Perfectly Played: A Sweet Romantic Comedy (Love & Alliteration Book 1) Read online

  Maybe it wasn’t good for him.

  Flopping onto my back, I hold the stem of the flower gently and stare at the ceiling. I don’t even know Dean, so why should I be surprised that he left? I know nothing about him—maybe he didn’t even get dumped? Maybe it was only a sob story designed to pick up pathetic women like me.

  I liked him.

  Even if he was telling the truth, I have no way of finding him. He said he was staying in the hotel but other than knocking on doors—

  With the room still in darkness, I dial the front desk. “Hi. Morning. I was wondering if you have a room booked for a Dean Coulson?”

  Dean

  I open the door to Clay’s room to find him standing stark naked, fresh from the shower.

  “Dean! Where the hell have you been?”

  I slap a hand over my eyes as Clay saunters back to the bathroom. Not that I have anything against walking around naked, but it’s not something I look forward to seeing, especially not first thing in the morning.

  “Out,” I say. Now’s not the time to tell him about Flora, because then he’ll ask about M.K. “Where’s Evelyn?”

  “She’s gone.” He reappears in the doorway, this time with a towel wrapped around his hips. “She was here, like half an hour ago. Woke me up.”

  “What did she want?”

  “You, I guess.”

  “What did you tell her?” I’m annoyed, angry—why wasn’t I here? Why did I have sneak out of the room? Why did I have to stay the night with Flora?

  I left her. I ran out on her.

  I didn’t even check to see her room number, or ask her last name.

  I pace the room. The frustration over Evelyn and regret over Flora mix together and directs at Clay.

  “I couldn’t tell her anything because I didn’t know anything. I made a half-assed comment about meeting the girls—”

  “You what?” I shout.

  Clay waves away my cry of disbelief. “Bro, anyone who knows you, knows that would have been the last thing on your mind last night. I said you were probably walking the streets, trying to get a handle on her dumb-ass move.”

  “Is that what you said?”

  “Not in so many words.”

  “What exactly did you say to Evelyn?” I demand through gritted teeth.

  “I didn’t say the dumbass part. But pretty much the rest of it.”

  I sink onto the bed. “Where did she go?”

  Clay shrugs. “She didn’t say, just that she’ll be in touch. It wasn’t cool, her not showing up, and definitely not cool just showing up here.”

  “I would have liked to talk to her,” I mumble, dropping my head into my hands.

  “Sure, but what good would that have done?” Clay asks. “She already told you why, so it’s not like you need to know more. You’d only go back and forth with her trying to understand, and face it bro, nobody’s gonna understand a woman. And you’re not going to marry her now, even if she changed her mind.”

  I meet his gaze.

  “You’re not going to marry her,” he repeats firmly. “I’m not gonna let you. She’s made her choice and you both have to deal with it.” He drops a comforting hand on my shoulder. “I hate to say this, because we are in Vegas, but let’s go home. We’ll catch the next flight and get out of here. I think it’ll help.”

  Chapter Eight

  Flora

  I don’t say anything to M.K. or Ruthie about Dean. Not about finding him in the middle of the night, or hooking up, or especially not about him running out on me.

  There’s no room booked under his name so I don’t even know if anything he said was the truth.

  M.K. and Ruthie take my silence on the ride to the airport as leftover emotion from the botched wedding. Neither of them say much either. M.K. is furious with Ruthie, blaming her for our arrest.

  “I wasn’t the one who told Flora to deck the girl,” Ruthie argues as we file into McCarran International airport.

  “We weren’t about to let you disappear into the mass of women fighting,” M.K. says. “We went after you. If you had stayed in your seat—”

  “You just wanted to get in on the action.” Ruthie nudges my arm, hoping to humour me into siding with her. I manage a wan smile, but that’s it.

  “I wanted to get into some action with Clay, but because of you, I got nothing!” M.K. cries, a little louder than necessary. Her lips pucker as if she’s trying to suck the words back as she glances around at the smirks.

