Unbreak My Heart

The bell above the door chimed at exactly 8:47 in the morning, and I knew it was him before I even looked up. I knew it was him because the bell had been chiming at exactly 8:47 every single morning for the past two weeks, and I knew it was him because nobody else in this godforsaken coastal town bought sunflowers at eight forty-seven in the morning when the fog was still so thick you could barely see the pier from the boardwalk. I knew it was him because he always opened the door slowly, like he was giving me time to prepare myself, like he understood that my first instinct every single time was to duck behind the counter and pretend I was suddenly very busy with the carnations that definitely did not need rearranging. But I didn't duck this time. I was done ducking. I looked up. Ethan James Hollister stood in the doorway of Whitmore's Blooms with his hands in the pockets of his dark gray coat, and water droplets clinging to the ends of his hair because apparently he had walked here, in the rain, like some sort of psychopath who didn't believe in umbrellas. He was tall, which I hated. He was broad-shouldered, which I also hated. And he had that smile on his face, the one that wasn't quite a smile but also wasn't a smile, the one that made him look like he knew something I didn't and was patiently waiting for me to figure it out. "Good morning, Hannah," he said, and his voice was exactly the same as it was every morning, warm and steady and completely unbothered by the fact that I had told him to leave twelve times in the past fourteen days. "It's raining," I said instead of hello. "You're soaking wet." He looked down at his coat like he hadn't noticed. "It's just water." "You're going to get sick and cough all over my inventory, then I'll have to explain to my customers why their wedding bouquets smell like respiratory infection." He smiled. Not the knowing smile. The real one. The one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made me feel like I had just told him the funniest joke he'd ever heard, even though I knew I hadn't said anything remotely funny. "I'll try not to cough on your flowers," he said. "Wouldn't want to ruin your inventory." He walked past the display of hydrangeas and stopped in front of the sunflowers, which I had purposely arranged on the top shelf of the back display, because I thought maybe if they were harder to reach he would give up and leave and never come back. That plan did not work. Ethan James Hollister was six foot two, so reaching the top shelf was not a problem for him, which was just one more thing on the very long list of things I resented about him. I watched him select six stems with the kind of care that irritated me. He turned each one over, examined the petals, checked the stems for any signs of wilting, and I stood there with my arms crossed over my chest and my jaw tight enough to crack teeth, wondering how someone could make buying flowers look so intentional, like he was choosing something important instead of just grabbing a handful and paying for them, then leaving like a normal person. "Six again?" I asked, because I had noticed he always bought six. He looked up from the sunflowers and met my eyes. I immediately regretted asking because something flickered across his face that I didn't understand, something that made my stomach flip in a way I refused to acknowledge. "Six is a good number," he said. "Six is an odd number." "Six is even, Hannah. Odd numbers are one, three, five, seven, nine, eleven—" "I know what odd numbers are, Ethan." He smiled again. That real smile. "I just like the number six. It's balanced. Two groups of three. Like a team." "You're buying flowers for a team?" "I'm buying them for myself. I like the way they look in my apartment. Makes the place feel less like a construction site and more like a home." I opened my mouth to tell him that his apartment was not my problem and I didn't care if it looked like a construction site or a landfill, but what came out instead was, "You live on a construction site?" He shrugged, and water droplets fell from the ends of his hair and landed on the floor. "I'm an architect. I renovate old buildings. I'm currently living in one I'm working on. It's functional, but it's not exactly pretty. That's why I buy the flowers." I should have stopped there. I should have rung him up and taken his money and told him to have a wonderful day in the most sarcastic tone I could manage. But something about the way he said it made me ask I had been avoiding since day one. "Why do you keep coming here?" He didn't flinch. He didn't look surprised. He just turned the sunflower over in his hands and looked at it for a long moment, and when he finally looked back up at me, his eyes were softer than I was prepared for. "There's no other flower shop in town," he said. "There are three other flower shops in town. There's one two blocks down on Maple and one at the farmers market and one all the way on the other side of the highway—" "I know. I've tried them all." "Then why—" "Because the lady who runs the shop on Maple charges twice as much for half the quality. The one at the farmers market uses pesticides and I can