Bloom of love, p.19
Bloom of Love, page 19
Carla nodded slowly, but didn’t say anything. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. He was dying to ask her, but also wanted to give her the really terrific news.
He decided to go for terrific first. Then he could figure out what was going on.
“After Mom cried her happy tears, I laid out the ultimatum. We will never bring our children around if my uncle is there, too. Period. My dad quickly said he’d talk to my uncle about this and straighten him out.”
“Do you think that’ll help?” Carla asked cautiously, a crease between her gracefully arched eyebrows.
“Not at all,” Christian said cheerfully. “Fortunately for us, my mom wasn’t born yesterday. When my dad said that he’d talk to his brother, my mom jumped all over him. Said that she was gonna talk to Nicolás and if he didn’t straighten up, she was done with him. She wouldn’t have him in her house ‘no more.’”
Christian’s smile broke into a laugh at the memory. “My mom is so sweet. You have to know, she doesn’t ever talk to my dad that way. So when she started into this, he just sat there, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water. I swear I could see him gasping for breath. I think Mom’s hated my uncle’s drinking for a long time, and hasn’t wanted him at their house, getting drunk all the time, but…”
He ran his hand through his hair distractedly. This was something he wasn’t particularly proud of, and when it came to his kids, was not something he would stand for. Luckily, he was sure Carla was on the same page with him.
“You know how the traditional Hispanic culture is,” he finally said. “My dad is the one in charge, so she goes along with whatever ‘the man of the house’ says. Younger Latinx aren’t this way, but the older generation…”
He trailed off for a moment, and then decided that this wasn’t the time to discuss women’s rights in a very traditional household. “So here, she’d finally been handed her chance, and she grabbed it with both hands. She laid down the law; told my dad that no one was going to stand between her and her grandbaby. I really think my dad finally agreed just so my mom would stop spitting nails at him.”
He laughed again. Honestly, the look on his father’s face…
Priceless.
“Is…ummm…is your dad actually going to be okay with this?” Carla asked, not so much as even cracking a smile. She normally had an easy laugh, and the fact that she wasn’t finding the humor in this like he was, caused a tiny splinter of worry to appear. “Do you think he’s going to resent me for making him choose between his brother and his grandchild?”
And with that, the splinter grew into a small tree, and he sobered up. It was a damn good point, as much as Christian hated to admit it.
Still, he shrugged. “It’ll be fine,” he said confidently, not ready for anyone to rain on his parade. “My mom rarely puts her foot down like that, so he knows she means it when she does. He won’t want to piss her off by fighting her on it. He wants sex again this century, sooo…”
He winked at Carla. She blushed and shook her head.
“Is sex the only thing that men think about?” she asked rhetorically.
“No, of course not!” Christian contested hotly. “We also think about how to get more sex. See? Totally different topic.”
Carla threw back her head and laughed. “Of course,” she said dryly, when she could finally talk again. “Excellent point. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“But I bet you can guess what I’m thinking,” Christian said with a naughty wiggle of his eyebrows, squeezing her plump ass with both hands. Oh, she had an ass to die for.
And after that, there was a lot more kissing and a lot less talking.
Chapter 31
Carla
Look. Are you just fiddling around with me or what?
~Westley in The Princess Bride
Christmas Eve, 2020
Carla pulled the flowers out of the vase with a grumpy sigh and then started stabbing them back into place one at a time, trying to keep her mind on her work. Was it pregnancy hormones that were making it so hard for her to concentrate?
Sure. She’d blame it on that.
Except for the part where Christian was just…off. Weird. Not acting right.
He’d come over the night before and they’d looked at real estate listings together online – a hobby that was quickly developing into an obsession. She enjoyed looking at the listings and dreaming together with Christian about their life to come, but at the same time, it was heart-wrenching.
Everything was so expensive. Stupidly expensive. How were they ever going to afford these kinds of prices?
But last night, in the middle of the usual sighing and daydreaming and discussions about things that mattered to them (kitchen layouts) and things that did not (having a formal dining room), Christian had been as fidgety as a three-year-old boy stuck listening to an overly long sermon at church.
After the fourth time of asking him if everything was okay, he’d abruptly announced that he had to head home, had given her a kiss on the forehead, and then had headed out.
She’d been left staring at the open doorway of her apartment, listening to him clatter down the stairs and out the door of the flower shop, wondering what on earth was wrong with him.
He hadn’t texted her first thing that morning, either. Not even sweet nothings, telling her how sexy he thought her toes were (she did have fun with her last paint job) or suggesting godawful names for the baby (no, she was not going to name their baby International – she didn’t care how much Christian loved the new Case International tractor that Stetson had bought for the Miller farm).
The radio silence was starting to kill her. Was he messing with her mind on purpose?
But…why? That just didn’t seem right. Christian wouldn’t do that. What was causing this, though, she could not begin to imagine.
With a groan, she stepped back and looked at the bouquet with a critical eye. Better. Not her best, but better than the first disaster she’d thrown together.
Was it so bad that she wanted Christian to propose to her? Yes, she knew she was an empowered woman who could propose just as well as Christian could.
