lilies

5 years, 1 month before.

The worst thing about working in a flower shop is probably the swans.

When he first took the job, swans weren't the first thing on Dev's mind. They rarely are. It obviously came as a surprise when at least five of them had tailed a customer in through the heavy door and began attacking Dev as he shrieked and thrashed helplessly. How were you even supposed to defeat a gang of swans? This was not information anyone had ever thought to bestow upon him.

"Oh, yeah," his manager had drawled disinterestedly, not taking his eyes off his phone. "Yeah, that just kind of happens."

It has taken exactly five months of constant swan invasions for Dev to reach that same level of jaded indifference. He has even fixed a handy 'NO SWANS' sign to the door (to warn customers, but also in the event that swans gained the cognitive capacity to read English. Who knew what those bastards were capable of?) For the most part, his job is now placid, fragrant, and blissfully swan-free. Occasionally the odd swan will slip in after a customer like a bundle of feathery hell, but winter is approaching so the majority of them are heading south to warmer regions.

Clearly this one has not received the memo.

"Sorry!" screeches a customer, seconds after the bell above the door jingled, and a white, feathery hurricane tears into the shop.

It crashes through the mountains of blooming marigolds and poppies, knocking down a large display of violets. Then it turns, its soulless eyes locking onto the centrepiece of the shop: a giant vase spilling with tender, paper-like camellias.

But Dev is prepared.

Seizing spray bottle filled with water, and an airhorn, he leaps over the counter and blocks the path of the cygnine devil. The spray bottle in his left and hand the airhorn in his right, he primes his fingers on their respective triggers and he aims.

The swan bundles backwards, repelled by the collective outbreak of loud sounds and inexplicable wetness. Catching on, the customer jumps to action and flings open the frost-fringed door. When the swan had finally retreats to the pavement outside, the customer slams the door shut and leans back against it with a confused grin.

"I think we're safe for now," says Dev seriously, twirling his weapons like a cowboy. He drops exactly both of them.

As he scrambles to pick them up, the customer beams. Scanning him, then peeking behind her shoulder through the glass of the icy door, she confesses, "I've...never helped fight a swan before."

"Really?" asks Dev, straightening up and slamming his attack canisters down on the countertop emphatically. "I couldn't tell. You're a natural."

"Clearly not as natural as you?"

"Oh this?" He nods to his airhorn-spray-bottle-combo and juts his chin. "This took five months of constant swan-based warfare to perfect. Turns out swans hate frustratingly loud sounds and mysterious sources of moisture."

"Don't we all?"

He laughs loudly. "Well," he declares in his best raspy impression of a miscellaneous superhero. "I'm just doing what I can to defend this town, one swan at a time."

Some internal critic in his brain despairs at the fact that the second Dev is confronted with a pretty girl, his first instinct is to rattle off embarrassing swan-themed superhero lines. He forces his smile wider in the hopes that she would pretend he's said something cooler.

Her big grin melts into an apologetic grimace, and she glances back at the door. "I'm sorry about...whatever that was, just now. I should've taken more notice of the sign."

Dev dismisses it with an airy gesture. "Don't worry, that happens confusingly often." He heaved a sigh. "Swans are the worst."

"They are?"

"Oh, yeah, they're like the Chris Columbus of birds." He realises a need to elaborate. "This area's pretty close to the lake, and we need to heat the shop to keep the flowers happy. In the winter especially, the swans like the warmth." 

The customer's eyebrows rise slowly, but then her smile returns and Dev notices that it made her eyes crease up at the sides. He isn't sure what to do with this information. He settles for leaning suavely on the countertop and reciting his internal mantra: be less weird, be less weird, be less weird. ('Be cool' is honestly too much to ask from a guy like Dev. He likes to set the bar at a reasonably low standard).

All of a sudden, Dev is suddenly conscious that he has been discussing the plight of humanity against the malice of swankind with a stranger and potential customer for the past few minutes. He switches on his retail-face (which is an uncomfortably forced grin), and he gestures at the flowers with an open hand.

"Uh," he says, rubbing the back of his neck. "Are you looking for anything in particular?"

"Flowers," replies the customer, then she grimaces at how unspecific that was.

"Well, sorry," says Dev Nair, shop assistant at Flowers Emporium. "If you want flowers, you've come to the wrong place. Try the petrol station."

