Work Text:
I can see us in a small town
You count the stars up in the sky
She pulls pink carnations together with yellow roses, hopes the message will meet in the middle as one of friendship and a woman's love. It’s a candy-coloured wonderland of a bouquet with the colour mixing and melding like a fruit salad chew. They were always her favourites. She finds she has very little hope anyway but the pink of the carnations almost matches the pink of her dress and, god , she is smitten.
She retouches the red of her lipstick till it matches the roses they keep in the back of the store, lets its brightness give her a little bit of confidence as she heads out to finish opening up the shop. It’s small and quiet, opposite a patisserie owned by one of the softest people Katya has ever known. She’s just lovely. She creates tiny delicacies that have her mouth watering like nobody’s business, all sweet and saccharine sugar (a little bit like her). Katya cannot get enough.
She rolls a black glove onto her tattooed arm as she slowly and carefully fertilises the opening display. Across the street, she can see Trixie opening up shop a little earlier than usual (although they’ve both been there since five, so she’s not hugely surprised.) Once she’s done, she ties a pastel pink ribbon around the base of the bouquet and walks it across the street, letting herself in with the spare key. They do their morning dance, an awkward shuffle around each other as (even three hours after getting there) neither are quite awake enough to face their relationship head on. Katya takes out yesterday’s flowers and places the bouquet in the vase on the counter, grins eagerly as Trixie boxes up the spoils of the morning - it’s a fair trade if it means Katya gets to see her face every day. With a shy smile, Trixie waves her out.
They’ve been doing this three years.
Never thought that they could fall down
Onto your suit or on the tie
She reckons she could buy a mortgage with the amount she’s wasted on these flowers, she thinks as she creates the morning bouquet. It’s all yellow today, chrysanthemums, tulips and poppies; precious, hope and success.
She waters the succulents with care only given to her plants and then sketches new tattoo ideas until she sees Trixie pull up the blinds of Yellow Cloud Patissiere - it’s an unspoken rule, helps keep them in check. She serves a couple of business people that she always gets on a Friday morning (she’s started opening earlier to catch them). They always need a bouquet for their wives, an apology for some sort of wrongdoing, and Katya can’t say she minds helping them as they bustle in, flustered and impatient. She has a blackboard behind the counter with ‘EMERGENCY FLOWERS’ scrawled onto it in cursive, it details the apology bouquets she does and their exact meanings - it’s gotten her a lot of coverage in the flower shop community, and she’s grateful for Trixie’s handwriting.
Once she’s decided she won’t look desperate, she heads over the road with a spring in her step, lets herself in and replaces the flowers. Trixie has decorated one of her fuckups with a red flower today and Katya is touched but also just really wants to eat it. She doesn’t say that.
She almost falls as she leaves and as the door swings shut behind her, she can hear Trixie’s cackle catch in the wind.
Across the table at a French place
I lose my way into the wine
She’s brainstorming dates on a Monday as she ties together the bouquet. It’s a French colour theme with blue roses, white lilacs, and red daisies completing the fantasy, and she loves it. She wants to take Trixie to Paris and stroll on the Champs-Élysées , taking their time, sipping wine meant for two as they stare out across the water. She wants to pick roadside flowers, weave a bunch with some grass and present it to her, make flower crowns, and tuck buttercups in the blonde’s hair when she is distracted. She wants to take her to an art gallery, the Louvre maybe, or the Centre Pompidou so they can stand a foot away from the paintings and examine them until they start laughing. She wishes more than anything that she could hold her tight against her in the cold evening air, watch the Eiffel light up at midnight and ring in a new day with her. She would do anything.
But instead, she dutifully arrives with the flowers, takes Trixie's baking and leaves.
She tries a new truffle on her lunch break, hands smelling like fresh flowers and pesticide - the air thick with moisture that's dripping down her back as the shop heats up like a greenhouse. It’s perfect for a florist, not so good for the sweatiest woman alive.
