The studio was a graveyard of good intentions.
Bruised rose petals littered the floor like crimson tears, and the sharp, green scent of snapped stems hung heavy in the air, a funeral dirge for their collaboration.
The fluorescent lights hummed a merciless, buzzing tune, illuminating every speck of dust and every discarded, mangled flower. It was past midnight.
The crew had packed up, the other contestants had retreated to the hotel to lick their wounds or celebrate their victories, but Rev and Julian remained, trapped in the wreckage of their own making.
Rev swept a pile of thorny clippings into a dustpan with violent, staccato strokes.
Scrape. Clatter. Scrape. Each movement was an accusation.
He was still standing by their workstation, a marble statue of a man in a ridiculously pristine apron, staring at the single chocolate cosmos she had managed to save from their floral carnage.
He hadn’t moved in ten minutes. The silence between them was a living thing, thick and suffocating with unspoken resentment.
They’d survived. Barely.
Giselle’s underhanded attempt to poison her competitor’s water source had been caught on camera, and the judges, disgusted, had sent her partner packing for being an accomplice.
It was a hollow victory that tasted like ash. They hadn’t won on merit; they’d simply been the second-worst disaster in the room.
“Are you just going to stand there, or are you going to help?” Rev’s voice was a low rasp, shredded from hours of arguing.
Julian’s gaze finally lifted from the dark, velvety flower. His eyes, usually a cool, confident blue, were clouded with an exhaustion that seemed to go bone-deep.
“I am helping. I’m contemplating where, precisely, it all went so wrong.”
“I can pinpoint it for you,” she shot back, slamming the dustpan against the bin.
“It was somewhere between you calling my Venus flytrap ‘a vulgar gimmick’ and me telling you your pastel roses looked like they belonged on a sentient toilet paper cozy.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I believe my exact words were ‘a departure from classic romantic sentiment.’”
“Yeah, well, my sentiment was ‘first dates are terrifying, and you might get eaten alive.’ I thought the flytrap was a perfect metaphor.”
He sighed, the sound heavy and final, and ran a hand through his perfectly coiffed hair, finally messing it up.
He picked up a stray pair of shears and began methodically snipping the dead heads off a bucket of discarded hydrangeas.
The rhythmic snip, snip, snip was a fragile counterpoint to her aggressive sweeping.
They worked in silence for another long stretch, a tense choreography of cleanup.
The shared, mindless labor slowly began to drain the venom from the air, replacing it with a profound weariness. Rev’s shoulders ached.
Her fingertips were raw. All she wanted was her bed and to forget the look of patronizing disappointment on the head judge’s face.
“You know,” Julian said, his voice quiet, stripped of its usual polished cadence. “I hate pastel roses.”
Rev stopped sweeping and turned to look at him. He wasn’t looking at her, but at the pale pink petals falling to the floor. “You could have fooled me. You fought for them like they were your firstborn child.”
“They’re what’s expected,” he said, still not meeting her eyes. “They’re safe. Predictable. The calling card of an Astor-White florist.”
He said the name with a quiet bitterness that pricked at Rev’s curiosity. She knew the name, of course.
Everyone in the floral world knew Astor-White Blooms.
They were a dynasty, with legacy shops in New York, London, and Paris. Their arrangements were timeless, elegant, and, in Rev’s opinion, soul-crushingly boring.
“I figured that was your family’s shop,” she said, leaning against her workbench.
“You’ve got the rich-kid-with-a-trust-fund vibe down pat.” It was meant to be a jab, but it came out sounding more like a question.
He finally looked at her, and the crack in his perfect facade was suddenly visible under the harsh studio lights.
“It’s not a shop. It’s a gilded cage. My father… my grandfather… they built an empire on tradition. On never taking a risk. On the belief that beauty has a specific, unchangeable formula. A dozen red roses for an anniversary. Lilies for a funeral. Peonies for a wedding. There are rules.”
He set the shears down with a soft click.
“I came on this show to get away from them. I thought if I could win this, on my own terms, I could prove that I’m more than just a name on a sign. That I have my own vision.”
