19
Olli organized, cleaned, scrubbed, and polished, her tears dormant. She let her anger drive her to get the perfumery spic and span. When it was spotless, she stood back, her gloves hanging from a couple of fingers.
In the morning, she’d return and put out the fresh flowers she’d cut from her garden. The three new scents she’d developed for next quarter sat on the end of the table nearest to the entrance, and she was ready to show them all to Frank Renlund.
She had note cards she’d go over in the morning one last time, and she had a new speech she needed to prepare. Surely Frank would ask her about her boyfriend or husband, and she needed to be assertive without being defensive.
She nodded to the perfumery, as it was all she had left. Turning away from the sterile room, she left the building and headed home. After tossing the gloves in the trashcan, Olli washed up in the kitchen sink, scrubbing all the way to her elbows.
She looked out the window above the sink, the lights at the ranch twinkling. A sob gathered in her stomach and grew. When it was too big to hold back, it surged up her throat and out of her mouth. She spun away from the lights and sank to the floor, everything she felt for Spur flowing through her.
He’d sat right on her steps and admitted how he felt about her. She’d never told him in so many words, but she’d thought her actions had shown him how she felt. She could hear his voice in her head, so demanding and so desperate to know how she felt about him.
“Of course your opinion is important,” she said amidst her tears. “It’s the only one I care about.” She could make him a personal cologne, but if she wanted to sell the masses of male cologne wearers, it was smart business to do a test panel. “Why didn’t he understand that?”
The better question was why Olli hadn’t just walked away without breaking up with him. “You always take things one step too far,” she told herself, her self-loathing combining with the fact that she’d failed again.
She cried right there in the kitchen, wishing her cat wasn’t a hermit or that she had a dog to come lick her salty tears from her face. When her tailbone ached and her legs had started to go numb, she got to her feet and headed down the hall to her bedroom.
She lit her Serenity candle and placed it on her nightstand. She changed into her pajamas and used the body spray she hadn’t released to the public yet. It was called Sleep, and she’d infused it with lavender, jasmine, and warm vanilla.
Most people didn’t know there was a difference between warm vanilla and cold vanilla, but Olli knew. Other things produced a rounder, more whole scent when warmed, and she always toasted almonds and cinnamon before infusing them into oils.
Almonds were not very pleasing, and Olli had given up using nuts of any kind in her concoctions.
She picked up the tester bottle of cologne she’d made for her demo tomorrow and spritzed her pillow with it. While that dried, she went through her nightly routine, hating looking into her bloodshot eyes and seeing her wet eyelashes. When her skin was clean and her teeth brushed, she exhaled heavily as she climbed into bed.
She took an extra pillow from the other side of the bed and hugged it as she rolled onto her side, her misery complete and endless. The notes of Spur’s cologne—literally a cologne she’d created and named after him—floated into her nose and reminded her so much of the man she’d started to fall in love with.
She wasn’t sure how she fell asleep, but the next thing she knew, her alarm woke her.
“It’s Saturday,” a woman’s voice chirped. “Time to get up and make this weekend the best one yet.”
She reached over and swiped off the alarm, which was a thirty-second snippet of a wellness podcast that repeated if she didn’t turn it off in time. She always turned it off on time, as she wasn’t a very heavy sleeper.
She went through the motions of getting ready for the day. Ginny had laid out her clothes days ago, and she stepped into the navy blue pencil skirt and bright purple blouse. The silk flowed around her arms and hid her extra weight. She’d cover it with a white jacket that would give her polish and class, but she didn’t need to wear that until the last minute.
She stepped into a tasteful pair of navy heels and clicked her way into the kitchen to make coffee. She draped her jacket over the back of a dining room chair and went over her notecards while her coffee brewed. She sipped half a cup before her stomach told her to stop as it was boiling enough already.
Armed with the vase of flowers she’d arranged yesterday, her notes, and her jacket, she went to the perfumery. She made sure everything was sitting just-so, and she stood back and snapped a couple of pictures of the room to send to Ginny.
Her carefully constructed happiness stared back at her on her screen, and she wanted to scream and start throwing the nearest objects she could get her hands on.
That’s beautiful!Ginny sent back. Good luck today. I can’t wait to hear all about it.
Olli couldn’t wait to tell her about it. She looked up after confirming that she’d call as soon as she could, and she found herself wishing she didn’t have to handle or entertain Frank Renlund alone. If she’d known that from the beginning, she’d be ready, but she’d been counting on Spur being at her side.
“It’s your fault,” she whispered, and the clean perfumery seemed to capture the words and echo them back to her.
She couldn’t stand the thought of him being hurt and upset, and she knew he’d be both. Spur was a big man, but that only meant he felt big things too. He possessed a big heart to go with those hands she loved so much, and she spun and went outside, the air inside the perfumery suddenly too heavy and too full of the wrong scents.
She pulled in breath after breath until she calmed down. She brushed her hair off her forehead, hoping she hadn’t ruined the gentle wave she’d put in it that morning. She hadn’t cried, so she knew her makeup was still flawless.
An alarm sounded on her phone, and she straightened her spine and her shoulders. “You can do this,” she said. “You opened this perfumery with eight scents and three hundred dollars in the bank.”
In the past seven years, sometimes her bank account had been lower than that. Olli had dug in and worked harder. She ran sales on her perfumes to get more product out into the world. She learned online ads and started profiting more and more.
She’d fixed up the old equipment shed on her property, turning it into the perfumery over the course of a year as she continued to work out of her kitchen and save money for the renovations. She’d never looked back.