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“I’m not the person you remember me as,” he said, laughing. “Thank God for that.”
“No,” she said, her eyes looking his handsome face over. “You are not. But you were a great guy then too.”
They continued to eat their loaded fries. Sage licking her fingers rather than wasting the sauce on a napkin. He laughed at her. “I wonder if this place does takeout. I wouldn’t mind having these in my truck for lunch one day.”
“They do have takeout,” she said. “I’ve gotten it before. How often do you eat in your truck?”
It reminded her of the nerdy kid that she’d remembered without a lot of friends eating his bagged lunch by himself and watching what was going on around him rather than being part of it.
She hated that for him and felt bad at times. She’d go over and talk to him or say hi before her friends would yank her away or shame her for seeking him out.
Looking back, she should have stood up for herself more than she had.
But didn’t everyone have regrets from middle school?
“Most days,” he said. “It’s not good to eat in the client’s house. If the weather is nice, we eat outside, but I tend to sit in my truck and do some work while I eat.”
“Nice and efficient,” she said. “I could go home for lunch, but it seems wasteful to leave unless I need to. I like being close enough but most times either sit in my office to eat while I work or have lunch with a coworker. The office staff isn’t massive by any means, but we all get along.”
“I thought Blossoms was pretty big,” he said.
“They are. But most of the employees are at the plant. I’d say they’ve got over a hundred employees now. They’ve got several in the offices but not a ton.” She started to count on her fingers. “I think there are five in the flower shop, some part time, ten in the retail store and again, some part time. Rose and Daisy do jewelry full time. Poppy and Lily are there too. Then Lily has a secretary: Ivy is the sisters’ assistant. Dahlia is in finance and has one full-time staff. Me. The rest are out at the plant or greenhouses. I know Lily wants to add on. There are things she is doing that she just can’t always handle. Human Resources. IT. We all help out, but it only goes so far.”
“That is why I’ve got someone I pay to do that stuff,” he said. “I can only do so much.”
“That is how it all started for them,” she said. “I guess first world problems when you grow so quickly and need to expand jobs.”
“The pros and cons,” he said. “The more employees, the more problems.”
“Don’t I know that,” she said drily. “I learned that at my last job. Way too much drama. But I should have expected that in the fashion world.”
“You always did like to draw and design. Is that what you did before?”
She sighed. She shouldn’t have said as much as she had.
“I worked for a fashion consulting firm. I had an internship there. I got it through Trace’s best friend, Kate.”
“She was the model, right? I remember her.”
“She was,” she said. “Everyone remembers Kate.”
“I thought they were dating or something.”
“No,” she said. “Just friends.” It wasn’t a secret that Kate was gay, but if Knox didn’t follow gossip information on the internet, she wasn’t going to volunteer it. “Kate is like a sister to Trace. One to me too. When she was done modeling, she became a buyer. She got me the internship, which turned into a job. I was there for years, only moving up once. It just got to be too much and not what I thought I wanted.”
It’d been her dream job, but dreams aren’t always meant to come true for people if you could barely show your face at your job without feeling as if you were going to have a panic attack.
“That’s too bad. But it sounds as if you’ve got what you want now. I want to say it’s a big change, but I don’t think it is. They have fashion at Blossoms, right?”
“They do,” she said. “Poppy’s line. There is jewelry, lotions, candles, a health line of lotions and shampoos, a men's line. They are growing all the time, as I said.”
“And now it’s your job to make sure the world knows,” he said.
“I like that,” she said softly. “Yeah, it’s my job and I love it. I don’t have an unlimited budget, but I think that makes it more challenging. Not to mention a lot of the work is about social media influencers. So I’ve been working with the sisters to get their products out that way.”
He shuddered a bit and she held back the laugh.
“Better you than me,” he said.