For a second, a confused little frown graces the customer's face, and Dev curses his terrible, terrible joke. Sarcasm is not his forte; he has a habit of packaging up every word in a sunny cadence. It has never landed him in any problematic situations so far, just wildly uncomfortable ones like this. The worst part is having to explain that this is actually his feeble attempt at comedy, only for the victim of his quasi-sarcasm to inevitably respond with a polite, uncomfortable, "Ha..."

"Oh, really?" asks the customer slowly, a new, impish grin tugging at one side of her lips. "Man, I am so stupid! Of course the 'Flowers' part of your shop's name was just sarcastic..."

Dev took a moment to silently thank whichever god it was that had allowed him to pull that one off. "Yeah," he says, opting to roll with it. "We're just super subversive like that."

"Yeah, really trail-blazing the way for ironic floristries," she nods, stifling a big grin. "Do you get a lot of business?"

Dev paused. "Is that like a serious question or are we continuing down the...ironic floristry route?" he checks quickly.

"Either one, either one," she says with a wave of her hand.

"I mean, really we don't. Weddings and funerals, mostly." Sensing a need to lift the mood a little, he adds, "Weddings are more fun. More hectic too."

She raises an eyebrow. "Oh, any reason?"

"It's just that people like to plan their wedding flowers months in advance."

"Don't they for funerals?"

He grimaces. "If they do, I'd think something quite suspicious would be afoot."

Before Dev has time to hate himself for his use of 'afoot', the customer's eyes widen and she bites her lip. "Oh no! I didn't think that through, did I?"

He shakes his head. "It's alright, your cover as a very polite murderess has been blown. Nothing you can do now."

"No," she groans, still smiling. "I'm done for! Are you going to turn me in to the police, or is it just swans you defend the world against?"

"Just swans and passé floral arrangements," he says, instantly regretting the level of flamboyance that sentence alone held.

She nods sincerely. "You're the hero our town needs." She glances about, then her eyes settle back onto Dev. "How long have you been working here?"

"It's just a part-time thing," he says. "After school, three nights a week. No big deal."

This is a lie. It is a very big deal. It's no small task to balance the rest of his life with commerce and swan warfare. By the time he gets home, he has just about enough energy to eat the kind of desserts that came in foil wrappers, and then vegetate. He isn't exactly a man of action these days.

"Swan-wrangling is a pretty good extra-curricular for your CV," she admits.

Dev chuckles. Very suddenly, he is completely overwhelmed by two conflicting sentiments. The first is a weird feeling somewhere below his diaphragm like butterflies, only the butterflies are pterodactyls, and the pterodactyls are pissed. The second is that he still hasn't sold any flowers yet.

"Shall I leave you to peruse?" he offers.

The customer's eyes jerk wider as if she has only just remembered the purpose of her visit. "Oh, er, yes. Yes, okay. I will peruse."

"Happy perusal."

"Currently perusing." She bares her palms in a gesture for surrender, turning to scan the shelf displays.

He smiles as she turns to the display of flowers. The mass of flora almost swallows her up. She's nowhere near tall enough to reach the lilies she's eyeing, so she scans some poppies instead.

Dev busies his brain trying to come up with a list of things that the customer is taller than. After your standard domestic animals, pins, pebbles, garden gnomes, alveoli, and 'seven babies stacked vertically', he begins to run short of ideas.

This doesn't even count against her, he notices. She isn't beautiful, exactly. She looks like the sort of girl who could feasibly own several scrapbooks full of rare stamps, but somehow still make it look eccentric and interesting instead of lonely and pointless. In fact, Dev is willing to bet money that she has some sort of quirky pet like a chicken or a fox or an ant farm. She has the kind of shoulder-grazing bob of a girl who owned an ant farm.

"Do you own an ant farm?" asks Dev out loud.

The customer turns. "I...did? When I was nine?"

Close enough. He nods, secretly commending his highly refined skills of deduction.

The icy winds have frosted the edges of the windows a lacy white, and the display of lilies in the shop front matches it perfectly. The customer has honed all her attention on them, and is brushing each stem with her fingertips to rifle through them delicately for the best one.

"So," she says conversationally, still fiddling with the lilies, "what's all this interest in ant farms? Are they a hobby of yours?"

"They...really aren't."

"So it's just floristry then, or...?"

Dev tries very hard to scan his brain for something cool and artistic to say. From his experience, the customer has the vague look of the sort of person who enjoys artistic, conceptual activities that Dev doesn't understand enough to appreciate. He has friends who dress like her, and they do slam poetry and use phrases like 'traversing the void of existentialism, but in a post-impressionist kind of way'. They're decent people, but Dev can never get his head around why they do half the things they choose to do on purpose.

