Who: Gabe and Laura What: Meetings! In person! Where: A really crappy flower shop. When: Today? Warnings/Rating: Adorably mild flirting.
The man who came to a halt outside the door of the store fitted neither usual type for a man who bought flowers. He was not fumblingly awkward; he did not look at the flowers in the buckets outside (notably cheap ones) and incline his head just so as though to look at the prices might be awkward or to invalidate the no-doubt first time gift he was about to make. Nor was he in a hurry, no confidence-bordering-arrogance in a blind dash through the door toward where the red roses (twelve, paper-wrapped not tied) were kept in order to do duty. Gabriel Reed had not been in a hurry for a significant enough amount of time that he did not wear it oddly. He was a silhouette on the sidewalk, a tall figure in a well-fitted coat over the jeans that did not entirely suit the dark softness of the jacket itself, and he was solemnity and stillness on a sidewalk emptier than entirely usual.
The storefront was amongst a collection near enough by to the motel -- he’d thought it best to try and walk - Gabe had a vague notion that doctors, particularly government ones, recommended things like exercise and health, and that perhaps this would not apply to the leg held together with metal screws and the fuzzy pleasantries of a bottle of prescribed opiates, did not occur. The motel was dreary; the grayish, clean spread of the blankets invited only the anonymity of sleep from its guests and the slow but dignified progression of the man along the sidewalk was not looked at askance, merely stepped around as the stream of general traffic drifted and diverged.
Perhaps it was that he had bought enough flowers for one woman to know exactly how transactions were meant to be, perhaps because the curtain had fallen on that particular scene with all the electric-edged certainty that had precipitated buying flowers before. Perhaps it was a laughing conversation about the meanings of them - the store was there, Gabe did not hesitate on the doorstep.
The electronic whine of the door was startling, but Gabe did not blink. He blinked at the pink, at the cramming together of roses and freesias and lilies, the most popular of flowers clustered together at the very front of the place like a ‘buy with purchase’ last minute set of selections. He had no precise taste himself for flowers, he knew only Eloise’s and that any sort of flowers bought in a place the particular color of pepto bismol would be wrong (were, in fact, he to buy flowers for a particular person rather than no one at all). But the door was narrow, and the backing out was more difficult, as it involved turning, and the light tread of someone within the store signaled Gabe’s escape would not be as graceful as desired.
Laura had eventually been forced to find a job in Las Vegas, since she was still too proud to keep taking money from Orin, especially when she had barely even spoken to Anton or Nell. He was being his usual stubborn self and continuing to “help” her, and she was being equally stubborn and not spending a cent of it. It left her looking for a job, though, since there was no way that she wasn’t going to pay her fair half of rent with Max, and the job she’d found was in a low-end shop that was more kitch than anything, filled to the brim with flowers that were already a little past their prime. She mostly worked in the back, bundling baby’s breath around roses and carnations, tedious little tasks that were almost worse than not working with flowers at all. But she persisted, even when she was the only left in the shop, meant to keep working in back while watching the front for any customer that wandered their way in.
The electronic doorbell that announced every time the door opened was among the worst sounds in the entire city, even taking into consideration the overly loud jangle of slot machines. She winced and set down a wilting group of carnations on the work table before poking her head out of the back to see a man lingering around the doorway, a strained expression around his eyes. Laura didn’t know if it was due to the color of the shop’s walls, or something that he’d brought in with him, but she sighed. “Can I help you?” she asked, though the supposedly polite question was laced through with just an edge of annoyance. Maybe she wasn’t the best person to watch the register, especially when she had to deal with some husband that thought that dying flowers were a good apology for whatever he’d done wrong.
Gabe paused. The combination of cane, of electric buzzer that whined and the irritated, trying-to-be-pleasant-but-clearly-not-good-at-it voice lined up, like beads sliding together neatly in a line. He was caught; the man on the doorstep had the awkward stillness of someone who had intended to be in motion and was not, an ungainly comportment of lines and angles that filled the doorway entirely. The woman was blond, softly so - Gabe was used to assessments made with the clarity and dispassion of field reports, to outlining distinctions down on paper; she was blond, she was of average height, she looked profoundly annoyed at being disturbed. He supposed, somewhere (with the quiet unclosing of the fist around that kind of thing) he ought to take note of the look of her. This was not work; this was not the field.
