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"Hey."
Neil looked up from his phone from where he was sitting behind the register in the outdoor garden center of Lowe's.
In front of him stood a short blond man with a scowl and an all black wardrobe. "Where's tall, dark, and super anal about the rules?" he said.
Who? Neil considered his coworkers. Ok, actually, there was one who fit that description. "If you mean Kevin," Neil said, "he's not here today as evidenced by me sitting at his register. Also, bold choice to wear all black when the heat index is pushing 100 degrees."
Short, blond, and scowly blinked once, taking in Neil's insult and tilted his head about two degrees to the side in the most unsubtle subtle threat Neil'd ever seen.
"Kevin works Thursdays 11-7," he said, as if Neil was supposed to care.
"Kay." Neil looked back at his phone. This candy wasn't going to crush itself and there wasn't anything he could do to help this customer who clearly had the hots for his coworker. "If you want to flirt with him, that's on you. And don't ask me for his updated schedule because I'm not a narc. Just a hint, by the way. If someone gives you the wrong schedule, it's usually not by accident."
"I know. Also, you're horrible at your job. Are you going to check me out or not?"
Neil scowled, but only because his combo was broken. "Thanks for the feedback, feel free to write it on the survey on your receipt where they'll get back to me in three to six months when I've already left this job. That's if you're buying anything. Gotta spend money to have an opinion, you know."
The customer hefted his basket full of plants and garden stuff onto the belt. Neil sighed, tossed his phone by the keyboard and half heartedly signed into the register.
"So do you garden in all black too?" Neil couldn't help but ask as he rang up the various items. "You know heat stroke is a thing, right?"
"I'm perfectly capable of regulating my body temperature as needed."
Neil raised an eyebrow. He scanned a packet of seeds. "Are you? Because you're kind of sweating right now. Looking kinda flushed. Your face is getting redder by the second."
Somehow, the blond's scowl deepened.
Neil kept tossing things from the basket across the scanner. He noticed a few succulent leaves in the bottom of the basket. He did not notice a succulent mixed in among the random ass assortment of ferns and flowers.
Remember, proplifting is still shoplifting!
At least, that's what the giant sign over in the middle of the succulent section said.
Neil didn't really give a fuck, though.
But he realized who would.
"Oh!" Neil said, so suddenly that the customer frowned at him and actually looked even the slightest bit concerned. "You wanted Kevin here not to flirt with him but to have him yell at you for trying to take these succulent leaves home. Oh, or wait, I guess that could be some form of flirting for you too, huh?"
The customer grinned, just a little. "What can I say? He's fun to provoke."
"Then you must be Andrew," Neil said as the pieces all slotted together. So this was the customer that Kevin complained about all the goddamn time. "As much fun as you might be having with it, could you keep in mind that I'm the one who has to hear it from Kevin when he gets home from a shift?"
Andrew's grin faded quickly into a frown. "Oh, you guys live together?"
"None of your business, but yes, he's my roommate. It's not like a guy can afford an apartment here on his own anyhow, especially not working part time at Lowe's, so yeah."
Andrew's frown faded a little. Neil wondered what that was all about.
"Well, do me a favor?" Andrew asked, conspiratorially. "Tell him how many succulent leaves I took home today?"
"Fuck no," Neil said, with emphasis. "You think it's all fun and games, but if I tell him I let you do that, I'll never hear the end of it. You can tell him the next time you see him and I'll deny it until the end of time. Or until I leave this job."
"You could try to stop me," Andrew suggested, as if that was a totally normal thing to say.
Neil rolled his eyes. Andrew had already paid for everything else, so there was no reason for him to be lingering.
"They don't pay me enough to tackle anyone," Neil said, handing Andrew his receipt. "Have a day. Or don't. They definitely don't pay enough for me to care."
Andrew considered Neil for a moment with a steady stare that had Neil the tiniest bit squirmy. What the heck was up with this guy anyhow? He didn't give off stalker vibes or otherwise raise an alarm, so Neil allowed him exactly one moment of staring. He was about to tell Andrew to fuck off when Andrew spoke up again.
"See you next time, Neil. I'll let you know how my succulents turn out."
"Yeah, ok," Neil said, and that was the end of that.
Or, at least, it should have been the end of that.
*
Andrew showed up the next week. He was wearing all black again and heavy boots to top it off.
Normally, Neil would sit at the register when customers were browsing. But he didn't like sitting still for too long, so he'd stroll the aisles on occasion, although never for something as boring as 'helping a customer.'