"Do you like existential art?" asks Dev.

The customer takes a second to look rather taken aback, but then she says, "I can't say that I do."

"Oh thank god," Dev sighs, letting his head roll back with relief.

"Wait," she says suddenly. "Does The Bee Movie count?"

"As 'art' or as 'existential'?" He stops. "Actually, no, you make a fair point. The Bee Movie definitely counts."

She shoots him an apologetic grimace. "Then sorry, I guess I do."

"Like, ironically?" he asks slowly.

"No, as in I think it's a genuinely good film."

She's perfect.

Dev hunches over to rest his chin in his hand, and his elbow on the countertop. He watches as the customer turns back to the flowers, popping up on her tiptoes to reach the highest lilies. The cars and cyclists rattle outside the window, wrapped in the whitewashed skies of a November morning. Though the walls are fighting valiantly against the worst of the cold, it still manages to slither through the cracks around the door, diffusing sparsely through the shop. But Dev is too busy to notice.

His head has only just begun brimming with impressive anecdotes and suave little insights he could bestow upon his new acquaintance. A niggling urge to impress her slowly creeps across his mind. Although, he thinks, he would be equally as happy just being impressed by her. All of a sudden he wants to know more about the future recipient of her flowers, and what other films she liked, and why she gave up on that damn ant farm.

Dev freezes. Something is wrong. After running his mind down a list of potential red flags in his behaviour, he finally settles on the cause of his problem. He's no doctor, be he strongly suspects he's developing the early symptoms of feelings.

He groans loudly.

The customer turns sharply. "Oh my god, are you alright?"

It takes him a moment to realise that he's done that out loud. "Um...just questioning our place in the universe as a grand, encompassing mechanism," he says in a disastrous attempt to seem more casual about it.

She nods very slowly, and her hair bobs from the residual motion. "Yeah," she says, pursing her lips. "I mean, I feel that. When you say 'our place' you mean humanity?"

"Honestly, I mean as a joint unit of two people," he admits, his pitch rising exponentially with his soaring levels of awkwardness. He decides that now would be a great time to change the subject, and he forces the most contrived laugh that has ever been squeezed out of an actual human. "So, do you er, need any help?" He points to the lilies. "With those?"

"Very gallant," she thanks, somehow not visibly disconcerted by the universe thing. "But I'm alright. How much for a bunch of these?"

"Fifteen for a bouquet."

Hopping back onto her toes, she wriggles the best bouquet free from the top shelf. As she reaches for it, Dev notices a lock of hair tangled up in her necklace.

"Just this, please," she says, returning to flat feet with the bouquet safely in her arms.

Dev glances at the till, and he realises that he is probably nearing the end of this interaction. He should probably say something, he thinks. He should ask for her number. Is that too forward? Perhaps he should just casually repeat the digits of his number under his breath and hope that subliminally it would sink in and she would go home and call him? That's hideously creepy, he thinks, and he decides he should probably just roll with the conversation. Oh god, why is it so hard to just talk to people and tell them you want to maybe in the future explore some kind of potentially non-platonic option?

"So," he says loudly, breaking free from his own thoughts. "These are nice. Who are they for?"

"Yeah," she mutters distractedly, rummaging through her jacket pockets for cash. "My mum's friend just had a kid. Lilies are appropriate, right?" she asks, looking up suddenly.

That particular bouquet of white lilies was a customer favourite for funerals, but Dev decides it might be best to just say, "Sure."

"Good," she says, smiling as she handed Dev three five-pound notes.

He takes them, taking an odd amount of care not to be creepy with the hand-touching interaction. This isn't something he usually considers with customers, but this time it's the only thing clouding his mind. He didn't know how he usually took money from customers. What if it was an oddly long kind of fumble, like some kind of creepy caress? Nobody wants that.

"Er," he says, snatching up the money quickly and hurling it into the till. Smooth...

"So, er, I'll be off then..." She pauses, waiting for his name.

"Dev," he supplied.

"No, I need your whole name so I can stalk you online," she admits.

Dev nods, flattered. "Dev Nair."

"Clara Monroe," she returns.

That's a pretty name, Dev thinks. It's like something from a detective novel from the forties.

Trying to shelve the thought that this is a bizarrely specific connection to make, Dev says, "Um, hey, Clara. I don't want to be...blunt or weird, so feel free to say no – or yes, hopefully yes – but I mean, if you say no it won't be awkward. I mean, it will, but for me. And I'll get over it. But, I just..." He takes a deep, deep breath. "You know Mothra?"

