The email arrived the next morning.
Beto saw the notification while opening the shop, his hands still smelling of fertilizer and his body weighed down by a restless night. He unlocked the door, turned on the lights, and stood there staring at his phone as if it might bite.
Sender: C. Monteiro. Subject: Arrangement for Corporate Event.
Professional. Cold. Not a comma out of place. The kind of email a stranger would send.
Beto read it twice. Specifications for the arrangement, delivery date, office address. Not a single personal word. No “how are you?” No sign that the man had been there the night before, standing among the roses, his eyes saying everything his mouth refused to.
He locked his phone. Put it in his apron pocket. Went to water the plants.
His hands were trembling again.
He replied at noon, after rewriting it four times. Kept the tone professional. Confirmed the arrangement. Provided the price. Signed it “Sincerely, Alberto Reis — Flor & Raiz.”
Alberto. Not Beto. Because Beto was the name Caio whispered in the dark, and that Beto no longer existed.
Or shouldn’t exist.
The week passed the way a fever does—slow, sticky, full of chills that came without warning. Beto worked. Put together arrangements, served customers, smiled. His usual smile. The one that worked on everyone.
But at night, alone in the apartment above the shop, the bond wouldn’t leave him in peace.
It pulsed. Not like before—not like the dull ache of the last five years, that constant hum he’d learned to treat as background noise. Now it was different. Since their reunion, the bond had woken up hungry. It sent waves of heat through his chest at the most inconvenient hours. Made his heart race when Beto was almost asleep. Brought the scent of cedar and coffee like a hallucination that wouldn’t fade.
On Wednesday, Beto dropped a vase because a stab of pain hit his chest so hard he lost his balance. He crouched on the shop floor among the shards and spilled soil, breathing slowly and waiting for it to pass.
It didn’t.
On Thursday, he couldn’t eat. His stomach closed up, and his whole body seemed to vibrate at the wrong frequency, like an out-of-tune instrument trying to play a song that only made sense to two people.
Friday morning, he looked in the mirror and didn’t recognize himself. His dark circles had deepened. His lips were dry. The light eyes everyone said were beautiful looked dull, like flowers cut too long ago.
But it was Friday. And Friday was delivery day.
He put the arrangement together carefully. Chose each flower as if he were writing a letter no one would read—white dahlias for the elegance the event called for, eucalyptus branches for freshness, and at the center, almost hidden, a sprig of rosemary. Because rosemary meant memory. And because Beto couldn’t stop himself from adding it.
He wrapped everything up. Put it in the car. Drove to the office address.
The building was exactly the kind of place Caio belonged in and Beto didn’t. Glass, steel, thirty stories of stacked ambition. Beto parked in the delivery spot, picked up the arrangement, and entered through the service entrance.
He wasn’t going to see him. It was just a delivery. Leave it at reception, get the signature, go.
The receptionist smiled, checked the order, and asked him to wait while she found someone to sign for it. Beto stood in the lobby, holding the arrangement against his chest like a shield, trying not to breathe too deeply because the building’s air conditioning carried a trace—a faint, diluted, but unmistakable trace—of cedar.
He was here. Somewhere on a floor above, behind some door, Caio was breathing the same air.
The bond noticed before Beto did. It heated up. Pulled. Like a fishhook buried in the middle of his chest.
—Beto?
The voice came from behind him. It wasn’t Caio’s.
Beto turned around. A man around his age, dark-haired, with an easy smile, wearing a suit without a tie. Familiar in a way that took three seconds to click.
—Lucas?
Lucas Monteiro. Caio’s younger brother. The last time Beto had seen him, he’d been an awkward twenty-year-old college student in a band T-shirt and sneakers with holes in them. Now he was standing there, an adult, in the same firm, with the same last name on the door.
—Man. —Lucas opened his arms, genuinely surprised. —How long has it been? Five years?
Five years. The number that measured everything.
—More or less —Beto said, and the smile that appeared was almost real. Almost. Because Lucas had never done anything wrong. Lucas was the Monteiro who laughed loudly, showed up with beer without warning, who had once told Beto, drunk at a party, that he was the best thing that had ever happened to his brother.
Before.
—You’re making a delivery? Wait, is this flower shop yours? —Lucas looked at the arrangement, then at Beto, and something changed in his face. Something quick, which he tried to hide. —Caio ordered from you?
The question carried weight. Beto felt it.
—It’s professional —he said, because it was the only safe answer.
Lucas opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at the elevator, then at Beto, and made a visible decision.
—Come on. I’ll take you to the event room. I’ll show you around the firm while we’re at it.
—You don’t have to. I can just leave it here at—
—Beto. —Lucas lowered his voice. The smile disappeared. And in his eyes, Beto saw something he recognized with painful precision: concern. —Come with me. Please.
Beto went.
They rode up in silence. The elevator smelled of coffee and paper and that cedar undertone, growing stronger with every floor. Beto held the arrangement with both hands and tried to keep his breathing steady.
On the twelfth floor, the doors opened.
And Caio was in the hallway.
Standing still. Folder in hand. Jacket draped over one arm. Returning from some meeting with the expression of a man carrying the weight of an entire building on his shoulders.
His eyes met Beto’s, and the world did that thing again—it stopped, contracted, narrowed down to two bodies and an invisible thread stretched between them.
The arrangement in Beto’s hands trembled.
Caio looked at his brother. Then at Beto. Then at the arrangement. His jaw locked.
—Lucas —he said, and the name came out like a warning.
—He came to deliver the arrangement —Lucas replied lightly, as if he couldn’t feel the hallway’s temperature drop ten degrees. —I thought it would be good for him to see where it’s going to be. For future reference.
A lie. All three of them knew it.
Caio took one step forward. Just one. His eyes never left Beto, and in them was something Beto couldn’t decipher—anger, fear, hunger, all mixed together in a darkness pulsing to the rhythm of the bond.
—Thank you for the delivery —Caio said. His voice was controlled. Professional. Dead. —You can leave it at reception.
—Caio —Lucas began.
—At reception, Lucas.
Silence.
Beto felt his chest tighten. The bond screamed. Screamed at him to stay, to touch him, to say something, anything. But Beto knew that tone. That tone was the wall. That tone was Caio saying, “Go before I can’t make you leave anymore.”
—Of course —Beto said. His voice came out steady. Almost. —Excuse me.
He turned around. Pressed the elevator button. Waited.
He felt Caio’s gaze on his back like a burn.
The doors opened. Beto stepped inside. He turned to press the button for the ground floor, and in that half second before the doors closed, he saw.
Caio was still standing in the same place. He hadn’t moved. And the hand holding the folder was trembling.
The doors closed.
Beto went down twelve floors alone, the arrangement in his arms and the scent of rosemary rising from the flowers like a prayer no one would hear.
He left the arrangement at reception. Walked out of the building. Got into the car.
And only then, with his hands on the steering wheel and his forehead resting against it, did he let his body do what it had been holding back all week.
He didn’t cry. He had no tears left for that.
He simply stayed there, breathing, while the bond pulsed like a second heart—hungry, exhausted, and completely, irrevocably bound to someone who couldn’t stay.