Tensions at work [MF] [Workplace] [Sexual Tension] [Part 1]

I’d been working in my new job for three months when I first started to notice it. The head of the R&D technology department really had it out for the finance and business operations staff. He’d come to our joint strategy meetings and always had snide remarks for us “businessey” types. It was small, but constant. “Oh, good idea, where’d you come up with that one, the golf course?” followed by self-indulgent chuckles. “If you put as much effort into your appearances as you do into strategy we might not be in this position” followed by lascivious looks. It was surprising coming from him, he didn’t have a mean look about him, and he was clever about it too. He made the comments when no one in his chain of command was around and said it light heartedly enough you’d never be able to build a case against him for harassment. Not only was I always one of the only girls in the room for top level strategy meetings at our R&D company but I was also one of the youngest at just 28. I’d moved up quickly in my prior company and when I took this job I got another promotion with it. Perhaps I’d moved up the corporate latter too quickly. I certainly didn’t feel like I deserved to be one of the decision makers.

He was one of the most respected engineers at the company and he too had moved up the corporate latter at a lightening pace. He was in his early 40’s but already a director. He was usually the next youngest person in the room after me. His subordinates loved him, his leadership loved him, and really what wasn’t to love about this roguish, handsome, brilliant engineer. He instantly commanded the room when he walked in, his jokes were always laughed at, and his ideas were always praised. Me on the other hand… I took meeting notes. It only took three months before I started to resent him and avoid him. That was easy enough to do though since I was in finance and he was a tech lead. This worked well for another 5 months or so until I found out I had to work a new project closely with him.

He was leading a small team of 7 engineers to design an engine concept for a new customer. I was the finance and business lead on the team and it was my job to speak on behalf of the customers interests and ensure a successful capture. If we succeeded, it would be because of his team’s amazing design skills, if we lost the competitive contract, it would be because I failed to understand the customer. “Oh good, you can help keep us fed and format the document”, he’d said when he found out I was on his team too.

Right off the bat we were butting heads, but I wasn’t going to let him bully me into relenting on decisions I didn’t agree with. We fought on everything. Me: make it cheaper, Him: make it perfect, Me: make it reliable, Him: make it exciting, Me: make it manufacturable, Him: make it sexy. I didn’t know engines could be sexy, but that is what he wanted, sexy engines that cost a fortune and whirred like hummingbird. I knew our customers wanted something affordable that was assured to work the next 10 years without expensive maintenance. We’d sit in his office for hours debating customer values and our competitors’ capabilities. He’d always leave the door open.

“You wouldn’t know a thing about engineering”, he’d spout if I was winning an argument, “you’re just a business major”. It stirred something inside of me, not anger or embarrassment, but a drive to prove him wrong. So I hit the books during the evenings. I was proficient at math already because of my finance background and it wasn’t a stretch to teach myself some engineering basics. I learned thermodynamics, structures, statics, and manufacturing. I spent a lot of time online learning about how engines work and best design processes. There was still a long way for me to go before I’d be the next big inventor of engines, but I was picking up the language.

The brainstorming meetings started getting more detailed, I was asking the right questions, and I saw the flicker in his eyes the second he realized I knew what I was talking about. I’d shocked him with one of my questions about machining tolerances on the pistons that he didn’t have an answer for. I wish I could bottle that look and open every time I had an ounce of self-doubt.

The jabs about my intelligence stopped and suddenly I found him coming to me for advice. Not necessarily technical advice, but advice on how a feature would be perceived or if the value of extra capability warranted the cost. I still didn’t trust him though. He’d stab me in the back the second he needed a scape goat.

One day, he asked me to close the door behind me but not before checking to make sure I was okay with that. I could tell he was tense. Was I in trouble, did I make him uncomfortable, my mind was racing. “What do you think of Rachel’s work?” he asked me before I even made it into my seat. She was one of his employees, but she was unabashedly awful at engineering and a terror for team morale. “I need her off the project and I need something else for her to do. I can’t seem to get her fired; she keeps threatening lawsuits against us for sexism.” He just wanted to confide in me on personnel matters that he didn’t want overheard by the rest of the office. I relaxed and we talked for 20 minutes bashing Rachel’s work ethic and trying to find a solution to get her off the team amicably. Before I left his office, he looked straight in my eyes and said “Thank *you*” with such earnestness it hit me in the chest more than my ears.

