Forget Me Not by Julie Soto

18

Elliot

THREE YEARS, THREE MONTHS, ONE WEEK, AND FOUR DAYS AGO

Ihaven’t talked to Ama about anything but business for two weeks. At last Saturday’s wedding at the Willow Ballroom, we were both swamped with work. She had the most decadent design I’ve ever seen, and it really paid off. But that meant that there was no time for any conversation outside of “Looks great. Move that over two inches.”

Now, at the Ng wedding, I’ve only been contracted for centerpieces, so I don’t even see her until she shows up at the reception venue with her Bluetooth in her ear and a fiery face of concentration.

I still don’t know how I feel about all this. Have I been blown off? Was it a one-time thing? If so, I’m not going to be the one who approaches her, even though I do want to see her again. I want to take her on a date and chat about something other than flowers and weddings. I’ve been waking up hard every morning since the Gordon wedding, dreaming about being with her again.

But I don’t know how to make it happen other than just … hanging around. I’ve asked out exactly four women in my life, and statistically, I’m not great at this.

So I set up the tables, take my dolly, and head back to the parking lot. As I’m starting my truck, a knuckle raps on the driver’s side window. Ama’s bright face is on the other side of the glass. I roll the window down with a push of a button.

“Hey.”

“Hi,” she says sweetly. “Leaving already?”

“I need to get back to the shop.”

She hums and hops up on the step so she can lean her arms in through the window. “How’s your week been?”

It hits me that I’m probably not cool enough for whatever this is. Whatever she thinks she’s doing, whether it’s biweekly hookups or casual dating—I think it’s beyond my capabilities. But still I answer her, “Good,” with a dry throat. “Yours?”

“Busy. I need this wedding to be over with. They set a low budget and then continually asked me to exceed it.” She blows out a breath and runs a hand through her hair. My eyes snag on it. “What time does the shop close?”

“Six. I’ll be back here at ten for the vases.”

She nods. “Do you want to come back a little earlier?” Her hand reaches out, to adjust my collar maybe, but then she’s just playing with the top button. “You can help me set up sparklers,” she says in a silky voice, as if sparklers means something else entirely.

“Is it really setting up sparklers? Because you know how I feel about you needing an assistant—”

“I mean, come back and I’ll fuck you in your truck.”

My jaw snaps closed and I bounce my head as if weighing my options. “I was thinking maybe I could fuck you in my truck.”

Her lips press together to hold back a smile. “I’ll consider it.” She drags my collar forward and kisses me. Before I can tangle my fingers in her hair, she pulls away, winks at me, and disappears.

I’m back in the parking lot at 6:02. Before I can contemplate going in to find her, I see a figure leaving the reception. “YMCA” is playing.

As the music changes to “We Are Family,” she jumps through my passenger door and slips her underwear down her thighs, and I tell her to get on her hands and knees on the bench seat.

When I got this truck in high school, I always hoped I’d get to have sex in it. Maybe after a football game, where I was inevitably the star quarterback despite never having a natural talent for the sport.

It’s a bit more complicated than I imagined, but I still get the hang of it with one knee on the bench. Her hands are braced on the window, the headrest. The truck is muggy and smells like her, and I stare down at her hips as I slam them back against me. My knee is slipping and my hands are sweating on her skin.

“Will you …” she pants, her face against the seat, “call me Amaryllis again?”

I groan, almost losing it there, but manage to whisper her name once before I come.

She puts herself back together much like before. Panties up and a kiss to my lips. I roll the windows down and collect myself as she walks back into the reception.

Two weeks later, she’s ruining my floral design at the Singh wedding, rearranging flowers and pulling the spider mums out altogether. When I scream at her in a cleaning closet, she screams back until her mouth is on mine. She drops to her knees that day, and I forget about spider mums. In fact, her ideas were better. They always are.

At the next vendor meeting we have at my shop, she behaves normally. It drives me up the wall. She’s all business, and all I can think about is how badly I want to put my mouth on her until she screams. She leaves with the clients, and I don’t see her for another week.

I feel like maybe I’m getting over her. Like maybe I’ll be fine if we just work together from now on. And then the next time I see her is a venue meet for a couple getting married at the parents’ house. She’s standing next to me in the backyard, showing me where the wedding arch will be, and I blurt out, “Do you want to get dinner with me this week?”