“I am woman, hear me roar,” she muttered under her breath as she wrapped the ribbon around the neck of the vase.
And yet…
She wanted the grand romance. Was that so much to ask?
She felt impatience and a bit of righteous indignation boil up inside of her. Dammit all, Christian should know she’d want this. It wasn’t like she’d been hiding this fatal flaw of her personality from him.
She wanted a big proposal, and she wanted a house to live in that wasn’t an oversized shoebox or an ugly tin can, and she wanted to be married in a dress with a skirt so big, she couldn’t fit into her shoebox apartment, and she wanted…
She was snuffling now. Dammit. She really, really didn’t want to be snuffling. This was ridiculous. It was Christmas Eve, for heaven’s sake. She should be happy, and singing carols at the top of her lungs, and drinking way too much hot chocolate.
What if a customer came in and saw her makeup wrecked? She dabbed at the corner of her eyes with a tissue, trying to salvage the hard work she’d put in that morning while getting ready for work. She’d hoped…
Well, what she’d hoped hadn’t come true, and it was time to stop being a crybaby.
She tapped her cell phone to check the time – 10:13 am. Maybe Christian was just having a busy day at work, getting ready for the snowstorm the weathermen were all predicting was going to hit that night. Just because every other morning since they’d started dating, he’d sent her a sweet text message, didn’t mean that she should read anything into this morning’s silence.
She made herself hum a few bars of Let it Snow. Tonight’s snowstorm would mean a fresh layer of snow for Christmas Day. It really was going to be a picture-perfect Christmas, and she scolded herself for not throwing herself into the Christmas spirit this year like she normally did. She was going to keep the store open until two, just in case anyone wanted to do some very last-minute Christmas shopping, and then—
The landline for the business rang, startling her out of her internal pep talk. She reached over the counter and snatched the phone out of the cradle.
“Happy Petals,” she answered, a very bright – and very fake – smile pasted on her face. Like anyone with any modicum of customer service training, Carla knew better than to answer the phone with anything less than a brilliant smile on her face.
“Carla Grahame!” Declan half yelled into the phone. She instinctively jerked the phone away from her ear to keep from going deaf.
What on earth…
Declan Miller, a strait-laced, salt-of-the-earth farmer, sounded like he was drunk and giddy as a school girl.
She heard his voice, tinny and distant, spilling out of the speaker, and she jerked the phone back up to her ear. “—bigger than Austin’s! Twice as big as Austin’s! I know Iris loves her blue irises, but this occasion calls for red roses, don’t you think? Every red rose in your store. Oh, and Franklin, too!” he added as an afterthought. “I don’t want a single red rose left in the Long Valley area after you’re done making this bouquet!”
“What, uh, what’s the occasion?” she asked as she stood on her tiptoes to grab a notepad, sliding her reading glasses into place and pulling a pen out of the messy bun on top of her head.
“Iris is gonna have a baby!” he crowed. “She’s pregnant, can you believe it?! I want every Congratulations balloon in the store too. Everything you’ve got. Can you deliver? I can’t pick them up. I’m on my way to Boise – stupid snowblower decided to kick up a fuss and with that storm coming in, I need to do a part’s run, especially before everything closes down for Christmas. Charge it all to my card on file,” he added, abruptly switching back to the ordering of flowers. “Just write I love you, Cookie on the card. Can you deliver it today? I know it’s Christmas Eve, but Iris is over the moon and I hate leaving her and—”
“No problem,” Carla broke in, trying to hide the laughter in her voice. If she lived to be a hundred, she’d never hear someone as happy as Declan was in that very moment. “It’s getting close to noon, though, and I doubt the florist shop in Franklin will be open much longer. Is it okay if we just use the red roses I have in stock?”
“What?” he asked, clearly forgetting that he’d ever asked her for something different. “Yes, of course! All the red roses you have. Thank you!”
After he hung up, Carla pulled the receiver away from her ear and stared at it, then began laughing to herself as she hung it up.
Iris is finally pregnant. Holy shit, she’s pregnant!
Carla did a little jig, grinning like a fool.
When Carla’d found out back in October that she was pregnant, the guilt had hung over her like a black cloud as soon as the thought had crossed her mind: This was going to hurt Iris.
She’d avoided telling her friend the news. She knew Iris would smile and hug and congratulate her, and then cry herself to sleep that night, cursing her body once again for failing her.
But now…
How far along is she? She clapped her hands with delight. Our babies will be best friends, or future lovers, I’m just sure of it.
As Carla gathered up every red rose she had in the store, even going so far as to strip them out of the other pre-made bouquets with the mental note that she needed to replace them, she began planning the wedding of the as-yet unsexed babies.
Iris would have a red-headed baby girl with fair skin and big blue eyes, of course, and Carla would have a baby boy with Christian’s caramel skin and chocolate brown eyes, and they’d be beautiful together, and Carla would throw them the biggest party ever held inside the city limits of Sawyer for their wedding.