  “Let’s just drop it,” I say as I lead the way to the Air Canada counter. “We all had a crappy time, so let’s get home and forget about it.”

  Easier said than done.

  ~

  Ruthie comes back to my little house. She announces she’s staying at my place and I don’t argue, even though I know I won’t be good company. Part of me wants to be alone and lick my wounds. Prepare for life without Thomas. But the other part of me doesn’t want to be by myself.

  All I want is to go to bed and forget about the last twenty-four hours.

  “You’ll get through this.” Ruthie gives my arm a pat before getting out of the cab.

  I unlock the door. The house feels like I’ve been gone for a week. It’s empty without Cappie, my English bulldog wagging his stump of a tail in a hello. The clock ticks a greeting. Other than that, the house is silent.

  I don’t like silence. I never have.

  I turn on music as soon as I get to the kitchen. Ed Sheeran’s “Perfect” fills the room and my shoulders release some of the tension. Ed can always make me feel better, even when he’s singing about a perfect love that I will never know about.

  “Are you going to wait until the morning to pick up Cappie?” Ruthie asks, pouring herself a glass of water.

  I take the glass from her hand and drink deeply. “He’ll be fine with Imogene for another night. I didn’t tell her I’m back.” I hand the glass back for her to refill.

  “Time enough in the morning. You should go to bed,” Ruthie adds. “You look like a pile of poop.”

  “Thanks.”

  “This is bad.” Ruthie frowns. “It’s the first time I’ve told you to go to bed. Usually, it’s the other way around.”

  “I didn’t sleep much last night.” An image of Dean flashes through my mind and I push it away with a forceful shove. No thinking of Dean. No thinking of Thomas.

  No thinking.

  “I always sleep like a baby after I dump someone.” Ruthie sets her glass on the counter. “Come, auntie. Let me get you into bed.” She pauses before she heads for the stairs. “Do you leave the music on all night?”

  “Sometimes.” I don’t meet her eyes. Sometimes, the quiet of the house bothers me. I don’t mind living alone, but at times the quiet makes me feel too alone. I can easily tune out the constant noise of cars and buses along the street, but I can’t ignore music. “I can turn it off if it bothers you.”

  “Nothing bothers me when I sleep,” Ruthie says with a wave of her hand.

  “Nothing bothers you.”

  “No, not really.”

  Once upstairs, I pause in the doorway of my bedroom. Thomas’ things are still strewn around the room, clothes piled on the bed.

  He moved in three weeks ago, and because of the small space, had kept some of his clothes in a suitcase in my closet. That had been the suitcase he took to Las Vegas, so those clothes were now all over my bed.

  Thomas’ faded gray Maroon 5 T-shirt is crumpled on the pillow. Heaving a sigh, I press it to my face.

  “You okay?”

  I jerk back from my memories to find Ruthie standing in the doorway with a sympathetic expression on her face.

  “He’s a bit of a slob, isn’t he?” Ruthie nods her chin around the room.

  “Not normally, no. Usually, he’s meticulously neat.” I smile ruefully. “It was kind of annoying.”

  “So’s having to clean up his mess.”

  I glance at the bed.

  “There’s plenty of room in the g
uest bed,” Ruthie offers. “Or I could crash on the couch and you could sleep in there.”

  “I have my own bed.”

  “Which you might not want to sleep in tonight.”

  Suddenly, sleeping in my bed is the last thing I want to do. “Do you mind if I stay with you in the other room?”

  Ruthie smiles. “’Course not, auntie.”

  Dean

  I feel like the walking dead by the time we get back to Toronto.

  The stop-and-go traffic keeps jerking me awake during the ride home. When the cab drops me off in front of the house Evelyn and I had bought just six weeks ago, I pause before I get out of the car, looking for lights or any evidence that Evelyn is there.

  I don’t know if I want her to be there or not. But the house is empty and echoing when I drop my suitcase by the door, and drift through the house like a ghost. The pile of wedding magazines stacked precisely by the couch mocks me, with each spine lining up with the one below. The pictures in matching black frames placed just so on the shelves in the living room taunt me: our trips to California, London, a friend’s place in Muskoka, where Evelyn refused to leave the cottage because the blackflies were too much for her.