We were embroiled in this proposal for nearly 8 months. Our typical 40 hour work weeks had morphed into 60 hour work weeks then nearing 80 hour work weeks. He joked with me that his wife was very unhappy with him. We were eating lunches and dinners at our desks. We’d turned a conference room into our war room for working on the proposal to keep the team centrally located for collaboration.

In the last month of the proposal we’d pared down the team to just three of us, him, myself, and one other technical author since the engineering work was completed. We were regularly breaking 80 hours each week and one fateful week, I logged 115 hours. We both had. His wife left him… or possibly he’d left her when he found out she’d been sleeping with a banker who lived in their neighborhood.

There was one night the three of us were working late. The third guy’s wife had been generous enough to bring us all food and stayed to keep her husband company. She was giving him shoulder messages and cleaning up around the conference room. The trash was overflowing with old take out containers and crumpled paper. Every surface was cluttered with old drafts of the proposal. The director looked over his shoulder and thanked her profusely for helping tidy up but I noticed his smile faltered.

Eventually the director told the third guy to head home with his wife for the night, that we’d take it from here. After they left, it was silent for a while until I stood up to use the restroom and he finally said something. “Are you okay here with me… I mean… it being just the two of us? I should have asked.” He flushed as he stumbled through the question.

I responded a little too quickly, “Of course, why wouldn’t I?”.

“Just making sure you weren’t uncomfortable”.

I sat in the restroom longer than I needed to. What did he mean by that? Why bother asking me? Did I make him uncomfortable? Should I have asked him the same question back? When I finally headed back to our den, he’d packed up his worn leather shoulder bag and had his sports coat slung over his arm. “I’m headed out for tonight to get some shut eye, don’t stay too long”. He followed it with a wink as he turned walked out. My stomach did a little flip flop and I gave him a smirk back that he never saw.

It was the last week before our proposal was due to the customer. We were down to final edits and I was constantly running numbers to refine our cost estimation. We were still over our target budget for the program. We sat side by side as he scoured through the data looking for cost outliers. I could just barely smell his musk when he leaned over my shoulder to look at the latest spreadsheet and it made me blush. He would rub his forehead like it would help drum up ideas that would make us more affordable. With the deadline looming, I felt helpless.

One day in particular, he looked completely defeated. His face was long, he had bags under his eyes, and his square jaw was uncharacteristically hidden by several days-old scruff. I reached out when he walked by and just simply said, “you okay?”. If I hadn’t been mistaken, I think he was wearing the same shirt he had the day before except the sleeves were rolled up now to reveal his toned forearms. Was he even going home?

The team had been riffing “what if” scenarios off each other for months now so it was nothing special when I started my next sentence with “what if we…”. But that was it, that was the idea we needed. His head shot up from the computer screen next to me. He let out an expletive. “It was so simple!”. He rushed to grab one of the engineers who’d started the proposal with us. I heard his excited shouting trail off as he ran down the hall, “I need you to run a monte carlo simulation on fuel efficiencies if we …”

Maybe an hour later he came busting back into our makeshift proposal war room beaming ear to hear. “Does it work!?” I asked standing up. He scooped me up in a jubilant hug and we high fived. “It works!”.

We reran the cost numbers with the new simplified design. The manufacturing cost, materials cost, and labor cost all went down. The cherry on top was seeing the recurring fuel cost estimates also plummet. “Now that is sexy!” he shouted while leaned over my shoulder looking at the new numbers. I gave him a funny grin inches from his face which made him falter and quickly add “a sexy engine design…the engine is sexy, not…”. I was laughing at him now and he was turning bright red. “Are you saying I’m *not* sexy?” I teased. “No that isn’t what I meant at all, oh god, how do I undig this hole”. He’d taken a step back but we were both deliriously tired and happy and couldn’t stop laughing at our own joke.

