Lovely Sad

Poppy’s once clean desktop had been transformed into a makeshift war zone of paint samples, polaroid photos, blueprints, pictures torn from glossy magazine pages and fabric samplings. She was overwhelmed already and she hadn’t even begun working on the actual house yet. Candice Palmer had arrived to Poppy’s office nearly an hour late, introduced herself and dropped this pile of what Poppy deemed absolute crap onto the desk before launching into the million and one ideas she had for her new house. She had been warned this was typical behaviour of socialites like Candice, so Poppy just sat back and let her talk, nodding occasionally to signal she was paying attention to all of these ideas that were being thrown at her. Personally, all of the paints and fabrics clashed and Candice kept describing everything she wanted as ‘modern contemporary,’ but Poppy wasn’t entirely convinced this girl even knew what that term implied. She must have read it in a magazine before tearing out a picture of an entirely black and white bathroom from its glossy pages and decided to run with it.

“Do you do backyards too? Or should we be hiring another landscaper for that?” Poppy opened her mouth to answer, but Candice just continued talking. “I mean, not to, like, design the pool, I’ve already done that. But I mean, like, to place a couple chairs by the pool. And a cabana. Maybe an outdoor living room type of deal. Definitely a large grill, Adrian loves to grill. Right?”

Her fiance, Adrian, spoke for the first time as he concurred with Candice.

“Yes, we can do that as well. We’ll actually work closely with the contractors to make sure it all comes together perfectly.”

“Lovely!” Candice exclaimed, clapping her hands together in excitement. “Our dream house is finally coming together!”

Poppy just smiled politely at the woman, doing her best to hide just how overwhelmed by the whole situation she was. While the pile of stuff on Poppy’s desk and Candice’s constant talking and pushiness wasn’t helping, it wasn’t exactly the cause of Poppy’s internal crisis. The root of the problem was about 6 feet tall with salt and pepper hair and had only spoken about 4 words since arriving to Poppy’s office. Seated in one of the chairs on the other side of Poppy’s desk, his hands were folded casually in his lap, occasionally tearing his gaze away from Poppy to glance over at his fiancee as she spoke.

How could Poppy have been so stupid? The contract for her new clients was proposed and signed under Candice’s name, with no mention of who her fiancee was besides a wealthy doctor in Flagstaff who had left the Phoenix area quite abruptly a few years earlier, but was now itching to return to the Valley. Candice came from a pretty wealthy family herself, so a simple background check would have informed Poppy who the other half of the client was. There were probably dozens of online engagement announcements for the pair, and if she had taken the time to look them up she probably wouldn’t have been so caught off guard and helpless in this situation. She made a mental note to use this as her defensive argument for Bridget when she finished googling her blind date later.

Adrian’s eyes were now firmly fixed on Poppy as she began to say a silent prayer that the floor would open up and just swallow her whole at the moment. But evidently whatever greater power there is has quite a sick sense of humour, as Candice’s phone began to ring and she quickly got up to excuse herself for a moment. Poppy had no choice but to look up at the mean seated across from her, his gaze still fixed on her as an awkward silence settled around the pair who were now entirely alone in the room.

As the glass door shut behind Candice, Poppy could have sworn she saw the slightest of smirks make their way across Adrian’s face.

“Now that I can get a word in,” He began, clearly attempting to introduce a little bit of humour to the tense room, “how are you doing, Pops?”

She was caught off guard at the use of a nickname, stuttering out a quick “Good.”

“Boy, was I pleasantly surprised when Candice mentioned she had hired you for the new house.” So he knew who he was going to be working with and didn’t mention it or make any motion to stop it? “I knew it had to be you. I mean, what are the chances of two Poppy Rae’s decorating houses out of Phoenix?”

Poppy stayed pretty quiet, just nodding her head as he continued to talk. She was watching Candice out of the corner of her eye through the glass wall that looked out to the rest of the office, every nerve in her body on edge that Candice was about to walk back in at any moment and hear this conversation.

“I’ve never known you to be so quiet.” He chuckled, the sound of his laugh making Poppy’s stomach turn.

“I don’t really know what to say, I guess.” Poppy was never one to get nervous or be at a loss for words. This entire meeting had ripped her out of her comfort zone and thrown her into what she now considered her worst nightmare. “I guess I wasn’t sure if you…” She paused trying to think of how to word what she was thinking. Was there a polite way to tell someone you had secretly hoped they had completely forgotten you existed and were now devastated to learn that not only did they remember you, but they found the whole situation to be hilarious and you were now going to probably be seeing each other everyday for at least the next couple months. She settled for shrugging her shoulder lamely. Yeah, that definitely got the same message across.

“Of course I remember you, Poppy.” He laughed again, shaking his head. “It was a divorce, not a head injury.”

“Right.” Poppy replied slowly, looking back up to see Candice was still pacing outside her office and talking animatedly to whoever was on the other end of the phone.

“About Candice though,” He started, gesturing over his shoulder to his new fiancee, “she gets jealous pretty easily, so let’s keep our little fling between just us. Ok?”

That pulled Poppy out of her trance, tearing her eyes from Candice and glaring across at Adrian. “Fling?” She questioned, “We were married for-“

She was cut short as her office door opened and Candice poked her head in, phone still pressed to her ear. Poppy bit her tongue as Adrian just smiled at her before turning around in his chair to look at his fiancee.

“My mom’s moved her flight up so we need to go get her from the airport now. We have to go.” Adrian nodded, standing from his chair. “We’ll see you later this week to talk some more.”

