His One Night Obsession

Lottie

Florence's POV

"Flora!"

I was mid scroll through my phone when her voice hit me from across the floor. My whole face changed without permission. That was what Charlotte did. She was the kind of person whose presence rearranged the air in a room before she even fully entered it. Warm and loud and completely unapologetic about both.

I spun my chair around.

She was already moving toward me in that way she had. Heels clicking, bag swinging, her whole body committed to the arrival like she was walking into a room that had been waiting specifically for her. Which, honestly, it had been.

"Hi Lottie," I said, stretching the last syllable out the way she liked, already grinning.

"Hi Tia," she said and dropped into the chair across from my desk. She crossed her legs, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and her chin propped in her palms like a woman who had cleared her entire schedule for this exact conversation. "So."

"So," I said back, leaning against my chair with my coffee.

"Four years," she announced. She said it with weight, deliberate and serious, the way you announce something that deserves to be announced. "What are we doing tonight? And I mean what are YOU doing, because I need details and I need them now."

I laughed, the real kind, the kind that started somewhere low and just came out. "Something special," I said and set my coffee down, folding my hands in my lap. "I want him to feel it. All of it. How much I see him, how much I appreciate what we have."

Charlotte's expression did something careful and quick that I caught and chose not to examine.

"I got him the watch," I said.

Her eyebrows went up. "THE watch," she said.

"The watch," I confirmed. "The one he stops at every time we pass the case downtown. He never asks for it, you know how he is, but I see him looking." I shook my head, smiling at the image of it. "His eyes do this thing. Like he wants it but he won't let himself want it out loud. He's been between jobs and I know it's been sitting on him heavy so I figured why not. Why not just give him the thing."

Charlotte was quiet for exactly one second longer than felt natural.

"Flora," she said softly. Her voice had shifted, just slightly, the brightness dialed down one notch.

"I got balloons too," I continued, because I was on a roll and because the look on her face was one I recognized and was not ready to receive. "And flowers. The full thing. I want it to feel like an event when he walks in. Or when I walk in, however it works out."

"That's perfect," she said. She meant it, I could tell she meant it, but there was something underneath it that she was smoothing over with her smile. Charlotte had the best smile of anyone I knew and she knew exactly how to use it.

"I can't wait to see what he gets you," she added brightly. The brightness was back up, full wattage.

"Me too!" I said, matching her energy and holding it there because that was what I needed today. Not the careful look. Not the one careful second of silence. I needed Lottie at full volume, excited and certain, reflecting back the version of tonight I had been building in my head since I woke up.

She gave me that. For the rest of lunch she gave me exactly that. Gossip and laughter and the comfortable noise of two women who had been each other's constants long enough to know which version of themselves to show up as on any given day.

We had been Tia and Lottie since high school. Since the first time we watched The Princess and the Frog together on her bedroom floor and she had pointed at the screen and then pointed at herself and said that's me, obviously, and I had looked at Tiana, steady and driven and building something with both hands, and thought yeah. That tracks.

Some things you don't outgrow. You just carry them forward.

When lunch was over we walked back to our respective desks. I put my head down and finished the rest of my shift with my eyes on the clock and my mind already three steps ahead. Parked in the garage, balloons in hand, riding my private elevator up to the life I had built and the man I was choosing to celebrate in it.

I could not wait to see his face.