She opened ‘Fine and Dandy’ three months after finished college. She got a degree in design with a minor in business and to be honest they work pretty damn well for a woman who once said she wanted to become a shark gymnast - whatever that might be. Her parents hadn’t agreed at first but now she’s a thirty-three-year-old woman with an award-winning flower shop and she does it all herself - they’re proud of her. She’s proud of her.
The truffle tastes of gin and regret and it’s a little too close to home. The others are half melted - she bins them.
With your glasses on your pretty face
We can go up, baby we can float up
It’s a bouquet of forget-me-nots on a Saturday morning.
It’s a sprig of lime blossom surrounded by arum on a day where she just wants to make jokes. (fornication and purity - it’s days like these she hopes Trixie cannot read flowers)
It’s Asphodel, Basalm and Balsamine. (regret, ardent love and impatience)
Trixie's pastries taste more and more like things she knows - like sorrow and sadness and hope. They taste like old cigarettes and new heartbreak, longing and desire and unrelenting pain. She wants to hold her tight, qualm the fears she bakes into her food because god knows it only takes a taste to see every little thing she’s poured into it. Katya’s been around long enough to know Trixie's baking - she knows that she only uses blueberries on rainy days, that passionfruit is saved for deserved occasions and that grapefruit is a bad day.
Why does everything taste like grapefruit?
Say we'll never come back down
To the place in the yellow cloud
Things go back to chocolate, vanilla and peach when the weather picks up and Katya’s bouquets get bigger and brighter as each month nears summer. A regular casually describes one as ‘carnival in a vase’ or so Trixie retells one morning as Katya snorts on her danish. The cinnamon is strong and so’s the girls' humour, so she barely chokes it down before she has to gesture for water to clear her throat. Trixie’s cackling so hard though, that water begins to run out of Katya's nose. It was a mistake she deems as she’s wiping the counter down from her nose-water. It was a mistake to ever start this - this... She falters in her thoughts. She doesn’t even know what this is; it’s never been discussed and yet she feels closer to the patisserie owner across the street than she does her roommate.
She would hesitate to call it love - then again she only knows love as pansies and cloves and gardenias.
She builds more apology bouquets for businessmen and asks them why they love their wives. None of them can give a straight answer and she begins to wonder if maybe that’s the point - love isn’t really a straight line - it sort of loops round and round and over itself. It slaloms around the major arteries and gets caught in the capillary net.
(She also asks a man who, it turns out, is buying for his mistress. It’s an apology for getting her pregnant but he gives the most straightforward answer out of the lot so she keeps it as a data point.)
Yours forever, thumbtack down
Ooh, ooh
Trixie comes into the shop at 6 p.m. on a Thursday in June. It seems like a negligible detail but Katya wants to remember it for the rest of her life. She hears the bell go about an hour after she flipped the closing sign, as she tidies the small shop away to make room for her Friday morning craziness. She comes to the counter with a purpose, requesting a bouquet that has Katya at a happy medium between screaming and sobbing (mentally of course).
She knows all the plants’ names, wants exactly what she wants and Katya blindly agrees until she takes a look at the bouquet and realises what she’s made. It’s good news, admiration, beauty, and love in all seasons. Devotion and an invitation to dance. (iris, gorse, heliotrope, hibiscus and viscaria)
It’s beautiful.
Trixie pays quickly with a shy smile and goes to leave the shop but she turns around before she reaches the door. Instead, she slowly walks back towards her with a steady step and a quiet grin. Katya has started to shake now, she knows what's happening (or at least hopes she does) and she can’t tell if she wants to sob or scream - she does neither, it’s not the right time.
They meet between the ambrosia and the roses, Katya's favourite aisle, the sun backlighting Trixie til she glows a soft gold. It casts a halo on her hair and Katya swears she’s never seen an angel look so beautiful.
Trixie hands her the bouquet wordlessly but her eyes, wet and happy, reflect all she doesn’t need to say. When they kiss, Trixie tastes like passionfruit and gin and hope - undying hope that glistens in the summer sun. She hopes it’s a flavour that will stay on her lips forever.
Say you'll never come back down
To the place in the yellow cloud