Page 49 of Later Bloom

When Aubrey looks over, she finds Florence’s lips taut and her eyebrows drawn. She’s watching the road intently. “I might be wrong, you know. Maybe I’m reading into it.”

“Okay.”

“Does that help?”

“A little.” It doesn’t. Not at all. Aubrey can’t ignore the drop in her stomach, the strange feeling in her gut she pretends very hard isn’t disappointment. She tells herself it’s because it’s nice to feel attractive, knowing that someone might want you.

“I’m just you’re right,” she says, and she knows she doesn’t like what she’s saying as the words leave her lips. “It’s probably nothing.”

She decides then she’s in one of those movies, where she doesn’t know what this means, and Arthur is just a friend, and she’s just his friend.

She doesn’t check her phone for a message from him when she gets home. She goes straight to bed instead.

Chapter Fifteen

It’s snowing on Monday morning. The world beyond the windows is a blinding curtain, blurring everything together. The air sits slow and quiet in the early hour. Winter is surprisingly bright in Lunenburg, when the sky isn’t too low and the snow is fresh.

In the kitchen, Aubrey busies herself with anything but the dishes piled up in the sink. She wipes down the table, the chairs, the door frames. On the table sits a bouquet of dried flowers she’d collected over the summer and hung to dry in the entryway closet. Its shades of beige, brown, and purple fit well against the white kitchen. In the background, piano music is playing for Louise, who’s meant to come home soon for lunch. It’s something they agreed on—Louise works a lot at the hospital these days, and there are nearly no guests for Aubrey to tend to, so Louise comes home for lunch, smiles pitifully at Aubrey, and says things like, “Just call me if you get too bored. I don’t mind.”

Aubrey doesn’t call Louise. At 2:00 a.m. she writes her aunt a lengthy email dissecting her thoughts on Arthur’s potential crush—things she would never allow herself to say out loud, like how she’s been thinking about it a lot, how she wants to ask Florence about it but can’t, how she’s been trying to imagine what Arthur would even be like as a boyfriend. How frustrating knowing he might be a good catch, yet the story halts there, a tale of pleasant friendship without really picturing him in a different light, with his hands on her waist, his smile in her heart. Her thoughts on the page make her seem ungrateful, she knows it. A hypocrite, it feels like, crying for something she refuses to grasp when it draws near. She wakes up in the morning with her cheek on her keyboard, her email cut off mid-sentence. Her bed is a mess.

Both houses, however, are otherwise spotless. The guest rooms have never been tidier or the bathrooms so shiny. The dishes are a backup plan, just in case she should grow too agitated, so she doesn’t touch them for now.

She’s humming along to the music when the door opens behind her. The sound of boots knocking snow off their soles breaks the quiet.

“You’re a little early,” Aubrey calls to her aunt, with a smile to herself. She teases, “Hospital sent you home for a snow day?”

There’s laughter, but it’s not Louise’s. Then, “I honestly can’t think of a funny answer to that.”

It’s Arthur. He wears a brown leather jacket that’s faded in spots, melting snow clinging to the seams. Aubrey hasn’t seen him since her night out with Florence, and she’s so conscious now of how she looks at him, how he looks at her. She says, “I thought you were Louise,” which is obvious, but “hi” feels harder to get out.

Arthur kicks off his boots and undoes his jacket to reveal a plain white tee. “Do you mind if I sit a minute? I’m frigid.” Already he’s making his way over to the table and pulling out a chair.

He sits, so Aubrey sits, too. They’re at the same height like this, each on their chair. “Can I get you something to drink?” she offers. How dreadfully formal.

She makes to get up again, but he says, “No, no, it’s good. Sit, here. You never told me how it went with Florence, the other night.”

“You didn’t tell me about your date.”

The retort hardly seems to faze him. His lips curl in a smile. “There’s not much to say.”

“Isn’t there? You don’t go on dates very often.”

It’s not clear really what her point is, but it seems to feed into Arthur’s amusement, and into the dampness of her palms. She’s not sure how to sit, what to do with her hands. She picks at some of the dried petals that fell on the table as Arthur replies, “You’re one to talk.” He’s so in control while Aubrey fails to catch up, a foreign imbalance in their dynamic.

“So it went well, then. If you’re so precious about it.” She means it playfully but it doesn’t echo this way, not exactly. She doesn’t want Arthur to think she’s defensive, so she adds, quickly, “I mean it’s a good thing. Really good, yeah. I’m happy for you.”

“It went fine, I think. We haven’t made any plans to see each other again.”

“Okay.” Aubrey stares at the table, too afraid he might read something in her eyes if she looks up.

“I didn’t have much hope in it, anyway,” Arthur says. “I just thought it’d do me some good to leave the house.”

“Right. Well, good.”

“That the date didn’t go well?”

“That you left the house.”