“Probably not,” he said. His voice was warm, pleasant, bland. It was thoughtful, as if the question had really been a question and not the sort of blandishment irritated shop-workers asked men that looked as though they hovered, undecidedly, over half-dead buckets of roses. Gabe had bought roses enough in his time, armfuls of soft-velvet things just-bloomed, had carried them with thorns biting his hands. It was an apt enough flower for Eloise, for the look of her before her clear instructions as to where to put them, how to display them, how to set the stage for other admirers. He did not like roses.
“Got anything that isn’t pink?” He looked at the stock, he looked at the walls, he looked at her, and he smiled; it was an invitation to a joke, he shoved his free hand in his pocket and he surveyed the place. “I’m looking for something,” and he paused, a beat. “Non-funereal.”
Laura rolled her eyes to herself as she stepped farther out from the back room, because ‘probably not’ had just enough sass to it to poke at her irritation, no matter how blandly it was delivered. The shift around the counter was easy and loose, belonging to a body that was accustomed to moving, still ready to step quickly, still primed for fighting back, even if she refused to admit or acknowledge it. It was another reason that she kept so often to herself in the back room, and why most customers simply bought their flowers and left as quickly as possible. But this customer, with the grey starting to show in his hair and (more especially) the way he leaned on his cane, was less of a registered danger in her mind, so the tension to her shoulders eased just a little. The slightest bit. Barely noticeable, but there.
She glanced at the buckets near the door where the man was standing, looking for something in reaction to his question before all of it sunk in. Her answer paused as she looked up at him, considering, and with the hint of something that might almost be a smile lingering at the corner of her mouth. “We don’t have a lot of that here. But I might be able to dig something up in back if you need. If you tell me what it’s for so I know what you’re really looking for.”
The man and his cane moved further into the room; it was cautious and it was slow, partly because with the number of buckets of half-dead carnations and the tchotkes on the walls (Gabe wondered why exactly a flower store would make itself so absolutely anathema to its intended target audience; men buying last minute flowers for occasions they’d forgotten) there was no clear wall to put a hand out if he stumbled. His eyes trained themselves very steadily on the cash register, rather than any particular point - whether because the evenness of the floor was a problem or simply because he had no intention of looking directly at the blond behind the counter before he was entirely certain there was no possibility of stumbling. He came to a stop closer perhaps than others would, when the bottom of the cane hit against the solidity of the wooden counter-top and then he smiled, slow and careful and directly at her, as though the progression had not taken a full three minutes rather than seconds.
Gabe looked at her rather than the wilted flowers displayed strategically at the counter’s end, and if he noticed the uncoiling of her shoulders, if he took in the twist upward of her mouth, he gave no visible sign of it himself, all steady brown eyes and a smile without stint and then an interested look around the shop. He spread one hand upward; bare, fading tan, and he shrugged, rueful as if he were pulling her on into the joke.
“I don’t know what it’s for. I got reminded about flowers, figure I might pick some up and if I decide what they’re like, maybe I’ll know who they’re for.” Gabe’s voice was mild, even - he sounded as though it were normal for a man to walk on in and buy flowers without occasion; his eyes passed over the selection of roses and discounted them immediately. Even if he were to buy flowers for Eloise, they would not be these ones. “Maybe something for the office. I got a coworker or two with a temper.” A grin. Dimples.
Laura watched the progression across the shop with the patience of a woman that had a stubborn roommate in a wheelchair and that had, herself, spent disjointed days in one lately. She wasn’t going to rush him, and wasn’t going to step out to help him unless he specifically requested it. Or he fell. The passing time was given no comment once he made his way to the counter, which she’d leaned one hip against halfway through his journey. No rushing him - she knew what it was like to fight for every physical victory.
