Seasons of love - Freenbecky ☆𝆬

Chapter 5: The painting

When Freen returns to Permanent Record wearing a grin, Nam eyes her suspiciously.

Freen rolls her eyes and says, "Relax. I just went next door."

"Ah, that explains it," Nam says, laughing at Freen's almost palpable happiness.

Freen sees Mind smirk at her from her tattoo station, where she's stencilling a design onto a client's shoulder, and she shoots the girl the middle finger with her free, non-flower-toting hand.

"That's not as effective when you're wearing a shit-eating grin, Chankimha."

"Up yours, Nekkham."

Freen leaves Mind to focus on her customer and leans against the front counter on her elbows, cradling the gardenia between her fingers and examining it. The white petals are unblemished and they look so delicate; she's almost afraid to touch them.

"So you finally talked to her, huh?" Nam asks, eyeing the flower with interest.

"Yup," Freen says breezily. "And I learned that her name is Becky."

She dips her chin down to the gardenia in her hands and asks, "Do you know how to press flowers, by any chance?"

_____

The next time Freen returns to the florist, she has the framed and finally completed artwork under her arm. It's undergone several changes, from her sketchbook page to cold pressed paper, from pencil to watercolour. It's taken a long time, but she's quite proud of how it turned out.

She places it on the counter between her and Becky, and apprehensively awaits her reaction.

Becky traces a finger over her painted counterpart, down the waves of hair that Freen painstakingly recreated, across the blooming flowers of the outdoor display, over the muted pastel letters of the flower shop name above the door. She hovers over the finishing touch, the rolled and dried gardenia petals, arranged in a flower crown atop her likeness's head.

"You made this?" Becky asks, eyes flickering between Freen's own.

Freen smiles shyly. "It's from that day when you caught me sketching you from across the road. You asked me to show it to you when it was finished, so... yeah. Here it is."

"It's beautiful," Becky says honestly. "What are you going to do with it?"

"I'm giving it to you, of course," Freen answers, brows twisted as if to say that fact were obvious. "I couldn't possibly give it to anyone else."

Becky shoots her a smile so blindingly bright, it's well worth the hours of work she's put into the painting, and Freen's heart soars.

_____

When Freen visits Becky again later that week, she sees the painting hung up on the wall at the end of the aisle with Becky's favourite flowers.

_____

Okay, so, Freen is probably being really obvious about her feelings for Becky. But the thing is, she kind of doesn't care. Mind and Nam tease her but it no longer fazes her, because she's fully embraced the fact that she has super huge crush on the girl next door.

So she continues to wave through the flower shop window on the way to work every morning, and goes over to the shop when her lunch break permits it.

She learns that Becky is twenty-two years old and the sole owner of Stop and Smell the Roses. She's clumsy and accident-prone and has a fully stocked First Aid Kit beneath the front counter just in case, but her fingers are nimble and she is somehow still able to wrap a bouquet of flowers without creasing the paper at all. She doesn't style her hair in the mornings, just brushes it and accepts where it falls, and there is soil lodged beneath her short French manicured nails almost all of the time, but she never looks anything less than perfect every day. She's messy and uncoordinated and her handwriting is almost illegible, but she laughs loudly and unabashedly and underneath her dirt-streaked apron is a heart of gold.

Freen learns a thousand things about Becky, which are really just a thousand reasons that cause her to fall deeper and deeper, but she honestly doesn't mind.