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It began with a bouquet of tiny blue flowers that showed up on the doorstep of his trailer on her last day of filming. He didn’t need to look at the card, a simple cream slip of paper, to know that they were from her. He looked at it anyways, and saw a tiny sketch of the flowers she had left, complete with a note. It was short, simple, and sweet. ‘Forget me not? – A’
He never told her that he would never forget her, had he? The thought made his stomach plummet, and he closed his eyes against the rush of feelings. He would not forget her, but he could never say that, not in the traditional way.
On his lunch break, he slipped out to go to the florist’s, and returned with an armful of flowers.
---
She made her way back to her trailer to change back into her costume, and found there was an overwhelming amount of flowers there. She picked one up, twisting the stem in between her fingers idly. She wondered if he knew what they meant, and if he was even the one to send them. She brushed a couple of the flowers aside to find a small card buried among her bounty.
‘I will never forget you. – M’
She knew as soon as she read the card that he did know what the carnations meant. Pink carnations, one of her favorite flowers, but also a symbol of remembrance. She gathered as many of the flowers as she could (leaving quite a few behind) in her arms and scooped them into a vase in her trailer before hurriedly changing back into her skin-tight costume and wondering how she could ever thank him.
She decided to do it the only way she knew how – with flowers.
---
He wasn’t really sure where she had managed to find flowers without leaving set. Yet here they were, a heap of stems, coated in bright yellow flowers. He silently thanked his mother for being a gardener, and his own, strange childish self for loving the language of flowers so much. If his memory served (and he knew that it did), she had given him a bouquet of agrimony.
Thankfulness. She was thankful for his gift, then, or thankful that he would never forget her? He didn’t really care either way. He caught her eye as she walked into her own trailer, but she blushed and looked away. He searched the bunch of flowers for a note, but couldn’t find any. That was to be expected. He knew the flowers would wither and die, but whatever note she wrote with them would keep good until his fingers faded the ink and age crinkled the paper.
That gave him an idea. It could be an extremely stupid idea, or it could be an extremely good one. He wouldn’t know until he was done, now would he?
---
There were more flowers by her trailer when she opened the door again. She raised her eyebrows, but scooped up the three flowers, her curiosity overtaking her confusion.
The first flower, she could tell, was an amaranth. It had the spiky shell and the rounded body, with the texture painted on with hurried strokes of ink. Unchangeable, her mind supplied helpfully. She turned to the next flower, hoping it would clear up his meaning just a little bit. It wasn’t a flower, really, but rather a leaf, and she was confused until a swift breeze blew, sending a strong smell up to her nose. Peppermint. No, not peppermint – spearmint. Warmth of sentiments.
She tucked her lip beneath her teeth, mind racing to supply an answer to this puzzle. The warmth of his sentiments towards her was unchangeable? She fumbled slightly to the third flower. It didn’t resemble any flower she knew, which was strange, considering her near-encyclopedic knowledge of flora.
She gasped in surprise when the piece of paper unfolded itself, trying desperately to fold it back together before realizing that was it was supposed to do. She looked at the pencil that was scratched onto the clean white surface. ‘My warmth towards you is unchangeable. – M’
She sighed, frustrated. Did the man have no idea how she felt about him?
She would just have to tell him, then.
---
Honestly, how did she keep getting all these damn flowers? His paper flowers felt extremely inadequate compared to the sunset-hued blooms that were tied with a bright purple ribbon and left, once again, next the door of his trailer. He stared at them a moment, brain rushing to identify the blooms before their break was over. They looked familiar, but he couldn’t place just why. The orange hue reminded him a tiger lily, but they obviously weren’t that. He squeezed his eyes closed, thinking for a moment.
Oh.
The air rushed out of his lungs in a heavy exhale. Gilly-flower – bond of affection.
He set the flowers down on the table, forgoing the note as he stepped back out onto the set, trying not to let his disappointment show. He opened his mobile, dialing the florist’s number and mumbling incoherent directions to them before hanging up.