Yet for some reason, Neil found the words, "Can I help you find anything?" coming out of his mouth when he found Andrew over by the succulents. "You know, like a reasonable fashion sense?"
Andrew turned slowly, like he had expected the insult, and gave Neil a very leisurely once over, no doubt taking in Neil's garden center outfit of torn jean shorts and a t-shirt. A perfectly acceptable outfit.
"I'm pretty sure I prefer what I've got going on to whatever you're wearing," Andrew said. He gestured to the rows and rows of perfectly tidy, perfectly intact succulents. "Been busy cleaning succulent leaves? Preventing crime?"
Neil rolled his eyes. "You should have come yesterday. Kevin got on a kick the last hour of his shift and cleaned up everything. All of those potential plant babies, right into the trash."
"Where, incidentally, your outfit belongs," Andrew replied.
"If I roll my eyes again, I'll risk damaging them. And I couldn't afford eye coverage so how about you do me a favor and don't say stupid things." Neil thought it was kind of funny how Andrew just kept talking to him. He decided to make it his goal to annoy Andrew enough that he left. "And what, are you trying to get me naked?"
Andrew opened his mouth to say something, and that overheated flush started to build on his cheeks again.
"Seriously, if you're going to act like a goth plant fairie, you need to drink more water," Neil said. "Which I can't believe I'm saying, because Kevin routinely tells me off for forgetting to drink water until noon on my days off. Oh right, and the being naked. Not happening. As much as I hate the job, getting fired for public indecency is really just not on my bucket list."
Andrew stared. He did not say anything for a good ten seconds. Neil sighed. The bright flush on Andrew's face was too much.
"Do you want a water bottle or do you prefer to drink straight from the hose?" Neil asked. No one was getting a heat stroke on his shift. He had some standards after all.
"I'm not overheating," Andrew said.
Neil was pretty sure that the flush on Andrew's face went down his neck and possibly even onto his chest, but he wasn't about to pull his shirt off to check.
Though, maybe he should, just to help cool him off.
Neil blinked. What an odd thought. He pushed it to the side.
In lieu of getting Andrew to answer a question about his well-being, Neil grabbed a water bottle out of the refrigerator near the check out and handed it to Andrew.
"No charge," Neil said. He grinned. "Don't let Kevin know."
Andrew paused before grabbing the water. He rolled his eyes, uncapped it, and drank half of it in one go.
"See." Neil waved at the water bottle. "Dehydration. Seventy percent of the way to heat stroke. You should say 'thank you Neil'."
“Fuck you, Neil.”
Neil rolled his eyes. “Whoops, and now I need to go see the doctor for my poor eyes. I wonder if this falls under workman’s comp. Hope you didn’t want to buy anything because I’m going to need to go rest my eyes for a good ten to fifteen minutes.”
"I'll wait."
"I'm not giving you any more water," Neil said. "No matter how red you get."
"I'll be fine."
Neil tossed his vest towards the register, not looking to see if it landed or not. He knew technically he had to wait for his replacement to take his break, but Andrew was the only person browsing now anyhow. He went inside and stared at his phone in the air conditioned break room for fifteen minutes.
When he came back outside, Andrew was still there. Surprisingly, he wasn't even as red as before.
"Really?" Neil asked.
"It's not like anyone came by to check me out," Andrew shrugged.
The faintest hint of red was on his cheeks again.
"You could have gone inside."
"And risk an unknown employee losing their life because they tried to steal my succulent leaves?"
Neil narrowed his eyes. "Did you…take those off the plant while I was gone?"
Andrew didn't take his eyes off of Neil's. "Tragically, one of the plants fell over. Huge gust of wind. You should have seen it." He made sure Neil was following his gaze and nodded at one of the little plants. Sure enough, it was on its side, undamaged except for two tiny missing leaves.
He picked it up and put it back on the display, with a tender touch that Neil didn't expect.
"So do you just take these clippings home and let them die?" Neil asked, heading to the register.
"You think I'm here this often just to kill plants?" Andrew was sarcastic as hell. Neil had to admit he kind of liked it better than the customers who wilted when Neil went on the offensive.
"I can't think of another reason," he said, crossing his arms over his chest. "Kevin's not here and I'm not going to yell at you for plant murder and the abysmal lack of water you drink while doing your best grim reaper impression."
Andrew's flush spread across his face. This was the weirdest case of heat stroke Neil had ever witnessed, that was for sure.
With a sigh, Neil put his vest back on. "Alright, now that I'm official again. What are you actually buying?"
