Isabelle #3
I should throw them away. I should toss the flowers and the card in the bin. I should rip up the card and pretend this never happened. I should text Naomi and tell her she was right, I was Femi-intolerant, and I needed to stay as far away from him as humanly possible.
Instead, I set the card carefully on my desk and went back to work.
Or tried to go back to work.
The flowers sat there for the rest of the afternoon. Every time I looked up, they were in my peripheral vision. Beautiful. Insistent. Impossible to ignore. The smell filled my office, overwhelmed my senses, made it impossible to think about anything except who had sent them and what that meant.
I didn't respond to the card.
But I didn't throw them away either.
I just sat there, glancing between them and my sketchpad, my pencil hovering over paper, completely lacking the inspiration I needed to bring my design to life. But my creative well was dry. Empty.
I gave up eventually around four-thirty, it was a decision I'd pay for tomorrow when I had nothing to show my team.
Oh, well. That was tomorrow's problem. Tomorrow's Isabelle could deal with it.
I grabbed my coat and bag around five. The office was nearly empty, most of the staff long gone. Meg had left a stack of notes on my desk with tomorrow's priorities. She was efficient to the point of being slightly terrifying. I’d be lost without her.
I locked up and headed for the lift, already thinking about the leftover Thai food in my fridge, the bath I was going to take with expensive bath salts, and the terrible reality TV I was going to watch. Naomi had another shoot tonight, so she wouldn't be getting back until later.
The lobby was empty when I stepped out of the lift. The security guard had settled into his chair with a paperback, his reading glasses perched on his nose.
I pushed through the front doors into the cool evening air.
And stopped dead.
Femi Davies was leaning against a black car parked directly in front of the building, his long frame arranged casually against the door. Arms crossed over his chest. Eyes locked on the entrance like he'd been watching it for hours and didn't mind waiting hours more.
He straightened when he saw me. He was wearing a navy suit with the jacket open and no tie. The white shirt underneath was crisp, the top two buttons undone. He looked like he'd just come from a business meeting. He looked devastating.
"Before you say anything," he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender, that familiar half-smile playing at his lips. "I know this is borderline stalking, yeah? I'm aware. But you didn't respond to my flowers, and I was in London anyway, and I thought..."
He paused, his accent slightly thicker than I remembered. He shrugged, the movement elegant, easy. "I thought I'd take a chance. Worst case, you tell me to bugger off. Best case…"
He let that hang in the air between us, full of possibility.
“You're here on purpose," I said, gripping my bag strap like it was a lifeline. "You can be honest about that."
"Purely coincidence."
"Femi." His name rolled off my tongue easily, like I’d never stopped saying it.
"Mostly coincidental." His smile widened. "Fine. I wanted to see you. Happy? I got your address from Xavier—don't be cross with him, I can be very persuasive when I want to be. And I've been standing here for an hour feeling like a proper muppet, getting strange looks from your security guard."
I stared at him. He stared back, completely unrepentant. The streetlights were starting to flicker on, catching the angles of his face, the careful lines of his suit, the way his eyes hadn't left mine since I’d walked out the door.
Those eyes. God, those eyes.
"Dinner," he said, his voice going softer, more serious. "Just dinner, Issy. It’ll be like two old friends catching up. You can tell me about your business, and I'll bore you with finance talk. Then, I'll walk you to your car like a gentleman, and that'll be that."
"That'll be that," I repeated slowly, not believing him for a second.
"If you want it to be." He stepped closer, just one step, but it felt like he'd crossed a continent.
The smart thing was to say no. The sensible thing, the thing that would protect me from this man who'd already proven he could dismantle my defenses with nothing more than a smile.
But there was another part of me, a reckless, self-destructive part that was apparently in charge now, was tired of running away. The part that wanted to prove, once and for all, that I was over him. That I could sit across a table from Femi Davies and feel absolutely nothing.
"One dinner," I heard myself say, my voice not quite steady. "And you're paying."
His smile broke across his face. "Wouldn't have it any other way, love."
He opened the car door for me. I slid inside, the leather cool against my skin, already regretting every choice that had led to this moment.
One dinner. I could survive one dinner with my ex-boyfriend. People did it all the time. They had mature, civilized conversations. They got closure. They moved on.
Couldn't I?