Chapter 35 – Grant
THIRTY-FIVE
GRANT
He knew there would be some day in the future where he might think of her fondly. And not like a broken glass with sharp edges that kept cutting him.
January
It was time to let her go. Intellectually, I understood that.
Emotionally…I didn’t like to let myself wander down any sort of emotional paths that might get me in trouble.
All I knew was that I had to put Flowers in the past, quickly. Before she firmly became my present.
The challenge with doing that was how completely and irrevocably she’d dismissed me first.
These past few weeks, she did her job. Naturally, she continued to be an exemplary employee.
She embraced her new classes with enthusiasm.
Because she now could drive herself to the office, she’d started to get there before me so I had to give her a key.
Personally, I thought she was just trying to show off her new skill.
However, she’d made it plainly clear that any lingering sexual interest she had in me was over.
Gone. Done. Not to be repeated.
Yes, I’d been the one to set down the rules first, but she’d picked them up and run with them. She recovered from her UTI, returned to the job, agreed that what I’d decided, regarding no future sexual activities, was for the best to continue our working relationship.
There had been emphasis on the fact that it had been my decision, not hers, but she was happy to comply.
Then she’d gotten back to work.
It had been weeks and nothing. No lingering glances, no sly innuendos. Certainly, none of the clinginess or sentimentality one might associate with a young, mostly sexually innocent woman giving it up to her billionaire boss.
It was almost like she was over me.
Which had to be impossible. This was Flowers. We had a connection. We were important to each other. We couldn’t stop what ultimately happened in her bedroom because our attraction, our mutual chemistry, was so strong we couldn’t not do it.
Right?
It was the truth, that there had been some dark days where I wondered if I hadn’t been one of those guys. An isolated wealthy man, with no one to stand up to him, to say that his young, funny, smart assistant wasn’t really that into him.
Ultimately, it was my faith in Flowers that talked me off that ledge.
She knew herself too well. She wasn’t the type to be swayed or pressured into something against her will.
She’d been forged in the fire of having to navigate this life on her own too well to be pressured into something she didn’t want to do.
The fact that she wasn’t crying every day over the fact our intimate connection was over, because I’d said it was over, was just another testament to her internal strength of character. Flowers wasn’t someone who was ever going to beg for affection.
If you gave it to her, you did so freely, without condition, because anything less…
Would be almost criminal.
It made sense she was behaving perfectly normally around me because I’d set the terms of our situtationship.
I’d told her we weren’t having sex again. I had plans to fire her the minute I found a position worthy of her talents. I was going to walk away and never look back.
She was too much, I’d told myself these past few weeks.
If there was going to be a time where I might heal. Where I might get over the loss of Allison, now was not that time. Flowers was not that woman.
She was ill-suited to me in every way.
Too young.
Too inexperienced. Although, she’d probably lived more in her short life than most women twice her age.
Too na?ve. Although she could read a person sitting across from her like no one I’d never met before.
Too…
Okay, just too young, I supposed. What kind of age was twenty-three?
When I’d buried Allison, I knew then I would never love another woman. I would never marry another woman.
However, after a time, I started to imagine maybe finding a convenient partner. Someone to attend charity functions with. Show up with me at restaurant openings. Possibly travel together.
A sophisticated woman of the world. Maybe someone European, where a continent would separate us when we weren’t together.
A beautiful, age appropriate French woman.
Madelaine. Brigitte. Aimee.
“Can I go to lunch a few minutes early?”
Flowers’ voice broke through my musings and I looked up from my monitors to where she stood in the doorway of my office.
In a few weeks, when I looked up, she wouldn’t be there.
Wearing a cheap navy pant suit she’d most likely bought off the discount rack.
Flowers was not French.
“Your pants are too long.”
She glanced down at where her pants draped over her shoes and tugged at the waist a bit to pull them up.
“I know, I really need to get them hemmed. I just haven’t had a lot of time between work and my classes.”
That was a challenge if I ever heard one.
“You’re blaming me for your lack of fashion etiquette?” I asked her, incredulous. “I’m keeping you too busy? Because I’m forcing you to go to class to improve yourself and improve your life trajectory?”
Her face scrunched up. “Fashion etiquette? Is that really what I’m violating here?”
“You work in a professional office, you should appear presentable at all times. Dragging pants that are too long for you, gives people an impression of you, and, by association, me.”
“What do you think my overly long pants say about you, E.G.?”
I sneered at her. “You think you’re being cute. I’m serious about this.”
“No, you’re not,” she sighed. “You’re pissed about something else and you want a fight. You’re looking for a partner, but I’m choosing not to engage. Instead, I’m leaving for lunch. I have plans with Claire.”
“I can’t believe you’re still hanging around with her,” I snapped. “She’s a troublemaker who abandoned you at a club where any number of things could have happened to you.”
“She got too drunk, it happens, and everything turned out fine. Besides, I need a girlfriend at this very crucial time in my life.”
“What does that mean?” I said, turning my chair now fully in her direction.
“Well, I recently had my first one-night stand with a guy who ghosted me. Sexually speaking. Of course I won’t be sharing who I was with, but I probably need help breaking down the events of that night. A little girl talk should do the trick.”
I made a mental note to see a doctor because it was as if I could feel my blood pressure spiking to all new highs almost instantly.
“You’re going to tell Claire, Silly Drunk Claire, about our night together?”
She smiled benignly. “E.G., I told you not to worry. I’m not going to say who I was with. I just want to get a little perspective.”
“Perspective about what?” I barked.
“All of it. You know, what it means when a guy bangs and bails. Does that say something about me? Or him?”
I pushed out of my chair and cleared my desk before I was crowding her back into the corner of my office. Only once I had her pinned, I had no idea what I was going to say.
“You don’t tell Claire anything about that night,” I ordered her.
“Hmmm,” she hummed, not intimidated by me at all. “I don’t think you get to tell me what I can or cannot say. It’s not like you had me sign an NDA before we did the deed.”
I laughed without any humor behind it. “See, and here I thought you’d handled the whole thing like a level-headed adult. When really, this whole time you’ve been secretly angry with me.”
“Whoa, I’m not the one who has you pinned in a corner, my friend.”
She was right. I gritted my teeth and took a step back.
Then she approached me, getting a little too close, a little too much into my personal space.
I could smell her. I could see the individual strands of her hair, all of varying shades of blonde, brown and honey.
I could see the freckle just beneath her ear that had fascinated me while she’d slept next to me and I watched her.
“Repeat after me, E.G. ‘You’re not the problem, Anna. I am.’”
Her eyes were dark, and yes, as blasé as she appeared to be about everything, there was an anger there. Hurt too. She wasn’t unaffected by what happened between us. She had just done a better job at keeping it to herself.
Which was its own humiliation.
“Say it,” she snapped.
“You’re not the problem, Flowers. I am,” I repeated.
She nodded. “Just remember that. Now, can I go to lunch?”
“Yes, of course.”
She turned on the ball of her shoe and I took absolutely no satisfaction when she tripped on the material of her overly long pants. Her head whipped around to glare at me, but I said nothing.
Instead, we both agreed to retreat temporarily from the battlefield.