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It starts with a girl.
You are 15 and impossible and her name is Paige. It means young servant or young helper.
She is anything but servile. But she helps you a lot.
You fall in love.
She loves flowers. She shows you her favourites, explains their meanings. You listen but don’t hear, enraptured by her joy.
You start to have conversations with pictures of flowers for their meanings.
Red Chrysanthemums - I love (you)
Gardenias - you’re lovely
Red Tulips - (please) believe me
Jonquil - love me (back)
White Camellia - you’re adorable
Red Camellia - you’re a flame in my heart
Ambrosia - your love is reciprocated
White Violet - let’s take a chance on happiness
She dies when you are 17.
You hold her in your arms as she takes her last breath.
You do not cry.
You plant her flowers.
Magenta Zinnia - lasting affection
Dark Pink Rose - thankfulness
Purple Hyacinth - please forgive me
Pink Carnation - I’ll never forget you
You graduate high school and go to college. You’re not sure what to study, but you keep going anyway. She believed in you.
You are 19. You meet Kate - never-call-me-Katherine-Kate and she is beautiful.
Her name means pure; blessed.
She doesn’t love flowers.
She hates them. You don’t know why.
She is nothing like the girl you love(?)d and lost. She is wild and fire and lightning and steel.
You worship her and she adores it. You adore her and she revels. You love(?) her and she — well she doesn’t say it back.
She hates Paige.
Rather she hates the idea of her, because she can’t hate someone dead that she’s never met.
Rather she hates that you bring flowers to Paige’s mother and water the flowers around her grave.
She hates that you know that flowers have meaning and that you want what you do to have meaning like that and maybe you want to do something with flowers.
She hates flowers.
She won’t ever tell you why but she does and it’s real and you never lie but you go alone every time you go to buy flowers for Paige’s mom.
You always visit Paige’s grave alone.
She’s hard and cold and you don’t always understand her but you learned devotion long ago and don’t give up on her.
She gives up on herself. She burns inside, you find out later, constantly setting herself ablaze.
She tries to burn down your house because you go home for Christmas and invite her and believe her when she says no.
They pull her away screaming, crying, burning up inside.
She doesn’t go to jail, but to another kind of prison where it is soft and light and too many flowers.
She cries the first time you visit her, still healing from the blaze that almost burnt everything away.
She screams at you the next time.
The time after that, she is silent.
You are 21 and have taken a year off of college to get yourself together.
Your ex-girlfriend tried to kill your family and yourself and maybe would have killed herself. You visit her every other Tuesday.
She talks about trivial things once she realises that you’re permanent.
She doesn’t give a reason. You do not ask why.
You tell her that no blames her and that you love her still. Not the way that counts, but perhaps in a better one.
She tells you she doesn’t love herself. You will do it enough for the both of you.
On visit you-can’t-remember you tell her that you are going to get your bachelor’s in business. She asks you why. You tell her you’re going to open a flower shop.
She refuses to see you the next time you come. She leaves you a letter.
In her letter she confesses the spark that lit the fire inside her. You hate her father and don’t have to meet him and you sort of wish he were dead.
She signs it with a small picture of a purple hyacinth.
You send her an azalea.
She’s there when you come the next time.
You are 25 years old and you’ve opened a flower shop.
You’ve been doing well enough that you have employees.
And they came like good things do, in a set of three.
And they bring with them new customers and tentative friendships and most of all they bring connection to the tattoo parlour next door.
You are 28 years old and you have a crush on your best friend.
His name is Scott and he is 25.
He likes flowers. His mother loves them. His right shoulder is covered in them and her name and her face and like her he is beautiful.
He buys her pink roses (grace, elegance, appreciation) and white ones (joy, friendship) and lilacs (love between mother and child) once a month and has bought her those and carnations every Mother’s Day.
The first time you meet her, you know she deserves them.
You love how much he loves his mother. Your mother thinks it’s a good sign. She loves him. You love him.
You cannot say the words.
Although, Katherine has reclaimed her name and strength and soul and become someone that you call friend, you are afraid to fall in love again.
Because after Kate came Jennifer and you liked her and she liked you and you could have loved her but she loved/loves Kali and they’ve been married for 5 years.
