The Book Cove

This is an excerpt from a piece called “Speak to Me With Tenderness, Howard Sun.” In it, our protagonist Lisa combats her growing fascination with an incredibly attractive yet awkward male co-worker who uses multiple personas on Facebook to interact with her. She starts to feel paranoid, not know who is really whom. Her discovery of Howard Sun’s veiled interest is not without a certain irritated and baffled series of exchanges. Read the footnotes to get an insight into what I was thinking as I wrote this piece! Excerpt: Then came the escalating gifts—two Hershey’s Kisses on her desk one morning that he denied leaving her though she had watched him place them there, the unexpected daffodils, memos he wrote to reduce her workload, that mix CD that floored her since it was full of the sort of well-spoken love songs she couldn’t even imagine him listening to—and just the other day, he had invited her to a football game. “I have two tickets,” he said. “Want one?” “To go to...