“Yeah, looking forward to working with you.” Adrian called over his shoulder with the slightest hint of a laugh in his voice as the pair left Poppy’s office.

When the pair finally disappeared from Poppy’s view, she reached under her desk to pull out a small box and carelessly shoved the pile of fabrics and magazine clippings into it before setting it on the floor out of the way. She’d go through it later and see if there were any ideas she could salvage, but at first glance it all seemed like crap and she knew Candice would hate it if she saw all those ideas thrown together in real life. The surface of her desk was now clear and free for Poppy to lay her head down, eyes firmly shut in hopes she could wish away this morning and erase either the meeting that had just taken place or the fact that she had thought it was a good idea to get married at 22 to a man 10 years her senior.

Finally lifting her head off of her desk, the clock placed beside her computer told her it was just a little bit after 10am, far too early in the morning for a drink. So she settled for picking up her cell phone from where it had been pushed aside and forgotten about on the far corner of her desk in order to call and rant to Bridget. She could almost hear her best friend’s mocking laughter as she flipped the phone over and swiped her thumb across the screen to unlock it. Bridget always got a kick out of the awful situations Poppy found herself in.

Unlocking the phone it opened back up to her conversation with John that she had not had the chance to exit out of before Candice and Adrian had abruptly entered her office. Only this time there were now two new messages from her potential blind date.

’Is tonight too soon to ask you out for drinks?’ Her eyes scanned across the first message, momentarily taken aback by his forwardness. According to Bridget and Melissa he was shy and usually came off as timid around girls, but this text didn’t seem like that all.

The time stamp on the message indicated he had sent it just as Candice and Adrian had arrived, the following message after that arriving about 45 minutes after that.

’Sorry, that was kind of pushy. I didn’t mean to freak you out or anything.’

Poppy laughed a bit, tapping on the small text box at the bottom of the conversation to type back a reply. That message seemed a bit more in character with how John had been described to her.

’Sorry, I was caught in a meeting! Drinks tonight sound great, John.’

Being confronted by your ex-husband and his new fiancee was hardly the kind of thing to put anyone in the mood to go on a date, but alcohol sounded like a great idea, and she knew Bridget wouldn’t agree to go out with her. Not that Poppy hadn’t tried previously, but Bridget consistently declined, giving some excuse about how she was a teacher and couldn’t be showing up to classes hungover. Ironic, because the pair had gone to college together at the University of Arizona down in Tucson, and Poppy knew for a fact that Bridget had earned her entire degree by showing up to classes hungover every day.

Tucson had been where Poppy originally met Adrian, running into him at a bar in her freshman year the same night she had just gotten her first fake ID. She was 18 and immediately smitten over the fact that this wealthy doctor, fresh out of med school and beginning his residency at a hospital in the area, was interested in her. He was older, financially stable, and in Poppy’s opinion, gorgeous. She became the envy of all her friends as her and Adrian became more serious, and by the time her graduation came around, Adrian was finishing up his residency and had been offered a full-time job at a clinic in Phoenix. As soon as she finished her senior year, Poppy and Adrian made the two hour move up north to Phoenix, stopping and eloping along the way.

But about as quickly as the honeymoon started it came to just as abrupt of an end. Poppy then found herself selling her, now useless, wedding ring back to a local jewellery shop and using the money to put a security deposit down on an apartment with Bridget. She had just moved up to Phoenix as well after completing teacher’s college and Adrian was long gone to Flagstaff to open his own clinic. Now apparently he was engaged to a wealthy socialite and hiring the girl he had left behind in his wake to decorate their new dream home, despite not making any attempt to contact her in the nearly three years that had elapsed since cutting all ties with her initially. She could very easily call up Candice and cancel the job, and the problem would be solved and she could go back to pretending the marriage had never happened in the first place. It’s what she usually did, and outside of her parents and Bridget she couldn’t think of anyone else off the top of her head who actually knew about Poppy’s brief walk down the aisle.

It wasn’t that she had feelings for Adrian still, she just didn’t want to be around him anymore. He was an unnecessary complication she didn’t need in her life at the moment.

But cancelling the whole job just as a precaution to prevent anyone from finding out about her marital mistake seemed a little too drastic. She really needed this job, and the future of her newly independent design firm kind of depended on it. Candice Palmer was going to either make or break Poppy’s career, so she was going to just have to suck it up and hope Candice wouldn’t figure out about her history with Adrian. Poppy figured she probably wouldn’t take too kindly to that news, and Poppy would more than likely be out of a job instantly in that scenario.

The vibration of her phone brought Poppy back to the real world, unlocking her phone to read the latest message from John.

’Does the White Chocolate Grill work for you? Say 8 o’clock?’

Poppy had never been before, but the name seemed relatively familiar.

’Do they have tequila?” After her falter in confidence this morning in front of Adrian, Poppy was finally getting back to her normal self.

’A full bar, I promise.’ Came John’s reply almost instantly.

’Then that works perfectly for me.’

’Awesome. Thinking of tequila this early in the morning, though.. rough day at the office?’

Poppy laughed to herself, unsure of where to even begin with an answer to that one. Dropping the ex-husband and his new fiancee story seemed a little to forward for a blind date she had yet to even meet. Instead, she settled for a simple ’You have no idea’ before locking her phone, and setting it back down onto her desk. She grabbed her notebook planner out of the top drawer in her desk, focused on getting back to work after all of the distractions this morning brought her. She flipped to today’s date, folding the corner of the page down to bookmark it for future use.

Now she just needed to figure out a plan in order to get her through the next week with Candice and Adrian, one day at a time.