Page 2 of Sing Your Secrets
I cross my arms and let my eyes hit the ceiling. It’s annoying when grown men look at me like I’m on the menu, let alone eighteen-year-olds. I snap at him when I catch his eyes lingering on my chest.
“Harry, my eyes are up here, mmkay? What I meant was, why don’t you take these flowers to the girl you like? My treat. Write a new note and surprise her with these.” Whatever it takes to get these out of my apartment.
“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” he says with his eyes widening. “This is like a three-hundred-dollar bouquet.” To an eighteen-year-old, I’m sure it’s a disgusting amount of money to spend on flowers. What he doesn’t realize is that Petey’s last tour grossed over sixty million dollars. He could wipe his ass with hundred-dollar bills without a care in the world which is why these fancy bouquets don’t mean a damn thing to me. A man simply throwing money at a mess he made fixes absolutely nothing. My love is free… So, stop trying to buy it. I loved him well before he was worth anything. I didn’t want his wallet, just his heart.
And I came up short.
"I insist. It’s either your girl or my trash can—where are these flowers going to call home?”
His eyes shuffle left, right, to his shoes and then back to me. Finally, he agrees. “Okay, but tomorrow’s you’ll keep, right? Junie has a really special bouquet planned. It’s blue and it has feathers in it.”
Christ. “How many more?” My eyes narrow to slits.
“You’re on the morning schedule for at least another two weeks.”
I give him a deadpan stare. Blinking at Harry with the most stoic face I can muster, I try to say fuck no without actually saying it.
“All right, Harry,” I say, fishing out a one-hundred-dollar bill out of my wallet and handing it to him.
“Oh, I was pre-tipped, ma’am.”
“Mhmm, this isn’t your tip. I’m going to try and put a stop to this, but in the meantime, this is payment for you to forge my signature and take the remaining bouquets to any apartment in the city of Denver except this one. Got it?”
He looks at me with furrowed brows and wide eyes but still nods. “Okay?”
I rustle his hair, patronizingly. “There you go, scamp. Now get out of here, you.” Harry rolls his eyes at my sarcastic tone. “And seriously,” I say, my voice returning to its normal even tenor, “don’t bring me any more flowers, Harry.”
“What’s wrong with flowers, I thought… Well, never mind.”
“It’s okay. What?” My hand finds my hip and I already know what he’s about to ask.
“Well, if I sent a girl flowers every day, especially really nice flowers, that’d mean I really liked her—loved her, even. It’d suck if she was giving them away and throwing them away.”
I cross my arms and look Harry up and down. He’s a handsome boy. I’m sure he’ll go to college this coming fall and have all the girls lining up for…flowers, so I feel like I need to impart some wisdom on someone who has been there and done that.
“When you find a girl you want to give flowers to, make sure it’s to say I like you, or I love you. Try not to be the guy who uses flowers to say, I’m sorry I dumped you, humiliated you, lied to you until you believed all the gaslighting, and then used you to climb my way to the top while starving you of any credit.”
“Oh,” Harry says, looking at his shoes while his cheeks flush. “I didn’t realize.”
“How would you know? On the outside, it looks like a really romantic gesture, right?” Bashfully, he nods, and I wink in response. “All right, kid. Out you go. Take your flowers.”
When the door closes shut behind him, I whip out my phone and head to blocked contacts. My stomach swoops like I’m at the top of a roller coaster as the hot nerves rush through my veins.
After all this time, I still get nervous. But not because of Petey, and not because I want him back—it’s just hard to face the person I was with him. She was desperate, scared, and paranoid. I hate reliving the past. I hate thinking about how long it took for me to finally stand up for myself. I hate that even though I did all the right things—I moved on, I stopped talking to him, I leaned on my friends. I still wanted to run back to him every step of the way. I’ve never felt weaker in my life. The term first love is deceptive. It implies there’s a second, a third…
Love doesn’t work like that. Not true love. The memories go fuzzy, but they never go away. The scars fade, but they don’t ever completely heal. Your first love lasts forever. It marks you. It changes you.
Sometimes for the worse.
It took a lot of effort and work on my part to put the past in the past. It took a lot of dates, hookups, and extremely short-lived relationships before I got used to the idea of moving on. I was just trying to put as many bodies as possible between me and Petey until I was comfortable with the lingering ache of losing what I thought would be my forever.
For a while, I was hopeful. Convincing myself time healed all wounds, I kept dating and fucking, trying to fall in love again in the same passionate, desperate way I did the first time. But it’s been three years since we officially parted ways, and nothing comes close. No one comes close to making me feel the way he did—the good and the bad.
Me:Petey, stop. No more flowers. Please just let me go.
The minute my message is delivered, I see his response bubble populate. Petey’s good with words. He’s made a fortune manipulating them into rhymes. I can’t afford to give him the time of day and get sucked back in.
I block his number again before he has a chance to reply.