Page 3 of He Loves Me Not (Cambric Creek #5)

Sumi

It all started when she joined the houseplant server earlier in the year, seeking advice on her ailing Swiss cheese philodendron.

DiscHorse felt oddly comfortable ― more private than most of the other popular social media platforms, completely absent of the typical audience one found on CrowdJournal, which mostly appealed to her parents’ demographic.

One could find a community for almost every interest, reminding her of the message boards and blogging communities of her teenage years.

The evening she had typed out her initial message to the group, it had been quiet, with only a small handful of respondents, none of their advice particularly good.

It wasn’t until she’d gone to bed that a response had come, the notification pinging on her phone screen.

ChaoticConcertina: Sounds like an issue with soil content?

Have you repotted lately?

She’d straightened in bed, light from her phone illuminating her face as she read the response, quickly tapping out a more detailed summary of the plant’s progress.

ChaoticConcertina.

Their profile was empty beyond username and pronouns. He/Him.

Instantly, Sumi was on her guard.

She was no stranger to men online, who often left her asking the age old question: why are men? He’d asked a few more questions, had given her the best advice, asking for photos.

When he sent her a DM after she had posted the photo of the pathetically sagging plant, she prepared herself for the inevitable dick pic.

Block him and forget about it.

To her light shock, all he’d done was let her know that he was going to ask a friend of his who owned a shop specializing in rare houseplants.

Sumi assumed he was lying.

Surely a place like that didn’t exist in the real world, where jobs were something one primarily looked forward to leaving each day and where consumers couldn’t be bothered to support an entire business specializing in monsteras and hanging jades.

There were flower shops that sold the odd planter, home improvement superstores with seasonal greenhouses, and if one was lucky enough, a year-round garden center, but even those tended to place their emphasis on outdoor growing.

A houseplant store.

It was such a silly, stupid thing to lie about.

She’d huffed, rolling her eyes at the mere thought.

Does he think you were born yesterday?!

Perhaps it was because she spent her days with middle-schoolers who lied as often and easily as the most hardened criminals, but Sumi considered herself a good judge of truthfulness, and this seemed as probable as all of her students showing up on time on standardized testing day.

ChaoticConcertina: I’m going to save your photo, if you don’t mind.

I’ll pop in tomorrow on my way to work and show her.

I’ll let you know what she says!

He’d done exactly that.

She’d not actually expected a response from ChaoticConcertina, outside the lingering threat of an unexpected dick pic.

When the top left corner of her phone screen displayed a notification from the chat server app two days later, Sumi expected another unhelpful response from another member of the server, swiping open her phone with only half-interest.

ChaoticConcertina: The most likely culprit is a bit of rot at the root

beneath the point you can feel with a finger.

Probably started when you repotted last month.

If you’re using vermiculite, swap it for perlite and an equal part orchid bark.

If you have access to fresh bone meal, a little bit works wonders.

She’d stared at her phone on her lunch break that day, eyes widened, shocked that he responded at all and flabbergasted by the photo he had sent.

It was an example of each of the items he’d mentioned, assuming she was a novice.

She was familiar with perlite and bone meal, but she had never in her life seen anything like the shop in the background, looking like something from a dream.

Antique cabinets and mismatched marble-topped tables stood behind him, topped with ceramic pots and glass Mason jars, beakers and bud vases, all bearing clippings from various plants.

From the ceiling, the trailing vines of pothos and jades, strings of hearts and strings of turtles, zebrinas and ivies.

On top of the closest table was a sawhorse draped in a scarf of rich emerald, and on top of that was an old-fashioned librarians card catalog cabinet, the drawers pulled out, with vibrant green strings of pearls cascading to the surface below.

The hand that held the container of orchid bark was large and well-formed, tawny with an olive undertone, with long fingers and raised veins, the kind of hand one envisioned if one were fantasizing about being held down and fucked within an inch of one’s life—

“Whatcha lookin’ at?”

Her room para had startled her from the inappropriate thought that day, nearly causing the phone to escape her grasp.

