I looked up and they were both watching me with that look. The one that meant they had already formed a theory and were just waiting for confirmation.
“There’s nothing to tell,” I said.
“You just smiled,” Ashley said.
“I’m just in a good mood.”
“You know that we have your location, right? Not to be in your business, but you have a whole house. How the fuck did you end up at the Hilton Hotel?” Ashley asked. These two had been mygirls since I first moved out here. I brought them on with me at my tax company so that they can make the extra money during Tax season. Although they were my best friends, they were also a big pain in my ass. And I had to remember to stop sharing locations with their asses.
“Can we just set up for the class please,” I said and went back to my papers.
They exchanged a look and let it go. For now.
The training class got started and I got into it the way I always did when I was teaching something. This was my business, my system, the thing I had built from studying and grinding and refusing to let anyone tell me that a girl from where I came from couldn’t run something real. I knew this material inside and out and I was good at breaking it down for people who were coming in fresh. The new hires were attentive and the questions they were asking were the right ones, which told me I had hired well.
About an hour in Ashley stepped out to answer the office phone. She came back in a few minutes later with a look on her face I couldn’t immediately read. She waited until there was a pause in the session and leaned over to me.
“Somebody called,” she said low. “A man. Asked how many employees we had on staff.”
I looked at her. “What did you tell him?”
“I told him. I didn’t think about it until after I hung up.” She made a face. “It was just a weird question. I don’t know why I answered it.”
I sat with that for a second. Strange call. Man asking about staff count. I filed it somewhere in the back of my mind and kept moving because I had twelve people in front of me waiting on meto continue and I wasn’t about to let whatever that was derail my morning.
We broke for lunch right on schedule.
I was pulling my phone out of my bag to figure out what I wanted to order when the front door of the office opened.
I looked up.
And every promise I had made to myself in the dark last night evaporated in approximately three seconds.
Griz walked in like he had been there before and knew exactly where everything was. Black jeans that were designer and distressed, clean sneakers, a fitted black shirt that did nothing to hide the fact that this man was built in a way that should have been illegal in a professional setting. He was carrying food bags in one hand and three separate rose arrangements in the other, each one a different size.
He walked directly to me. Didn’t look around, didn’t acknowledge anyone else in the room, just moved straight to where I was standing like everything else in the space was background.
He held out two of the arrangements. “Give those to your girls that’s working.”
I took them slowly, still processing that this was actually happening.
Then he held up the food bags. “I brought Mexican. For lunch. I called and asked what time was lunch and how many workers y’all had.”
Ashley and Savannah were behind me and I didn’t have to turn around to know exactly what their faces looked like right now. I could feel the energy radiating off of them from six feet away.
He looked at me like he was waiting for me to say something and when I didn’t he just stood there comfortable, completely unbothered by the audience, like showing up at a woman’s place of business in the middle of a workday with roses and takeout was something he did regularly.
I handed all the arrangements back to Ashley without turning around. “Put those in a cool spot til we can put them in water.”
She took them. I heard Savannah make a sound that she quickly converted into a cough.
“Come on,” I said to Griz and turned toward my office. This nigga was out of his mind, showing up here like this.
I closed the door behind us and locked it and turned around and looked at him.
He set the food down on the small table in the corner, straightened up and looked back at me, relaxed, like he hadn’t just walked into my business unannounced in the middle of my workday.
“You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “You cannot just show up at my job.”
