She narrows her eyes at me, and I should leave. Should take the flowers and walk out and drive home and go back to my system.
Instead I stand there, holding yellow flowers in brownpaper, letting a twenty-one-year-old girl stare me down across a counter full of dahlias.
I leave before I can say anything as stupid as everything else I've ever said to her. I sit in my car for a full minute before starting the engine, flowers on the passenger seat.
The problem is that Lily is everywhere after that. Tuesday I'm at Ramsey's house, dropping off shelves he asked me to help install. She's on the couch, painting her toenails, barefoot and carefree. She waves at me while inspecting her nails.
"Hi, Callahan," she calls without looking up.
I nearly walk into the doorframe.
Thursday is group night at the pub. Ramsey and Poppy on one side of the booth, Erin and Rome on the other, Lily tucked next to Erin. I slide in beside Ramsey because it's the only seat left, which puts me directly across from her.
I'm close enough to see the freckles on her nose and smell whatever she smells like. Feel it when her knee almost touches mine under the table.
She doesn't say much to me. She talks to Erin, to Poppy, is intrigued by something Ramsey says. Every now and then her eyes find mine over the rim of her glass for maybe half a second before she smiles and glances away.
Rome hasn't said a single word to me all night that wasn't strictly necessary. He doesn't need to. The man communicates entire paragraphs with his stare. Every time Lily speaks, Rome's eyes move to me. Not to her. To me, as if making sure I'm not looking at her the way he suspects I am.
I'm not. I'm looking at a very interesting knot in the wood paneling behind Erin's head. My beer. The table. Anything except the girl four feet away with freckles and gray eyes.
I last about forty minutes before making an excuse about an early shift and leave. Ramsey gives me a puzzled look on the way out. I don't return it.
Saturday I see her at the grocery store. She's there in Converse and a mini skirt in February, gold earrings catching the fluorescent light. She's arguing with a cantaloupe. Actually holding it up and frowning at it like it could tell her if it was good or not.
I turn around and go down a different aisle, and stand in front of canned beans way too long, pretending to read the sodium content on kidney beans while waiting for her to leave produce.
She doesn't leave. When she moves on to avocados, I leave the store without buying anything.
Sunday is at Ruth's Diner. She's in the window booth, chin in hand, reading something on her phone. Ruth is hovering the way Ruth does, refilling coffee, talking too loudly about something I can't hear through the glass.
She says something that makes Lily throw her head back and laugh. Even through the glass I can hear it, or I imagine I can. Hard to tell at this point.
She actually lives here now and my system doesn't account for this.
The following week I am at the pub with Ramsey, just the two of us. No group night, no Rome and no Lily. I can relax for the first time in days.
Ramsey leans back, beer in hand, watching me with that look. The one that says he's about to be annoying about something.
"Man, stop checking the door. She's not coming."
"I'm not checking the door."
"You check it about three times a minute since we got here."
"I'm aware of my surroundings," I say flatly. "It's a professional habit."
"You're a firefighter, not a Secret Service agent."
I take a sip of beer. Ramsey keeps looking at me, just sitting there, calm, waiting for me to crack.
"She's Rome's sister," I offer, as if that explains anything.
"I know who she is."
"She's also twenty-one."
"That has been said once or twice, yeah."