The rain was merciless that night, beating down like the city itself wanted to wash Old Town away. Amelia hunched her shoulders as she fumbled with the lock, braid plastered to her neck. The shop smelled of wet soil and wilted carnations — cozy, but weary, like she felt after school and a double shift.
She heard the wheels first. The slick whir of a skateboard cutting through puddles. She glanced up, and there he was — some boy standing in the rain like he owned it, hood low, board tucked under his arm, dripping like a stray dog too proud to admit it was lost.
He didn’t belong here. That was obvious in a second. Too tall, too polished, too… sharp around the edges.
Not Old Town. Not hers.
“Hey,” she called over the storm. “Don’t just stand there like a stray cat — you’ll get sick.”
When he turned, she caught his eyes under the hood. Strange. Bright. The kind of gaze that didn’t fit on the corner of Dalmira Flowers.
He smirked when she teased him. She rolled her eyes, pretending not to notice the way her chest skipped. Boys like him were trouble. Always.
Inside, the bell chimed warm against the storm’s roar. She set down her schoolbag, apron already dusted with pollen, and tried to ignore the drip-drip-drip of his hood as he hovered by the door. The towel practically jumped into her hand before she even thought about it — habit, really. She’d grown up keeping customers dry, comfortable, welcome.
He grinned when she shoved it at him. Too easy with that smile. Too practiced. She sniffed.
“You look like trouble,” she muttered, almost to herself.
He laughed — not offended, just… alive. And for some reason, it filled the little shop more than the flowers did.
She tried to lose herself in routine. Bag down. Homework out. Ink-stained pages waiting. But his presence pulled at her like static. So she threw a wall up the only way she knew how: sarcasm.
“So,” she said, pen tapping the counter, “you gonna buy something, or just stand there steaming like a broken radiator?”
When he picked the lilies, she almost choked.
Funeral lilies. For a birthday.
The sheer ridiculousness cracked her guard before she could stop it. Laughter burst out of her, sharp and sudden, shaking the tiredness off her shoulders.
For a moment she wasn’t
Amelia-who-had-to-close-shop, Amelia-who-kept-the-bills-paid, Amelia-who-grew-up-too-fast.
She was just a girl laughing at a clueless boy.
“Sunflowers,” she told him, voice lighter now, pressing the bouquet into his big, awkward hands. His fingers brushed hers, warm despite the rain.
She caught herself staring, then busied with scribbling the receipt, cheeks warm for reasons that had nothing to do with the storm.
He said something about owing her one. She shot back without missing a beat:
“You owe me twenty credits.”
It was safer, keeping him in that box. A customer. A stranger. Trouble.
But when she glanced up, the storm roaring beyond the window, she saw him still there — really there — like the rain couldn’t wash him away.
And something in her chest whispered this was not the last time he’d step into her little shop.
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