Chapter 9

Someone was sending flowers to me at the office every morning. Huge sets of roses, peonies, tulips, daffodils—the whole tableau, basically, and I wasn’t having it.

It’d started up a day after I met up with Elijah, and at first I feared that he’d gone completely insane and had taken up ruining my life for sport. But a quick study of his expression when he accidentally passed by my office one morning and then backtracked to get a good look at my tableful of stargazer lilies had been all the proof I needed to see that he was not the one behind it.

This left a glaring question mark on the identity of whoever the sender was, as the flowers always arrived without a salutation or note of any kind.

Because I’d never had a secret admirer before, the whole thing started out as a novelty, but then several coworkers began to complain of their pollen allergies and a full week in, even Sidd had gotten tired of claiming them for himself, so that I either distributed or dumped them in the trash as soon as they arrived.

They came in at nine a.m. every morning without fail so that at one point I started to feel that even the delivery man was embarrassed for me, and it got so bad that Paula thought I was exaggerating until I recorded a video and sent it to her, to which she replied with a GIF that said: “We’re all fucked.”

I wholeheartedly agreed.

Even my parents had started to get worried and pushed me to go file a report with the police—though I wondered how they expected me to pull off the explanation. Excuse me officer, I’m being threatened with flowers.

I didn’t think it’d gotten to that level yet, though a feeling of apprehension had started to steal over me each time they came in. I was sure that if this whole ordeal ever came to an end, I would consider my life a well-lived one for never having a shop’s worth of flora get sent to me again.

Today, however, it was a little past eleven a.m. and they hadn’t arrived yet. A sense of tension hung in the air as I, Sidd, and Markus’s eyes darted to the doorway every time we heard footsteps, anticipating a knock that never arrived. I was too strung up and couldn’t figure out whether I felt relieved that they’d finally stopped, or dread at the thought that my delivery today had just been delayed.

My hope was a fragile thing, and but with every passing minute that went by I could feel it begin to unfurl inside my chest.

Then at around twelve-thirty p.m., Tristan Davenport swaggered in, interrupting a question Markus was asking as he whistled into the room with a bouquet of damask roses confidently clutched in one hand, while the other held onto a large box of chocolates.

He didn’t stop until he stood in front of my desk.

“Hey stranger,” he said, flashing me a practiced smile. “I was just passing through and decided to drop by.”

An interlude passed in which I expected the whole room to burst out in a cry of Surprise! Complete with camera crew and everything, like Wilkinson was the set of a reality TV show that aired on MTV, which put emphasis on throwing new hires into uncomfortable situations and seeing how long it took them to break.

I was snapped out of this brief daydream by the muffled thud of Tristan’s gifts on my table as he set them down gently in front of me. A moment later the sweet, musk-like fragrance I had come to detest in the past week wafted up my nose, and I closed my eyes, barely present in the moment as a migraine that’d started up over my weekend hit a new peak, making my stomach roil with nausea.

“Are you alright, Aurora?” Sidd asked from his corner of the office, and I failed to give him a reply he got up promptly to snatch the flowers off my table.

Tristan’s nostrils flared, and he grabbed his hand in a vice grip. “What’re you doing?”

The smaller man’s eyes flashed, and in one smooth movement he jerked away, face flushed.

“Just watch,” he snapped, and Tristan looked on, fixated as he dumped the flowers into a bin at the entrance of our office.

When he finished Sidd clapped his hands together, dusting them off with a distasteful sniff before returning to his chair.

“Do you know what those cost me? You fucking—”

“What?” Sidd cut in goadingly. “Please, please say it because I’ve got a word for you too, boo.” He held up a finger. “Lawsuit.”

A part of me soared at how unrepentant he was about not asking for permission before he took action, how unrepentant he was about protecting me, and as Tristan threw a disbelieving look at me Sidd caught my gaze, giving a brief nod, which I translated to mean: Just say the word and I’ll fuck up his kneecaps.

“Have you been sending me flowers?” I asked when the force of my headache eased up enough that I was able to think clearly, and Tristan’s mouth twisted unpleasantly. After a little while he gave a disbelieving laugh, running a hand through his hair as he sneered.

“Jesus Christ. What are you even on about?”

His words caught me off-guard, and I noticed that a small crowd had started to form up outside, so that even if faces weren’t pressed up against the glass wall, but they could very well have been for all the good it did.

“I’ve been getting huge orders of them since Monday last week, every day without fail,” I explained, and at the slight furrow in his brow I was left with a sick sensation like someone had reached into my chest and started to squeeze my heart.

Something about the idea of a person who knew enough about me to have unsigned flowers get delivered to my place of work felt like a violation, and the truth was that I hadn’t had a moment’s rest since they started to come in and I realized it was not a fluke.

I’d spent the past week in a paranoid haze, heart in my throat each time a man brushed too close to me or let his eyes linger for longer than what was socially comfortable, because for all I knew it could’ve been that I was profiled by a wannabe serial killer, who was using me as a test guinea pig to bounce off his MO.

I may have told my parents it wasn’t that deep, but looking at Tristan in that moment, seeing he had absolutely no idea what it was I was referring to made me become conscious of how on some fundamental level it had been.

My head throbbed with a pressure that spiked occasionally and wouldn’t go away even after all the pain meds I’d been on, and I was overwhelmed. Not a moment had passed since I arrived in New York where I wasn’t worrying about one thing or another.

Just that morning, I’d woken up to find a fragment of my molar in my mouth that’d cracked off in sleep, probably as a result of how hard the stress was making me clench my jaw, even unconscious.

I’d always thought of myself as a pressure worker, and yet in that moment I could have asked for nothing more than a moment to myself where I’d just sleep, because I was drowning and pretty soon I’d run out of air. I felt like a total disappointment.

A sense of acidic entrapment at through my defenses and I let out a ragged sound, startling everyone, but it didn’t stop there as I felt something soft give under all that pressure, causing the world around to fall silent as tears rose unbidden, making me dip my face into my hands, shoulders heaving as I ugly cried for all I was worth.

Vaguely it crossed my mind that Paula would murder me for ruining my makeup. I’d been doing a better job of it lately as there were only so many times she would agree to sacrifice her rest for me. Today had been one of those.

Where usually this thought would have been enough cause to have me pull myself together it only made me cry harder now. I was inconsolable, though I registered Sidd asking Tristan to leave and Markus running a palm over my back in small, comforting circles.

Then he arrived.

Even without having to look up, the scuttling of feet as my colleagues scattered back to their various stations announced Elijah Wilder. All actions ceased around me at his appearance, but even then I did not stop crying, or better yet I could not. It was a testament to how far gone I’d actually sunk.

I was sure that in my life I had never felt so wretched, so low, and my palms were a sleek mess of powder, mucus, and runny mascara.

After a moment Markus’s hand resumed its soothing motions only to hesitate, and then he stepped away from me, pausing for long enough to let me know he did not actually want to before wheeling n his heel and returning to his corner.

“Tristan,” Elijah began softly, his voice a low rumble. One would have to be deaf to miss the dangerous edge his tone carried. “Explain.”