Page 123 of Bloom

Jesus. And I thought I had problems.

“Does he know?” He didn’t seem like he knew. Back when he showed up on the ranch, he certainly didn’t act like a guy who was visiting the mother of his child—now that I think about it, he said he’d never met Lux, didn’t he?I met their grandparents once, he said, and that was it.

Lux’s shaking head confirms my suspicions, unnervingly timid as she offers an explanation. “He didn’t know who I was. We met in a bar in Ponderosa Falls. Mark and I were fighting, and I was a little tipsy, and Everett was…” She slices a shaky hand through the air. “Everett.”

I nod knowingly.Everett, indeed.

“By the time I found out, he was long gone. And what was I gonna do? Track him down at some rodeo in the middle of nowhere, drag him away from his buckle bunnies and say, ‘surprise, youmightbe a father!’? Yeah fucking right.”

She huffs a laugh, talking to herself more than to me, but that’s okay. God knows she’s been my sounding board a lot over the past few days; I can return the favor.

“I was gonna tell him.Maybe. I was building up the courage, but he’s already gone again. I heard the guys talking—his dad had a heart attack so he came home for a few weeks. I thought—” She cuts herself off, laughing sardonically before scoffing. “He probably wouldn’t even remember me. We talked for, like, a second. It all happened so quickly, y’know? I didn't—”

She stops mid-sentence again and makes a frustrated noise, like she keeps saying things she doesn’t mean to. Lowering herself onto her back again, she stares at the sky and whispers,quiet as a mouse despite our solitude, “He has a birthmark. A huge one, on his shoulder.”

Sobering realization washes over me just as her head flops to the side, her mouth set in some wobbly semblance of a smile. “Just like Alex’s.”

I don’t know what to say to that. What can I say? I’m trying to conjure up something, anything, when she looks away again—when she takes my silence to mean something it doesn’t. “I know. I’m a terrible person.”

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

She snorts like she doesn’t believe me. Like she really thinks I’m lying here judging her.

“I was thinking,” I roll onto my stomach and catch her gaze, “that we make quite the pair. The adulterer and the mistress.”

Her laugh is real, but strained. “The difference is you didn’t know about Cheryl. I didn’t bump my head and suddenly forget about Mark.”

“The difference is,” I flick her shoulder, “I hate Mark. I love you.”

“You?” She gasps, feigning shock. “Caroline Brennan, capable of hatred?”

“You’d be surprised.”

Another laugh, and the corners of her mouth quirk too. Wriggling a little closer, she tugs on a strand of my hair. “I love you too, you know.”

“Yeah,” I say, and I relish in the unfamiliar, utter certainty of it. “I know.”

37

“You’re lucky I don’t shove these up your ass,” the sullen, accented man snips, even as he sifts through the piles of flowers on his stall to find the freshest blooms.

On Monday morning,I find a mason jar of tall, purple flowers outside my door.

Hyacinths. Commonly associated with expressing feelings of guilt or remorse.

I don’t know if Hunter knows that. Just like I’m not sure if the irises that showed up a day later were picked for their perfect, violet petals, or the hope they represent. Maybe Wednesday’s gladioli were just meant to be pretty, not signify endurance and integrity. On Thursday, I Googled daffodils and spent hours trying to decipher what new beginning they might be shepherding. The honeysuckle I almost tripped over yesterday, their meaning, I wish I didn’t know. Today’s delivery…

I’m not thinking about the bluebells I found decorating the doorstep. For my own sanity, I can’t. Literally, I can’t—my brainempties of anything coherent when the bell above the front door chimes and I lift my gaze from the bouquet I’ve been arranging for an hour too long to greet my first customer of the day, and I find it isn’t a customer at all.

Really, it’s pretty miraculous that Cheryl Whitlock waited a week to confront her husband’s…mistress, I jokingly called myself, but I guess that really is the word. I guess that really is what I am. I’m sure as hell not anyone’s girlfriend, despite what the fashionable woman peering at me over the rim of her designer sunglasses might think.

“You’re not at all what I expected.”

The feeling,I think,is most definitely mutual.

Intimidatingly tall heels click against the tile floor as Cheryl invades my place of work, her long nails tapping against the counter I clutch tightly. Instinctively, my gaze flits to the cowboy-boot-shaped vase right next to her hand, filled to the brim with humility, gratitude, and ever-freaking-lasting love in floral form.

Cheryl can’t know who they’re from, but she stares at them like she does. And for a second, she almost looks human. For a second, my knees wobble as I contemplate dropping to them and begging for forgiveness, insisting I didn’t know, promising to do anything she wants.

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