During our freshman year at college, Lina and I made black heart-shaped valentines emblazoned with particularly cruel Smiths lyrics and gleefully passed them out to our black-clad, bisexuality-considering friends. We watched in great amusement as the reactions came rolling in—our friends were alternately and about evenly either totally amused or clueless.

The valentines said things like:

I know I’m unloveable
You don’t have to tell me

And:

If a ten ton truck kills the both of us
to die by your side, well,
the pleasure and the privilege is mine

Though it was nearly ten years ago—which is a horrific thought by itself—this clever nose-thumbing at the Hallmark-invented February holiday has always seemed to me one of my and Lina’s best. So when I stepped into a conversation about Valentine’s Day and all of its sordid celebratory rites at a work-related party in early 2004, I snickered and told the story of Lina and I crouched on our dorm room floor meticulously applying sparkly pink paint around the perimeters of warped-looking hearts that we’d cut out of black construction paper. Before long, I had one co-worker reciting Smiths lyrics in fake Morrissey baritone and another—a die-hard classical fan with no previous knowledge of the Smiths—contemplating the meaning of the lyric “If it’s not love, then it’s the bomb that will bring us together” and scheming about how, exactly, we could pull off such a stunt at our workplace.

Of course, I was doing some scheming of my own.

Giving valentines out to the office staff at large meant making valentines for the office staff in particular. Which meant making a valentine for the exquisitely sexy art director who I’d been eyeing since I started my job in August. Art Director sat just off the hallway by the kitchen behind a bookshelf loaded with comics, illustrators’ guides, and CDs whose titles I could barely make out as I took mental inventory of his desk on my trips back from the water cooler. He had clear gray-blue eyes that peered out from a shock of messy dark brown hair and just enough of that self-assured, pompous bite that makes me swoon—he was positively dreamy. We’d been exchanging darting, flirtatious emails for months. I could barely wait to plant a delightful and ferocious valentine on his desk.

Last year, Valentine’s Day fell on a Saturday, which nearly disrupted the office valentine plan, sending me into a serious panic. But my valentine cohorts and I soon realized that if Saturday was the 14th, the day before would be Friday the 13th—and what better day for black valentines? On Thursday, three of us spent the afternoon holed up in a private office furiously snipping hearts from black paper and pasting the happily-fonted lyrics I’d combed the Internet for all morning. At a little after 11 at night, I headed back to the office to distribute the valentines under cover of night.

I made the rounds in the smallish office, spending way too much time considering each lyric and what kind of an impact it might have on its recipient. For sensitive officemates, I chose benevolent lyrics, for the cynics I reserved selections from “There is a Light that Will Never Go Out.” For the publisher and the editorial director, I chose totally neutral and slightly amusing stanzas from less jaded tunes.

When I arrived at Art Director’s desk I furtively examined the extensive collection of stuff he’d accumulated on his shelves. I catalogued the overlap in our music collection, the various striking doodles he’d tacked to his corkboard for inspiration, the mesmerizing half-toned screensaver that undulated on his 24-inch Mac flat panel. I was vaguely, unreasonably jealous of the Polaroids of various women that decorated his desk, and intrigued by the seemingly random collection of books that he kept piled over his head on a bookshelf. Finally, I plunked a black heart on his desk before I could further ruminate on the consequences of my action.

The next morning, Friday the 13th, my co-workers reacted similarly to my old college friends—with a mixture of utter confusion and winking appreciation. Some of my co-workers hung their valentines on their corkboards, others tossed them aside as if some inexplicable piece of trash. My valentine cohorts and I kept our mission under wraps, but the office buzzed with speculation, most of which was directed at me. It was all I could do to keep my cheeks from staining in their usual fair-skin crimson giveaway.

Art Director didn’t comment on his valentine that day. We carried on in our normal fashion, coyly emailing each other throughout the workdays that followed and carefully constructing iTunes playlists that subtly disclosed a vague but somehow tangible mutual feeling. In fact, I didn’t disclose the secret of the office valentines until one of nearly a year ago—on one of our first dates. He’d known all along.