“Okay,” he told Basil. “This is definitely straying into weird territory now.”
But he used it that evening, filling it with tea and wrapping both hands around the warm clay while he tried to write. His characters argued about destiny and fate while Sam stared at his own name rendered in careful brushstrokes.
Who did this? Who knew him well enough to know he liked fantasy stories, chocolate, and good coffee, but not well enough to justtell himthey were interested?
/~/~/~/~/
Friday morning, Sam opened his door and froze at the sight of tissue paper. It was cream-colored, expensive-looking, and wrapped around something soft and folded. As he picked it up with careful hands, the tissue fell away.
It was cashmere. More to the point, it was a jumper in soft charcoal grey,exactly his size, with a note pinned to the tissue:To keep you warm.
Sam stood on his porch in his worn jeans and coffee-stained Henley, holding a piece of clothing that probably cost more than his monthly groceries, and felt his concern rise. This wasn’t cute anymore.
This was...what? A prank? Some elaborate joke where his friends were pooling money to see how long before he noticed? Except his friends were broke librarians and fellow baristas. Nobody he knew had cashmere money.
Sam looked down his quiet street. Mrs. Channing had already left for her morning walk. The Kapoor’s car was gone. Everything looked just the same as it always did.
But someone was watching him closely enough to know his size, his interests, and his schedule - that same someone who was spending some serious money on him. And Sam had no idea who, or why, or what they wanted in return.
He brought the jumper inside, added it to the growing collection on his kitchen table, and tried to ignore how his hands shook slightly as he made his morning coffee, in the special mug, with the expensive beans.
While wearing his regular clothes, though, because cashmere felt like too much for a Friday shift at the Daily Bean.
“This is fine,” he told Basil. “People get secret admirers all the time. This is...normal. Probably.”
Basil was eating his breakfast and declined to comment.
/~/~/~/~/
Saturday morning saw Sam’s porch gift free.Maybe my admirer has something else to do over the weekend.He left the Daily Bean at noon, relieved to escape Emma’s increasingly elaborate theories about his secret admirer. Maya had joined in the gossip, and they were now both convinced the gifts were romantic gestures from an “eccentricmillionaire who saw you once and fell madly in love.”
“That doesn’t happen in real life,” Sam had said.
“It’s happening to you.”
Now, walking up his garden path, Sam spotted another package on his doorstep. It wasn’t as big as the jumper, and it was wrapped in plain brown paper, rather than tissue.
Sam’s stomach did a double flip. It seemed his gift-giver just got up later on a Saturday. He picked it up, surprised by the weight of it, and unlocked his door with the package tucked under his arm.
Inside, Basil wound around his ankles, demanding lunch.
“Give me a minute,” Sam muttered. He set the package on the kitchen table - next to the other gifts, and stared at it.
Five days. Five gifts. Each one was more expensive than anything he’d ever buy for himself. What on earth could come after cashmere?
Sam unwrapped the brown paper with careful fingers. A wooden box emerged, plain and unvarnished. There was no note this time. He opened the box, and gold gleamed up at him…actual gold.
“No.” Sam blinked and looked again. “That’s not possible.”
But that was what was staring back at him. A small gold bar, maybe three inches long, stamped with official markings he didn’t recognize. But it looked disturbingly legitimate, with serial numbers, purity stamps, and weight measurements on it.
Sam picked it up. The bar felt cold and dense in his palm, heavier than it had any right to be for its size.
“This is getting a bit out of hand, isn’t it?” He looked at Basil, who’d jumped onto the table to investigate. “It has to be fake, surely?”
Basil sniffed the gold bar and turned away. Sam turned it over. The stamps looked real. The weight felt real. But that one little bar had to be - what, a thousand dollars? More?People didn’t just leave gold bars on doorsteps for non-descript baristas.
It was insane, beyond insane. It was the kind of thing that happened in his novels, where powerful immortals courted oblivious humans with riches and jewels because they didn’t understand modern currency.