  I push one of the frames with my finger. I used to do that a lot, to move something to see how long it took Evelyn to fix it. It had been a joke, a way of making her laugh, to relax her meticulousness. It never worked. Evelyn was as uptight as a nervous horse forced to cross a stream.

  Why am I thinking of horses?

  Ruthie had mentioned a horse balking.

  Flora.

  I head for the kitchen. I’d been in such a hurry to get to the airport on Friday morning that I left my glass on the counter, a big no-no for Evelyn. I grew up with two sisters and a mother nagging me to pick up my socks and leave the toilet seat down. I don’t think I’m a messy person, but I’ve never been able to measure up to Evelyn’s strict standards.

  I throw the glass into the sink with such force that it shatters, the shards tinkling against the stainless steel.

  I didn’t know I was so mad.

  It’s not as bad as when I got the diagnosis, but there’s some temper brewing. I don’t normally let it out. My coach had told me that made me such a good pitcher; the lack of emotion during games, my focus to get the pitch right, to get the out.

  “I’m sorry, Dean, but professional baseball is no longer in your future.”

  I start at the soft noise, but it’s only a dried leaf falling from one of Evelyn’s plants.

  Evelyn already put her stamp on the house. We’d only moved in last week and already she had made it her home. I bought her whatever she liked, whatever she told me worked with the décor, the theme of the house.

  Why did a house need to have a theme? It’s the place I slept, I shit, and I showered. I like it when there’s food in the fridge. Evelyn can do what she wants with it.

  What’s she going to do with it? Am I supposed to move out?

  It’s then I realize some of her things are missing. The tea she drinks in the morning, her vitamins. Her drawer in the bathroom is empty, without the expensive creams and makeup.

  She looks better without makeup. I always told her she doesn’t need to make a fuss, that she’s already so beautiful.

  Evelyn always made a fuss.

  “Why didn’t you want to marry me?” I say it aloud to my reflection in the bathroom mirror, noticing for the first time that I look like a mess. Evelyn would not approve.

  I run my hands through my hair again to make it stand up, then go into the bedroom.

  At least the bed is still there. It’s the one piece of furniture that isn’t new. We brought the king-sized bed from her condo.

  I like the size, because anything smaller makes my feet stick out, but the width of the bed meant more space for Evelyn to move away from me. I like to cuddle, like the feeling of her small body nestled into mine, but as the months had gone by, each night Evelyn moved farther away from me.

  Flora had stayed in my arms all night.

  Who am I more upset about—Flora or Evelyn?

  There’s nothing with Flora, nothing that should upset me. Yes, I like her, but it’s only a connection, an attraction. She may not want to get in touch with me. I may never see her again.

  Evelyn—I feel stupid about Evelyn. I should have seen what was going on between us. I should have seen it falling apart.

  With nothing else to do, I crawl into bed.

  I can smell her—a faint hint of her perfume, her coconut-scented shampoo. Pulling her pillow close, I pretend it’s Evelyn I’m holding.

  Chapter Nine

  Flora

  Life goes on, but without the major transformation I expected. Thomas is no longer in my life, which means less texts and calls. No more hugs and kisses or sexy time. He’d only been living with me for a few weeks, but in that time he had firmly entrenched himself in my home.

  A few days after we get back from Las Vegas, Thomas lets himself into the house when I’m at work and clears my room of his things, forgetting about the dirty clothes in the hamper. I politely wash and fold them with my own laundry, leaving them sitting on my dresser in case he comes back.

  He takes his toiletries, removing his shower gel and aftershave, and for the first time in months, my bathroom smells like my coconut-scented shampoo again. He forgot to check the fridge or take his protein powders for his smoothies. I wouldn’t put it past Thomas to leave them for me, like he’s setting traps to remind me how much I once loved him.

