The air in the Floral Gladiators workroom was thick with the cloying scent of lilies and resentment.
Twenty-four hours ago, I’d watched my life’s passion be twisted into a caricature of arrogance on national television.
Twenty-four hours ago, Julian Croft had been cemented in the public’s mind as a blue-blooded dilettante with a silver spoon lodged firmly in his mouth.
Now, he was my partner. My lifeline. And I’d rather have been tethered to an anchor and thrown into the sea.
We stood at our designated workstation, a gleaming stainless-steel island that felt more like an operating table.
A sterile silence stretched between us, a stark contrast to the nervous chatter filling the rest of the studio.
Julian, infuriatingly, looked as impeccable as ever in a crisp linen shirt, not a single blond hair out of place.
He was polishing a pair of shears with a microfiber cloth, his movements precise and deliberate, as if the fate of the free world depended on their gleam.
I, on the other hand, felt like a frayed nerve ending stuffed into a pair of paint-splattered jeans.
Magnifico swept into the room, his sequined blazer catching the studio lights like a disco ball. “Gladiators!” he boomed.
“Welcome to your first pairs challenge! As you know, romance is the lifeblood of floristry. It is the poetry, the passion, the very soul of our art! Your task,” he paused for dramatic effect, “is to create… a ‘First Date’ bouquet!”
A smattering of polite applause. My stomach twisted.
“You must capture that delicate, terrifying, thrilling moment,” Magnifico continued, his hands flourishing.
“The butterflies. The awkward silences. The spark of potential! You have three hours. Your buckets are filled with the basics, but the specialty cooler is now open. May the best bouquet… bloom!”
The moment he finished, the room exploded into action. I turned to Julian, my arms crossed. “Okay. Let’s get this over with.”
He set his shears down with a soft click.
“I agree. The key here is elegance. Timelessness. A first date is about making a classic, favorable impression.”
He gestured toward the standard-issue buckets.
“I’m thinking a base of soft pink peonies, some delicate Queen Anne’s lace for texture, and a few perfect, long-stemmed white roses. It’s sophisticated. It’s romantic. It’s a language everyone understands.”
I stared at him. He couldn’t be serious.
“It’s a language for people who are afraid to say something new,” I countered, my voice sharper than I intended. “It’s the floral equivalent of a vanilla ice cream cone. It’s boring.”
A muscle twitched in his perfectly sculpted jaw. “It’s classic, Rev. Not boring. There’s a reason these flowers have symbolized love for centuries. They work.”
“They work if your goal is to put your date to sleep,” I shot back.
“A first date isn’t some fairy-tale waltz. It’s nerve-wracking. It’s awkward. There’s a current of danger to it, the risk of rejection, the possibility that this person could completely upend your life. It’s not soft pink peonies, Julian. It’s… it’s something with teeth.”
My mind was already racing, picturing it. I could see the colors, feel the texture.
“I’m thinking a core of deep, velvety chocolate cosmos. They smell like bittersweet vanilla and look like the night sky. We surround them with dark, moody foliage, some spiky eryngium for that electric, nervous energy. And then,” the idea bloomed, wild and perfect in my mind, “right in the middle, nestled where you’d least expect it… a venus flytrap.”
Julian looked at me as if I had just suggested they garnish the bouquet with live scorpions. “A carnivorous plant,” he said, his voice flat with disbelief.
“You want to put a carnivorous plant in a ‘First Date’ bouquet.”
“Yes! It’s perfect! It’s the danger, the unexpected bite. The idea that romance isn’t just pretty—it can consume you.”
“It’s grotesque,” he snapped, his composure finally cracking. “It’s what I’d expect from someone the producers edited to look like she thinks she’s better than everyone else. It’s a gimmick, not art.”
The jab landed, sharp and painful. “Oh, and a dozen roses is art?” I retorted, my voice rising.
“Or is that just what a Croft buys when he needs to make a grand, soulless gesture? It’s exactly the kind of privileged, predictable nonsense they portrayed you as.”
We glared at each other across the steel table, the ghosts of our on-screen personas hovering between us. The cameras were on us, of course.
A boom mic drifted closer, hungry for our conflict. We were giving them exactly what they wanted.
“We’re wasting time,” he said through gritted teeth. “We have to compromise.”
Our compromise was a monstrosity.
He refused to abandon his precious peonies, and I refused to give up the cosmos. He insisted on lacy, delicate ferns; I grabbed handfuls of jagged, dark eucalyptus.
We worked in stony silence, our movements jerky and resentful.
Every time I placed a dark, dramatic stem, he would follow it with a fluffy, pastel bloom that completely neutralized the effect. It was a floral civil war happening in a single vase.
“That’s too much,” he’d mutter as I added a thistle.
“That’s not enough,” I’d hiss when he reached for more baby’s breath.
