“You’re likable and worthy of gifts,” she says, and I scrunch my face.
“It’s not that.”
“You’re also doing him a favor.”
I sigh and look away, over the blisteringly green horizon, stuffed with grass and trees and mountains, humidity rising in waves even though it’s late Tuesday afternoon and the sun won’t be up much longer.
You think we can’t make him beg?Silas asked, yesterday, the darkness of his voice at stark odds with the fluorescent brightness of my office and fuck, fuck, why am I still thinking about that? Why does that thought feel like it settles somewhere at the base of my spine, warm and electric?
“I also don’t like the roses because now everyone in the office is going to see them and want to talk to me about them and tell me how they’re soooo sweet and soooo nice and I’m soooo lucky to have such a great boyfriend,” I start.
“Your office is mostly guys in their mid-twenties who live in their parents’ basements and wouldn’t notice flowers on a desk if their lives depended on it,” Anna Grace counters.
“Rude,” I tell her, but I’m grinning. “My team is very perceptive and only some of them live in basements.”
I don’t actually know where most of my programmers live. They’re my coworkers, not my friends.
“So you hate the attention,” Anna Grace says, and whacks another golf ball. “What else?”
Soar, bounce.
“Do you ever aim for the guy driving around out there in the golf cart?” I ask.
“Of course not,” she says, but she’s grinning.
“I do.”
“Well, you’re an asshole.”
“I’ve never actually hit him.”
“Wow, really? With your swing?”
“My swing is fine, thanks.”
Anna Grace doesn’t dignify that with a response, even though it’s true. My dad and grandfather are both very into golf, so I’ve played my fair share of it, even though I’m decidedly fine at best.
“The roses make me suspicious that he’s setting me up for some sort of public humiliation,” I finally admit.
Anna Grace, God love her, doesn’t roll her eyes and tell me that I’m being paranoid, or that I’m crazy, or that it’s a completely ridiculous thought to have even though any of those things might be justified. Instead, she gives me another thoughtful look under her visor.
“I know,” I say, answering all the things she didn’t say.
“Do you think you feel that way because of him, or because of you?” she finally asks.
I huff, pretending to be annoyed, and lean back against the rail behind me.
“I told you about the six pack, right?” I say.
She plucks another ball, lines up the shot, gives me a look.
“Yeah, you’ve mentioned it once or twice,” she says, which definitely means I’ve told her the story about Silas trying to bribe me with cheap beer a thousand times.
“He was a nightmare,” I go on, mostly to defend myself. “He was drunk half the time and a disruptive jackass all the time, and then when he failed the class he tried to gaslight me with his whole ‘traumatized war veteran’ shtick in front of the professor and my thesis advisor and the dean.”
A few stalls away, a white man with gray hair shoots me a glare, so I duck under cover of my visor and clear my throat as Anna Grace hits another ball.
“There are channels,” I hiss, even though I know Anna Grace is well aware of everything I’m about to say. “You can’t just bring that shit up after you’ve already failed a class.”