  After a week of pushing aside his kefir and kombucha in the fridge, I go through the kitchen one night when I can’t sleep, and purge the rest of his things.

  I shower Cappie, my English bulldog, with affection, trying to make up for the time I spent with Thomas. I start bringing him to work with me, disregarding every word Thomas has said about it being unprofessional.

  I focus on the shop, staying late to go through inventory lists and accounts and going in on weekends.

  Fleur is my baby and without Thomas, I have more time for it.

  My grandfather, Everett Shaughnessy, made his money during the American prohibition. He had lived in Niagara-on-the-Lake, only a short hop across Lake Ontario to Buffalo and countless thirsty folks desperate to get their hands on Canadian whiskey.

  He had been a very prosperous smuggler.

  But since prohibition didn’t last that long, Grandpa had a backup plan. He’d taken his ill-gotten gains and opened a garden store because his wife Harriet loved flowers. His one little store grew into Shaughnessy’s Family Nurseries, with garden centres dotted along the QEW through the Golden Horseshoe in Southern Ontario.

  Now my brothers Archie and Oliver run the main nursery in Niagara-on-the-Lake. My plan had originally been to finish my internship with the Royal Botanical Gardens and then jump right into the family business. I’m the only one with a degree in horticulture and been blessed with my grandmother’s green thumb.

  Oliver has two business degrees but can’t keep a weed alive even if his life depends on it. Archie is a little better, but not much. The nursery should have been mine. Growing up, my father had always told me he was counting on me to teach my brothers a thing or two about flowers.

  My father died of a heart attack when I was sixteen.

  When I left to follow Thomas to Toronto, Oliver threw a fat cheque at me and said the family business was closed to me. Oliver and I had never gotten along, not since I told his new girlfriend he was a bad kisser. I’d been six, Oliver sixteen and over twenty years later, I know Oliver still was holding a grudge.

  What really hurt was that Archie had gone along with the decision to buy me out. As much as I love my brothers, Oliver’s not the only one who can still hold a grudge.

  But I find timing is everything, and things eventually work out for the best. I’d been a twenty-one-year old with a chunk of change in a new city and so in love that I couldn’t see straight to realize what I’d given up.

  My first jo
b in the city was at Wu’s Flowers, which had been nothing more than a convenience store with pre-cellophaned bouquets perfect for Easter and Mother’s Day. Within six weeks, I managed to push the flowers to the forefront and began to get a steady business. Within six months, Mr. Wu decided to retire and happily sold the store to me.

  The setup had been perfect; there was already a refrigeration unit in the back, good for keeping flowers fresh, as well as a tiny room that I converted to a lab/office. I got rid of the racks of bubble gum and chocolate bars and concentrated on what I’m good at—growing flowers. Now it’s Fleur, the local go-to for flowers and plants and the perfect I’m so sorry gift.

  So, I have a nice little flower business but it’s landscaping that’s my big love. It’s difficult, because I’m a one-woman team—stressing the woman—and I haven’t been able to develop a good relationship with any nursery because the local places recognize my last name, which makes them leery about the possibility of me bringing the big guns—my brothers—into their turf.

  Slowly, but surely, I’m getting there. I’ve got a new client, one that I’m really excited about. When I wake up on Monday morning, I decide to get a jump on the good weather and go play in the dirt.

  After walking Cappie, I pause on my doorstep and check out Mr. Cullen’s paper like I do every morning. My house is a semi-detached, which means I share a wall with my neighbour. Mr. Cullen is older and usually bad-tempered, at least around me.

  He doesn’t like me, and after living so close to Mr. Cullen for the past seven years, the feeling is mutual.

  I know Mr. Cullen is a late sleeper, because most mornings when I come home from walking Cappie, his newspaper will still be on the front step, like it’s waiting for me to read it. Sometimes I take it inside to read with my cereal, but I always have it folded neatly on the step again before he wakes up.

  Today, there are only the usual headlines about politics and the TTC construction, so I leave the paper where it is and head to my truck with Cappie.