Of Flowers and Fire

Chapter 1

Sawyer rubbed his eyes and yawned. Checking the clock, he got up. 8:25am. He was running late despite having set an alarm. The shop was supposed to open at six, and had, almost everyday for sixty years. Like clockwork. The only times he had ever opened late - or slept through his alarms - were on mornings like this. Mornings with pounding rain and thick cloud coverage. Mornings that discouraged many folks from the joys of flower shopping.

He got out of bed and changed into a posh, cobalt blue shirt he'd gotten at a mall in Indianapolis a month ago. He quartered the sleeves before leaving his room, and sighed contentedly.

He went downstairs to the shop after mussing his hair enough so that it stuck up in the just rolled out of bed way he had become so accustomed to. He ducked into his workshop and pulled his apron on over his clothes. Sawyer rubbed his hands across his face. He had been sad for the weekend, but he wasn't going to let his Monday be infected with gloom as well. He breathed out and looked around the room at his flowers. "Okay, guys," he said, "let's have a good day." He grinned. You know, fake it 'til you make it.

Sawyer went for the door and flipped the sign to open. He unlocked both of the deadbolts and the knob, and then pushed on the handle so it opened. The door hit something solid. Something solid that grunted a dissatisfied, "ow." Sawyer almost screamed but refrained when the something solid looked up and met his confused eyes.

"What?"

"I'm Diego Torres," the something solid grumbled, "the guy who's fixing your sign."

"Yeah. Diego." Sawyer said, "Right, I know who you are." His manufactured good mood had lasted maybe 120 seconds. The rain that was splashing him in the face really wasn't improving anything. "What are you doing here?"

"You said to come in Monday." Diego said. His voice was lower than Sawyer's,  and intimidating but unsure.

"Yeah," Sawyer said, "I remember." Diego flashed him a look that meant 'so what seems to be the problem?' Sawyer cleared his throat, "I meant in the rain. What are you doing in the rain?"

"Oh," Diego said. Sawyer took a step back and held open the door to let Diego come in. He was wearing a pair of acid wash jeans and a maroon t-shirt with some mess of words emblazoned across the chest, hidden under an ugly dirt brown rain slicker with the hood pulled up over his head so it shaded his face from the rain. "Well, your sign says you open at 6."

"Yeah," Sawyer's cheeks tinted, and he shook his head, "I'm really sorry, but it is raining, you could have left and I wouldn't have minded."

"It's okay," Diego pulled his hood off of his head and ran a hand through his hair which - apparently - the hood had not protected.

"You're probably going to catch a cold." Sawyer mumbled combined with a shake of his head.

Diego waved him off, "It's okay."

Looking at Diego standing there, water dripping from the second ugliest jacket Sawyer had ever seen, he didn't feel like it was okay. Sawyer shook his head again, and placed his hands on his hips. Surely this guy wasn't as much of a dick as he'd originally come across. Maybe he'd just also been having a rough day. There were no visible smile lines around Diego's mouth, like there were around Sawyer's, but maybe he just had a better smile. "I'm going to make you some tea," Sawyer said.

"You don't have to," Diego replied, grimacing; almost as if he were shy.

"I want to," Sawyer smiled and tried to ignore the way Diego rolled his undeniably pretty green eyes, "besides, you're dripping water all over the place, so you must be cold." Diego shrugged off the jacket and folded it over his arm. "You can hang that in the back if you want to." Sawyer suggested, pointing over his shoulder into the back room that had the cases of flowers.