is,” I say, breathless. “Like the?—”
“Mirror in the hallway in your apartment.”
He remembered the shade he couldn’t really see. “Yes. Exactly,” I confirm.
With a pleased nod, he gestures to another plant table. “And this is sunshine yellow.”
I’m stunned. “Yes. It’s bright and happy.”
He gives a faint smile. “I’ll trust you on that.”
He sets a hand on the small of my back, sending a hot shiver up my spine as he leads me a few feet to a shelf full of terracotta pots.
“I had a feeling you’d love this place, so I asked Annabelle,” he says, tipping his forehead to the woman at the counter, “the color of everything in the store. I wrote them all down to remember them, and where they were. I wanted to give you the tour myself so I needed to learn the colors to show them to you.” His smile is warm and kind. “I was going to do it soon, but it seemed like maybe you needed to see it today.”
My heart stutters, then speeds up to double time. He did this for me. Learned and memorized so he could share it with me. Just because I love places like this, colors like these. Emotions rise in my chest, climb up my throat. “I really do. Thank you.”
He shows me a pot at the end of the shelf. “This is teal blue.” The one next to it. “Baby pink.” Another one. “Cherry red.” He lowers his voice to a deadly whisper. “Like the paint.”
The memory slams back into me, hot and sharp. “Just like the paint.”
He takes me around the shop, showing me a sign for a wall that saysAll My Friends Are Plants. “Sage green.”
“Yes,” I say, and my smile takes over my face. No, it steals my entire afternoon.
He bypasses the cooler holding bouquets of flowers. Those are probably tougher to memorize, since they must change more regularly.
But he finishes at a high white wooden table teeming with bouquets of irises. “Lilacs aren’t in bloom now in California. But irises are.”
My heart is too big for my chest. “This is incredible, and I needed this so much,” I tell him, and he deserves to know why. “You asked what’s wrong. The women in the knitting club are placing bets on how fast I fail.”
I tell him everything. His eyes burn with fire.
“They’re not betting on how fast you fail. They’re betting on how quicklywefail,” he says, his voice as protective as it was that day at the romance fair.
My heart softens, but the reality is I know it’s me they’re betting against. “No, Corbin, they think you’re a success. They think I’m a joke.”
Stepping closer, he slides a thumb across my jaw. My chest flips. “But you’re not a joke, and we are going to prove them all wrong.Together.” Then he says, “Do you like flowers?”
“Of course I do.”
“I had a feeling. That’s why I wanted to show you the irises. They’re close to your favorite color. Let’s put them in the bakery. I think we should have some flowers there every day, and they should be in your favorite color.”
All at once, he’s turned my day completely around.
When he buys a bouquet of irises, the woman at the register—Annabelle—smiles at him like she knows something. “Told you,” she says to Corbin, her dark eyes twinkling.
“Annabelle,” he warns.
I don’t know what she knows, but I like her already, especially when she says to me, “That was one hell of a London Fog cake you made.”
“Thank you.” Then it hits me—she’s the someone he asked about the color of the London Fog cake I left on his doorstep as we were getting started. She must matter to him if he put himself out there in that way. A fond feeling digs into my breastbone.
