An Open Relationship? Fine Meet My New Boyfriend novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Roommate

A kind young nurse named Tilly walks into the flower shop to say hello before Trevor's mother's birthday and thank 'the roommate'. Trevor has coached her to dismiss anything Eliza says, so Eliza sells her the best bouquet of the year and takes the delivery for the eighteenth herself.

I told Dani everything at seven in the morning, over the buckets of ranunculus.

She dropped the shears.

"He said what?"

"Open relationship. He'd drafted rules. It was version two."

"I told you to say yes," Dani said. Her face went red. "Eliza. I told you to say yes."

"You didn't know."

"He called me in July. He asked what size ring you wear."

I stopped with a stem in each hand.

"He asked you my ring size?"

"And then he called back and said he'd found it in your jewelry box and I could forget it." She pressed her palms against her freckled cheeks. "I told him you'd cry. I told him you'd want a table by the window."

"Dani."

"He said to keep you calm and happy this month. I thought it was a surprise. I thought I was in on a surprise."

"You were in on one."

She picked up the shears again and cut a stem so hard it flew across the shop.

"I'm going to feed him to a pigeon," she said.

My phone buzzed on the counter.

It was a number I didn't have saved: "Cillian. Your phone, last night. You typed mine in while you were still shaking. I'll come by after you close. We need a story."

I had no memory of typing it in. I saved it anyway.

At eleven, the bell on the door rang.

A young woman in lavender scrubs stood in the doorway with her hair clipped up and a lanyard around her neck.

She had a kind, open face, and she looked nervous.

"Hi. Are you Eliza?"

"I am."

"Oh, good." She let out a short laugh. "I'm Tilly. I work across the street at the children's hospital. I know this is weird, but I wanted to say hi before Joan's birthday, so it isn't strange."

Behind me, Dani went very still.

"Before Joan's birthday," I said.

"Trevor's mom. I'm meeting her for the first time on the eighteenth." She glanced at the buckets. "I need an arrangement for her. And I wanted to meet you, because it would be awful if we ran into each other and nobody said anything."

"Why would we run into each other?"

"Because you two live together. For now." She said it kindly. "He told me you're being amazing about everything."

I looked at her hands. She had short nails and a plastic bracelet from the hospital, the kind they put on children.

She was twenty-five or twenty-six, and she had picked out a nice shirt to come meet me.

"What did he tell you?" I asked.

"That you were together for a long time, but it's been more like roommates for a year. That the lease is a mess and you'll be out by the end of the month." She winced. "He said you might say it was different. That you'd get a little sad about it."

Dani made a noise.

"He said I shouldn't take it personally," Tilly went on, quickly. "He said you were really sweet and that you'd cry about it."

He had prepared her for me.

He had told her in advance what I would say, so that when I said it, it would be the sad ex talking.

"We aren't roommates," I said.

Tilly's face softened with pity, and that was the worst part.

"It's okay," she said. "It really is. He told me you'd say that."

I could have shown her the rules on his phone.

I could have told her about Lumière.

But I saw how it would go. She'd go straight to him, and he would have a gentle face and a perfect answer ready, and she would believe the person who had been warming her up for five months.

I had a stranger's word against a man who tells the whole city whether to bring an umbrella.

I needed Trevor to say it himself, with people watching.

"Peonies are out of season," I said. "But I can do garden roses and white lilac. It says you're lovely and aren't trying too hard."

Her whole face lit up. "That's exactly what I want."

I built it right there at the counter, and I made it the best arrangement I had made all year.

Dani stood beside me and didn't speak, and her jaw was tight enough to crack.

Tilly paid with her debit card and took a card from the rack.

She wrote on it in careful block letters, and I read it upside down because I make a habit of reading cards.

To Joan, with so much love from Trevor and Tilly.

"Saturday the eighteenth," she said. "Five o'clock. Her address is on the back. Could you deliver it? I'd like it waiting on the table when we come in together."

"I'll bring it myself," I said.

She hugged me across the counter.

She smelled like hand sanitizer and vanilla, and she said, "I think we're going to be friends."

Then she left, and the bell rang behind her.

"You're not telling her," Dani said.

"Not yet."

"Eliza."

"If I tell her now, she asks him. And he has a smile for that." I pinned the card to the order tray, over the date. "Saturday the eighteenth. Five o'clock."

"Then what?"

"Then I deliver them myself."

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