She got out a monster vase – the size she rarely used, since so few people wanted to pay for a bouquet of that magnitude – and got to creating the most elaborate, the most gorgeous, the most over-the-top bouquet in the history of Happy Petals. Declan was gonna shit a brick when he got the credit card bill for it, but he might be so happy about Iris being pregnant, he might not even notice.
Maybe.
When she stepped outside of the shop, bundled up against the cold, the bouquet cradled safely in her arms, the bite of winter air made her gasp. No matter how long it’d been winter, she never got used to the cold. Every year, she just endured it until spring finally rolled around again.
She got the bouquet to her van mostly by feel, balloons bobbing along above her head, hoping against hope that she didn’t fall into a pothole or trip over something on the way. Her normal carrying crate for her creations wasn’t set to accommodate Fezzik-sized bouquets, so she had to fiddle with it to get everything strapped in and protected.
With it finally settled and just so, she let out a giant sigh of exhaustion mixed with pride. She didn’t remember being so tired all the time before she got pregnant.
She patted her belly with one hand as she steered the van out into the street. “You, bebé, are gonna make me as big as a house soon,” she said, stroking her stomach.
She’d been able to hide her pregnancy so far because, well, she wasn’t stick thin to begin with. But she was just starting to get to that point when smart people would wonder if she was pregnant, but wouldn’t ask.
It was the fools who’d open mouth, insert foot.
At Declan’s place, she held her breath as she shuffled her way across the frozen gravel and ice and up to the front porch. She had to turn sideways to study the front door and finally spotted the doorbell, which she whacked with her elbow.
As strange as it was, this was actually the first time she’d delivered flowers to her friend. Before, she’d always made sure to have one of her high school kids deliver the flowers. That way, Iris could pretend that Carla didn’t know every detail about her personal life, and Carla could happily join in that pretense with her. It was best for all involved.
But today? Today she got to actually give the flowers to her friend, along with a huge hug.
It was 5th grade Carla all over again.
She heard the creak of the door open and then a gasp of shock.
“Carla, is that you in there?” Iris asked, and then burst into tears. “I’m pregnant!” she hollered, and then, “Shit, it’s cold out there! Come inside before you let all the heat out.”
Carla crab-walked in, trying not to run into Iris (or anything else), and she could hear it in her voice when Iris switched from happy tears to laughter.
“Oh Carla!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands with delight. “Declan told me he was going to order a bouquet that was bigger than the one Austin had ordered for Ivy, but I didn’t think it was possible.”
“Where, uh, where do you want this?” Carla tried to keep her tone light and happy, and not show how much her arms were struggling under the strain. She was beginning to regret not at least trying to strap the vase to a dolly and carting it around that way.
“Here,” Iris said, taking her by the arm with a soft hand and leading her forward. Together with a lot of patting and feeling of the granite counter, they got the vase down and Carla stood back to admire it with a huge grin.
“How much did that—”
“Don’t ask,” Carla advised her friend.
“Good plan,” Iris admitted with a laugh. “Declan is just so happy…we’re having a baby!” She said it with wonderment and glee, as if the concept hadn’t quite settled in yet.
Carla pulled Iris into a huge hug, feeling how frail her body was now compared to what she remembered in high school. Iris had always been athletic and strong; now she was a frail piece of glass that needed to be protected at all costs.
A thought Carla would never, ever share with her friend. She’d probably get whacked in the shins for saying something so blasphemous.
“I’m pregnant, too,” she whispered into Iris’ thick red hair.
“No way!” Iris gasped, pulling back, her blue eyes huge and sparkling. “Congratulations! When are you due?”
“Beginning of April,” Carla said, grinning so hard, her cheeks hurt. For the moment, she was able to ignore everything that’d gotten her down just an hour earlier, and celebrate their good luck. “Do you know yet when you’re due?”
Iris shook her head. “I have a doctor’s appointment on Monday, but we’re thinking somewhere towards the end of July.”
“I’ve decided that our kids will either be best friends or marry each other,” Carla said with a conspiratorial grin. “I made that decision while I was putting this bouquet together.”
Iris let out a belly laugh. “I love how you think! Better yet, be best friends who marry each other!”
“Exactly!” Carla crowed. “We’ve got their lives all figured out. Now it’s just time to get these babies out in the world. But! Not right now.” She patted her stomach. “I still need to find a home for you first,” she told her belly. “Plus, I think you still need to grow some good lungs and lots of other important body parts.”
“Where does Christian live?” Iris asked as she turned back towards the kitchen counter, burying her nose in the bouquet and breathing in deep. Carla grinned to herself. She loved seeing someone enjoy her flowers; it made her heart so damn happy.
But at the same time, Iris’ question was kicking over a hornet’s nest, and her friend had no idea she was even doing it.
“Umm…” Carla said, stalling for time, trying to think of the best possible light to paint Christian’s living situation in, that could still be considered the truth. “He’s the foreman for Stetson, of course, and Stetson has some, uh, company housing he lives in.”
Iris straightened up, nodding her understanding, and Carla could see it in her eyes – she did understand. She knew “company housing” was a euphemism for “ugly tin cans.”
