Chapter 5

Serena

The refrigerator was working. 

Under normal circumstances, it was good news. But the unit had been running since before she arrived, holding temperature all night without interruption, which meant there was no fluctuation to account for the three white roses that had been closed buds when she left yesterday and were now fully open. 

She stood in front of the door with the cold coming out and looked at them for a moment. The display read thirty-eight degrees. They weren’t meant to open at that temperature. She closed the door and went back to the bench, deciding to worry about the roses after she had arranged a few orders.

She was wiring a sympathy arrangement when Lena came. It was still 8 am, and the store was not open yet. Lena had a key for exactly this reason: she believed that the answer to most problems was to show up before you were invited, so you could shock the person with your presence.

"Coffee," Lena said, setting a cup at her elbow. She climbed onto the stool on the other side of the bench and wrapped both hands around her own cup. She was dressed in a pink skirt suit. Serena knew she had a presentation at eleven; she had been panicking about it all through last week, so she wondered how she found the time to come question her. 

"How are you?" Lena was staring at Serena like she wanted to see her brain.

"I’m working, Lena. Don’t you have a presentation today?"

"That's not what I asked."

Serena kept her hands moving. She reached for the next stem, measured it, and cut it. "I'm fine."

"You keep saying that."

"Because it keeps being true. It’s not my fault you don’t want to believe me."

"Oh, you’re so fine that you freaked out at the club," Lena said.

"The crowd." Serena did not look up. "I already told you there were too many dominant wolves in a small room. I got overstimulated, I needed a second. You've seen it happen before."

"I've seen you get quiet and want to leave early," Lena said. "I've never seen you go white and press your hand to your chest and look like you heard something the rest of the room couldn't."

Serena tied off the arrangement and set it aside. She picked up the next bunch and started sorting. 

The problem was not that she had no explanation. The problem was that she had one, and she wasn't ready to say it out loud. She had spent twenty-seven years being treated as unremarkable. Her wolf had always been quiet. The only time she reacted was when she was around too many wolves. She had never thought much about it. She had basically lived like a human, no pack, no shifting, no particular investment in the wolf side of things.

Last night, her wolf had gone from flat to honed in under a second. There was no other word for it. She was uncertain about what that meant for her; was it something that came with age? How would her life be if she investigated the feeling? She wasn’t even sure she wanted to find out.

She had stood at the edge of the dance floor looking at a room full of people and found nothing, and then it was over, and she had told Lena it was the crowd. She had told herself it was the crowd for the entire drive home and for the ceiling-staring hour before she slept.

But now this morning, she can’t keep telling herself it was just the crowd.

"Look, I’m fine right now. If I figure out anything, I’ll let you know," she said.

Lena looked at her. "That's different from what you were saying last night."

"I know."

Sereana rolled her eyes. She knew Lena had gotten what she came for. She drank her coffee and talked for twenty minutes about the presentation, then gossiped about Lena’s coworkers, especially whether the VP actually listened in meetings or just pretended to. 

Lena left soon after, promising to call Serena in the evening.

Left alone with her thoughts, Serena went to the refrigerator. She opened it and looked at the roses again.

She had a notebook on the corner shelf. Recently, she had been noticing things she could not explain. The propagation bench is responding differently than it should; certain varieties are keeping longer than they ought to. 

She had started keeping the notebook early that year 

She pulled it out and wrote the date, then followed it with; three fully open white roses in the refrigerator. unit at 38 degrees, no fluctuation on the display log overnight. Closed buds when I left yesterday. Also, something weird happened at the club yesterday.

She closed the notebook and went back to work.

At ten o'clock, she had a customer come in for a wedding consultation.  She talked to them about which flowers would be in season and how to make their budget work, showed them samples, and by the time they left at ten forty-five, they settled on an arrangement she sketched out. The client thought it was beautiful and made a deposit.

She made a note in the order book and went back to the bench.

Her phone buzzed.

Damon and Serena

Damon: Morning. How are you feeling?

Damon was observant in a quiet way that people underestimated, and she had not been herself in the car on the way home. She knew he had noticed something.

Serena: Good. Busy morning. How are you?

Damon: Good. I was thinking we could have dinner this week… Say Thursday?

Serena: Thursday works.

Damon: Great. I'll book somewhere.

She put the phone down. She thought about what Lena had said, " You don't talk about him.

The thing she had never said to Lena was that she knew Lena was right. She had known it for a while. Damon was a good person. He was easy and warm, and she felt comfortable with him, and comfortable was not nothing, but it wasn’t true love either. Comfortable was not what her parents had.

She had been with Damon for two years on the basis that comfort was enough, and last night something had reached into her chest and reminded her she had never actually believed that. Her wolf was searching for something, and she wanted to know what.