Her eyes locked onto the glassy stare of the rider. He was frozen as still as she’d been a moment before. Okay, that was weird. His eyes didn’t blink. His bike didn’t fall over even though both of his feet were on the peddles.
Gillian thought, maybe I should take a moment to examine what’s going on here. But she was already behind her tight morning schedule, and drenched, so she turned her head back to the madding crowd and forced her frame past knees and elbows and cacti, onward to work.
After thirteen minutes of pushing past particularly pushy people, Gillian arrived at the uninviting, uninteresting façade of the big pharma finance office where she filled in. Full time. Gillian had OCD and antisocial proclivities that made it especially difficult to deal with coworkers on any grand scale. The medical billing office only employed fourteen people. A nice number of data entry engineers. Not too many. Not too few. Just right.
Gillian marched mechanically past the nonresponsive new security guard at the front desk. In the unisex employee facilities, she quickly stripped off her suit coat and looked in the mirror above the sink.
The image reflected back at her didn’t look familiar. Gillian blinked at the soggy locks of hair dangling to either side of a face streaked with black eyeliner and dust which stuck to the thin sheen of coffee all over her face and neck. The previously white blouse below the face and neck was now woefully beige. As beige as the floor and the walls, and the ceiling, and the stall doors, and the bank of lockers behind her.
Stripping off the now irreparably soiled shirt, she shook it unceremoniously into the rubbish bin and shimmied out of her skirt, setting the skirt carefully on top of the suit jacket beside the sink.
In the exact center of the wall of lockers was Locker No. 61. A prime number. Perfect. Beautiful in its serene simplicity. Serendipitous, really, that she should have been given this locker since it was one of her four favorite integers.
Gillian may not have noticed it yet, but since leaving the coffee shop, her OCD had been working on max setting. Today, her disorder was ranging in the Overly psychotic Completely neurotic Disaster spectrum. Not the best state of mind to be in, especially when she was about to be blessed with another chance encounter with her lately least favorite fashionisto.
Arlo bounded through the space between eternity and the doorway like the veritable bull in a china shop, stopping in surprise at the scene of Gillian in her underwear in the unisex.
“You again?” Gillian demanded. “What’s going on here? Are you punking me?”
“Wuuuhhhh?” Arlo asked, elongating the word comically. “Of course not! This is where I work… well starting today, anyway.”
He let out a nervous titter that set her teeth on edge. The wordless warble winnowed out to an uneasy silence.
“So, yeah, don’t mind me. I’m just gonna…” He pointed at the toilet stall behind her.
“No,” she growled. “Hold it.”
He stared at her with wide eyes, slowly slipping out of the shared bathroom and letting the door close slowly behind him. Or before him, actually, if you want to be technical about it.
Gillian struggled to regain control of her higher reasoning as she realized that she was stringing alliterative sentences together in a singularly strange fashion.
Scrubbing her face roughly, slapping on a fresh coat of paint/makeup, and quickly changing into clean clothes, she grabbed her heavy (with coffee) handbag, slipped on her squishy shoes and sauntered to her work space.
Gillian took a deep breath as she released all of the tension and frustration of the last one hour ten minutes. Dropping her bag on the floor beside her, she booted on her desktop.
“Gail,” Roger’s monotone drifted from the doorway to her tiny but perfectly enclosed and cut off from everyone else space.
She’d worked in the same office for… forever… but her boss just didn’t care what her name was so he called her whatever semi sort of close thing he could think of.
“Yes, Roger,” she acknowledged him as she clicked away at her keyboard.
“You have a trainee.”
He may as well have said, “You have cancer,” because the sense of dread that descended upon Gillian in that moment felt like a death sentence. She knew without a shadow’s left butt cheek of a doubt that her ‘trainee’ would be none other than-
“Jean-Paul!” Arlo’s bubbly voice blurted out. “What are the odds?”
The odds? The ODDS?! Whatever the odds were, they definitely were not in her favor.
Gillian squeezed her eyes shut and prayed that it was all just a horrible nightmare. Maybe, if she was lucky, she’d wake to find herself curled up in bed, blissfully unencumbered by the unwelcome role of trainer.
The squeal of wheels along carpet set her teeth on edge. So… definitely not a dream, then. Arlo was dragging one of the rolling office chairs from an empty nearby cubicle to her side.
The unprofessional-looking man sat on the cracked black leather seat and crossed one leg over the other at the knee, his jeans riding up slightly to show a bit of pale skin above the top of his shoe. Gross.
“Supervisor Goodspeed said you were going to train me,” he said.
Gillian ignored him. Maybe if she refused to believe he was really there, he would cease to exist. It was a thin hope, but she clung to it.
“Ummm…” Arlo said after a moment. “Should I make some coffee or-”
“No!” Gillian shouted. The painful memory of blistering java dripping down her body was still too raw. So much for ignoring him.
“Oh, okay,” Arlo said softly. His eyes were wide.
“Here,” she said, thrusting a stack of paper at him. “Go, make copies. The copy room is down the hall.”
“Cool,” Arlo said.
He jumped up from the rolling chair, bumping her elbow slightly in passing as he rushed from the cubicle. Gillian tensed at the brief skin to skin contact. Gritting
