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“A flower? Delmon, you must realize there's no point in me keeping this in my room,” Tamsy had sighed but Delmon insisted, his loud voice reverberated around the hall and his face was flushed a deep crimson.
“You can't give it back! It's a gift! It's…” Here Delmon made a pause that surprised both Tamsy and a very bored Semiu, who kept sneaking glances at them from behind the receptionist’s desk. With her glasses on, she could see into the deepest recesses of the mind. Although it didn't take a mind reader to tell what was going on in Delmon's head.
It was the anniversary of his wife's death and, coincidentally, the anniversary of Tamsy joining the cleaners — for his own nefarious reasons but that was neither here nor there.
Tamsy thought of something to say but Delmon pushed the potted daffodil onto Tamsy's chest, and he instinctively grabbed it so as not to let it fall. For once, the gentle giant wasn't loud. Standing as straight as a soldier, he took off his straw hat and —entirely red in the face— bowed his head slightly. “It reminded me of you! I… Please don't write me off just yet!”
This last part he did say (yelled) in his usual register before bolting, his heavy steps quickly leading him away from the reception.
Tamsy shot Semiu a tight smile, not even pretending to conceal his distaste, for once. Semiu's shoulders trembled and she hid her face behind one of her raunchy magazines but it was obvious she could barely hold her laughter in.
Now, Tamsy's first thought was to smash the pot against the tiled floor and watch it collapse into a million little pieces — earth and clay covering the entirety of the space around him. Alas, that would be entirely out of character for him to do so he just mumbled his goodbye and retired to his room for the day.
Safe in that confined space, he could have easily disposed of the potted daffodil without anyone's knowledge but… Truth be told, Tamsy had been messing around with Delmon for some time now. The reactions he got out of him were always hilarious — What do you mean Delmon was weak to Tamsy's bare back? Well, he found about it that one time he asked Delmon to unzip a black top he'd gotten on purpose. To rile his partner up.
It was no wonder someone as sexless as Delmon — who hadn't had any kind of intimacy with anyone after his wife died— would confuse Tamsy's game with real, honest affection.
“Unrequited love, that's what you mean in the language of flowers,” Tamsy informed the lone daffodil, barely surviving in its pot cage before leaving it on the far end of the desk, away from his antique radio and nowhere near his precious Tokushin. “Of course, Delmon couldn't have known that when he chose to save you from whatever forgotten pocket of the Ground he got sent to on his solo mission.”
Tamsy untied his hair, blond and blue strands cascading freely down his back. He put on his pajamas and his slippers, turning on his radio. A classical song played in the background as he debated with himself whether to water the daffodil now or later — drown it in Tamsy's love.
“It's a forgotten language. Only a select few up there are fluent in it,” he went on to inform the poor plant sitting on his desk, in his room, where its chances of survival were at an all time low.
Tamsy stared at it again, his face blank. Thoughts of destruction plagued his mind but he, eventually, shook his head. No, no, that wasn't wise. Even if they were tempting. Tamsy sighed as he changed the station, headbanging to a deathcore song and grateful for the insulated walls. It wouldn't do to kill the poor thing, he still planned to have Delmon over sometime soon. He wasn't quite done playing with him. Not by a longshot.