The eventual familiarity of voice and comments finally identified him, and it earned a wider smile from Laura, one this shop’s customers rarely saw (if ever), but one that anyone from her past would have been more familiar with. It caught in her eyes for a moment before she pulled a more “acceptable” expression to the forefront. One that was still a smile, but not quite as wide. “Coworkers with temper problems aren’t easy to find flowers for. Especially when they don’t actually like flowers.”
The lilt of her voice was immediate identifiable, once Laura (because it was Laura, ‘Daniels’, in Main’s clipped tones, the blond stood at the counter with a smile that looked like sunshine on her) said half a dozen words that weren’t a rote enquiry and that sounded as mechanical as the door’s yelping. Gabe stood still, and he admired the smile with the frank, male honesty of doing so, until it burned down into something tucked away in the corner of her mouth that was less sunshine but still warm. “You think I want to buy Main flowers?” His voice curled up at the end, warm laughter contained within it, threaded through like glinting honey. He spread his hand flat on the countertop, curled it up until he could rap knuckles on the wooden countertop.
“God forbid, I buy flowers for Main. Nope, this is for Buttercup,” Gabe said cheerfully as decisions made up on the spot could sound. Once still, once the cane was in position enough to be leaned on rather than requiring repositioning, he assumed an ease, a careless sort of attitude that sat across the broad shoulders and darted in and out the dimples. “Shy man. Quiet. Hard worker, our Buttercup.” It was not that Gabe was predisposed to flirting, nor that he did so with the intention of deliberately directing it at Laura; Gabriel Reed was the sort of man who sat in diners and flirted with the aging waitresses, who did so with all the harmlessness of a man obliquely lacking in pursuit, in chasing something down to its finish. He did, however, admire the blond across the counter, and the smile with all the due care and attention any man gives to something pretty and passing.
“What do you suggest, Laura?”
“Well you said coworker with a temper. What else was I supposed to assume?” The smile was still firmly in place, still real. The interaction was easy at this point; with the solid counter still firmly between them, Laura could feel secure enough in having a barrier between her and a still-strange man. Though she was slow to admit it, the man’s easy smiles and warm voice helped as well. And the thought of him buying flowers for coworkers...
“You want to buy Jack flowers?” Her smile shifted into a quick, quiet laugh, one that was captured again quickly and drawn back into silence, though the echo of it remained in her eyes. “I’m not quite sure I have anything that Jack’s going to like either.” Her ‘I’ was proprietary, as if the shop was hers, as if she had her own expanse of flowers in the back to choose from. It was an entirely different feeling than when she was simply going through the motions - different when she was actually helping someone choose something, giving flowers and plants meaning for someone else. Her thoughts caught along finding something that would match the man she’d met back in Seattle, and she made a soft sound in the back of her throat. “Actually... I might...”
Turning quickly, her thoughts already in the cooler in the back room, she gestured toward the stool behind the counter. “Have a sit, if you want.” As she turned, the movement pushed her hair back over her shoulder, revealing the side of her neck and the years-old silvery scar that ran from behind her ear down toward the collar of her shirt. It was uneven, but healed enough and covered by a hand skilled enough with makeup that it was only noticeable when it caught the light the right way. She was gone in the next second, the heavy slide of cooler door filtering through to the front of the shop.
The chill slid through the stuffy air of the shop, pleasantly. It was a wave of cool air that smelled of green things, of freshness, of the clarity that came with the cold. It reminded Gabe briefly (looking at the tracery of old scar tissue as it glinted faintly, caught by the shrewd eyes of someone trained to see whatever could be seen whether looking for it or no) of Playbill, of the particular cool and quiet associated with the place, and if the smile slid sideways, folded itself up into nothing but the faint lines beside his mouth, there was no one at all to see it in the pink fussiness of the flower store. He looked at the chair, instead, and he listened to the clatter and the hum of the vast cooler in the back of the place, stringing together assumed movements she was making into a picture of his own making. It was an agent’s skill, not a civilian’s and it came with an unsettled sense of self that Gabe acknowledged even as he examined it with faint bemusement and set it (and the construction of the scene beyond) to one side.
