“And it did.”
“Yeah.”
“And so you ran away?” he says with a smirk.
“I walked over to Dane,” I reply, and he chuckles, I’m sure now able to picture the scene. “I needed to talk it out with someone. I was so shocked by the whole thing—I mean, what are the odds?”
“You didn’t want to talk it out with me?” His voice is small.
“Well, I did actually, once I was coming back,” I continue, taking a deep breath. “But then ...” I trail off.
“Then I told you about my mum and said I was leaving,” he says as he realizes.
I nod. He leans over and puts his head in his hands, running his fingers through his hair again, as though taking all of it in is hurting his brain.
I can’t help but wonder what’s going on in that swirling kaleidoscope of a mind of his. But before I can even theorize, he stands up.
“I want to show you something here,” he says, grabbing my hand. His is warm in mine, and it makes my heart pound, like there’s a string of hope now knotted between us. He drags me a few feet and then stops in front of a flower.
It’s a showy one—lavender-lobed petals fan out, with spindly dark-purple tendrils above them, making a circle of dozens of the thinnest jazz hands you’ve ever seen. Rising out of the center is an elongated stalk, with ornamental and multipronged stamens pushing out on every side. I’ve never really seen a plant like it.
“It’s called a passionflower,” he says, and I snort.
“Is itnow?” I smirk, and he shakes his head with a grin, as though he’s disappointed in me but can’t help but be amused.
“That’s not the important part,” he says pointedly. “This is the plant that makes passion fruit actually; it’s a tendril climber.”
“As a New York City kid, you’re losing me with the plant knowledge, I have to admit,” I say with a grimace.
“Eh, it just sort of means it’s like a weed.” He shrugs. We both stare at it for a moment, the whole plant beautiful and wild. But he continues, clearly having some point to get to, even if at the moment I can’t quite fathom what it is. “This was my nan’s favorite flower,” he says, staring at it with a sad smile. “She said she loved it because it can be so many things. It has evergreen leaves all year, so a lot of the time it really does just look like a vine that can cover walls or a fence. Then it has the buds of the flower, which look like they’d just contain quite a normal flower. And then all of a sudden, they bloom, and you have this completely insane, vibrant, wiggly thing. When it goes away, you thinkthat’s it, but then a few weeks later you get these egg-shaped basic-green fruits, andthenwhen you open them up, they’re surprisingly practically neon-yellow, with black seeds.”
I nod, starting to understand where he’s going with this. “They have a lot of sides to them,” I say.
“They have a lot of sides, yeah.” He pauses and breathes in the humid air. “No one in the building seems to remember it, but Nan had a few of these plants on the roof when I was a kid. She had two chairs and two planters, and she’d sit upstairs with me, and we’d read books and she’d have a gin and tonic and I’d have a soda—which felt pretty exciting because my mother never let me have anything sugary. And because each flower only lives for about a day, there’s only a couple weeks a year when they all come out on any given plant. So she would always get really excited about it. She once woke me up out of bed to say the first one bloomed, and we ran upstairs together to see. She told me the plants reminded her of me, because in the right conditions they open up and then once you think you’ve figured them out, they surprise you. After she died, I wondered if I’d lived up to that assessment.”
He reaches out to touch the leaf of one of the flowers, tender, like the memory is right in front of him.
“I think she was absolutely right,” I whisper.
“Yeah?” he says, turning back to me.
“You’re full of surprises, Eli Whitman,” I chuckle. “There’s so many beautiful pieces of you that some people are lucky enough to see all of.”
He gives me a small smile and turns back to the flowers.
“That’s what I was building the planters for, by the way. Dane says there’s only a few varietals that’ll grow as far north as New York City, but I ordered the ones she recommended. I think they’re the ones Nan used to have.”
“There’s so much Dane didn’t tell me,” I grumble, and I love the laugh that unintentionally hiccups out of him at that.
“But we have said quite a lot to each other over the years,” he whispers. He turns to face me and gently tucks a strand of hair behind myear, the small movement flint enough to practically set my whole body on fire. One finger lingers at my jaw.
“Apparently so,” I respond, holding my breath in and wondering what comes next.
“I know ...” He pauses and breathes deep, as though he’s got to get ready. “I know you kind of already know what I’ve been thinking, because apparently I texted you all my internal thoughts,” he says, his cheeks turning red in a way I’ve never seen before.
“I wasn’t trying to deceive you or not tell you—” I try to explain, but he cuts me off.
“I know that,” he says thoughtfully. “When I ran into you this morning, it really blew my mind.”
