Petals
A week later, Lynn went to rehearsal with a new song called “Aqua.” She didn’t necessarily want to put it on the album that her band was planning to self-release, but she wanted to record it and give it to Ashley. She only had a little bit of the song done, a verse, or, with a little work, the bridge.
Everything was aqua blue,
That day I found love in you.
Subway cars and rose-colored kisses,
Oceans of water, our petal-covered riches.
Holding your hand in the dreams and haze,
Wishing this could last for all our days.
After Lynn was satisfied with the clip of the song, she walked to the now-familiar flower store. Ashley met Lynn on the street outside the shop, carrying a few huge, colorful paintings. They were so different from Lynn’s careful pencil sketches, and Lynn loved them. They walked to the café down the street. Lynn carried her sketchbook, guitar case, and the laptop she kept the band’s work on. Ashley maneuvered her paintings and a pot of flowers through the doors and sat down while Lynn went up to get the coffee. She had a little bit of anxiety about it, but it wasn’t even close to where she’d been after her girlfriend broke up with her months ago. She was getting better, she noted. It felt good.
Ashley had spread out her paintings on the table so Lynn could see them; their brilliant colors and messy lines making them feel bright and complex. Lynn handed Ashley her sketchbook.
“You can look at it if you want. It’s mostly anatomical studies and sketches, but there’s probably a few landscapes or something in there.”
Ashley leafed through the book slowly. Lynn wanted to look at her face as she took in the drawings, but that was a very good way to get anxious, so she looked at the paintings on the table instead.
“These are… great. The detail on them is amazing. And they’re all different but they feel the same. It’s really, really good. Seriously, it is!” Lynn couldn’t stop smiling as she thanked Ashley. She had shown Ashley a piece of herself with the drawings, and Ashley had liked them. Not only that, she felt like Ashley understood them. Lynn hoped she felt the same about Lynn’s response to Ashley’s paintings.
They hadn’t really known each other for that long, and there was still a lot they didn’t know about each other. She had only met Ashley a little more than a month ago in the rain. But they were connecting in ways that Lynn liked a lot, even if there was still lots for each of them to learn about the other. It was the best feeling, talking to Ashley at the shop every night while she arranged flowers or worked the counter, looking at her and knowing that they were heading towards love, or something like it. And now they were in a café, just being near each other in the way people who knew each other were. It felt like a big step, somehow, but Lynn wanted to take it.