He’s back at the shelves, lining up books with tidy precision. “If it’s nonfatal, you only serve a few years.”
I trip into the door, yelling, “I knew it!”
“Honestly, Gabriella.” He rolls his eyes. “I read thrillers. Doesn’t mean I want to be in one.”
“I’m still hiding the box cutters.”
As I’m about to unlock the door, I catch my reflection in its pane of frosted glass. Between this morning’s windswept walk to work and Jonathan’s mind games, I look like I walked through a tornado: cheeks flushed as rosy as my lips; hazel eyes saucer-wide, blinking frantically; my hair’s honey-brown, loose curls, which usually sit at my shoulders, look electrified.
“Yeesh.” As I fuss with my hair and command my eyes to look less deranged, a prickle of awareness dances up my neck. Jonathan’s eyes lock with mine in the glass reflection. He throws me another chilly arched eyebrow. I stick out my tongue.
“Real mature,” he says.
“Coming from the guy leaving some poor delivery person to freeze on the sidewalk.”
Jonathan—shocker—is a hard-ass who won’t answer the door until opening, but sometimes delivery people get turned around and can’t find the alley entrance. I’m the sympathetic one who helps them out.
With a wrench of the bolt, I open the door to the sight of a delivery person—their legs at least—staggering under the weight of a bouquet that dwarfs their upper body.
A voice from behind it says, “Delivery for Miss Gabriella Di Natale?”
I stare at it, slack-jawed. This is hundreds of dollars in flowers. Crimson roses and velvet poinsettias, cheery sprigs of pine and holly, snow-white lilies the size of dinner plates. Their cloying scent hits my nose, and a vicious sneeze doubles me over.
A warm, house-sized torso reaches past me as another sneeze wracks my body. Jonathan grips the tapered vase like it’s a twig rather than thirty pounds of floral opulence and goes straight for the note wedged inside. I’m equally curious to know who it’s from—his guess is as good as mine.
“Um, but…” The delivery person finally peeks around the bouquet. “This is for Miss Gabriella Di…” Their voice dies off in the face of Jonathan’s arctic glare. “I need a signature.”
“Does she look like she can sign?” Jonathan jerks his head toward me as I double over in another sneeze, then signs with a flourish. “Gabriella, tell them I’m not stealing your flowers.”
“He’s not. It’s fine. Thank—ah-ah-ah-CHOO.”
“Happy holidays,” Jonathan says, as he shuts the door in their face. “Last time I show up December first with a baked-good olive branch. You accuse me of poisoning you with cookies, when your boyfriend’s the one gifting you a biohazard.” He crosses the store toward the back, systematically plucking each lily from the bouquet. “Some fella you’ve got yourself.”
I double over in a sneeze that rattles my sinuses. “W-what?”
“Knows you well enough to send a holiday-themed bouquet but not well enough to make sure it’s low fragrance. Strong scents make you sneeze and trigger your headaches.”
“He’s not—Wait. How do you know that?”
“Twelve months, Miss Di Natale.” Jonathan sets the bouquet on the counter, whips open the back door to the alley, and flings a hundred dollars’ worth of lilies into the dumpster like they’re vermin.
“Twelve months what?” I ask.
After shutting the door, he strolls into the break room kitchenette where we keep a coffee pot and mugs, along with a cabinet of snacks whose shelves are divided down the middle by boundary-defining tape, like we’re feuding countries and the corner of a Triscuit box encroaching on enemy territory is cause for war.
Jonathan flicks on the water at the sink and rolls up his sleeves to his elbows, each fold of crisp, white cotton revealing two new inches of corded muscles and a dusting of dark hair. I tell myself to stop staring, but I can’t.
Besides my two best friends, who are also my roommates, the only person I spend this much time with is Jonathan Icicle-Up-His-Butt Frost, and I think it’s warping my brain—day in and day out, eight eternal hours around him. Brushing elbows as we pass each other in the store. Watching him grunt and flex all those muscles as he opens boxes and stocks shelves. Catching his eyes narrowed at me when I break the rules and plop on the floor with a tiny customer, cracking open a book to read to them.