Stealing glances

You settle down at what little space serves as your desk, tucked away in a corner left over from all the ‘real’ employees cubicles. It’s cramped, gloomy and about as far from a window as any spot in the office can be. Just the sort of place they would stick an unpaid intern such as yourself…

Still, at least it gives you a little privacy during the work day. No-one ever really seems to even notice you’re there, most of the time. You pick up the list of data entry tasks set for you every morning and can have most of them done by noon, leaving plenty of time to just meander around on the internet until the clock strikes five. The work network is in fact surprisingly unrestrictive, allowing you to watch, read or play whatever you want really, with little fear of being caught. It hardly seems different to what you’d be doing at home, as shy and antisocial as you have a tendency to be.

There is one more advantage too… Sabrina. Though you’ve known for a while she has also taken up a placement here, and assume she’s been plonked in a similar out of the way location, you haven’t actually been able to work out where that is yet. However, every morning, just after 10am… she passes you by. Through a gap in the precarious filing rack on your left, you can watch her swaying hips sidle confidently up to a darkly intimidating oak door at the end of the room. This, you know, leads into the head manager’s office… a stern, no-nonsense man in his late forties who quite frankly scares the hell out of you. Sabrina heads in there every day, though, presumably on some routinely-ordered coffee run. It truly drags you out of bed and brightens your entire day, just knowing you’ll have that guaranteed chance to see her.

What’s curious, however… is that you’ve never actually seen her leave the office afterwards. Whether it’s by pure coincidence, or due to some other, unseen exit you are unaware of… That one, momentary glance is all you get of her each day. A flash of purest beauty in this nightmare of modern bureaucracy… then nothing more for all the day long. If you were a more creative soul, you could probably write a poem about that single moment of joy each morning. Something about short, black skirts and the swishing haze of tight nylon. But, instead, you just savoured the view… and tried to imagine what it might be like to have those long, smooth legs wrapped around you.

This, particular, morning started out like any other: You settled down in your uncomfortable workspace and got a good hour of mindless typing in before your most auspicious appointment of scheduled peeping arrived. Even five minutes beforehand, you’d lost all focus on the screen… glancing up every few seconds just in case she came early. Yet, as always, Sabrina was exactly on time. Popping into view like a sultry goddess of punctuality. You watched her every, measured pace in smart, black heels. Counting the steps you had left before she vanished into that doorway. She stopped, for a second, and knocked. Turning around to scan the room behind her. For an instant… your heart froze in your chest, thinking she had latched onto the glint of your eyes through the crack. Yet, she turned back quickly at some voice from within, giving no further indication that she’d seen you.

And then she was gone. The highlight of your day done with. Leaving nothing but the clicking of keyboards and ticking of the clock to entertain you. You sighed wistfully… and logged back into your gone-to-sleep screen. Perhaps later you’d try looking her up on facebook again…