He did not sit, he leaned on the cane and he studied the outdoors in a window surrounded by so many frills and furbelows it was scarcely a window at all, there was so much curtain to it. Gabriel had not intended to follow up with a voice - even a pleasant one, warm and female as it had been - on the telephone and particularly not after the especial note of warning that had bitten into Main’s own. He was craning his head to the side to see exactly the eyeline to the diner he had picked out as a favorite for eggs benedict that had been close enough to make the walk, and he turned before she entered, responding to the heaviness of tread close by rather than to the entrance itself - habit, superimposed onto civilian life as ‘excellent instincts’.
Laura had very few qualms leaving Gabe out front by himself. Even if he hadn't been someone that Max knew, she had very little care for the shop itself, nor its dubious inventory. What she was more concerned with was the faint memory of a delivery of gladiolus that had inexplicably been included in their shipment of flowers during the last drop-off. They'd been pushed to the back of the cooler, no one else in the shop being interested in the long stalks with their blooms that worked their way open from base to tip. She chose the three best columns, dividing the darkest red from the rest of the colors, the scarlet somehow seeming right. They already had blooms open, but with enough buds up top that they would continue to open for at least several days.
It didn't take much to find a vase that would be too tall for nearly any other arrangement, and she wired the stalks together to form one solid spear of plant. They were tucked into the vase with a single blade of a dark green leaf, and then the entire thing was filled with lightweight stones and water. The entire process took her only a few minutes before she was slipping back out front with a satisfied smile for the arrangement she set on the counter.
He would have been hard-pressed to put a name to the flower on the countertop; Gabe had given many over the years but little that suggested something he had not been asked to imply; roses, ‘brava’, lilies, ‘congratulations’, orchids, ‘I am sorry’. (Had he truly put a flower to his wife, it would have been those he passed by each time, put out an absent finger and stroked the silky, pale petal between finger and thumb and tweaked the same way he’d pulled at her cheek on occasion; Eloise was freesias, even if she’d prefer not to be). He had carefully never chosen anything that appeared spiny, or spiky or otherwise fractious and the flowers that lipped at the edge of the vase were somehow elegant and irritated at the same time; ‘irritated’ suited Buttercup fine. Gabe’s eyes slowly took in the sight; the flowers and then the woman behind them with the kind of smile that said it had been work to put them together, pry them out of all that half-dead stuff and make it look like it didn’t fit at all in the pepto-bismol store, and he grinned back, an echoing lop-sided thing that dimpled into one cheek.
“Well look at that.” Calm, mild. Gabe put his right hand on the counter, and he turned the vase a fraction, as to better see the spiky things. Dark red, veining out toward the ceiling. Gabe touched one blossom, very carefully - the hesitancy of a man prone to breaking things, or giving the impression of things breaking merely by compensating for breadth and height and he withdrew his hand to the cane’s top, folding it over his left. She was, when she wasn’t thinking about it, lovely. He made the assessment without a whit of it reaching his eyes beyond pleasure in the blooms and he wondered how the hell Blossom here had looped up with Main in the first place.
“You like flowers.” It was a statement, thoughtful at its edges. “And you damn near picked Buttercup in flower form.” It made him speculative; the brown eyes vague as he studied her. Did Daniels - Laura - know more than Main gave her credit for, or was she just a blond with green fingers and a smile like sunshine?
Laura almost drew his hand up to touch the petals of the flowers, not nearly as delicate as they appeared, but his hand was already moving down to his cane before she was able to reach out. “What’s not to like? They’re lovely, people usually appreciate them if you get the right ones, and they don’t talk back in any sort of annoying way.” Her smirk lodged itself in the corner of her mouth as she reached out to touch a petal with the back of her fingers, completing the motion that Gabe had aborted. Her eyes were actually fond as she looked at the arrangement, the one she felt the best about since moving to Las Vegas. In that moment, she deeply, desperately, wanted her own shop back. She wanted the freedom to make what she wanted, to keep her shop the way she saw fit, to surround herself with living, green things instead of pepto-bismol walls. She pushed that thought away again with an internal sigh, only a flicker of regret actually registering on her face.