Her lashes flutter so prettily that I barely hear her soft “Yeah. That sounds great.”

I stare at her face, her cheeks popping with pink and her bottom lip caught between her teeth.

“So, what’s the chair arrangement?” I prompt her. She smiles and continues explaining her design.

That Thursday, I take her to a little Italian place a few blocks from the shop. She eats more than any girl I’ve ever dated, and when she belches at the table, I end up laughing so hard the waiter has to check on us.

When she hears I went to college out of state for three years, she makes me tell her everything. “What were you studying?”

“Architecture,” I say, the word almost bitter in my mouth.

Her eyes brighten. “That explains a lot.” When I frown at her, she says, “The things you’re building. The wedding arches, hoops, chandeliers.”

“I don’t really think I’m using my architecture schooling for displaying baby’s breath and peonies,” I mumble, poking at my carbonara.

“Really?” She tilts her head at me. “I see it. Did you get your license too?”

“No, I would have, but I left in my final year and just … never went back.” I look away from her.

“Did you want to? Go back?” she asks, as if reading my mind. “I mean, I don’t know anything about the program, but would it be easy to go back if you just had the time?”

I shrug, trying to brush off the fact that she just nailed it. “It doesn’t really matter, ’cause I don’t have the time. I have the shop and …” I trail off, biting my cheek.

“Did you leave when your dad got sick?” she asks softly. I nod. “What was it?”

“Lung cancer. Never smoked a day in his life.” My lips tug in a rueful grin. “Anyway, the shop meant everything to him. I was always going to have the shop. No siblings to take it, no one else. He wanted me to get my degree, but it was always unsaid that I’d have Blooming one day. That day just came sooner than expected. Mom called me and said there was a mass in his lungs and he was never going to tell me himself. So I came home.” My eyes flick up to her. “But I do like the shop. It took a while, but flowers are … Well, flowers are better than people.” I quote Dad to her with a laugh.

Her eyes sparkle. “Your dad said that to me.”

My heart skips. My ribs squeeze.

“He was so nice to me once,” she says, eyes a bit misty. I swallow and look away, and she says, “I mean, he was always so nice. Like truly special.” She snorts and picks up her wineglass. “Nothing like you.”

I nod in agreement, and she continues.

“But I was having a really hard wedding under Whitney one time, and he … He made me smile.” She does it now. “I don’t know if this is weird, but he gave me a handkerchief. I still have it. Would you want it back? I think it’s his initials on it.”

I remember the crack of her fist against a nose. The pathetic way she held her hand to her chest afterward. Her laugh ricocheting, like music.

I shake my head. “He had hundreds of those. It’s fine. I like that you have one.”

She sits back in her chair and crosses her legs under the table. “I think you could go back, if you wanted. They have a bunch of online options for degrees. It’s up to you, but … you just said it yourself—your dad wanted you to get your degree. And who knows? Maybe it would give you a leg up in some way, when you inevitably open a showroom.” She winks at me.

“Maybe.” I hate to admit it, but I like the way she can spell out my future so easily. “You didn’t go to college?”

“I started with Whitney a few weeks after high school. I guess I could have gotten a hospitality management degree, but I’d have had to go out of town for one. And I was already working under the master.”

She has a sparkle in her eye as she talks about Whitney, and I try not to frown. “I always wondered what your title was under her,” I say.

“A couple different things. But by the time you were working with your dad, I was director of design.”

“And why did you leave?”

“You mean, why did Whitney ‘let’ me leave?” She echoes my words from earlier this year, reaching for her glass with a teasing tilt to her brow. I roll my eyes. “I was assisting with weddings with budgets in the hundreds of thousands, but I knew I wanted to be working with lower budgets. Lower budgets almost open up more opportunities—does that make sense?”

“Yeah, it does,” I answer honestly.

“Whitney was starting to actively turn away anyone who wasn’t working with fifty grand or more, regardless of what they could pay her, so I thought, ‘I could be taking those. I could be making something really special out of that budget.’”

“So it had nothing to do with your pay? Or how she treated you?”

She blinks at me, and a stunned silence crosses the table. I regret saying it immediately.