It was going to be a long night updating the design, the pictures, the cost write up, everything had to be touched in the proposal. We didn’t mind, we finally had the product we were proud of. He tackled drawings and figures while I took ahold of our 1,400 page cost volume to start updating tables and summaries. We watched the sun set around 8:00 PM and rise again around 5:30 AM. Most of the others had stayed until 9:00 or 10:00 PM. The only other last stalwart had stayed until 1:00 am when he’d finished a drawing with the new cylinder design he’d promised the boss. Like so many nights before, it was just the two of us again.

I’d run my fingers though my hair so many times trying to brush it out of my face it was getting stringy. His dark mop of hair was also tussled and completely disheveled. It was a good look. I hoped he didn’t notice me admiring him.

“I need to go home and shower” I proclaimed when I looked at the clock and saw how close it was to the start of the workday. “I’ll be back in an hour and half to clean up the document, but I think I’m done with all my sections”.

“Rachel can look over it when she gets in to verify we didn’t make any stupid mistakes in our haste” he suggested. Rachel was now working in estimating after deciding engineering wasn’t for her.

There was an awkward, do-we-hug-pause as I was about to leave but we settled on a high five.

In the shower, I took inventory of how close we’d grown over the last 8 months. I knew how spicy he liked his curry, I knew his dog’s name, I knew his favorite place to get tacos for take out, I knew that clicking pens was his biggest pet peeve, I knew about his father being dishonorably discharged from the military, and I knew the name of the man his wife had left him for. It was hard to picture him as the same guy who’d been negging me just months ago.

The past 24 hours had been a rush and we were almost done. Back at the office, it felt bittersweet to see the proposal being packaged for delivery. By 3:00 that afternoon, it was ready to go out the door.

He put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed gently as we all stood around waving to our delivery team as they walked out the door with 4 CDs and a box full of binders. They were much more well rested than us. Maybe realizing that this might look improper he quickly threw his arm around the engineer on his left too for the camaraderie.

“I think its time for us to get some sleep” he proclaimed to the group at large.

“Back to banker’s hours already!?” someone from the back joked. I saw him cringe just slightly before someone joked back “too soon” and the room busted out laughing. He laughed too but I could tell it wasn’t genuine even though no one else noticed. “Happy hour!?” someone chimed in. “Let’s celebrate” someone else echoed. “First round of drinks on the boss!?”. I looked up to see him bust into a more genuine smile. “Okay!” he conceded, “first round is on me”. The group cheered and turned to head out the door.

He looked down at me and whispered, “but *all* your drinks are on me tonight, okay”.

Happy-hour turned into happy-four-hours quite quickly. We ordered nachos for the group and I was on my third gin & tonic. I was exhausted and it felt like my eyes were bloodshot. I was starting to struggle to keep up with the group and decided it was time to leave.

“I’ll walk you out”, he said as he grabbed my elbow to help me keep my balance. “Are you okay to drive?”

“Probably not” I admitted.

“I’ll drive you. I can Uber back to my car from your house”

“Don’t be silly, I can just catch an Uber myself and get my car tomorrow” I insisted. He looked hesitant, pleading with his eyes to let him drive me home. I didn’t relent, some internal voice asserted that I didn’t need his help. At least I let him wait with me until my ride showed up.

“Your eyes are really really green today by the way. They look lovely” he said nonchalantly as he stared at me. I was so surprised by the forward compliment I didn’t have a response and I was too tired and my brain too mushy to say the right thing. I can’t remember what I said back but it was lame.

My rideshare arrived and interrupted the moment. He held my arm steady as I slumped into the back seat of the car, his fingers lingering on my skin seconds after I’d already sat down. I felt the tension ridden hesitation of letting go. The door closed and I found myself watching him through the car window walk back into the bar as we pulled away.

