She’s crouched down now beside Pan at the berry cart, letting him pick out the fizziest-looking fruit while she listens intently to his rambling description of their relative pop-strength. Her face lights up every time he says something absurd, like“This one explodes like a moonfire beetle!”and she just keeps nodding like it’s the most important science lesson she’s ever heard.
She looks like she belongs here.
Flora sidles up beside me, passing off a little bag of honey almonds she must have grabbed while I was staring. “You’re doing that thing again.”
“What thing?”
“That dopey ‘I’m in love with my best friend and I want her to stay forever’ face.”
I take the almonds. “It’s a complicated face.”
Flora laughs under her breath. “No…it’s a good one.”
I smile.
And when Iris returns, bag of fizzy fruit in one hand, reaching instinctively for mine with the other, my heart just about bursts. She falls back into step beside me like she was made for it. Like this is just…what we do.
And it is, isn’t it?
It’s what we did for a decade on Earth, even in very different circumstances. The two of us, side by side.
Meant to be.
“I got the extra-explody ones,” she says, cheeks flushed. “Pan dared me.”
“Pan’s gonna have sticky eyebrows for a week.”
“I’ll bring wipes next time.”
“Next time?”
Her eyes twinkle. “Yeah…for our next date.”
We wander for another hour, past a glassblower shaping bees from golden flame, a watercolor gallery built into the roots of an ancient tree, a book stall selling stories handbound with soft, painted leaves. Pan gets a hat shaped like a moth, Davrin chases him into the toy store, and Flora and Ivarr peel off to find coffee and give us ‘privacy’ in the most unsubtle way imaginable.
By the time we round a curve toward the end of Fablegrove’s Main Street, Iris has one hand in mine and the other holding a flower-pressed journal she bought at a cart. She’s flushed and laughing and drunk on sunlight…and I’m in love. I’m so in love that it takes my breath away.
We pass under an arched trellis woven from wild bloomvine and wisteria, and there it is—my favorite place in all of Fablegrove.
The Bloom & Quill.
It’s tucked at the end of the street, nestled beneath the wide, low limbs of an ancient storytree. The whole shop looks like it grew out of the earth itself—its curved doors carved into the natural knot of the trunk, the roof blanketed in moss and flowering vines. Roses spill from the window boxes in a riot of pink and cream, and wisteria dangles from the eaves in long violet curtains. The windows glow with soft light and stained glass, and through the door, the faint scent of paper and pressed petals drifts out to meet us.
Iris gasps softly. “Is this…”
“It’s a romance bookstore,” I tell her, a little shy. “All genres, all species. The owner specializes in hand-translated Jotunbei novels…they do a lot of floral binding and archive-quality preservation too. First editions. Artisan bookmarks. Sappy poetry scrolls.”
She turns to look at me, eyes huge behind her glasses. “You brought me to aromance bookstorein the middle of a flower forest?”
I nod, rubbing the back of my neck. “Well…I thought you might like it.”
Her whole face lights up, and then she’s leaping into my arms, flinging her arms around my neck. She kisses me softly, chaste—but it’s our first time kissing out in the open like this, for anyone to see, shameless.
She pulls back, biting her lip. “Garrik, this is the nicest date I’ve ever been on.”
My heart stutters in my chest. “Not a lot of opportunities for dates on Earth, I guess,” I mumble.
She swallows a giggle. “Don’t sell yourself short,” she says. “I mean it.”