Sumi had squeaked in shock and fumbled the phone, hand moving over hand as if it were a slippery fish intent on evading capture.

ChaoticConcertina: If you don’t have access to it, you can buy it online.

The bone meal, I mean

Like, that wasn’t advice to go commit murder just for fresh bone meal

You definitely shouldn’t steal someone’s bones

Unless it’s a really nice philo

Then it’s your call

He was real.

If his hand was anything to go on, and it was all she had, he was gorgeous.

You can’t tell that from a hand, what’s wrong with you? The shop was real as well, like something out of one of her most fevered dreams.

Someone out there, wherever it was that ChaoticConcetina called home, had a plant shop, living their best life, she had no doubt.

It was everything she wanted.

It was the very first time Sumi admitted it to herself — she wanted her own little shop, airy and bright and full of flowers, a place that was hers, where she would never be in charge of standardized testing preparations and would never again have to break up a fight between twelve-year-old girls.

It’s giving aspirational.

It’s giving dream life.

It’s giving manifesting.

She’d wandered into the pretty little flower shop in her neighborhood later that same day, feeling an itch beneath her skin, her feet propelling her to the shop almost without her full conscious consent.

The Lucky Lily by Bloomerang.

There was a tree growing right through the center of the sales floor and a wall of refrigerated cases containing buckets and buckets of flowers.

She could choose a premade arrangement from the case or select her own individual stems à la carte, which was her preference.

“Bloomerang is your parent company?” she asked the friendly woman who checked her out, whom she knew to be the owner.

Sumi had been in the smaller shop at least a dozen times before, but never before had she felt compelled to ask questions.

She’d never had a reason to.

Now, though .

. . the thought of that plant shop whispered at the back of her mind. She loved all of her plant babies but knew she was nowhere near knowledgeable enough to run a store like that.

Flowers, on the other hand, that was a language she spoke.

The way other women joined book clubs or took voice lessons or horse riding lessons or playing intramural sports, she had done workshops at the Arboretum, volunteered at the garden, taken several different courses on advanced floral arrangement, offered through various community centers and enrichment programs.

As a young teen, she had completed several summers’ worth of certification at summer camp, and developed what was probably a not completely healthy obsession with the Victorian’s secret language of flowers.

Sumi heated, remembering her “vicious Victorian” phase, when she carried a tussie mussie around the halls of her school and gifted friends and enemies alike carnations in symbolic colors.

A flower shop had been something she’d long dreamed of, although it was never something that she considered realistic.

She was captain of the SS Sunk Cost, and there was no port in sight.

“Yup, we’re technically a part of their franchise.

It’s nice though, because they really let each shop operate independently.”

Her lungs had felt overinflated, pressing on the walls of her chest as if they might buckle outward, turning her into a balloon.

A franchise! She had never seriously considered this latent little fantasy of hers, always reminding herself that she had spent too many years on teaching to throw it away.

And you don’t know the first thing about starting up a flower shop.

But then again, she had never asked.

“So like, do they just slap their name on your shop and take some of your profits? You had to do everything else?”

The woman behind the counter grinned broadly.

“They actually do everything, if you can believe it.

I own the shop with my mom.

This was always her dream, and once I looked into it, it seemed like a pretty profitable system in place here.

So, you have to find your own industrial space and secure the building. But if you’re accepted as a franchisee, they come in and do everything else. They cover the cost of construction and they supply you with everything you need to open. All the equipment, all of the distribution contacts and contracts.”

“So .

.

.

is it not really your shop then?” Sumi asked, already resigned to disappointment.

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. “I mean,” she added quickly, realizing who her words sounded. Way to be an asshole. “Like, no offense. I didn’t mean that to sound rude. But if they’re paying for everything, aren’t you just an employee?”

At that, the blonde woman barked out a laugh.

“Technically yes, but you start paying it back immediately.

It’s kind of like financing a house.

