Haze - By Andrea Wolfe Page 0,17

the fact that I had said no? It could have meant literally anything.

At the end of the day, I left the flowers on my desk, because frankly, I didn't want to carry them on the subway. Drawing that much attention to myself felt awkward, so I decided I'd keep them at the office for as long as I could. The whole day I obsessively checked my phone, certain that Jack would call me and beg for mercy. It didn't happen.

Why didn't he do what I expected? I really wished I could call the shots sometimes. Maybe that meant that management was my thing...

***

That night I had trouble sleeping. I kept thinking about how Jack had talked to me, how he had touched me, made me come. I went back and forth, sometimes convinced that he was he was perfect and then seconds later shifting one-hundred eighty degrees and thinking that I had just been vulnerable and taken advantage of. Any girl would have liked attention like that, right? Plus, he was really good at it.

I wanted to touch myself so badly—Jack's hotness seemed to be permanently etched into my mind and I was having trouble thinking about anything else; quite the inconvenience—but I fought the urge, stupidly thinking that it would somehow make me stronger if I resisted.

Well, I was wrong.

The next morning, I woke up sexually flustered, Jack on my mind again. Men were rarely ever so mysterious, at least the men that I had known. I mean, yeah, I got that he was apologizing, sure. But where did it go from here? When I got to work, it all started over again.

"Are you sure you're not keeping some big fucking secret from me, Effie?" Sam was standing next to my desk, grinning from ear-to-ear. There was a light blue box sitting there.

"What the hell is that?" I asked. Caffeine was absent from my body, and so I was a little on the irritable side. Sam just shrugged and walked back to his office. I picked up the card:

Can we

-J

"Dammit," I mumbled quietly to myself. No punctuation or even a complete sentence. These gifts were drawing unwanted attention to me, even though I secretly liked it. Had he just forgotten to finish the message in the card? That didn't seem like something Jack would do based on my incredibly limited knowledge of him.

"Those are MarieBelle," Sam said from right outside his office. "One of the finest chocolate makers in the city. Pricey as hell." He could apparently tell from the logo on the box since I hadn't opened it yet.

"Thanks for the history lesson," I said sarcastically. I opened the box to find four trays with these little diamond-shaped, multi-colored pieces of chocolate. It was incredibly pretty, incredibly charming. It felt like the dessert version of a box of Crayola crayons. I wasn't quite ready to eat chocolate that early in the morning, so I pushed the box over by the roses. Honestly, I was running out of space—and if he sent me more stuff, it was only going to get worse.

I thought about that sentence fragment all day. He was trying to get me to guess something, to somehow anticipate his next move, and I wasn't doing well. No guy had ever confused me like this. If it had been anyone other than Jack, I would have found it to be kind of creepy, a feeling that I didn’t think was entirely rational despite the fact that as a girl, I easily felt it. But despite my outward disgust in front of Sam, being spoiled publicly was kind of a nice, warm feeling.

Every girl needed a few moments like that, right? Spoiled by her boyfrie—

No, I couldn't go there.

After staring at the blue box all morning—it certainly was pretty—I decided to have one of the chocolates at lunch. It was so good that I almost passed out. It was decadent, artisan, melt-in-your-mouth chocolate. It was almost enough to put me into a food coma.

After a second one, I drew the line and pushed the box to the other side of my desk again. I would save these for later. Moderation was my friend.

There was nothing from Jack again. Honestly, I was thinking about him more than ever now. His persistence had to mean something. Maybe I was wrong about the girl outside the suite and now he was really trying to make things right.

My Wednesday morning commute was overloaded with high-intensity thinking. Oh yes, I arrived at a