“How she—how she treated me? What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have …” I trail off, but she’s still waiting. “It was clear to every single one of the vendors who was the real brains behind the Whitney Harrison Weddings operation. My father would talk about it all the time—how much Whitney’s style was growing, what a change there had been since she hired some fresh blood. Mark at Roscow Rentals used to talk to me about it; Minnie at Freeport Bakery noticed it.”

I can see her chest rising quicker and quicker, but her lips are pressed tightly together.

“I mean, Ama, a month after you left, Whitney asked me to replicate the order for the Teele wedding. Down to the bud. Your design, copy-pasted onto another wedding.”

She clears her throat. “I didn’t know that.” She sips her wine and averts her eyes. “I mean, to be fair, anything I designed while I was there belonged to Whitney. That was in my contract. So it was within her rights.”

My jaw snaps shut to keep from saying anything about that. I can feel my molars grind.

“How much of a salary increase did you get when you were promoted to director of design?”

“I don’t remember—”

“She has to outsource her designers now without you. Tamara Birch, who works with her a lot now? Whitney adds in her costs to the total budget. Tamara gets one hundred an hour for her wedding design.”

She’s staring at me, calculating. I can see she’s close to it—close to realizing what bullshit she’d been fed for years.

“But I was paid a salary,” she says. “Even if Tamara Birch was doing five hours of work every week of the year, I’d still have been paid more than her. And I had consistency throughout the off-season, so …” She sits up abruptly and flags the waiter for the check. “Let’s drop this, okay? I think you have—interesting points, but honestly, I’d like to be in a good enough mood to fuck your brains out tonight.”

And who could argue with that? I drain my wine, and when the check comes, I’m already handing him my credit card before she can pretend to reach for it. She grins at me.

“How did you know all that about Tamara Birch,” she says with a sly smile.

I sigh, rolling my eyes to the ceiling. “It was two dates.”

She laughs. “Do you have a thing for wedding designers?”

I sign the bill and mutter, “Maybe they have a thing for me.”

She doesn’t deny it.

We walk back to our cars at the shop, and she presses me up against her Camry, kissing me. She opens the passenger door for me to get inside and runs around to the driver’s side. She turns the ignition for the A/C, and then mounts me, which I’m learning is her favorite thing to do.

“I’d bring you over,” she mumbles against my neck as her hand reaches into my jeans, “but my mom is living with me this week.”

“Oh.” Her fingers wrap around me, and I find myself still talking about her mother. “Is everything okay?”

“Yeah, she’s just getting a divorce.” Her teeth run over my jaw, and my cock jumps in her hand.

“She—The wedding I just did the chandelier for? I’m sorry.”

Ama’s grinding on my thigh, so I guess the conversation doesn’t really faze her. “It’s okay. It happens.”

My hands slide under her dress and press to her center. She moans as my fingers dips into her.

Over her shoulder, my eyes catch on her dashboard.

“What’s—what’s up with your car?” I ask, breathless.

She seems to know exactly what I’m talking about when she says, “I just gotta get it to the shop.”

Her thumb swirls over the head of my cock, but I can’t even enjoy it because there are seven lights on.

“You … Are you sure you can drive this thing?”

“I have been for like two months.”

“Two months!” I pull her back from my neck. “Ama, you can’t drive a car when it’s like this.”

“It’s fine! It needs a nail taken out of a tire and an oil change. I’m sure it’s fine.”

I’m seeing airbag lights, maintenance lights, and something that I’ve never seen flash in any car that I’ve owned. “Ama.”

“Relax, and keep calling me Emma.”

Her mouth covers mine and her tongue does wicked things, but I push her back even as she starts to squeeze my cock again.

“I can’t. We could die in this car, just by sitting here.” I nudge her to dismount.

“No, wait—”

“Pop the hood. I’ll take a look.”

“Elliot Bloom, if you sit still and forget about this, I promise to suck your soul out through your dick.”

Her eyes are fierce, and her breath is coming quickly.

“I … Ama, I can’t. I can’t!”

I shove her to the side and open the door. I tuck myself back in my pants and gesture for her to pop the hood. We spend twenty minutes glaring at each other through the windshield before I tell her I’m calling a tow truck and driving her home.

Needless to say, she does not suck my soul out through my dick that night.