Everyone always says ‘they bought a house’, but isn’t the bank the one who bought the house? You have to use Bloomerang’s contractor, but you hire your own shop designer and it can look however you want.

The only thing all the shops have in common is the tree. So we pay a fixed amount every month back to the parent company to pay back the cost of the initial build and set up, plus a percentage of business for the licensing. And our rent,” she added with another laugh.

Sumi slumped, her stomach sinking.

There’s no way you would ever be able to afford all that.

“And it’s a fixed term, so you’re not paying back your startup loan indefinitely.

If you don’t pay back within that fixed time, I believe they have the right to come in and take over.

But,” she added quickly, seeing Sumi’s expression, “it’s honestly so easy to keep up.

Basically all the franchises fulfill their online orders, so business is never, ever slow.

That’s where their real money is, the brick and mortar end of it is a drop in the bucket for them. So all of those online flower orders get pushed directly to the franchise stores first, before independent stores get anything. Obviously they keep a percentage of it, but you make the money on every order. It would be a racket if it weren’t always busy,“ she laughed again. “Mom and I only have sixteen months of payback on our startup loan and I’ve been doubling the payments for the past year. It’s that busy.”

“What happens when you pay it back?”

“Then it’s yours.

You still pay the franchise royalty every month to have the name over the door, but that’s worth it for the business you get from the website.

I did this for my mom, but now it’s going to be a profitable business I can leave to my daughter.”

Sumi swiped her card as the woman wrapped her small bouquet.

That’s all you want.

An opportunity to do something you actually enjoy.

“Are you thinking about it? I can put you in contact with my franchise manager if you are, she’s super easy to work with.

At the very least take her card.

You can do your own investigation online.”

“Thank you,” she called back over her shoulder, leaving the shop a moment later with the franchise manager’s card taped to the front of her paper-wrapped bouquet.

Every nerve in body seemed to be vibrating as she walked home with a bounce in her step, thrumming with possibility.

She never would have ventured into the shop that day if she hadn’t been feeling good about herself, and she couldn’t deny why she was feeling on cloud nine.

She never would have had that first conversation if she hadn’t been buoyed by her interactions with ChaoticConcertina.

PinksPosies didn’t know the specifics of each other’s lives outside of the broad strokes and had never shared face-identifying photos.

Those details seemed strangely unimportant.

What he did know was far more personal.

Sumi had confessed to him that she didn’t actually enjoy being a teacher, that she felt trapped in her own life, a trap of her own making, for which she alone held the key.

She knew he was divorced and that his ex-wife had moved for work, drastically limiting the time he spent with his 9-year-old daughter.

Since then, they had settled into a schedule.

They were rarely online at the same time.

She was an obligate early riser, her alarm having the temerity to go off each morning before the sun had even made an appearance, while he was a night owl, based on the timestamps of his messages.

Sumi would send him embarrassingly long messages each morning, starting them before she left the house, finishing her thoughts sometime during homeroom.

By the time the 3 o’clock bell rang, there would be a response.

His afternoon response would be brief compared to the book she had written, but Sumi no longer felt self-conscious over that.

They would trade messages back and forth sporadically over the course of the late afternoon and evening, and then after she went to bed at night, ChaoticConcertina spilled his guts.

ChaoticConcertina: Have you ever considered

how much of our identity is sewn up in the brands we use?

The products we consume?

Loyalty to a particular brand of toothpaste.

A preference for one giant tech company-created cell phone

…over the other giant tech company’s cell phone.

The visible logo on the clothes we wear.

ChaoticConcertina: Whether or not you buy your dish soap from the supermarket

…or the superstore

or even worse!

from a giant online retailer who delivers it to your doorstep,

no interaction with your fellow citizens required.

I had a realization this afternoon, as I was placing an inventory order.

I used to get almost all of this stuff from independent vendors.

I had a basket guy, a box guy.

The woman who did our packaging.

ChaoticConcertina: One by one, they all went out of business slowly.

I guess that’s the nature of the beast, right? Nothing stops the engines of commerce.

And now I’m ordering all of these individual things from one catalog, one charge.

