The flowers almost seem like they belong there, standing upright in your imported beaten copper trash bin. The blooms spill out in perfect proportion, petals cascading in clashing confetti colors from the gleaming orange-green rim.
And as far as you are concerned, they do belong there. Why not? Let the clients due to meet you in mere minutes scratch their heads bald about a batch of blossoms wrapped in a rose-tinted cellophane cone thrusting out from the waste-bucket. What they say, or choose not to, will only give you a better handle on how they'll act before a judge.
You don't always understand or even care why people do certain things, but you can always use the data. It's this skill that's made you the firm's star litigator, its youngest partner. You are fluent in the secret language of signs and gestures, of tips and tells. So, in a way, you suppose you should thank your fiancé for her "gift." It was just what you needed.
She'd picked just the perfect time for a visit too: Cal-com on the cell-phone, Curtis White's tax-attorney waiting on the regular phone—texts popping up on your Blackberry from the interns, and e-mails from the boys in the archives with alerts as to what they'd uncovered. If this thing was going to trial, you weren't about to have your ass handed to you like some punk associate—no, you are going in both guns blazing like the courtroom cowboy you are.
You remember your eyes dancing from one e-document to the next—from flashing phone diode, to texts, to ticking clock—you heard an empty knock on the door to your office. "Come in," you said without looking up. "Just leave it on the desk."
"Aren't you afraid they'll leak all over your...whatever all that stuff is?"
She stood before you, a prodigious bouquet tumbling from her two-fisted grip. You'd seen smaller arrangements bedecking coffins. "Oh, hey," you said with a nod towards the flowers. "You got a secret admirer or something?"
"No. These are for you."
"Me? Somebody die?"
"No. Just because."
Because of what? you wondered. Was it some kind of joke? "Flowers? Come on. What am I supposed to do with those?"
"I don't know. Thought they'd brighten up the place," she said with a dismissive wave over the antiseptic and spartan expanse of your office, the mahogany and leather, the steel and lightly mirrored glass.
You grit your teeth. The last thing you wanted was to "brighten up" your well-orchestrated monochrome. The decor was deliberate; the details selected to speak of soothing strength, of a sure ship traversing treacherous seas. That's what the burnished brass diving-helmet paperweight was sitting on your massive slab-like desk for. That's why the shelves were lined with a set of hand-tooled, leather-bound legal manuals you were never going to crack open—all the information you'd need now just a click away online. It was why your desktop computer had been set in a custom teak cabinet, complete with one-of-a-kind keyboard fashioned from antique glass typewriter buttons. The room spoke power, masculine energy. No tacky Zen sand gardens in the corner, no Thomas Kinkaid assembly-line art on the wall, and absolutely no flowers.
You stared her down. "Does this look like a flower firm to you?"
"No. That's why I brought them."
And that's how it usually went. You'd say something perfectly rational, and she'd respond with something equally sensible but from her side of the looking glass-completely correct, just reversed. "I don't have time for this right now," you tell your fiancé. "I've got a client coming in here in like two minutes."
"So? Keep 'em waiting," she said, hunkering down on the edge of your desk, leaning back with a playful wink of one liquid black eye, then poking out a lip-gloss coated pucker. Damn she looked good, even when she was being impossible. Especially when she was being impossible. You cradle her neck with one hand, the other at the small of her back.
And push her off his desk. "You've got to go," you say. "Take the flowers with you."
You watch as her eyes began to calcify, the way they always do when she doesn't get her way, and you aren't sure how a look so icy could flash with such fire, but it does. Like a magnesium road flare waved over a frigid Alaskan ice road, signaling: Danger Ahead, Possibly Fatal. She half-opens her mouth to speak, and you half-wish she would—clients be damned. You'll read her the riot act right in front of them. In front of the whole fucking office. You hope the door swings open mid-tirade. Give them a dose of what you are capable of. Show them all that there are still men in the world. Flowers? Flowers!
And the pair of you stand there like gunfighters—not across a windswept prairie, but a fine grained mahogany desk with hand-forged antique brass hardware—testing wills rather than quickness on the draw; the imaginary strains of Ennio Morricone running through your head at least, as you flex your trigger hand—
—Ring—
And draw.
You snag the phone, cupping the receiver with one hand, saying, "I've got to take this," and shooing her out with the other as you answer your receptionist's routine questions, then keep the superfluous conversation rolling until she gets the point. Your fiancé—your ex-fiancé now—walks out the door, not a single parting word as she drops the flowers in the waste basket. And when your clients arrive a few minutes later, right on schedule, they take one look at the elaborate floral arrangement protruding from your shiny trash pail and say nothing. And you know exactly where you stand, with them, with her, and with the world.
Flowers? They can put them on your grave.