Waring: Somewhat graphic content follows the "Read More" link.
Office
Romance
Barbara
enjoyed the solitude as she typed at her computer. Having the office to
herself, after everyone else went home was the best of both worlds: it made her
feel professional but without the demands of maintaining a professional façade
with her colleagues. It wasn’t that she didn’t like them. She liked them all
well enough. It’s just that she felt something of an imposter. She’d recently
rejoined the workforce after taking a few years off to start a family. Now,
with her two children in school, she was trying to learn how to relate to
adults again.
The rituals
of the working world take time and are as intricate as those of the Freemasons,
though likely less codified and with fewer funny hats. Except on Funny Hat Day.
Barbara didn’t quite understand Funny Hat Day. She liked doing her hair,
putting on a flattering dress, chosen for style rather than how easily puke
stains would come out of it, and a pair of shoes in which she could never
negotiate a Lego-strewn family room. “Why would you want to deliberately mess
that up,” she thought? Especially when the day’s work remained unchanged? The
hats were just there, peripheral. Three minutes of chuckles and seven hours and
fifty seven minutes of hat head.
Fortunately,
it wasn’t Funny Hat Day. It was just a regular work day. Barbara liked those.
Not that she didn’t enjoy the office’s collegial vibe, but what she really
loved was that she was taken seriously, as a capable woman. She wasn’t
somebody’s mom, she was somebody.
Barbara
saved the draft she was working on and closed the document. She glanced at the
picture of her family on her desk as she thought about the e-mail she was about
it write. As she sat there, she heard a noise. She’d been hearing noises for
about an hour, since the last of her colleagues went home. She had been
dismissing them as the building settling, wind, or machinery. It wouldn’t do to
let her imagination get the better of her. There was something different about
this noise, though. It sounded like the outer door to the stairwell closing
with its characteristic clang. There shouldn’t be anybody coming in that door.
All the staff entered through the main door, using their electronic pass cards
and either took the main stairs or the elevator to the third floor office. The
fire stairs were only used as a shortcut to the parking lot when people were
leaving at the end of the day.
Barbara sat
a moment thinking about what she should do. She thought she could hear
footsteps in the stairwell. Her mind raced to scenes of women in heels being
chased by killers in countless movies and TV shows. They always tripped or
twisted an ankle, their vanity being their undoing. Feeling silly, Barbara
reached down and began to unbuckle the straps on her shoes. She’d loved them
when she bought them, but the three-inch heels weren’t made for speed.
She heard
the fire door open. That was odd. The door was supposed to be locked, only able
to be opened from the inside, just like the one at the base of the stairs. She
was reaching for her purse, and the phone it contained, when she heard a voice.
“Helloooo Barbara,” it sang out. Just as the greeting ended, Tom came into view
at the end of the row of cubicles in which Barbara sat.
“Tom, you
scared me,” Barbara said, feeling herself relax. “I wasn’t expecting anyone.”
“Sorry,
Barb. I didn’t mean to.”
“My heart is
beating a mile a minute.”
“Didn’t mean
to, but it’s only fair, since you always have that effect on me,” said Tom as
he stopped at Barbara’s cubicle and leaned against the partial wall. She could
see the small smile on his face and the subtly raised eyebrow.
Barbara
laughed a little and blushed a little. Tom had been flirting with her since a
month after she arrived at the office. One of the first conversations they had
was him asking her out. This was despite the wedding ring she wore and that, at
34, she was about eight years older than him. She had laughed and blushed that
time too. She had to admit to being flattered. Tom, while not overly tall, was
a good six inches taller than her and fairly solid, if not muscular. His dark
brown hair always looked as if he had just rolled out of bed and run a brush
through it once or twice before heading into the office.
“I saw your
car in the parking lot and I thought I’d come up and see how you were doing,”
he said, crossing his arms.
“Oh, um,
fine, really,” replied Barbara, averting her eyes from his gaze.
“In no hurry
to get home, huh?” As he said this, Tom moved closer to her and picked up the
picture of her family. It had been taken when she and Gary had gone camping
with the children. Barbara loved Maria’s smile in that photo. Jake had refused
to smile, trying to mimic his father’s look of mock anger at the request to
pose for yet another photo. Tom studied it briefly, sitting on the edge of her
desk while he did so. Then he placed it on the desk, face down.
“I just
wanted to get a few things finished before I head back home. There’s so much to
do there, what with making dinner and getting the kids to bed and making sure
everything is set for the morning.” Barbara stopped, surprised by how much she
had just told Tom. She tended to be on the quiet side when she was in the
office. She found herself particularly flustered by Tom, ever since the day
he’d casually asked her if she wanted to catch a movie after work. Now here she
was just blurting out everything!
“C’mon! It’s
got to be nice to get away from the white picket fence and cooking and cleaning
and the old Saturday night usual,” he said with a wink. “I wonder how a
beautiful woman can live with those constraints.”
He didn’t
know the half of it, she thought. Before she’d married, Barbara had lived a
life that would probably surprise Tom. In her early twenties, she had been a
fixture at the clubs and there wasn’t much she hadn’t tried. Thirteen years of
marriage had transformed the lithe, redheaded hellion of her youth into a
respectable housewife. She was grateful for that, really. Had she kept at it,
she probably would have pushed things too far and paid the price. She nearly
had. And Tom was certainly wrong about the “Saturday night usual.” Her husband
didn’t approach her for sex anywhere near that frequently. Two or three times a
year was more like it, and then it tended to be perfunctorily vanilla. Could he
see that in her? Could Tom tell how hungry she was to be taken up, wrapped in
flesh and sweat?
“Oh, no,
married life is great. I really like it. It suits me. I love the kids and my
husband is great. I admit I like coming to the office for the three days a
week, though. It’s good to get to act like an adult for a change.”
“I imagine
it is. Want to act like adults right now?” Tom lowered his chin and raised his
eyebrows as he locked his brown eyes with her green ones.
