a/n: I'm resetting the way I count to 6 roses because I was getting confused.
All the good things belong to Monolith Soft, but the station and the crew are mine.
Lila put Jack's roses in the cleanest bucket she could find and plunked them down on her office steps. It looked horrible, and she didn't care. She wasn't going to hide them in her office where she couldn't see them. This way, she could glance over at them whenever she had a spare second. She needed a reason to smile on a day like today. Her station was filling in for an unexpected and extended partial shutdown of the main hangar, and her whole crew had been running flat out for three days.
The sun had just set (or whatever it did; Lila wasn't clear how it worked on Mira) when an official technician bounced over to announce that repairs had finished earlier than expected. Lila almost wept with relief. Then she started sending her people home. Ricky Bobby and Twyleth first, because they were the least useful today, always stopping to hold hands and whisper strange endearments to each other. Then Case, to get supper and a shower, but with the promise that the kid would return to help with closing. Which left her and Gino to deal with the sudden lack of customers.
She walked over to the waiting area, next to the office, where Gino was sprawled in a tatty lawn chair usually reserved for BLADEs waiting to have their skells refueled. "Got any plans for tonight?"
"Couldn't make any, could I? What with you trying to single-handedly do the hangar's business."
"Never again," Lila swore. "I'm not even sure whether we'll get paid our regular rate or the official ECP rate. Ah, the things we do for love of this city." She paused to stroke a pink petal.
Gino made gagging noises. "Spare me the mushy stuff. Man, Lila, I did not need to hear the two of you making out on a skell today. You sounded like two fish smacking together. Bleeeeechhhhhh!" He twisted in his chair. "Then you decorated him like some discount waiter with that dumb flower on his shirt." He gagged some more.
Lila ignored the criticism. "I'm good on my own until closing. Why don't you ping your girlfriend and see if you can hang out?"
"Don't got no girlfriend."
"Pull the other one. Neesae. Tall, braids, fiercest nails in NLA. Ring a bell?"
"If I call her tonight, I'm sunk like junk. I'm praying she still thinks I'm working a 24 hour shift."
"Something happened?" Lila asked with concern.
"Valentine's Day happened. A guy can't call and say, 'Hey, wanna hang?' on Valentine's."
"So do something nice. Get her a gift or something." Lila's face turned positively goofy as she looked at her flowers.
Gino shot a deadly look at Lila. "Get a gift. On Valentine's Day. There ain't a single thing worth giving left in the city."
"There must be something."
He shot to his feet, waving his hands wildly. "Don't you think I looked?! I hit every place I could run to during that sorry excuse for a lunch break you gave us. Every place! I even went into that creepy toy shop, and even there they were out of anything remotely less than gross. My options are down to giving her a gift certificate for pizza or a handful of the skell air fresheners we sell."
"The strawlenny ones smell nice."
"No way in …"
Gino would have elaborated in a very colorful (and non K+) way, but Lila laid a hand on his arm and hissed to him to be quiet. The freight elevator was rumbling down, and she had recognized its sole passenger. Without considering what she was doing, she snatched 5 of the flowers out of the bucket and shoved them into his hands.
"Go. Go go go go go! Don't say I never had your back." She pushed him towards the elevator and held her breath. When she saw him pass over the flowers, she relaxed, picked up the remaining blossom and wandered off with a head full of kind wishes and romantic fluff.
a/n: Rather like the author's head at times. Shrug. Write what you know, they say. I seem to know about gas stations.
Next up: Gino.
