“Let’s get out of here,” he said. He stood up and took my hand by mistake. As we walked to the counter to pay, I could feel him letting me go in tiny self-conscious increments, and I imagined how sweet he must have been a couple years earlier, with a first girlfriend maybe.
Out on the street there was a vendor selling flowers, his stall lined with deep buckets of freshly cut blooms. Manu went over and picked out a rose, a red one with its petals still tightly closed. “Do you like roses?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He passed the rose to the vendor, a large man in a blue apron, who stuck the stem into a little vial of water.
“A special occasion?” the man asked me as Manu paid.
I shook my head.
“A flower just for today, then. The best kind.”
I carried the rose around all afternoon, smelling
