Free Love Blooms on Main Street by Olivia Miles

notch on a bedpost.
    With most of the men in her past, they hadn’t revealed their true colors until after it was too late—after she’d already fallen in love and slept with them. Oh, she supposed there were warning signs, looking back. Like Craig, who saw her only once a week and never told her what he did with the other six nights. Or Lance, who was completely reluctant about quitting the co-ed volleyball team… or letting her join. And then of course there had been the last guy she’d “dated” nearly two years ago, who, after six months and what she thought was the start of something real, hadn’t invited her to have dinner with his parents when they came to town.
    She’d been hurt every time, but she was determined not to give up the hope that she would find one guy who was looking for the same thing: a nice, quiet life in Briar Creek and a family to come home to at the end of every day. She hadn’t had that chance for the first half of her life. Was it so much to wish for it now?
    And all along, in the back of her mind, whenever another date turned into a bust, whenever another guy gave her the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech, she thought of the one man she knew who seemed so different from the rest. The one man who just had to go and move to Baltimore.
    The one man who had turned out to be no different than the others.
    â€œThey’re all the same,” her mother used to say bitterly, when Ivy confessed her latest dating woes. At the time, she’d tried to shut the words out, tell herself that she wouldn’t end up like her mother, that she’d meet a nice, sweet man and have a cozy, comfortable life.
    But now she began to wonder… Was it even possible?
    The kettle whistled in the small kitchen at the back of her apartment, and Ivy crossed the cramped living room to the sun-filled galley space where her favorite hand-painted floral mug was already on the counter. She grazed her thumb over the chip as she turned the stove knob with the other hand. When their mother had passed away last summer, Ivy had kept few things from the house before they sold it: the photo albums from when she and Henry were babies up through age five, when their grandmother and keeper of the albums had died. A few of her favorite childhood books that kept her company on those nights when her mother had one too many glasses of Cab. And this dainty porcelain mug with the sweet little petunias painted on in a variety of colors—chipped, but not ruined, and too pretty to part with.
    She’d loved flowers for as long as she could remember. She loved the symmetry of the petals, the way they could transform even the dreariest of rooms. And their house had been dreary. Damp and cold and uninviting. Flowers always made it better. She’d light up at the pastels, at the sunny yellows and vibrant reds. Every season brought something new, something to cheer up a room, something to evoke the spirit of a holiday, even if holidays were never celebrated much in their home growing up. Henry had stepped up, she realized as she grew older. Even though they were twins, he had always looked out for her in that way—tucking aside money and buying gifts for Christmas or their birthday in case their mother forgot, which she often did. She smiled sadly as she carefully filled her mug with the steaming water. She supposed he still was looking out for her.
    Ivy let the tea steep and carried it back into the living room, which was so very different from the dark and gray house she’d grown up in. What money she had, she tended to put into the shop, but just as with Petals on Main, she made her small apartment her personal jewelry box, with long, brightly colored curtains to frame the tall windows that looked out onto Main Street, a crisp white slip-covered couch with patterned throw pillows, and soothing celery-green walls that made her think of springtime, even in the winter.