“They mean strength of character, honor, and conviction. It seemed appropriate.” She may not have encountered Jack more than a time or two, but she knew the things she’d overheard on both sides of the door, and she knew that there likely wasn’t a more perfect flower to have randomly worked its way into the last delivery.
Gabe thought over Jack, and the look in his eyes was cautious approval, was all reserved for the flowers rather than the agent he’d been handed, called ‘volatile’ amongst other things. Strength of character, honor, conviction - it sounded right, it sounded ‘appropriate’ as Laura put it, in that soft-proud voice, all blond self-satisfaction and a smile she probably didn’t know she was still wearing. Gabe smiled back, reflexively. The dimples re-appeared. “Sounds like you got him down fine,” he said. He wondered just how much Laura knew of Jack, of Corvus rather than the man and he wondered just how far Main had allowed her life and the one of an agent to bleed together, introducing those elements until they swirled together, until CIA bled india-ink dark across them. Gabe would not ask, but he’d look, instead.
“They’re lovely,” Gabe said. It was the rounded sound of appreciation, of congratulation for her cleverness and perhaps a little for the lingering look at that smile; be it the flowers or the quiet woman with the scar that reached up beyond where accidents in the kitchen or a drunken mistake might call themselves cause - he wondered about that, too, but he studied the flowers instead, and he reached up, just once more, and he nudged a blossom. “Buttercup will love ‘em,” he said, with the perfect sincerity of one knowing a joke is all the better for the components that went into them, “How much do I owe you?” He’d figure out the walk home with them later.
The appreciation for the arrangement sparked something warm in her chest, something that had been quiet for a while. That the appreciation came along with a dimpled smile and a warm voice was just as nice (though infinitely more troublesome). “We met a few years back. I haven’t seen him in Vegas, but we have mutual acquaintances.” It was easy enough to choose flowers for someone if you had even a little bit of information about them. The meanings seemed to fit, and even Barbara approved of the red, in her own way.
She made a face at the talk of price and waved a hand between them. “Please. No one’s even going to realize anything’s gone. These would’ve just died in the cooler if I hadn’t thrown them together for you.” And that she sounded a little insulted at. Letting good plants wither and die in the back without anyone even seeing them. “And if you let me know where they’re going, I’ll even drop them off for you.” She didn’t say anything about it, didn’t even glance down at his cane, but she knew that juggling a vase along with that wasn’t going to be easy. Or possible. No matter how close the intended destination was.
Gabriel’s eyes slid down, past the countertop and the collection of be-jewelled picture frames at the very end of it (as though one might, were one buying flowers blind, feel the need to buy something as dreadful to compensate for poor taste with quantity) and to the cane. There was, of course, reason obvious enough to acknowledge it, to acknowledge that whimsy, spontaneity wasn’t readily available. Along with stairs, narrow doorways and playing soccer in the park with a small, curly-haired little boy who had no interest at all in accuracy but in going very fast. “That would be nice,” he said carefully, but there was no address forthcoming, nothing that directed one Laura Daniels toward a building as innocuous as it was secure, gray cement and armed security and the deadened silence inside of sound-proof walls.
“I think, however, I’m going to take a cab back.” This then the readjustment of priorities; the vase too heavy to allow for the walk and even as Gabe made calculation of cab-ride and motel, whether to move directly toward the office and deposit the spontaneous gift on Jack’s desk or to default back to a motel room as grim as it was spotless, he was thinking over ‘mutual acquaintances’ and wondering precisely how much Laura Daniels knew. “You have excellent taste.” He said this with the gravity of compliment paid entirely to the woman behind the counter, and not of the flowers at all. The smile came once again, calculated distraction from the request for location, for an office building that was government facility.