Despite how tired I was, I laid awake in bed thinking about him. But finally sleep overtook me.

I came in Monday morning well rested and bright eyed. I’d spent some extra time doing my makeup and picking out an outfit. I felt completely different having the stress of the proposal lifted off my shoulders. I’d gotten so used to seeing him every morning the second I walked in the door. He always beat me in to work. It was a weird shock to not see him Monday morning, or all day for that matter. His secretary told me he was taking the week off.

Of course he should take time off, he earned it. I felt a weird lump of disappointment in my throat. I’d looked forward to seeing him and having him see me. By Tuesday I fiddled with my phone, going through our text history. It’d all been work related stuff like “what time are you getting in tomorrow?” and “I’m on my way in” and “what was the latest pricing run?”.

I typed out a text, “you okay?” and let it sit in draft for the rest of the day. On Wednesday I deleted it and retyped, “miss you at work, enjoy your time off”. I deleted it and typed “I hope you are getting caught up on sleep during your time off”. I deleted it too. Finally, I retyped “hope you are having fun during your time off” and quickly hit send before I let myself second guess it anymore.

The response was instant. “Getting some much-needed sleep and working through divorce papers, wouldn’t call it fun”.

“Ouch, sorry to hear that, let me know if you need a drinking buddy” – Send

Ding – “Its not that bad, but I certainly wouldn’t turn down another happy hour with you”

“Tonight?” – Send

Ding – “Kicking Murphy’s at 5:00?”

“Make it 5:15, I’ll see you there” – Send

I was grinning like a schoolgirl. Rachel noticed from her cubical across from mine and asked me about it, “Hot date plans tonight? Who’s the new guy?”.

“Tinder date” I lied and locked my phone.

I got there early and sat in my car double checking my hair and touching up makeup. I didn’t wear much makeup or style my hair but I still felt the urge to primp. I should have stuck with 5:00. Finally I picked an arbitrary time when it seemed not too awkwardly early I headed inside. He was already sitting at the bar with his back to me. He had a beer in hand that was only three quarters full and the bar tender was setting a full rocks glass of gin and tonic in front of the empty seat next to him.

It dawned on me that this was the first time I’d seen him in jeans, even on the weekends, he’d dressed smartly. Damn he looked rakish in casual clothes and it made me blush involuntarily. His feet looked especially long and slender in classic black and white converses. My mind was tumbling and I kept reminding myself we were still professionals and neither of us had made a move yet. We hadn’t called this a date, he was a superior to me at work, and he was probably 15 years older than me.

The conversation started easy. We blabbed about work, commiserated about the proposal, talked about his divorce. It twisted and turned around my life story too. I admitted I hadn’t dated anyone since the proposal started which also meant I hadn’t had sex in over 8 months. I can’t believe I just told my male coworker how long I’d gone without sex.

His eyebrow raised and he leaned in and whispered “wow, that’s an even longer dry spell than me and I thought I was getting itchy.” Our faces were inches from each other, and he didn’t pull away. I kept glancing at his lips which were smooth and cherry.

“We should go somewhere more private” I suggested glancing around the room for anyone we might know.

He nodded and downed the last sip of his beer. He slid a card to the bartender without breaking eye contact with me.

We slipped out the door and started to walk along the sidewalk, towards the boardwalk. We kept talking and flirting and he looped his arm around my shoulders pulling me in. Just as we were about to walk past an ally, he made a sharp right turn and pulled me out of view of the street and instantly our mouths met. I cupped my hands around his neck and didn’t come up for air. It was explosive.

“We shouldn’t” he said breathily as soon as we broke contact. I just stared at him. I wanted it so bad, how could he just stop like this. I leaned in for another kiss but he just pulled my body in for a rather vanilla and comforting hug. “Really, we can’t start this. I could lose my career over it.”

He was right, of course. So I just rested my head on his shoulder listening to his heart race for a few more seconds in that ally. We both wanted it but were too sensible to go any further.

To be continued…

Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/k7flyt/tensions_at_work_mf_workplace_sexual_tension_part