Neil rang up Andrew's purchases and he even carefully gathered up the leaves in the bottom of the basket and made a huge show of putting them into their own bag.
"So that you can just put them straight into the compost," Neil said. "I assume you compost and that your bins are as black as your clothes."
Andrew didn’t look impressed. "That insult fell a little bit flat, Neil. Maybe you're the one getting affected by the heat."
“Hardly!” Neil frowned. Maybe he didn’t care for the way Andrew seemed to bloom the more he tried to insult him.
In any case, Andrew took his purchases, gave Neil a two fingered salute, and headed out of the garden center.
And that was that.
Well.
That should have been that.
*
It certainly seemed like that was that, because Andrew didn’t show up for the next two weeks. The fact that he showed up two weeks in a row before was hardly a pattern, though. Neil hadn’t realized how much he had just expected Andrew to be there until he wasn’t there.
Definitely odd that he thought about Andrew that much.
It was a busy shift, though, and Neil didn’t have a lot of time for wondering. Apparently it was the day to come to the garden center and ask ridiculously specific questions that Neil, as a minimum wage garden center employee, could not possibly answer.
“No,” he said, staring down the woman on the other side of the register. “I’m not sorry to let you know that I have no clue when the best planting season is for any of those seeds, although judging from everyone else who bought them like a month ago, I’m going to say you’re shit out of luck.”
The woman blinked and got that expression like she was about to ask for the manager.
Neil was prepared. He flipped his name badge to the other side, where he’d stolen one of the manager tags. “Yeah, I am the manager,” he said, before she could say anything else. “If you’re upset with Neil’s customer service, please make sure to call the toll free number at the bottom of the receipt and I’ll let him know about it.”
She looked like the kind of person who would ask to see the head of the store, and Neil braced himself for the question, all while keeping the most bored look he could manage.
If only Andrew could see me now. The thought popped into Neil’s head out of nowhere, and he wasn’t sure what had prompted it. Maybe Andrew would get a kick out of watching Neil interact with the customers. Who knew.q Not Neil, that was for goddamned sure.
The woman glanced at her phone, saw the time, and apparently decided today wasn’t the day to go all out. “Don’t worry,” she said, “I will make sure to fill out the survey incredibly truthfully.”
“Great,” Neil said. There were no customers in line behind her, so he pulled out his phone to see what was interesting on the internet. “And thanks. You’re right! I won’t worry.”
She fumed and left and Neil wondered, again, if Andrew would show up.
Definitely weird.
He never thought about Kevin like that, for example.
Neil shrugged it off. But the third time he caught himself looking up to see if Andrew was there, he realized he had a problem.
“Kevin,” he said that night when he got home from work. “Andrew didn’t come to the garden center today.”
His roommate didn’t look up from his homework. Apparently writing a history dissertation took a lot of time and concentration or something. “Ok.”
“He came last week and the week before that,” Neil continued.
“I mean, it’s a garden center, not a library.” Kevin looked at something in one of his books and frowned. “If you’re doing it right, you don’t really need to be there weekly.”
“I kind of get the point you’re trying to make, but if those are the types of arguments you’re making in your dissertation, you might want to reconsider.”
Kevin waved him off. “Andrew just likes to stir up trouble. Did he try to steal more succulents? He’s absolutely intractable.”
“Yeah,” Neil said, with a small smile, thinking about Andrew's conspiratorial glance when he had asked Neil to tell Kevin about the leaves. “He really is.”
For some reason, Neil’s response made Kevin actually close his book and look up at Neil with a curious expression. “Did you just…sigh wistfully over the idea that Andrew is a stubborn beast of a human being?”
Neil scrunched up his face. “No?”
“I’m pretty sure you did.”
Did Kevin really need to use that tone?
“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t matter because you need to get back to whatever primary source is destroying your life right now.” When Neil saw Kevin’s barely perceptible pout, he knew that he had won that round.
He was still thinking about Andrew though. Andrew and his black shirts that stretched over his body and showed off the time that he must spend in the gym when he wasn’t gardening. Neil couldn’t think of the last time he’d ever thought about someone else’s clothes so much.
“I just don’t want him to get a heat stroke, is all,” Neil muttered out loud, but he wasn’t sure whether it was to convince Kevin or himself that he was fine.
Everything was fine.
*
Everything was not fine.
Andrew came back the next week, dressed in all black as always. When Neil caught sight of his black jeans, his heart skipped a beat and he glared down at his chest. It was just Andrew. Neil was just glad Andrew hadn’t succumbed to the heat stroke.
