Forget Me Not

by Julie Soto

“A wedding is not a marriage. Marriages will never be perfect. They’re always a work in progress. But weddings? Weddings are just a moment in time, striving to be perfect. Let me make you a perfect moment, Eloise.”

“I told her about my mom. And how I believe marriages don’t matter, but weddings do.” Mar laughs. “That was bold of you.” I shrug. “She had one foot out the door. I thought it was time for some honesty.”

Deciding to leave Whitney Harrison Weddings could have been the most colossal mistake of my life, but thankfully I had Whitney in my corner.

Because I’m not doing this wedding.

I’m pretty positive that both flowers and people suck.

Flowers are better than people.

And he was right. They only needed light, water, and attention. But it’s not as simple as that. Because you need to know how much light, how much water, how much attention. But if you can get it right—if you can crack the code—flowers are infinitely better than people. Because you can find a person’s ratio of light, water, and attention, and it still won’t be enough. For flowers, it’s enough.

I don’t think I have the magic touch my father had, but after a while, I started adding my own magic.

I haven’t been to Blooming in two years. Two years, two months, one week, and four days, to be more exact.

I’m buzzing, remembering my first boutonniere. Buttercups and petunias—immaturity and resentment.

“You already are a flower.”

If there’s one thing Elliot Bloom is not, it’s casual.

“I just want to feel like we’re coming together,” Jackie whispers. “I want you to want the colors and flowers I like.”

“Um, my mom. And other connotations,” I mumble, pushing my hair over my ear. “In mythology, Amaryllis fell in love with a—with a man who loved flowers…”

“He didn’t want her, so she carved herself into something he liked, something he wanted.”

“Well, you won’t have them or me in your shop anymore,” she says hotly. “There are plenty of florists—”

“You’ll have to forgive me forgetting,” she says, reaching forward to finger the button at my collar. “You were in those skinny jeans and that plaid shirt. It made you look like a missionary come to save my filthy soul.” She presses forward, and her lips brush over my temple. “Those aren’t skinny jeans,” I argue. “I could barely get my hand in them,” she whispers against my cheek.

“Did I just kill her with a peanut butter donut?”

“Mom, please don’t marry him,” I hear behind us. I turn to see Ama being rolled out in a wheelchair. I’ve paralyzed her.

Sometimes I feel like she blew into my life like a hurricane and barely left me a second to catch my bearings, but in reality, I’ve known her for almost half a year now. And she’s been running in my circles for a few years before that. My dad even knew her—which is a strange thing to think about as I’m trying to narrow down my exact feelings for her. She knows a piece of me that’s gone. When I think about spending more time with her, about escalating—there’s something oddly right about Dad having met her.

But I’m learning that nothing with Ama is normal.

“I don’t give a fuck who it is. I want you to look debauched when I’m debauching you.”

“B-because I want to know you. I want to know what you like, what you hate—even if it’s me.” I start pressing a second finger inside slowly. “Fuck fuck fuck—I want to love what you love, even if it’s extinct.”

I want to know you. I want to know what you like, what you hate.

I want to love what you love, even if it’s extinct.

I think back to the Gordon wedding. How I truly thought I could keep it casual. How it wasn’t until after he’d rocked my socks off on a couch in a back room that I realized I wanted to go home with him. How I’d said things I couldn’t take back. And in the afterglow, he’d looked at me like no one else had ever in my life. Like he agreed. Like my words meant something to him, instead of just pleasurable mumbling. It made me question if it was just mumbling, or if I’d meant it.

She drops to her knees that day, and I forget about spider mums. In fact, her ideas were better. They always are.

“He had hundreds of those. It’s fine. I like that you have one.”

Needless to say, she does not suck my soul out through my dick that night.

“I don’t even know what this is,” I say honestly. “We see each other once a week maybe, and we fuck, I’ve taken you to dinner, but I’m just…” I swallow. “I feel like I’m just waiting for you to tell me the rules. I’ll keep playing even if you never do, but—but no, I don’t sleep with other people when I’m…doing whatever this is.”

I’ve seen too many men make promises to my mom—to me—that got broken when things got hard.

“I know it’s weird that I’m a wedding planner who doesn’t believe marriage works, but that’s exactly it. Weddings are just a party to me. Marriages are things that end. And I don’t think love should lead to a commitment when the emotion is so fluid and fickle for everybody.” “Not for everybody,” I whisper. She blinks up at me, and I take my chance, hoping she’ll give me a try. Because I’m pretty sure I’d never lose my grasp on her if given the opportunity. “Not everyone is fickle about it.”

“If you want to move forward with whatever this is between us, you don’t have to worry about me backing out. You may think everything ends one day, but you haven’t had ‘everything’ with me.”

“No labels?” I add helpfully. She grins. “Labels have expiration dates.”

“I’ve been wanting to do this for a few months, so if you could be patient, that’d be great.”

“Great, if you check your email, you’ll see a reservation for fifty guests under Elliot Bloom for Saturday, October seventh.” He snaps his eyes up to Vince and waves his phone. “All paid for. We’re gonna need those horses and carriages at the Rose Garden that day.”

“Well, and the flip side,” I say. “You wouldn’t get to work with other florists or custom fabricators—” “I don’t want to work with anybody else,” she cuts me off. “I want the best.”

“What if I’m forgetting something?” “You’re not.” “What if something goes terribly wrong?” I pull her closer to me, and she lets herself curl into my side. “It won’t. And if it does, you’ll fix it. You’re amazing like that.” I kiss her hair. “AmazingAma.” She snorts a laugh, and I almost say it. I almost say I love you.

She’s beaming at Stefan, in a different way than she looks at anything in her life. It’s something I’ve seen in the mirror a few times over the past six months.

“Marry me.”

“I love you,” I tell her. “I’ve loved you. I can’t imagine losing this, but I only wanted more—for a second. That’s all it was,”

“Great. So we’re breaking up because you want to be a better wedding planner.” Her eyes turn to ice. “We’re breaking up because you proposed. And because I never should have fucked you in the first place. This whole thing is a mistake.”

I’m left with an email in one hand and the memory of her warmth in the other.

“No, I’m coming to get you.”

“You are more important than the wedding, Ama.”

“What are you doing?” I ask. “If I’m going to be the wedding planner today, I need the wedding planner Bluetooth.”

“That’s not how it works,” he says. “There is no falling out of love for people like you and me.”

“Trust me, I know that when you’re in love with a person who’s that dedicated to their career, sometimes you don’t feel like you come first.”

“Sometimes you just count down the days, the hours, until you can be useful again,” he says. “And if it ever ends, Jackie?” He lowers his voice. “You’re still counting away. The months since. The exact days since. Like a tally of moments you’ve spent not being important to them. But don’t ever think you’ll wake up and not be in love with her.”

“It’s…I just wanted you to know that you won’t fall out of love,” he says. “It’s been years, and I can still tell you the number of days since she last needed me. Since I last held her through the night.”