Sunlight Held Like a Whisper

The rain had just stopped bleeding off the awning when I walked in, and the whole shop exhaled a warm, humid breath against my bare shoulders. Sunflowers—God, so many of them—glowing like sodium lamps trapped in glass. I pressed the stems to my chest and felt the petals pulse, slow as a heartbeat I was trying to remember.
He was behind the counter, wiping a vase, and the neon sign from the bar across the street bled pink through the window onto his jaw. He looked up, and something humid and electric slid between us, a pheromone fog neither of us had agreed to breathe. "You bought them for someone?" he asked, voice low, blurred at the edges like my vision.
"For myself," I whispered, smiling until it hurt. "The city kept taking the warmth from me. These are just... proof that sunlight still knows where to land."
He didn't sell me a single flower. He just set two more in a vase and slid them across the counter, his fingers brushing mine, leaving a ghost-heat I carried home through the wet streets. That night, the sunflowers on my kitchen table glowed like small neon hearts, and for the first time in months, I was not just surviving the dark—I was being healed by it.

Editor: Midnight Neon