Gatas Grudge

The first time I saw him, he was trying to drown a houseplant.

I stood in the doorway of the shop, my messenger bag still slung across my chest, watching this man in a wrinkled linen shirt pour what looked like an entire bottle of water into a pot of soil that had already turned into mud. The fern was drowning. Its fronds drooped like wet laundry. He had this look on his face, pure concentration, like he was performing open-heart surgery on the thing.

“You’re killing it,” I said.

He didn’t look up. “It’s thirsty.”

“It’s not thirsty. It’s dead. You’ve waterboarded it.”

That got his attention. He straightened up and turned to face me. And I mean, I knew he was supposed to be handsome. My best friend Claire had spent the entire drive over telling me about the mysterious new owner of the old bookstore on Maple, how he was tall and brooding and had cheekbones you could cut yourself on. She left out the part where his eyes were the color of a winter sea and he looked at me like I’d just tracked mud across his floor.

“Can I help you?” His voice was flat. No warmth. No welcome.

“Claire sent me. She said you needed a display designer.”

He blinked. Once. Twice. “You’re the designer?”

“I’m the designer.”

“You look like you’re twelve.”

I dropped my bag on the floor. “And you look like you’ve never successfully kept a plant alive. We all have our things.”

Something flickered in his jaw. A muscle twitch. I’d hit a nerve. Good.

He crossed his arms. The movement pulled his shirt tight across his shoulders, and I noticed things I didn’t want to notice. The way his forearms looked. The dark hair dusting them. The fact that he smelled like old paper and coffee and something else, something sharper, like cedar.

“I don’t need a display designer,” he said. “Claire is meddling.”

“Claire is worried you’re going to run this place into the ground inside six months.”

Silence. He stared at me. I stared back. The fern dripped onto the floorboards.

“Your store is beautiful,” I said, and I meant it. High ceilings. Original crown molding. Windows that faced the street and let in that golden afternoon light that made everything look like a photograph. But the displays were a disaster. Books stacked in crooked piles. A mannequin wearing a scarf that had nothing to do with any book in the window. A single sad cactus in the corner that looked like it was considering suicide.

“It’s a mess,” he said.

“Yeah. It is.”

He didn’t argue. That surprised me. I expected him to push back, to tell me he didn’t need help, to send me packing. Instead, he just stood there, hands at his sides, looking around the store like he was seeing it for the first time.

“I inherited it,” he said quietly. “My uncle. He died in June.”

The shift in his voice caught me off guard. The edge was gone. Underneath it, something raw and unfinished.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. I barely knew him.”

But he said it too fast. A reflex. The kind of thing you say when you don’t want to talk about the thing you’re actually feeling. I knew that trick. I’d used it a hundred times.

I walked past him, into the store. Ran my fingers along a shelf. The books were dusty. The place smelled like neglect. But underneath that, I could feel it. Potential. The bones of something good.

“I can fix this,” I said. “The window display. The shelving layout. The lighting. Give me a week, and I can make people stop on the sidewalk.”

“I don’t have a week.”

“You don’t have a choice. This place is bleeding money.”

He flinched. I’d gone too far. I could see it in the way his shoulders tightened, the way his jaw went hard again.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was blunt.”

“You’re not sorry.”

“No. I’m not. But I should be.”

He laughed. It was a short, surprised sound, like he hadn’t meant to make it. It changed his face. Made him younger. Made him look like someone who might actually smile if you caught him off guard.

“You’re annoying,” he said.

“I get that a lot.”

“I bet you do.”

He walked over to the dead fern and picked up the pot. Water sloshed over the rim. He stood there, holding it, looking lost.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. “With any of this.”

It wasn’t an invitation. It wasn’t a plea. It was just a fact. A man standing in a dusty bookstore with a drowned plant in his hands, admitting he was in over his head.

I should have walked away. I had three other clients waiting. A calendar full of consultations. A life that didn’t include fixing up some grumpy stranger’s failed inheritance.

But I looked at the windows. I looked at the shelves. I looked at the way the light fell across the floor, and I saw it. The display. The colors. The story it could tell.

“I’ll do it for free,” I said.

He frowned. “Why?”

“Because I want to see what this place looks like when it’s alive.”

He set the fern down. Water pooled on the floor. He didn’t wipe it up. He just stood there, looking at me with those winter-sea eyes, and for a second, neither of us said anything.

“One week,” he said.

“One week.”

“And you don’t touch my plants.”

I grinned. “No promises.”

He didn’t smile back. But his mouth moved. Just a little. A twitch at the corner. And I knew, with the kind of certainty that usually gets you into trouble, that I wasn’t going to leave this place the same way I’d walked in.

I just didn’t know yet how much trouble I was in.