The weekend was amazing, but Monday started off following a different pattern. Before I left home, I knew that my work schedule was full with meetings for most of the day. Some of them wouldn’t be fun. My team missed a few targets for business, and turmoil in Washington, DC was trickling back to Milwaukee creating a little uneasiness among some of my clients.

I trudged into the office and headed straight for the coffee maker. Anita met me there, and, in contrast to my mood, she was bubbly and excited. I asked, “Did you have a good weekend Anita? It looks like you are about to burst.”

She smiled wide and brushed the long, dark hair back out of her eyes. “I did have a good weekend, Mr. Paulsen, but I’m excited about what arrived for you first thing this morning.”

“Something arrived for me?” I retrieved the steaming mug of coffee from the machine and took a sip. I blinked my eyes as the rich aroma woke me up. I drank my coffee as stiff and black as possible.

She nodded yes and said, “It’s on your desk. I know you’ve got a really busy day today, but I bet this will cheer you up.”

Anita successfully stoked my curiosity. I walked briskly through the main office space dodging cubicles until I reached the door to my personal office. Sitting in the center of my glass-topped desk was a huge bouquet of purple and red flowers. It seemed to spray out in every direction, and a card hung from the cut-glass vase.

I could sense Anita lurking just over my right shoulder as I reached for the card and read:

Anita asked, “Am I being far too nosy, Mr. Paulsen, if I ask who Lowell is?”

I turned around and said, “Yes, you are being nosy, but it makes no sense to hide anything. I think he’s my new boyfriend.”

She clapped, and the paper in her right hand rattled in the air. “Oh, that’s so exciting, Mr. Paulsen! Congratulations! I’m so happy for you!”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Yes, he really is something special, and the flowers are a surprise.”

She asked, “Do you want to leave them there on your desk, or should I find a more appropriate place?”

“I think I’ll leave them there for a little while longer, but then I’ll probably put them on the top of a shelf or file cabinet.”

Anita gave me another broad smile and said, “I know you have a busy day, so I’ll leave you alone for now unless you need me. Remember, I’m just outside your door.”

I said, “I don’t need you quite yet, and yes, I barely have thirty minutes before the meetings start.” I sighed heavily while leaning over to smell the sweet fragrance of the flowers when Anita closed the door.

The bouquet made me so happy that I wanted to throw a fist in the air in celebration. I woke up three different times in the night thinking of Lowell. The flowers were the icing on the cake for now.

I sat in my office chair and swiveled it around to face out the floor-to-ceiling windows. I watched boats bobbing in the marina in the distance and wished I could be getting ready to pilot one of them out on to the lake instead of sitting in my office ticking off the few minutes left before having to explain a failure to reach a goal.

Closing my eyes and leaning back in the chair, I thought, Only five days and then it’s the weekend again.

The first meeting of the day was not nearly as bad as I feared. Two other managers also failed to reach similar goals. It was a company-wide failure not a personal lack of performance. Internally, I breathed a major sigh of relief, and my heartbeat slowed. I was not used to failures at work. School and work were always the venues in which I normally performed better than most of the rest. They were the places where I tended to shine.

Just before lunch, I returned to my office and leaned over to smell the bouquet once again. I thought of Lowell and kissing him up against the wall of the Toolbox. He was so hard, and so was I. Someday soon I expected that I would see him naked once more. I was excited by what I saw in our late night trip to the beach, but that was merely silhouettes in the darkness. I wanted to see his naked body in the light, too.

Anita poked her head into my office and asked, “How did the meetings go this morning? Anything that I need to know?”

I said, “The only thing you need to know is they weren’t half as bad as I thought they might be. We had some issues with our performance, but it seems like it’s a company-wide problem, so I wasn’t singled out for having issues.”

She smiled and said, “That’s good news then. I have confidence in you, Mr. Paulsen. I wasn’t worried.”

Anita was assigned to be my assistant when I first arrived in Milwaukee. We connected on a professional level almost immediately. She told me that her most recent boss was deathly quiet when he wasn’t barking orders or complaining about upper management. She liked the fact that I talked about everyday things like my crumbling house and Stuart’s sudden exit.

Anita was married and had two children of her own, a girl who was six, and a boy who was eight. She had a gift for sharing the humorous moments in her everyday life. I could also sense that she was deeply in love with her husband, and he was the solid rock of her life. Her parents both suffered from chronic illnesses, and he provided the comfort and assistance in caring for them that she needed.

