"Elowen Céleste Bloom?—"
A ding sounds from her end. Background noise shifts—the particular ambient quality of Bloom and Brier mid-morning, that layered green-and-floral scent I can practically reconstruct from memory. A man's voice, warm and uncertain, asking about the possibility of a special request for a bouquet.
"Certainly!" Elowen's voice transforms immediately into her professional register—warm, attentive, utterly engaged. Then back to me, two seconds, barely a breath: "Fate has other plans for this conversation, I'm afraid?—"
"Absolutely not. Elowen Bloom?—"
"We'll continue this! Over drinks! St. Patrick's Day tonight, it would be thematically appropriate?—"
"Bullshit."
"Take a shot for me during your shift! Celebrate! Don't mope!"
"We are revisiting this conversation in full, you hear me? Full. Explanation. No convenient customers."
She is already laughing again. "Goodbye, Mila!"
The call ends.
I sit on the kitchen stool for a moment, the phone face-up on the counter, the screen going dark. The apartment settles back into its quiet. Outside, the sky through the small window is the particular grey of a day that has already decided what it's going to do and is warming up to do it—thick cloud cover, that specific atmospheric pressure that precedes rain, the light flat and without shadow.
St. Patrick's Day.
I spent the luckiest night of recent memory at a St. Patrick's masquerade and came home alone with a wet hem and no coin and the persistent, circling preoccupation of a woman who kissed a stranger in a rose-covered courtyard and didn't ask for his name.
I get up and start moving through the apartment.
The space is—functional. That's the honest description. I moved to Oakridge Hollow five months ago with what fit in the car: clothes, two boxes of kitchen basics, a set of bedding I'd had since university, and a lamp because the overhead lighting in this apartment is the fluorescent variety and I had opinions about that. Since then, I've added a bookshelf from the second-hand shop on the main street, currently home to eleven novels that I've bought with genuine reading intentions and varying rates of follow-through.
Romance, mostly.
I'm not analyzing that.
The books accumulate faster than the hours available to read them. A new release comes out and I buy it thinking this week, this time, I'll actually find the window—and then the double shifts stack up, and the collector calls stack up, and by the time I'm home the window has closed and the book goes on the shelf to wait with the others, patient and unread, a line of spines that represents every intention I had that the week outpaced.
I look at the shelf now.
Three of those spines are Bridgerton-adjacent. I bought them before the masquerade and definitely didn't connect that to anything and am absolutely not connecting it to anything now.
The masked Alpha's scent comes back to me, unbidden and in full detail: cedarwood with age in it, leather that had been used rather than displayed, and underneath both the amber-warm Irish whiskey note that had done things to my baseline during the dancing that the scent suppressor had absolutelyfailed to mitigate. His hands—the specific pressure of them, the certainty with which they held space without crowding it. The way he'd named my scent signature back to me like something he'd been studying.
Honey. Warm vanilla. Lime—sharper underneath, like the zest rather than the fruit.
Nobody has ever done that.
In three years with the pack, across fourteen months of building a life from the debris they left, through every interaction this year with customers and colleagues and Elowen who loves me—nobody has taken my scent apart and handed it back to me like it was worth that level of attention.
I'm standing in the middle of my apartment with a mop-damp floor and eleven unread novels and the persistent, specific ache of someone who found something good and left it on a train platform.
If he was good in bed I'd be in actual crisis right now.
The kiss was enough to confirm the direction of that. The rest is speculation that I'm refusing to engage with on the grounds of self-preservation.
I close my eyes, just for a moment.
"All right," I say, to the apartment, to the grey window, to whatever version of the universe is currently listening. "If there's any actual luck left in this situation—" I gesture broadly at the general concept of my life. "Let me see him again. In real life. No masks, no event architecture, no train timing. Just—a real moment."
Thunder.