Julian is adorable. You love being a godfather.
Then after Jennifer came Braeden and you’re not sure if you ever started loving her or ever stopped.
She and you, were and are two different, too different beings.
Being a US Marshall takes her away from where you call home too often for you. You need more than the stability of this month, next week, sorry I missed your birthday.
It isn’t her fault. You hate it anyway.
You do not know how to fall in love with someone who could stay and be with you.
You are not incapable. You are out of practice.
Everyone around you waits and waits because they saw you falling in love while it was happening and Scott will not make the first move.
Because for all that he is brave and strong and fierce and loyal, he has been unlucky in romantic love and is afraid to fall again.
He constantly curses - jokingly - falling in love with people who leave him and fall in love with other people who’d left him.
He tells you about it all one night when he is almost drunk and you are glaringly sober.
How Stiles was his first kiss and first love, but Lydia Martin was all that was on his mind when he was kissing Scott so gently.
How Jackson would press him into a wall and kiss him so fiercely and then shove him in the hallways of their high school.
How Lydia only kissed him because she knew that something had happened between him and Jackson.
How Allison was the one for him, but he ended up not being the one for her.
How Isaac was his lover before he truly became his brother.
How Isaac and Allison apparently fit together better.
How Kira made him smile and laugh and sing and he did the same for her, but then Malia did it better.
And you wonder now how he could stand being friends with them still. You would have hated it.
You meet Scott because Erica wants a tattoo of a specific Magnolia blossom that she’s been caring for and Scott has to see it to get a good sketch. At least that's what she says.
You are 26 and he is beautiful.
You trip over air going to shake his hand. He doesn’t laugh.
You are 29 and Scott is still 25. It’s your birthday.
And because you’re a dork (Erica, Cora and Laura’s words) the party they throw you has a theme.
It’s flowers, because the only person to have given you flowers is still Paige. Most people find it redundant.
You would have appreciated it. You kept Kate’s letter, partly because of the care she took in drawing that hyacinth.
There are a bunch of yellow tulips.
Your mom and Scott’s mom both give you lilacs and you cry a little (a lot) but no one gets it on camera because mothers like telling stories like that and exaggerating. Pictures ruin their fun.
That’s what they tell you exactly. You pout. They coo. You pout more and they giggle.
You get azaleas and white camellias and white heather from your sisters and Erica and Isaac and Boyd. And you wonder when the three stopped being employees and became family.
They roll their eyes at you when you ask. You don’t cry at all when they hug you. The lighting is strange and you have an allergy.
The others, these friends you’ve made and somehow kept give you irises and chrysanthemums.
Stiles gives you a Stephanoti and things get uncomfortable because he looks at Scott and you do too.
You laugh it off, but everyone know it’s not funny. Not to you.
You think your sister’s might have gone a little overboard because your cake is covered in sugar flowers and there’s jasmine tea, but you’re just so happy that everyone’s here that you forget that Scott never gives you a flower.
You are 29 and he is still 25.
It is dark and late and he is leaning on the rail, next to you, on your balcony.
It is quiet and the silence feels weighted like never before.
You turn to say something. You see then that he is already looking at you.
He tells you that he has to give you your present.
You don’t ask why you had to receive it alone. The two of you are always more intense and innocent conversation can turn into soul splitting confession in a turn of phrase.
He hands you a book - unwrapped and unadorned.
The first page has only a name. Yours. The next has a face. Yours.
As does the next and the one after.
You are ever surrounded by flowers.
Acacias. Arbutus’. Asters. Camellias - pink, read, white. Carnations - solid: red, pink, white. Red chrysanthemums.
Daffodils. Daisies. Forget-Me-Nots. Gloxinias. Jonquils. Calla Lilies. Orange Blossoms. Petunias.
Primroses. Lavender Roses. Red Roses. Spider Flowers! Tulips. White Violets. Magenta Zinnias.
You look up and Scott is holding a single red rose, fully bloomed, no thorns.
He asks if he got it right.
You kiss him.
You are 30 and Scott is 27.
There is a jonquil looped through a ring on the kitchen table. It’s not for you.
He is beautiful with flowers in his hair.