“Please do,” I reply curtly. I always want to give people the benefit of the doubt, but I won’t deny that this feels like an invasion of privacy. Memories I’d buried deep begin to resurface.
Why would you want to hide anything from me?
Don’t you want to know everything about each other?
Let me see your phone. I need to make sure no one is taking advantage of you.
I swallow thickly, pushing the memories back down. Alfie isn’t like him.
“What are you looking for?” I ask when he doesn’t reply.
He rubs his hands down his face, glancing at the clock. I came straight from the Elwood campus, and he’s probably wondering what I’m doing here.
“Austin told me he overheard you and Olivia talking about some notes you’d received from me.”
“Oh…yes, I told Olivia about them.” My face starts to flood with heat. If Austin heard the details of that conversation, he’ll know damn well that I said I was starting to feel uncomfortable about the notes. Alfie’s pained expression has him running a hand over his face. The scrape of his beard scratching against his palm.
“Mia, I don’t want to frighten you—"
“You haven’t,” I interrupt, desperate to mitigate a reaction. “I just thought they were getting a bit…possessive, and they sounded so unlike you. I thought maybe you were trying to be sexy, but it’s not really the dynamic we have, and I just wanted to ask Olivia her thoughts. You know, given that Austin can be quite intense and—"
“Mia, I didn’t write the notes,” he interrupts, his eyes locked on mine, his mouth downturned. He’s running his hand over his mouth again.
I pause my rambling and stare. This is a joke. It has to be. Of course he wrote them. Who else would be writing me notes and leaving them in my drawer to find along with a flower?
“You’re joking.” I scoff, my pulse hammering in my ears.
“Mia…I’m sorry, but I’m not. I wanted to find the notes to see if I could work out who has been sending them.”
“They weren’t sent. They were left in my bottom drawer.”
“They’re not there now. I checked. Where are they, love?”
“I- I leave them under my keyboard. The flowers I would just take home with me. I thought…I thought they were from you.”
My God. I’d been keeping them like little mementos. Smelling them until they wilted too much. I’d pressed them in a book, for God's sake. What is wrong with me? Of course, Alfie isn’t leaving me love notes and flowers. Have I learned anything in the last ten years? Real men aren’t leaving their office managers flowers and love notes.
He lifts up my keyboard, taking the notes and flipping through them.
He pauses for a moment.
“You kept this?” His face looks concerned, almost guilty, when he shows me the print out of the address he gave me for the house-sitting. It didn’t say anything romantic, but he’d put a little smiley face at the end of it, and I don’t know why, but I wanted to keep it. He helped me out when I needed it, and I wanted to keep the token as a memory that sometimes people are good.
My cheeks flush. Is it weird to keep it? It was from around four weeks ago, maybe five now. It just made me feel wanted, and I wanted to hold on to the feeling. A sinking feeling hits my stomach, and I feel like I’m seventeen all over again, putting too much meaning into a relationship with a man that could ruin me.
I don’t respond. I just wring my fingers together. He doesn’t press, simply holding out the piece of paper to me, and I slip it into my purse.
The silence grows between as he flicks through the notes again, his frown marring his features.
“You’ve never seen anyone around your desk or dropping them off?”
“No.
“And when would you receive them?”
“Always on a Thursday. I was—" I stop myself.
“You were what?”