She pauses. "The film?"

Dev closes his eyes. Honestly, as far as defeats went, this isn't even a dignified one. He could have chosen to change the subject to anything to avoid rashly asking her out, and in some idiotic twist of weirdness he chooses Mothra? Dev already feels like this is going to be one of those things that'll plague him in the night years down the line.

"Yeah."

She cocks her head a little, leaning back. "With the...giant moth?"

Grimacing, Dev says again, "Yeah. That one."

"Do I know the film with the giant moth, Mothra?" Clara rephrases.

Nodding, looking at the ground, Dev says reluctantly, "Yeah."

Clara nods very slowly. "I mean, yeah? Yeah, I know of it."

He nods. "Cool." Then he says again, "Cool. Um, thank you for your patronage at The Flower Emporium. We value you as a customer." He heaved a long sigh.

A warm smile replaces Clara's confused frown. "Dev," she says slowly. "I don't want to be out of line here, but – you weren't by any chance asking me out? Were you?" she asks softly.

"I was trying," he says apologetically.

"Dev," she says again, her eyebrows rising. "I really like you. You're hilarious, and you're...you're like a lanky Asian Zach Braff."

"What would that even be?"

"Danny Pudi?"

"He's half-Slavic!" Dev declares, before realising how horrendously off-topic they were. He decides to compromise. "Can't I just be Dev Patel? I'll take Dev Patel."

"Damn, I'd take Dev Patel," she says, before shaking her head and sighing. "What I'm trying to say is, I think you're great. What I'm also trying to say is that I have a boyfriend." She says that last word slowly, pronouncing it almost letter by letter as she wrung her hands.

Dev nods. Then he nods again. Then he keeps nodding. It's not the worst thing in the world – they barely know one another, it's not as if a friendship is being ruined – but there's still a weird feeling in Dev's stomach. It's like a goblin of stress, clenching its fist around his gall bladder. Maybe it's a gallstone. 10-15% of adults in the UK have gallstones, he thinks, so it's possible. Maybe it's cholecystitis. Oh god, people die from that.

"That's fine," Dev smiles.

"Really?" Clara asks, squinting through an awkward grimace. She's got the face of someone waiting for a balloon to pop at any second.

"Don't feel weird about it," he says, scratching the back of his neck uncomfortably. "It's fine, I'm not...offended or anything. I get it."

She relaxes slowly. "Really? I mean, I get that there were probably a million ways for me to say that which weren't as excruciatingly awkward and strange."

Dev agrees. He is even willing to push that number into the billions.

"But I don't know, I didn't want to mess with you or anything," she goes on. "Because you seem really cool. And I'd hate for us not to hang out some time? You know, platonically."

"Of course."

She smiles apologetically. "Look, I just wanted to be upfront about this."

Dev nods. "I understand. I'd love to hang out. Maybe catch a movie?"

"Yeah, maybe one of these bug-themed films you like?"

Dev resists the burning urge to explain that he doesn't actually have any strong feelings about bug films, it's just that they happened to touch upon The Bee Movie and Mothra in the space of ten minutes by sheer coincidence. Instead he says, "I'd love that. I mean, like. I would platonically like that."

"I would platonically like that too," she grins. "Do you have a number?"

"Yes," he says. "Also, potentially, cholecystitis," he adds under his breath.

She nods thoughtfully. "I had laryngitis last month."

"That's...not even remotely similar. But I mean, I appreciate the sentiment."

"I have no idea what cholecystitis is, I'm sorry, I tried to be relatable."

"It's like an inflammation of the gall bladder," he explains hastily, then he grabs a receipt and scribbles down his number. When she takes it from him, it doesn't feel as though she's gone to an excruciating effort not to make the gesture a 'creepy caress'. That has only been around five minutes ago, and still he can't bear to think about it without being completely consumed by embarrassment and regret. 

Stuffing the receipt into her pocket, Clara smiles at Dev and says, "I'll see you round, Captain Swan-Exterminator."

"Catch you later Silver Swan."

Her eyes widen. "Oh, that's way better."

"Yeah, I stole it from DC Comics."

With a little laugh, Clara pulls open the door, wrestling with her bouquet of lilies, and she looks back at Dev and calls, "Good luck with the potential cholecystitis!"

"Thanks," he replies with a smile as the shop door shuts and the lilies disappear into the frosty air.

___

[A/N]

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