I said, “Thank you. I do appreciate that, and now I have to go wolf down lunch in about twenty minutes before the meetings continue.”

While I was stuffing the last bite of salad in my mouth at the bank’s employee cafeteria, my cell phone chimed with the arrival of a new text message. I pulled it out of my pocket seeing immediately that the message was from Lowell. It read:

Reading the message, I shivered with excitement. It was clearly another of Lowell’s adventures on the way. By 9:00 p.m. it would be dark out, and it might even be chilly. I wasn’t sure that we were supposed to be on a public beach at that hour, but I couldn’t turn his offer down. I was growing addicted to Lowell’s sense of adventure, and all of his choices so far were right on target.

I stuffed the phone back in my pocket, and dumped my leftover trash from lunch before I headed out the door of the cafeteria.

The afternoon meetings were even better. I still had to discuss some problems, but this time I had strategies and potential solutions in mind, too. I saw smiles on the faces of VPs, and they were enough to carry me through the rest of the challenging situations in the day.

I met Anita one more time at nearly 4:00 p.m. I was making myself another mug of coffee when she walked up and said, “You know, I could make that for you, Mr. Paulsen.”

I laughed and answered, “Of course you could, but my mom would be appalled with me if I required someone else to make my coffee. She always said the simple matters of taking care of yourself should not be given to others to do. She said that a man who did that would soon forget how to do it himself. She said taking care of yourself was always going to be necessary at some point. My mom still makes my dad do his laundry.”

Anita said, “Your mother is a wise woman. I wish I grew up with one who was a little more self-sufficient than that. I think we ate a few too many times at McDonald’s and left cleaning our rooms to the maid service too often. I really didn’t know much about taking care of myself or others when I first met Steven.”

“But you know now?” I asked.

She nodded saying, “I learned, and he helped me.”

I took my coffee to the office and inhaled the scent of the flowers one more time. They smelled like a blend of honey and slightly musky perfume. I cleared a space on top of the bookshelves that held my now dusty management textbooks. The spray of flowers fit perfectly and gave a much needed splash of color to the entire office.

I looked at the clock on my desk and drummed my fingers. I was ready to leave, but I made it my practice to wait until 5:00 p.m. and leave with the people who worked for me. I didn’t want to flout privileges that came only from occupying a higher position in the organization.

Not only would it be difficult to wait the next few minutes until 5:00 p.m., it was going to be awful waiting for 9:00 p.m. later in the evening. I placed both hands on the desk and took a long, slow, deep breath. I needed to relax. I would get to see Lowell soon enough.

As I pulled into my driveway and opened the car door, I wanted to call Lowell. I wanted to have a clue of what was going to happen, but my gut knew that it was better to wait for it to be a surprise. Walking through the kitchen, I dropped the phone on the table so that I wouldn’t have the temptation of having it with me.

I planted myself in front of the TV and turned it on. The local news blared from the set, and I was half paying attention. The other half of me gazed around the room. I wondered what it would be like to have someone really move into my house with me. Stuart spent a lot of time in the space, but he never actually moved in.

Lowell talked about his apartment occasionally, but it was clear that he wasn’t happy with it. He hadn’t invited me yet to see it, and I didn’t want to push him about it. I was raised to think that living in a freestanding house was always preferable to an apartment. My grandfather said, “Always own a piece of ground, Sven. Even if it is mostly covered by concrete.”

Fortunately, I had a real backyard and space between the front of the house and the sidewalk. I planted some of the space with flowers, but I wanted to overhaul the garden completely with shrubs, bulbs, and maybe even some small fruit trees.

By 8:00 p.m., I was standing in the bedroom trying to figure out what to wear. I finally opted for blue jeans and a University of Minnesota T-Shirt. It featured the smiling face of a golden gopher on the front. I speculated about whether I should wear swim trunks under my jeans, but then I decided to leave them at home. If Lowell wanted me to wear something like that, he would have been more specific.

It was a cool evening. The temperature was dropping down into the mid 50s. I decided to bring a jacket along and slipped on an old pair of sneakers. I could feel myself starting to tingle wondering what was coming.

I doubted we would be skinny dipping again. Swimming naked on a public beach in the shadow of the city’s skyline sounded like the perfect opportunity to risk spending a night in jail. I didn’t think that Lowell would take things that far. I wondered what else that he wanted to do on the beach and if it would be out in the open. My mind raced with the possibilities while I started the car and backed out of my driveway.