Laura’s eyebrow inched up at the subtle refusal to indicate an address, but she didn’t question and she didn’t push. If Gabe wanted to take the flowers himself, well, she wasn’t going to attempt to push past a stubborn nature. She dealt with a similar sort of thing often enough in her friends and herself, so his own pride was nothing she hadn’t seen before in any number of people, men and women alike. Her eyebrows lifted higher (both, not just the singular) at the switch of plans, but she only nodded. “Did you want me to call for one? I’ve got a place I use sometimes.” She ignored the comment about having good taste, but she couldn’t stop the subtly pleased flush that rose to her cheeks. She knew it was there, could feel the tingle of warmth along her skin, but it too was ignored.
“Please.” Gabe’s voice was calm, steady - as if there had been no change of plan at all, as if there were only the singular, as if he stood here at the countertop and had always intended upon purchasing a bulky vase full of spiky flowers for a coworker who doubtless would not know what to do with the gesture. (Gabe very much doubted Jack had ever been bought flowers and he thought that Jack was the type that bought roses, if he bought flowers at all). Gabe assumed this with the relaxed ease that was both very deliberate and appeared utterly casual, his hip leaned into the counter and if his leg was shooting spikes of dull, red pain at him in downright aggravation at having been stood quite so long, it was, Gabe thought, perhaps a little worth it.
“Do you get much foot-traffic?” He sounded doubtful. He was looking at the walls again, and not the woman, the woman who was oddly displaced for pictures of -- Gabe leaned, examined, pulled back -- kittens in jeweled frames and half-dead carnations, a woman who was scarred in a particular place and walked a certain way that made him think of broken operations, of secrecy and paperwork filled out in triplicate. He waited until she had moved beyond sight-line, to fiddle with the plastic child-proof cap to the orange bottle in his pocket, and he swallowed neatly and without undue fuss, the two capsules rolled out into his hand.
Laura caught the movement of his shift against the counter and hurried her motions slightly to find the number for the cab company. The call was quick enough, with a promise of a car arriving in the next few minutes. His question was answered even if the soft rattle of pills was not, though her eyes caught a wary edge when she next turned to look at him. “It’s really the only kind of traffic we get. Though there’s precious little of it, really.” It helped that there was a low-end chapel up the road, though even then the days tended to be quiet. She missed the days of having a good location, of having regulars that would come in specifically for a good arrangement, of making a difference in whatever small way she could for those people that came into a shop. More than a half-hearted bouquet of apology. She couldn’t hide the smirk at his reaction to the kitten pictures. She hated them enough herself, and to see the horror reflected on someone else’s face nearly pulled a laugh from her. “They’re terrifying, I know.” In the flow of conversation, it was a non sequitur, but it matched the flow of his thoughts near enough.
Gabe’s hand slid into his pocket and replaced the bottle there, with the soft smoothness of almost-sleight of hand. The pill case fell onto the cotton lining of his pocket and was soundless; Gabe glanced back at one photo of a particularly distressed looking fur-ball. He had, he recalled, wanted a dog at some stage. Something young enough and harmless enough that Phee and Ernie could play -- he’d had something of a hazy idea of parks, of wide open green spaces and laughter. Fuzz-balls were not helpful to that end. Gabe eyed it with the wariness reserved for live ammunition. “Hazardous work environment you have here,” he remarked, and his eyes flickered from the picture to her smile; a thread of honey-colored warmth stole through the brown gaze. “You’re a cat person?” And, his voice seemed to imply, maybe that was as bad as the pepto-bismol walls.
“Doesn’t seem like your kind of place somehow.” His voice was quiet, thoughtful as he rotated slowly, mindful of the floor and with his left hand still leaning against the countertop, and took in the full macabre sight of her workplace. Another smile, small but not remotely hidden.
