She had mentioned it eight months ago. They had been walking through the hotel garden after a vendor meeting and she had stopped at the peony bed along the south wall and she had said offhandedly, not expecting it to register, that white peonies were the only flower she had ever really cared for because they didn't try to be anything other than what they were. She had said it once and moved on. Julian had said nothing at the time. The fact that she was now sitting at her desk remembering this in precise detail was information she chose not to examine too carefully.
At 4:57, she told herself she was going to the break room to get water. She walked down the hall. She pushed open the door and she found Julian standing at the counter with a bouquet of 37 white peonies and a spool of white ribbon and his full unhurried attention. She stopped. She counted the flowers without meaning to, 37.
"Busy evening," she said. Julian glanced over his shoulder. "Hey, just finishing up." He turned back to the ribbon. She stood in the doorway and watched him tie it and something moved through her chest that she did not have adequate vocabulary for. Something that sat at the intersection of longing and defensiveness and fear and expressed itself, as these things often did for Audrey, as a very controlled tone of voice.
"She must be very lucky," she said. Julian's hands stilled on the ribbon. He turned to look at her fully. His expression was not readable in the way she was accustomed to reading him. There was something in it she couldn't place, something that was not confusion, but was adjacent to it.
"I'm sorry?" "Whoever you're bringing those to tonight." Audrey kept her voice even. "She must be very lucky." Julian looked at her for a long moment. Then something shifted in his face, a quiet thing, like a door opening. And he almost smiled. Audrey had already decided to leave.
She was already half turned toward the hallway when Julian said her name. "Audrey." She stopped. She did not turn around immediately. "Who do you think these are for?" She turned. She kept her chin level and her voice neutral, and her hands very still at her sides, because those were the things she knew how to do.
"For whoever you're having dinner with tonight," she said. "Lyndon and Stone, 8:00 apparently." Julian tilted his head slightly. "Where did you hear that?" "Marcus." A pause. Then Julian laughed, a genuine undefended sound, the kind that came from actual surprise rather than performance, and set the ribbon down on the counter. "Audrey." He said again.
His voice was different this time, slower. "I bought them for you." She did not move. "The reservation," he said, "is for the two of us. I was going to ask you this afternoon. Marcus saw me on the phone with the restaurant, and apparently drew his own conclusions, which he then shared widely, which I probably should have anticipated." She stared at him.
"I've been trying to figure out how to do this for about 4 months," Julian said. "I know what you think about work and relationships. I know your rule. I wasn't going to push." He paused. "But I also wasn't going to keep pretending that I didn't notice you.
So, I made a reservation and I bought you flowers and I was going to ask you properly, and then you walked in here and told me she must be very lucky, which was" He stopped. A faint smile illuminating. Audrey said nothing. She was aware that her heart was doing something inconvenient. "You remembered the peonies," she said finally.
Her voice came out quieter than she intended. "You said it once," Julian said. "8 months ago. You said they didn't try to be anything other than what they were." He met her eyes. "I thought that was worth remembering." She looked at the flowers.
37 of them, white and full-blown, tied with a ribbon that he had been knotting with that same deliberate care he brought to everything. She thought about the umbrella in his car. The 7:00 meeting cutoffs. The coffee she had never had to specify twice. She thought about 22 months of standing exactly this far apart and calling it professionalism.
"If I take the flowers," she said slowly, "does that mean I have to go to dinner with you?" Julian's expression did not change, but something in his eyes did. "No," he said. "But I hope you want to." Audrey Bellamy stood in the doorway of the break room and made a decision with considerably less deliberation than she typically applied to decisions of equivalent consequence. She crossed the room. She picked up the bouquet with both hands.
The peonies were heavy and cool and smelled exactly like the garden in late summer. "7:30," she said. "I need to go home and change." "7:30," Julian and She walked out with the flowers and spent the elevator ride down telling herself this was simply a dinner. A dinner between two adults. Professionally manageable.
Thoroughly containable. She did not believe a word of it. Lyndon and Stone was the kind of restaurant that understood candlelight as architecture. Low and warm and distributed in a way that made the space feel smaller than it was. More intimate than a first dinner between two people who had worked together for almost 2 years probably warranted.
Audrey had changed into a dress she told herself she'd chosen for practical reasons. Dark green. Simple cut. Nothing that could be interpreted as effort. Julian was already at the table when she arrived.
He stood when he saw her, which she hadn't expected, and the gesture landed somewhere she wasn't prepared for. They sat. They looked at the menus. A server came and went. And then Audrey, who handled quarterly reviews and board presentations and property crises without breaking a visible sweat, could not for the life of her figure out what to say to a man she had spoken to nearly every day for almost 2 years.
The problem, she realized with some discomfort, was context. At the Alder House, she always had context, an agenda, an objective, a reason to be speaking, and a direction to move the conversation. Here there was no agenda. There was only a table and a man who was watching her with the particular patient attention he gave everything, and the unsettling absence of anything she was supposed to be deciding. She started talking about the third quarter occupancy numbers.
Julian listened for about 90 seconds. Then he set down his water glass and said very gently, "I'm not going to talk about work tonight." Audrey stopped. "I wasn't You were. Not unkind. Just accurate.
You've referenced Q3 twice, the Bellingham renovation once, and you just asked me a question about the housekeeping schedule that I don't think you actually wanted answered. She looked at him. He looked back. "Tonight," he said, "I don't want to talk to CEO Bellamy. I want to talk to Audrey." The distinction landed harder than it should have.