He let out a dry, humorless laugh. “But the second I’m under pressure, what do I do? I retreat to the formula. I start defending the very things I came here to escape.”
He looked down at his hands, hands that were meant to create but felt, she now realized, like they had only ever been taught to replicate.
“I want to make things that are… alive. Interesting. Maybe even a little dangerous.” His gaze flickered to the chocolate cosmos still sitting on their bench.
“But I’m terrified that if I try, I’ll fail. And an Astor-White does not fail.”
Rev was quiet. All her anger, her frustration with his rigidity, suddenly dissolved. She hadn’t been fighting a competitor; she’d been fighting a ghost.
The weight of his entire family legacy had been sitting on his side of the workbench, and she’d been too blinded by her own insecurities to see it.
He wasn’t an arrogant snob. He was a prisoner.
Her own pressure, a familiar weight on her chest, felt suddenly heavier. He had shared his vulnerability, a piece of himself he clearly kept locked away.
It was a peace offering. And she found, to her surprise, that she wanted to accept it.
“My grandfather’s shop is in Detroit,” she said softly. The words felt strange in the sterile, high-tech studio. “It’s called ‘The Root Cellar.’ He’s run it for fifty years.”
Julian listened, his full attention on her now.
“It’s not like your family’s business,” she continued, a faint, sad smile on her face.
“There’s no legacy, no gilded cage. Just a little corner store with fogged-up windows and floors that are permanently damp. It smells like rich soil and old books. He knows every single person who comes in, knows which of their ferns is looking a little sad, what kind of fertilizer their African violets like.”
She picked up a fallen leaf, turning it over in her fingers.
“He taught me everything. How to listen to what a plant needs. That some flowers don’t want to be in a pristine, perfect bouquet. Some of them are weird and gangly and have thorns for a reason. They have character.”
She glanced at the flytrap, now sitting forlornly in a plastic pot. “He loves the weird ones most of all.”
She took a shaky breath, the confession sitting heavy on her tongue.
“And the shop is failing. The neighborhood’s changed. People want cheap bouquets from the grocery store, not a hand-potted succulent from a crazy old man who talks to his plants. He’s poured his entire life into that place, and it’s about to disappear. He’s too proud to admit it, but I see the bills piling up on his desk.”
Her throat tightened.
“The prize money from this show… it’s not for me. It’s for him. It’s to fix the leaky roof, to pay off his suppliers, to give him a fighting chance. So when I’m in here, fighting for a flower that’s dark and strange… it’s because that’s what The Root Cellar is. It’s not pretty or perfect. It’s real. And I am so, so terrified of letting him down.”
The confession hung in the air between them, fragile and raw. They were two sides of the same coin.
He was running from a legacy that was suffocating him; she was fighting to save one that was dying.
Julian walked over to her side of the bench. He didn’t say anything. He just gently picked up the Venus flytrap. He studied its alien form, the spiny-fringed traps held open like a silent promise of violence.
“A first date,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “Nervous. A little dangerous. The possibility of getting devoured.”
He looked up at her, and for the first time, she saw not a rival, but a fellow artist. He saw her. “I get it now. I was wrong. It’s a brilliant metaphor.”
A warmth bloomed in Rev’s chest, chasing away some of the cold anxiety. She gave him a small, genuine smile. “They have their own kind of romance.”
“They do,” he agreed, setting the pot down carefully.
They finished cleaning in a new kind of silence. It was no longer a weapon, but a space for contemplation.
They moved around each other with an unspoken understanding, passing brooms and wiping down counters in a comfortable, easy rhythm.
The war was over. A fragile truce had been signed.
As they stood by the door, ready to leave the pristine, silent studio, Julian paused. “Rev,” he said, his tone serious. “For what it’s worth… your grandfather is lucky to have you fighting for him.”
“You, too,” she replied, surprising herself. “Your family, I mean. They’d be lucky to see what you could really create, if they’d just get out of your way.”
He nodded, a flicker of something like hope in his eyes.
They walked out into the cool night air, not as enemies, but as two people who had just discovered they were both tending to gardens under impossible conditions, each just trying to help something beautiful survive.