It’s so much easier.

The prices aren’t much different.

It’s improved MY workflow.

And I can rationalize that this choice was made for me, but I’ve still participated in it.

The people who make the money off our choices have no idea who we are.

Most of them don’t care to learn.

They don’t care about the communities they destroy.

But still we make their products who we are, how we judge each other.

But I DID know these people, their faces and their names.

And I don’t know how we excuse not judging ourselves for being complicit.

PinksPosies&Pearls: Ugh, How dare you.

How dare you make me contemplate capitalism and my part in it this early in the day

I am the “even worse”

no talking required

You know what half of my identity is?

The size of clothing I buy.

The logo doesn’t make a difference.

That little number is all that matters, because it determines everything else.

Whether or not I even bother stopping into a shop, the styles I’ll be stuck with.

Whether or not I want a quarter of my wardrobe to consist of shirts with no shoulders.

Because of the size on my tag, the fashion powers that be have determined who I am.

I have to dress a certain way because of my size AND profession.

No deviation!

PinksPosies&Pearls: And the same is true on the other end of the spectrum!

My tiny-boned sisters are locked into dressing like teenagers indefinitely.

And I’m stuck dressing like their mother.

It’s maddening.

Maybe I should just embrace that I like talking to my plants more than people

What’s the dress code for a bog witch? That’s what I want to be.

But like, a sexy bog witch.

That’ll attract the right sort, right?

ChaoticConcertina: Absolutely.

I sense sexy bog creatures in your imminent future.

It was a relief.

If she were the only one using their friendship as an invisible therapist, she likely would have stopped after the first week or two, messages tapering off until she was back into her routine of drudgery.

He matched her early morning vent posts and ruminations at night, balancing the scales of their friendship, giving her something to look forward to each morning – a prize that had been long absent from her life.

And if she occasionally closed her eyes and tried to envision that strong, well-defined hand holding hers, well .

.

.

Sumi decided that was her business.

Then her great-aunt died.

An aunt whose existence had been completely unknown to her, her maternal grandmother’s sister, a family she’d never met.

Sumi and a second cousin on the other side of the Unification were contacted as the closest next-of-kin, named beneficiaries to an estate they’d done nothing to earn.

PinksPosies&Pearls: I know it doesn’t make sense to be upset.

Or at least, to be as upset as I am.

But I’m heartbroken that I didn’t know her.

My mom died when I was little.

Sometimes I can’t even picture her face without a photo.

I’ve had my entire life to get over it, but I feel like a part of me died with her.

I don’t know anything about Japanese culture.

I don’t know anything about Sylvan culture.

My dad did his best and my stepmother was always good to me

But I was still cut off from half of everything I AM.

I’ve never known anything about her family.

I’ve never known grandparents or aunts and uncles.

PinksPosies&Pearls: So to find out that I had a relative so close . . .

We could have met for lunch, we could have had tea.

She could have been in my life when I was growing up.

I could have been in hers so that she wasn’t alone at the end.

I have this money now and everyone is telling me how happy I should be

but I’m heartbroken.

Trigger warning for a MASSIVE overshare, sorry

She was mortified with herself for sending something so personal to the stranger on the other side of the screen, but she couldn’t deny that it felt good to get it out.

Her father was human, white, and from the unification.

He’d met her mother when he’d been an architecture student, studying on the other side of the world, and her mother had left Japan with him to start a new life as a professor’s wife and give birth to a half-sylvan baby girl.

Sumi had not been born with the shimmering markings around her eyes and on her face that other sylvans possessed.

They tracked down her back, visible only in the most daring outfits, but absent as far as the outward world was concerned.

She did not have the elongated fingers, but did have their slightly tapered ears.

At least, Sumi told herself she did, obsessively comparing the shape of her friends’ ears her entire life.

She didn’t have any noticeable outward markings that distinguished her as anything other than human, feeling cut off from the photo on her dresser of her beautiful Sylvan mother every time she looked in the mirror.