---
She swore her heart was going to break when she saw the flower, tucked around the handle of her door. It was a geranium, and a beautiful one at that – dark, dark blue, almost black, and darker than any other geranium that she had seen before.
Melancholy.
She was sure he couldn’t be half as sad as she was.
---
She walked up to him and handed him an oak leaf, presumably taken from the forest they were filming by. He had no idea what it meant, or why she had chosen to deliver it by hand and not set it on his doorstep, as they had been doing so many times before.
He knew what the leaf meant, but couldn’t surmise why she would give it to him.
Bravery?
---
He, in turn, walked up to her and handed him a single flower much in the same fashion she had handed him the leaf. A slip of paper was curled around the stem. She looked around guiltily before unrolling the paper, reading it in a few quick moments.
‘Doubt thou, the stars are fire,
Doubt, that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt’
The flower finished it for him. A red chrysanthemum – I love.
She was beyond frustrated with him. He was quoting Shakespeare, for God’s sake, but he couldn’t come out and just say what she so desperately wanted him to?!
I love who?
---
He was perturbed when another forget-me-not was pressed into his hand. Hadn’t he told her already that he wouldn’t forget her?
Damn it, Kingston. He huffed to himself. This was far from easy.
---
He obviously didn’t know the second meaning of forget-me-nots, then.
She considered just saying it. I love you.
For some reason, that just didn’t seem right. She had gone through all of this, trying to describe her love in flowers, and she just kept getting shot down. There seemed only one way to say it, and she wasn’t sure if she was really going to do it. There was no way she could do this, not on her last day. She should have done it a long, long, long time ago, not right before she was going to leave and the sun was fading. He didn’t seem ready to respond, so she decided to send one more message.
---
Let me go?
He could not damn well let her go, and she had to know that by now! She just had to know he could not forget her, he could not live without that wild hair and those bright green eyes and her wonderful, beautiful laugh and her sharp tongue and everything about her.
Butterfly weed did not seem the right thing for how he was feeling, and he hoped she didn’t really want him to let her go, either.
Then again, it was better than living in this awful in between.
---
She was sure he wasn’t going to respond. Well, by not responding he was responding. She had asked him to let her go, and as much as it hurt her, it seemed that it was for the best. She pretended it didn’t hurt, that her lungs didn’t struggle to breathe and that her pulse didn’t quicken when they had told hold hands in the scene and that she didn’t want to take it back.
She was getting ready to leave, covered in hugs and kisses and promises to call, when he tapped her shoulder lightly. She turned around just long enough for him to press a flower in her hand before she was pushed back into the throng. She looked down at the flower before it could get crushed by the mass of bodies giving her one final group hug, and couldn’t help the giddy smile that sprang to her face.
Primrose – I can’t live without you.
---
He knocked on her trailer door, hoping to say one last goodbye before she left for good. He paused, looking at the note taped haphazardly to the wood.
‘Yellow tulip’, it read.
Hopeless love.
---
When she opened the door, he dumped the roses on her. They were dethorned, thankfully, but the scent was suffocating and the velvet petals felt much too soft against her sweat-slicked skin.
Red roses.
Red roses red roses red roses red roses red roses. I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I -
Finally. Everything that she wished he would say to her, spelled out in a hundred flowers that were sticking in her hair and to her skin and his skin. She took a deep breath, and before she knew it, her lips were pressed against his, cool against warm and rough against soft.
---
Her wedding bouquet has a forget-me-not tucked into the center of a throng of Queen Anne’s Lace. It is something old, the sentiment behind it older than she can remember, and something new, picked just this morning. They are something borrowed – she took it from behind Karen’s shed when they were there to prepare for the wedding – and of course, something unbelievably blue.
He pressed a note into her hand when they reached the aisle. She slowly turned her palm over, trying to read it discreetly as the preacher began his long spiel about marriage and the sanctity of it, et cetera et cetera.
She recognizes her own handwriting instantly.
‘Forget me not? –A’
Beneath it, in his own untidy scrawl and much newer ink, is a single world.
‘Never.’