“I’m not really an any-animal sort of person,” Laura replied with another smile. In truth, it was the well-past middle-aged woman that owned the shop that had added all the decor. It was the sort of decorating that set Laura’s teeth on edge as she shook her head. “It’s not my sort of place at all. If I had my way, there would be more green, more white. More wood for shelves and tile on the floor. ...No kittens. Buckets full of healthy things, well-potted plants. In a place where there is foot traffic, and where regulars are apt to visit.” Her voice went wistful as she described her shop. The one that had actually been hers, with her name on all the paperwork and her touch to everything inside. The one she had started in DC and then moved to Seattle. The one that she had started from nothing and that had been shut down upon her arrest. She hadn’t longed for its return quite as intensely until this moment, in the face of this man’s quietly probing questions.
Gabe listened to the soft hesitancy of her voice, its rhythm as her vision unfolded, bloomed like one of the blossoms in the vase but he looked at her face, at the slow shift on its surface and the pull at her mouth, at the corners of her eyes. Laura Daniels was not working in a place all pink because it was easy, or entirely because it was convenient; she was not uncertain nor did she lack ideas as to how things ought be done. Gabe thought her imaginary shop - the one white and cool and busy with foot-traffic, sounded a great deal better than this one, and it reminded him once more of Playbill, of the green and stillness and calm of that particular store. It suited Laura; he thought for a minute of suggesting she visit it, and Gabe did not think one minute about how awkward that might be.
“So why here, instead?” Gabe’s smile was unprepossessing, it was warm as a mug of coffee wrapped in hands, it was as reassuring as being stood across from someone who had absolutely no weight resting on the answer. But the horn of the cab, a low sedan that had pulled up outside, saved her from answer, as he turned his head with a quickness that was neither meek nor mild.
Laura wasn’t comfortable answering the “why”. Not when it had to do with past things best hidden and the fact that she had to (legally) disclose being convicted of a crime on any sort of standard employment application. And for all her love of pink and kittens, the owner of the shop hadn’t balked too badly at that damning little checkmark and the explanation that had followed. It was the same fact that kept her from being able to secure a decent bank loan to start up her own shop again (and she was maybe still too uncertain and cowardly to take the personal loan she knew she could wrangle from those wealthy friends that knew her personally). She was saved by the horn, and at the startling quick turn from the man across the counter, she leaned forward to nudge the vase closer to him before reaching below the counter to find a support box and a bag with handles. “Don’t forget Jack’s flowers.”
There was a reticence in the blue eyes that slid away from him and Gabe had the certainty that was fitting a thumb into a notch, that this, perhaps was something of interest. Of interest meant, often, for a man who was used to the delicate mechanisms of conversation with those who least wished to converse, leaving it alone but he folded it up like it was a note taken down on paper and tucked it at the back of mind for safekeeping. The cab blared once again, and Gabe folded his free hand around the waxed paper handles of the bag, the weight unsteadying. He took a step to the side, very obviously a test, and then he turned to face her completely. There was a generosity of relaxation in the angle of his shoulders, in the way Gabe circumvented pink clutter and intrusive kitten-pictures. Gabe held out a hand with the smile of someone certain that it is to be accepted; his palm was very warm, and the pads of his fingers as they slid past the back of her hand were just rough enough for notice, like callouses almost entirely worn away to nothing, in white hospital sheets.
“Thank you,” he said, and there was nothing there that hinted it had been more than just that - but the close of warm hand around her own and the retreat that was all smile, all dimples, and a wave toward the cab with cane. “He’ll drive off without me,” and that was rueful, all joke and not a hint of any kind of real embarrassment or worry about it at all. “Goodbye, Laura.”
There was the slightest hint of hesitation before Laura placed her hand in his, strong but still somehow feminine, especially in his larger grip. She looked at their clasped hands as they shook and was maybe slower than usual to pull her hand back after the required shake (one-two). “You’re welcome.” Her smile was softer, unfamiliar on her face as she watched him go, the gait unsteady but in no way did she think it weak. Dangerous though, yes. All of that man was dangerous in his own subtle, warm way. And it was something she couldn’t pull her attention from.