The venus flytrap was the final battleground. I’d managed to snag a small, perfect one from the specialty cooler. Julian physically recoiled when I tried to wire it into the arrangement.
“Do not put that… thing… in there, Rev.”
“It’s the entire point!”
“The point is not to get eliminated! We are on the verge of creating the single ugliest bouquet in the history of this competition.”
He was right. I knew he was right.
The thing taking shape in front of us was a chaotic collision of soft and sharp, romance and threat. It had no focal point, no harmony, no story. It was just an argument made of petals and stems.
Defeated, I set the venus flytrap aside.
By the time Magnifico called, “Tools down!” I felt sick. Our bouquet was a testament to our failure.
A lopsided, schizophrenic creation that was both achingly pretty and vaguely menacing, satisfying neither vision. We carried it to the judging platform like it was a coffin.
Magnifico circled it, his expression a mixture of pity and theatrical disgust. The two guest judges, a celebrated wedding planner and a botanical artist, looked equally unimpressed.
“Well,” Magnifico began, drawing the word out. “What… is this?”
Julian stepped forward, his voice as smooth as ever, a desperate attempt to salvage the wreckage.
“We wanted to explore the duality of a first date,” he said, the lie sounding polished and practiced.
“The classic romance, represented by the peonies and roses, alongside the more… unpredictable, darker elements of a new connection.”
I almost snorted. He made it sound like we were geniuses instead of two stubborn fools who couldn’t work together.
The wedding planner, a woman named Celine, tapped a perfectly manicured nail against her chin. “The execution is messy,” she said bluntly.
“The colors are at war with each other. There’s no flow. It’s visually jarring.”
The botanical artist chimed in. “I see the individual components, and they are beautiful. The quality of this chocolate cosmos is superb. But together… it’s a failure of composition. It tells no coherent story.”
My heart sank to the floor. This was it. First challenge in a team, and I was going home.
All that pressure, all that hope for my grandfather’s shop, turning to dust because I couldn’t play nice with Mr. Hampton’s Finest.
We were shuffled to the side as the next team presented.
It was Giselle, the saccharine-sweet blonde who’d made a show of comforting me after the first episode, and her partner, a quiet, talented guy named Omar.
Giselle was all smiles, presenting a towering, ambitious sculpture of woven bamboo and orchids meant to represent two hearts meeting.
“It’s about connection, about two separate paths intertwining to become one beautiful structure,” she cooed.
It looked impressive. For about ten seconds. Then, as Magnifico reached out to touch one of the orchids, a crucial piece of wire, improperly secured, gave way.
The entire top half of the sculpture sagged, then collapsed in a slow, heartbreaking cascade of shattered orchids and splintered bamboo.
A collective gasp went through the studio.
Giselle’s hand flew to her mouth, her eyes wide with what looked like shock.
“Oh, my goodness! Omar, I told you that top piece needed more support!” she cried, loud enough for every microphone to catch it.
Omar’s face went pale. He looked from the wreckage to Giselle, utter confusion and betrayal in his eyes. “What? You… you were the one who wired the top section. You said it was fine.”
“I was just following your design!” she insisted, tears welling up.
But the judges weren’t looking at her crocodile tears. They were examining the ruins. The botanical artist picked up a piece of the failed structure.
“This is the wrong gauge wire for this weight,” he said, his voice cold. “This was a fundamental error. An amateur mistake.”
The deliberation was short. Magnifico looked from Giselle’s tear-streaked face to Omar’s stricken one.
“Teamwork,” he said, his voice grave, “is about trust and shared responsibility. But when the very foundation of a design is flawed, the blame must fall somewhere. Omar, your design was ambitious, but your execution failed. I’m sorry. You are eliminated.”
Giselle ran to hug him, sobbing theatrically about how sorry she was. But I saw it. Just for a second, as her face was hidden in Omar’s shoulder, she glanced over at me and Julian.
Her eyes weren’t sad. They were triumphant. A cold, hard gleam of victory.
She’d thrown her partner under the bus to save herself.
Magnifico turned to us. “Rev. Julian. You are in the bottom two. Your bouquet was a conceptual disaster. You are lucky that today, there was a bigger one.”
We were safe. But it didn’t feel like a victory. It felt like a stay of execution.
We walked back to our station in a heavy, suffocating silence. The adrenaline drained away, leaving behind a residue of exhaustion and shame.
We hadn’t survived on skill or talent. We had survived by default.
I stared at the pathetic little venus flytrap I’d left on the table, its tiny jaws open as if waiting to swallow my pride whole.
I risked a glance at Julian. The polished mask was gone.
For the first time, he just looked tired. His shoulders were slumped, his hands resting on the cold steel of the table.
He met my gaze, and in his eyes, I saw the same bone-deep weariness I felt in my own soul. We were still enemies, but we were both prisoners in this sequined, televised hell.
And tomorrow, we’d have to do it all over again.