Andrew was heading right towards him.
“Look at this,” Andrew said, pulling out his phone.
Neil’s response was almost automatic. “Do I have to?”
“Yes.” Andrew shoved the picture underneath Neil’s nose, right in his line of sight. A giant flower pot filled his vision, with tons of tiny succulents growing in the dirt. They’d all sprouted from single leaves of various sizes, with a large one in the middle. “There you go. Proof that they're all alive.”
Neil opened his mouth to say something, but strangely enough, nothing came out of his mouth. He could have said something about how they were still small and there was plenty of time to kill them. Or he could have said something about how, technically, succulents liked to be a little more crowded than that for optimal root growth. Or–
“Do you like them?” Andrew asked him, point blank. Somehow, Neil had a feeling that Andrew meant something more than just the succulents. He frowned.
“You can’t have possibly stolen that many succulents from here, did you?” was what came out of his mouth.
Andrew laughed. “I rotate between here and Home Depot and the hardware store down the road.”
“Was that where you were last week?” Neil asked. Damn, these questions really were just coming out with no consideration for Neil’s feelings.
“What, did you miss me?”
Neil didn’t miss the way Andrew’s cheeks started to get flushed. Somewhere in the back of his head, a couple of dim light bulbs flickered on, as if they were desperately trying to send him a message. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “I missed you last week.”
Andrew looked rather pleased. Even though his cheeks were getting more red by the moment. “And you’re happy to see me right now?” he added.
“Yeah,” Neil said, more confidently. There was a customer down the tree aisle that looked like he needed help with one of the lemon trees. Neil did not go to help him. “I am happy to see you. I thought you had a heat stroke for real.”
“Did you really think that?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, I didn’t.” Andrew paused. “Neil, do you–” For the first time Neil could remember, Andrew hesitated. But it was only for a fraction of a second. Neil didn’t think most people watching Andrew would have even noticed it. “Do you date?”
“Not really,” Neil said, another automatic response.
Oh. There was that frown again, the same one Andrew’d had when he thought Kevin and Neil were dating.
Oh.
“Do you want to date me?” Neil asked, his brow furrowed as he tried to make everything make sense. The succulents, their conversations, the way Andrew looked at him and got overheated…“Wait! You weren’t having a heat stroke. You were blushing!"
“Shut up,” Andrew grumbled. His cheeks got redder. “I can’t help how pale I am. And if you don’t date, then it doesn’t matter, I can just go.”
“Wait!” Neil said again. Ok, so. It didn’t quite add up, but Neil was pretty sure he was coming to the right conclusion: “I think that I would like to date you.”
“Don’t sound too excited about it,” Andrew said, but he was grinning.
“Oh my god, you’re flirting with me,” Neil said. He needed to sit down. Those three dim light bulbs in the back of his brain were working overtime to process all of this. “We’re flirting with each other.”
“Yes.” Andrew’s grin was much more confident this time. Neil thought it was the coolest expression he’d seen on Andrew’s face yet. “We’ve been flirting with each other.”
“Cool.” Neil paused. “Now what?” Did they kiss? Was that a thing Neil did now?
“Excuse me, can I have some help with this lemon tree?” called a customer, somewhat urgently.
Neil turned to see the customer halfway buried under a lemon tree he had somehow managed to knock over. There was dirt everywhere. A single lemon rolled across the concrete floor.
Andrew strolled over and plucked up the lemon. “Now you finish your shift, and I’ll be seeing you around, Neil,” he said. “Right now, I’ve got a tree to plant.”
*
And luckily, that was not the end.
Three months later found Neil sitting in Andrew’s lap in a creaky old outdoor chair, the two of them enjoying the warmth of a bonfire in the early autumn evening. There were other people milling around the backyard full of plants, friends of Andrew’s who were becoming friends of Neil too, but Neil only had eyes for Andrew right now.
“So that lemon seed actually took off a bit there, didn’t it?”
“Of course it did.” Andrew had his arms loosely wrapped around Neil’s waist. Everything was comfy and cozy and rather perfect. There were planters filled with succulents everywhere. “I know my way around a plant.”
“You do,” Neil said. He watched the flames dance in front of them and smiled. He hadn’t expected to enjoy the summer as much as he did, and now here he was, almost sad that summer was fading into fall. “Hey, Andrew?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I kiss you?”
The fire highlighted Andrew’s smile before he tilted his head so that their lips could meet, a first kiss surrounded by succulents and the first tender shoots of love.