She didn’t know anything about her mother’s Japanese heritage and culture, didn’t speak the language, didn’t know any family.

But now she was a beneficiary to this stranger, a stranger who shared her blood, her mother’s blood, and she couldn’t help feeling cut off from all of it all over again.

When she went to bed that night, her head ached from all the tears she had cried.

She was embarrassed for the over-the-top overshare, but there wasn’t anyone in her daily life to whom she could vent in such a way.

She didn’t want to make her father and stepmother feel poorly, and her much younger step-sisters — both human, both white, both the majority race and the majority species — couldn’t possibly understand.

She didn’t have close girlfriends, not close enough for something like this, and Jordan viewed every topic in which he was not the center as a problem to solve.

Rather than a supportive shoulder for her to cry on, he’d told her it was an opportunity for investment. ChaoticConcertina, as pathetic as it was, was the only judgment-free source of solace she had.

ChaoticConcertina: Please don’t apologize.

I totally get it, you’ve got a lot more to unpack just cashing a check.

I don’t understand what you’re going through specifically, but I get it.

I’m a pro at “there’s more to it.”

My grandfather started his business when he came to the unification.

My dad was already a teenager, grew up working in the shop until he took it over.

A few years ago he was diagnosed with a progressive disease.

The dementia is slow, but it’s steady.

It doesn’t matter that I have a degree in something else.

I’m the eldest, I’m the only son.

I was the first one born here.

This is our family’s business.

But there’s not a week that goes by that I don’t think about selling it.

The industry we’re in has changed tremendously in the past two decades

It’s almost all online now, so brick & mortar is a liability.

ChaoticConcertina: Everyone tells me to sell, get the money for the land and the building.

I’m in an area that is rapidly developing, so I know I would make a mint.

But it’s not just a shop.

It’s not just a business.

It was my grandfather’s dream.

It’s been my dad’s whole life.

And I can’t just sell that off like a used car.

ChaoticConcertina: Think of this as a gift from your mom, Pinky.

Everyone you know will tell you how to invest it, what you should do with it.

And I guess I am too — Spend like it’s a gift from your mom.

Take a course or two and learn about her culture.

Join a mixed-species group.

Do something that makes you happy, and then remember that it’s from your mom.

And think about how happy she would be to see you so happy.

And don’t ever apologize for venting here.

When she’d read his message the following morning, Sumi sat before her laptop, shoulders shaking as she sobbed, beyond grateful to this empathetic stranger who understood her so well.

PinksPosies&Pearls: Thank you for understanding.

And yeah, that’s exactly it.

There’s more to it than people see on the surface.

I’m so sorry to hear about your father’s diagnosis.

I can’t imagine how hard that is.

I know my mom was sick for a long time, but I was too young to remember her decline.

If you ever need to just scream into the void, the over-sharing void is here to listen.

I guess talking to each other is a hell of a lot cheaper than therapy, right?

Thinking of this as a gift from my mom is honestly probably the very best advice

so thank you for that as well.

If her inheritance had only been money, she likely would have done exactly as he’d suggested.

Inquired into whether or not there was a multi-species support group in the area.

Taken a class on Japanese Art, on kimono, a beginner’s language class.

After all, the handful of classes she’d had time for back in undergrad seemed very far away.

If it had been just money, she would’ve done exactly that.

But it hadn’t been just money, even though the money was substantial, a life-changing amount for her.

The little nest egg she’d accumulated in fifteen years of teaching would have been at home in a pigeon’s nest’s, a tiny crumb compared to what she had gained from this unknown relative.

Along with their savings and assets, her mother’s aunt had also left her home, the home she and her husband had lived in for more than thirty years, in a town called Cambric Creek.

She went to see it alone.

Sumi couldn’t articulate why she didn’t mention it to Jordan, why she didn’t want anyone else there.

No, that’s not true.

She would have been happy to have one person there with her .

.

. but he was an anonymous screen name.

The house itself was an L-shaped single-story brick beauty.