smell them from three feet away. The one on the highway is owned by a man who has a poster of a half-naked woman on the wall behind the register, and I don't think he actually likes flowers. He just likes that they get women in the door." I blinked. "You've done research." "I'm thorough. But that's not actually why I keep coming here." I stopped breathing. I could feel it, the way my lungs just paused, because he was about to say something that I was not ready to hear, and I had two seconds to stop him. But I didn't say anything. I just stood there and waited. "You have a way with flowers," he said, and I exhaled so hard I almost deflated. "I've never met anyone who arranges them the way you do. There's something about it. Like you're telling a story, but the story is all color and texture and somehow that still makes more sense than words sometimes." I didn't know what to say. He had just paid me the most honest compliment anyone had ever given me about my work, and he had done it while standing in a pool of rainwater with six sunflowers in his hands and the most ridiculous earnest expression on his face. I couldn't even bring myself to roll my eyes. "That's a very poetic thing to say," I finally managed. "Are you secretly a poet? Is that what architects do when they're not designing buildings? They write sonnets about sunflowers?" He laughed, and it was so low and warm that I felt it in my chest, which was completely unacceptable. "No sonnets. Just observations. I'm a man who pays attention to things, Hannah. That's all." I wanted to tell him that paying too close attention to things was dangerous, that noticing things about people meant you cared about them and caring about people meant you got hurt and getting hurt was not something I was willing to do ever again. I wanted to tell him that I was not a building he could renovate, that I was not a project, that I was a completed disaster and there was no amount of patience or persistence that could fix me. But I didn't. Instead, I walked over to the register and started ringing up his sunflowers. "Six dollars and fifty cents," I said. He pulled out his wallet and handed me a ten. His fingers brushed mine when he passed it over, and I jerked my hand back like I'd been burned. "Keep the change," he said. "I don't want your change." "It's not a charity. It's a tip." "I don't accept tips." "Everyone accepts tips." "Not me. Take your change, your flowers, and take yourself out of my shop before I call the police and tell them there's a sunflower-obsessed architect stalking me." He took the coins, but he didn't put them back in his wallet. He just held them in his palm, staring at them like they were important, and then he looked up at me with that patient smile and said, "I'll be back tomorrow." "Don't." "I'll be back tomorrow at eight forty-seven." "I'll close the shop tomorrow." "You won't close the shop tomorrow because Mrs. Henderson is picking up her anniversary bouquet at nine, and you've been working on that bouquet for three weeks because you care about it more than you care about anything else in your life." My mouth opened and closed like a fish. "How do you know about Mrs. Henderson?" "Because you told me. On day five. When I asked if you had any big orders coming up, you said you had an anniversary bouquet that was so important you'd been dreaming about it for a month. You said you wanted to get it right because Mrs. Henderson's husband had just been diagnosed with something and this might be their last anniversary, and you said you'd stay up all night if you had to because they deserved to have a beautiful final memory. That was the day I knew." "Knew what?" He looked at me for a long moment. "I knew you were worth getting to know. Even if you made it as hard as possible." He didn't wait for me to respond. He just turned around and walked to the door, and I watched him go, watched the water drip from his coat onto the floor, watched the six sunflowers bounce in his hand as he pushed the door open and stepped out into the rain. The bell chimed behind him. I stood there for a full minute, just breathing, just trying to remember how to feel nothing. It used to be easy. I had perfected the art of emptiness, the kind of hollow silence that kept everything safe and contained and completely, utterly closed off from anyone who might try to break through. I had been so good at it. And then Ethan James Hollister had walked into my shop two weeks ago and started buying sunflowers, and he had smiled at me with that real smile, and he had told me I had a way with flowers, and he had remembered Mrs. Henderson's anniversary, and he had looked at me like I was something worth knowing. I looked down at the counter and saw that my hands were shaking. I closed my eyes and counted to ten. I thought about the text message. I thought about the white dress hanging in my closet that I couldn't bring myself to throw away. I thought about the way I had stood at the altar alone, waiting for a man who had already decided I wasn't worth showing up for. I thought about the walls I had built. And I told myself, just like I did every single day, that those walls were going to stay up. No matter what.