Chapter 5: Flower Bouquet
The air in the boutique was so thick with the perfume of a thousand blossoms it felt like breathing syrup. Alexandra Hawk, standing at six-foot-three in her scuffed combat boots and a worn leather jacket over a band t-shirt, was a monolith of dissonance amidst the curated pastel chaos. She shifted her weight, the boots scraping on the distressed white floorboards, and scowled at the wall of roses before her. Reds, pinks, whites, yellows, oranges, even some bullshit blue that was clearly dyed. Each one looked like a threat.
She’d never done this before. The whole concept was alien. Her usual gifts were practical: a new video game she thought he’d like, a ridiculously soft hoodie she’d stolen back from him because it smelled too much like her now, a fancy pastry from the Korean bakery he loved. Flowers felt… formal. Frail. Too much like a statement she wasn’t sure she knew how to make.
The problem was, she realized with a sinking feeling, she didn’t know his favorite. It had never come up. Their conversations tended towards what he was wearing under his skirt, what shitty movie they were going to mock, or the low, whispering confessions in the dark about her mother, his anxiety, the shapes of their fears. Flowers hadn’t factored in.
And she couldn’t fucking ask. Not now. The mission was compromised if he had even a hint.
To her left, a man in his late twenties in crisp chinos and a desperate expression was muttering into his phone. “No, babe, I’m here. I’m at the place. There’s just… a lot of options. You like pink, right? You like pink things.”
To her right, an older gentleman, maybe in his fifties, with a kind, bewildered face, was gently stroking a petal of a massive sunflower as if seeking an answer by touch.
A younger guy, probably a college student like her, with beanie and a panicked look, was just staring blankly at a bucket of carnations as if they were written in a dead language.
Alex caught the eye of the older man. He gave a weak, commiserating smile. “First time?” he asked, his voice warm and tired.
“Is it that obvious?” Alex grunted, shoving her hands into her jacket pockets.
“The stance gives it away,” the man in chinos said, hanging up his phone and joining the unspoken circle of the lost. He sighed, a long, suffering sound. “It’s our fifth anniversary. You’d think I’d know by now.”
“Valentine’s virgin,” the college kid said, pointing a thumb at his own chest. “Three months in. I’m so screwed.”
A strange, grudging camaraderie settled over the four of them, clustered in the aisle like survivors of a floral shipwreck. The delicate bell on the shop door tinkled incessantly with more doomed entrants.
“What’s the issue?” the older man asked, genuinely curious. “Just pick the prettiest ones.”
“That’s the issue, man,” the college kid, who introduced himself as Ben, said. “What’s ‘prettiest’? Is she a ‘pretty’ person or a ‘striking’ person? Are daisies too casual? Are orchids too… fuck, I don’t know, sexual?”
“Orchids can be sexual?” the older man, who said his name was Robert, asked, eyebrows raised.
“Everything’s sexual, Robert,” Alex said, her voice flat. “That’s the problem.”
The man in chinos, Mark, nodded vigorously. “Yes! Thank you! I brought her tulips once. Just, nice yellow tulips. She asked if I was trying to say our love was ‘declining’. Because they droop. I was trying to say ‘I saw flowers and thought of you’.”
“Mine likes sunflowers,” Robert said, smiling fondly at the giant bloom. “Says they’re cheerful. Simple.”
“Lucky bastard,” Alex muttered. At least that was a direction. A personality. Angel… was he a sunflower? Bright and simple? No. He was not simple. He was a complex, pastel-hued ecosystem of shy smiles and hidden lace and quiet, stubborn strength.
“What’s yours like?” Ben asked her, leaning against a cooler filled with delicate ferns. “That might help.”
Alex glanced at him, then back at the wall of roses. She pictured Angel in her hoodie, his white curls messy, his dark blue eyes wide when she’d slapped his ass two days ago. The way he’d kissed her knuckle afterward. The way he’d said, I want the mess.
“He’s… not like this,” Alex said, gesturing vaguely at the shop. “All this… frilly shit. But he likes it. He’s all soft colors and soft sounds. But he’s tougher than he looks. Gets flustered easy. In a cute way. And he’s… mine.” The last word came out with a possessiveness that surprised even her, rough and unequivocal.
The three men were silent for a moment, processing the ‘he’.
Mark was the first to speak, shrugging. “Okay. So, soft colors. Pastels. Not red then. Red’s aggressive.”
“Red is classic,” Robert countered.
“Red is what you get when you have no imagination,” Alex said, dismissing an entire crimson bouquet with a flick of her eyes. “It’s a threat. Or a cliché.”
“Lilies?” Ben suggested. “They’re elegant. Sort of… serene.”
Alex recalled the heady, almost overwhelming scent of stargazer lilies in a funeral home from a childhood memory she’d rather forget. “They smell like death and department stores. No.”
Robert chuckled. “You’re a tough critic.”
“I know what I don’t want,” Alex said, but the statement was hollow. The negative space was vast, and the positive shape eluded her.
An employee, a young woman with pink hair and a nametag that read ‘Maya’, fluttered over. “Finding everything okay, folks?” Her cheer was a weapon.
“We’re perishing,” Mark said dramatically.
Maya’s smile didn’t falter. “Valentine’s panic? It’s common. Tell me about your person. I’m a floral matchmaker.”
They all looked at Alex, the de facto spokesperson for desperation. She felt a muscle in her jaw tick. “Pastels. Not loud. Not… funeral-y. Something that lasts more than a day. He’s delicate but not… breakable.”
Maya’s eyes lit up. “Okay. Not roses. Too predictable. Not lilies, too funereal. You want something with texture, with nuance.” She led them away from the wall of tyranny to a quieter corner. “Hyacinths. They’re fragrant, come in soft blues and pinks and whites. Symbolizes sincerity.”