It had a slightly retro feel in its design, but it was bright and airy, with a long backyard and the sunken sunroom she loved at first sight.

The kitchen amenities far outran her ability, but there was a cozy breakfast nook beside a wall of windows, and on the other side of the paned glass, an empty bird feeder.

The agent had laughed when Sumi had clamored into the tub in the master bedroom’s ensuite, squealing in delight to find it fit her ample frame.

The north-facing bedroom was heavily shadowed at that midafternoon hour, but the walk-in closet had track lighting, allowing her a good look at every inch.

You’re actually going to be able to start dressing like you again!

She had always loved frilly dresses and sweeping, dramatic silhouettes.

The problem with dramatic silhouettes when one was a size 20, however, was that even the most modest neckline was too bodacious for teaching middle school.

She had been taken to task several times early in her career for her wardrobe choices, even though there had been nothing wrong with any of the outfits, she had wanted to scream at the time — feeling as though she were being held accountable for having large breasts and a big ass in the first place, as though she could eliminate them if her clothes were frumpy enough — it hadn’t been worth the battle.

Turtlenecks and A-line skirts had been her near daily wardrobe for fifteen years, the turtleneck swapped out for a clavicle-hugging shell in the warmer months.

She could fill this closet with the clothes she actually liked to wear, diaphanous dresses of lavender and creampuff confections with pink ruffles and slits up to her thigh.

Her favorite article of clothing was a dusty pink Grecian-style dress with gathered shoulders and a deep V neckline, slit up several inches above her knee.

She would wear it every week in this place, would buy it in every color in which it was made, and if hormone-addled 12-year-olds wanted to stare slack-jawed, it wouldn’t be her problem.

Her cleavage was going to be allowed to breathe for the first time in more than a decade.

That was, if she decided to keep the house.

There’s no question.

This is it.

This is home.

The instant the thought invaded her mind, Sumi knew in her bones it was true, tears burning at the corners of her eyes.

A gift from your mom.

After she’d left the house, she had driven to Cambric Creek’s little downtown afterward, parking her car in the public lot and walking around the horseshoe of businesses that ringed a long oval-shaped park in the center of town.

There was a charming little gazebo, and a bandstand at the far corner that one could access by any of the meandering pathways cut through the greenery.

Around the park were more than a dozen different businesses in Victorian-style buildings.

A hardware store, an old fashioned-looking ice cream parlour.

A coffee shop that had a steady stream of traffic, and all around her, bustling about despite the fact that it was late afternoon on a weekday, were residents and shoppers of every conceivable species.

She’d dropped to one of the many stone benches enhancing the space, overcome with emotion at the sight of her soon-to-be new neighbors, bustling about this ridiculously charming little town.

The agent handling the house, Elspeth, was a tiefling, and once Sumi got over her initial shock, she was able to pay attention to the woman’s recitation about the house and the neighborhood.

She had mentioned it was multi-species, but Sumi couldn’t have envisioned this in her dizziest daydreams.

A chattering mothwoman shopped with a tall, tusked troll, a trio of fox-tailed young women in identical school uniforms, a goblin with several children on cell phones, instructing them to pick up your heads and stay out of the way! She watched a tall, broad-shouldered ogre with burnished gold horns shoulder his way out of the coffee shop, passing before her bench before he disappeared into the building on her left, his thick black glasses sliding down his brick-red nose as he did so.

There were humans here and there as well — at least, people who looked human from a distance.

They could have been elves or werewolves, Sumi reminded herself.

Or Sylvan, like you.

She could find herself here in this place.

She could find the piece of herself that it felt as if it had always been missing.

Sumi decided there was nothing compelling her to rush back home, and took her time strolling around after getting her own coffee from the busy cafe.

After looping Main Street, she cut down a little side street close to the bench where she’d sat, just around the corner from the center of town.

There was a stationary shop, a little sandwich bar, and a clothing boutique that seemed to be exclusively for goblins and gnomes.

The last four or five spaces were empty, likely all part of some larger business that had closed.