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It’s snowing and Dani is headed north. It’s almost December and the train station’s heaters are blasting to combat the chill, and Dani almost regrets bringing her big fluffy hat because she can feel her forehead sweating underneath it.
Maybe some of the sweat is due to nerves. She shouldn’t be nervous. She keeps telling herself as much. It’s just Phoebe. Just a week she’s going to spend with Phoebe. Alone. Alone, in person, for more than a few stolen minutes since those first three days they’d spent together. No other YouTubers crowding them, no parents Dani has to worry about impressing. Just Phoebe. Just Phoebe… as though she doesn’t mean the world to her already.
She still has a while to wait until she can get on her train. She spies a coffee stand and thinks it’s just what she needs despite her already erratically beating heart.
A caramel macchiato is a must, and also a muffin as big as her fist that she’s gonna try to make last the whole train journey. A vase of pink roses catches her eye by the register. They’re £1 each. They look almost out of place in December, but still very pretty.
She’s staring at them so long that the cashier asks if she’s going to buy one. Dani shakes her head and pays for the coffee and muffin and shuffles back over towards her platform. She isn’t quite sure why she didn’t buy one.
It wouldn’t have been for her. It would’ve been for Phoebe. She knows that much.
Dani thinks about the different birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Days and Christmases that her ex-boyfriend marked by picking up a Tesco bouquet. She’d liked them, at the time. Put them in a vase, place them on her desk. She remembers some early Skype sessions with Phoebe where some wilting flowers were in her peripheral, but she didn’t care. She was busy looking at the screen, at the fascinating woman who had given Dani her time and attention and changed everything by doing that.
It’d be weird for Dani to buy a flower. Wouldn’t it? Weird for her to buy it for another girl. Another girl who isn’t even technically her girlfriend, yet… Dani really hopes it’s just a matter of yet.
She’s running out of time to mull it over. The big clock overhead chimes and she only has a handful of minutes left.
Dani gets back in line at the coffee stand before she can talk herself out of it. She buys one pink rose and doesn’t look the cashier in the eye as she hands over her pound. She mutters, “Thank you,” and shoves the muffin in her backpack so she can hold her coffee in one hand and the rose in her other. She places it on the seat beside her when she finally gets on the train.
She’s even more nervous now than she was, thinking of handing the rose over to a smiling Phoebe when she greets her in a few hours at Manchester Piccadilly. But she’s also terribly excited, for everything this week could bring.