Alex leaned down and sniffed a cluster of blue ones. The scent was sweet, clean, potent but not sickly. It reminded her of Angel’s hair after he used that stupid expensive apple shampoo. “Okay,” she conceded. “Not bad.”
“What about these?” Ben pointed to a spill of tiny, star-shaped flowers in pale lavender and white.
“Astilbe,” Maya said. “Feathery. Soft. Whimsical. Good filler.”
“Filler,” Alex repeated, the word striking her. “I don’t want him to be filler.”
The statement hung in the air, more vulnerable than she’d intended. Robert gave her a kind, knowing look.
“Then he’s the focal point,” Maya said gently, not missing a beat. She moved to another bucket. “Ranunculus. Like a rose, but cooler. More layers. Softer. Comes in amazing pastels—apricot, blush, buttercream. They’re romantic as hell but in a… less obvious way.”
Alex looked. The flowers were indeed beautiful, cups of tightly wound, tissue-paper petals in colors that looked like a sunset over Angel’s room. They were elegant, intricate. Not fragile in a way that meant weak, but in a way that meant precious.
“Yeah,” she said, the word leaving her lips before she could second-guess it. “Those. The… ranunculus.”
“Excellent choice!” Maya beamed. “Now, we build around it. Some of those white astilbe for airiness. A few stems of this dusty miller for the silvery foliage—adds an edge, keeps it from being too sweet. Maybe a touch of this pink waxflower for a bit of wildness.”
As Maya gathered stems, talking about balance and composition, the other men watched, inspired.
“Can you… do something similar but with sunflowers?” Robert asked.
“Make me a ‘I’m-sorry-I-forgot-our-month-iversary-but-you’re-the-best’ bouquet?” Ben pleaded.
Mark just waved a hand. “I’ll take whatever she’s having, but in a ‘five-years-and-I-still-love-you’ size.”
They all laughed then, a short, sharp burst of shared masculine anxiety breaking into genuine humor. Alex found herself smiling, a rare, unguarded twist of her lips. It was absurd. Here she was, a tattooed, chain-smoking lesbian who could bench-press most of them, taking floral design advice next to a dad, a stressed boyfriend, and a college kid.
“You’re good at this,” Robert said to her as Maya worked, her hands a blur of green tape and sharp shears.
“At what? Standing here?”
“At knowing what he’d like. You described him perfectly. You’ve got a clear picture.”
Alex looked down at the boots that had tracked street grit onto the pristine floor. Did she? She knew the feel of him, the taste, the sounds he made. She knew the specific shade of pink that made his face light up, the way he organized his plush toys by size and not species, the fact he could curse fluently in Japanese when truly exasperated but refused to say so much as ‘damn’ in English. She knew the landscape of his body better than her own. But a favorite flower? That was a blank space.
Maybe knowing the person was enough. The flower was just a placeholder for all of that.
Maya presented the bouquet. It was stunning. A soft, cascading cloud of blush and apricot ranunculus, peppered with the feathery white astilbe, the silvery leaves of the dusty miller a subtle, grounding contrast, the tiny pink waxflowers like scattered secrets. It was pastel but not saccharine. Delicate but full. It was, undeniably, Angel.
“Fuck,” Alex breathed, impressed despite herself. “Yeah. That’s it.”
She paid, wincing only slightly at the total. The other men ordered their variations, the mood now one of relieved triumph.
Outside on the street, the cold February air was a slap after the cloying warmth of the shop. Alex cradled the bouquet in the crook of her arm, the paper wrap crinkling. It felt awkward, like holding a small, fragrant animal. She lit a cigarette with her free hand, taking a long drag and blowing the smoke away from the flowers.
She stood there for a moment, watching people rush by with last-minute gifts. The cynical part of her, the large part, sneered at the commercial machinery of it all. But a smaller, newer part, a part that felt suspiciously soft, looked at the bouquet and thought of the way Angel’s eyes would go wide and soft. He wouldn’t squeal. He’d probably gasp, just a little intake of breath, and his fingers would hover over the petals, afraid to touch. He’d find a vase, the perfect one, and spend ten minutes arranging them just so on his bedside table, where they’d catch the morning light.
He’d know. He’d know she’d looked at all those flowers and chosen these, for him. He’d see the thought, the attention. The care.
That was the terrifying part. Not the cost, not the effort. The exposure. A gift like this wasn’t a hoodie or a video game. It was a sentence spoken in a language she was still learning. A language of peonies and ranunculus and softness.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out, cigarette dangling from her lips.
A text from Angel. It was a photo of the movie case for My Neighbor Totoro, on top of their rumpled bed. The text below read: Radish spirit is on standby. Noodles arrived. They put extra fish cakes in by mistake. It’s a sign. Come home?
Home. He meant his dorm. Their mess.
Alex stared at the word. She dropped the cigarette, crushing it under her boot. She typed back, her thumbs clumsy.
On my way. Don’t start without me.
She hesitated, then added, her heart doing a stupid, hard thump against her ribs:
Got you something.
Three dots appeared. Then his reply, simple and sure:
You.
She looked down at the flowers, then back at the phone. A rough laugh escaped her, a puff of vapor in the cold air. He was right. He was the gift, the bewildering, beautiful complication she’d never asked for and now couldn’t live without. The flowers were just a pretty apology for all the times she didn’t know how to say it.
Tucking the bouquet more securely under her arm, she turned and started the walk back, the weight of the petals and the weight of the feeling settling into something like peace. Something like certainty. The streetlights flickered on, casting her long, tall shadow ahead of her, a dark silhouette holding a burst of captured spring against the winter night.