Chapter 1 - Chemical Attractors: Andrew's Story

There can't be such a thing as love as first sight. That's certainly impossible, regardless of what you've heard. People are mistaking love for lust. I believe lust at first sight happens occasionally. I'm an eyewitness.

I talked to her long before I physically met her. The first time I talked to her on the phone I hoped her voice was reflective of her looks. I saw a movie recently where a guy got off of the phone with a woman he had never met and said that she was 'audibly blonde'. When I talked to Deirdre on the phone I thought she was audibly fuckable. I've never had that happen before. I made a simple business call, asked to talk to someone who had called my office requesting me while I was out. I was returning a call, for crying out loud. I wasn't expecting a life-altering experience with a simple phone call.

Deirdre was with a consulting firm that was supposed to tell my company how to do its business. Our company has only been in business for 55 years. Why should we know how to do our job? It was obvious we needed someone to come in to tell us what we were doing wrong. Deirdre was a consultant with Brown and Raymond Management Consultants. I was one of the liaison guys who were supposed to give BRMC the lowdown on how things worked. Then they were going to tell us what to downsize, who to downgrade, how to cut expenses and generally fuck up the atmosphere in a previously great place to work. I think I can safely say that only upper management in our firm thought kindly of BRMC.

I reluctantly returned Deirdre's call. It was my job, after all. I was to cooperate in everyway possible with the BRMC team. The lady called me. I called her back; simple as that. I hate those voice mail systems that a lot of companies have installed in the last decade. They are a major indicator of the decline of the quality of life in our country, generated in part by an over dependence on technology. Just because we can do it doesn't mean it should be done. Fuck voice mail.

After dealing with "please listen carefully because our menu options have changed" and blah, blah, blah, I finally reached a real person. She answered the phone "Deirdre Martin". I didn't know that I was about to be hit by a truck.

Our company is located in the mid-west. We aren't near to being a Fortune 500 company, but we are publicly traded and have over 5000 employees in three facilities, two in Ohio and one in Indiana. We're respectable.

I'm the fair-haired boy. I'm a department head, even if it is only a small department. I'm the youngest department head in the company. The next youngest department head is twenty years older than me. She's forty-five, so that makes me twenty-five. I'm in charge of software development for our process control division. I also have a hand in some web-site development and in supporting some people in our general area who don't have time to wait for the IT department to actually respond to their requests.

I have three arrogant little pricks working for me as software developers. They're all teenagers, right out of high school. Some jerk-off in Human Resources heard that in today's market you either farm your software development out to India or Israel or some such shit, or hire little dork-faced numbnuts who are so young they don't cost any money. They also have no experience other than playing around with other computer nerds with no life. And they don't know how to follow through. They get 90% through a project and they get bored. They keep giving me buggy programs and don't understand why I'm upset with them. I end up finishing up the programming myself, or the damn shit just wouldn't work. Yes, I learned how to do all this stuff when I was a kid, but at least I was never a dork-faced numbnut.

I have my own axe to grind. I'll admit it. These BRMC guys are coming in here to tell us how to do business, but I already know what it's going to take. We've got to get a real internet presence and start conducting eBusiness. We are in the Stone Age in computing terms. We have a "calling card" kind of internet presence. We don't have our customers on-line for purchasing and delivery info. We don't try to sell our products on the net. We could be targeting new markets. We could be moving into the 21st Century. Instead we're using the tried and true same old method of doing business, while everyone else is trying something new. Eventually we will be shit out of luck. At least that's my opinion.

So I'm one of the guys who are dealing with BRMC. I have nothing else on my plate except trying to clean up half a dozen almost completed projects that will not go live till I have debugged them and given them a professional look. These kids wouldn't know a professional look if it came up and bit them on the ass.

Deirdre Martin has the kind of voice that turns my knees to putty. She speaks with a Southern drawl, but she certainly has been influenced by her time in the North, because it's not as strong an accent as I've heard from other people from Georgia. I asked where she was from when I first heard her speak. It was a natural question. I guess she gets it all the time, being a transplanted Southerner. She's been in Ohio for three or four years working for BRMC, doing her business consulting thing.

Her voice was magic. It's a kind of little girl's voice, soft and charming. There was laughter in it, and sultry sexiness. My secretary walked into my office while I was on the phone with Ms. Martin. She stood waiting for me to finish.

When I hung up, I just shook my head and said, "Wow! That woman is audibly fuckable. She has the greatest voice I've ever heard. What a Southern accent! Maybe this assignment won't be as bad as I had thought."

My secretary, a very nice but rather dumpy 48 year old-mother of four shook her head at my language. "Drew, please don't use language like that unless you plan to back it up. Besides, she's probably an elderly black lady."

"Thanks, Carol, for bursting my bubble. Well I'll see it when I believe it; or vice versa. This woman is going to be a goddess. In a just universe, a voice like that would have to be attached to a heavenly body. Please, universe. Be just!"

Over the course of a week or two, Deirdre and I exchanged emails, faxes, databases, spreadsheets, all the paraphernalia that are the hallmark of the modern business world. I even slipped in some of my own ideas about developing an internet presence designed to keep us current with standard business practices. I figured it wouldn't hurt.

We became friendly over the phone. She had a great voice, but I never forgot that her voice belonged to a potential enemy. Maybe a potential ally, too, and you can never have too many allies, especially ones who are going to have a major say in how your company is going to be run. It was a sticky political situation. I was in a position to push my own agenda if I were able to catch Deirdre's ear. Sure, I would benefit from that, but I really believe that it's a good course for the company to follow.

We did all of this preliminary legwork, but the real work was to begin when Deirdre spent two to three weeks at our plant to learn first hand how things worked and what our methods and problems are. I was to spend two to three weeks in a room with Deirdre. The thought occurred to me that this could be heaven or this could be hell. What if she doesn't look like her voice? Well, I could live with that. That's only my wishful thinking at work. I really had no reason to believe that my relationship with Deirdre Martin was going to be anything but professional. She might be able to help me professionally. She might be able to emasculate me professionally. She wielded power over me. That was an uncomfortable thought.

It was a Monday morning. I was a few minutes late (a tractor trailer flipped over while making an exit off of the interstate and everything was a mess - that was the story I planned to tell). When I got in Carol told me that Deirdre was in the conference room waiting for me. I took a deep breath and marched to my potential fate.

Deirdre was sitting at the conference table when I entered, and rose to greet me. I was stunned. She had stolen Joanne Woodward's face: the young Joanne Woodward, the Joanne Woodward of "The Long Hot Summer". Her hair was short with curls: blonde. Of course she was blonde. She wore a business suit that concealed her body effectively except that she was obviously slim with curves, but I didn't care about her body. I couldn't see her body. All I could see were her eyes. She had these blue-green eyes: round, innocent eyes; eyes that beckoned, invited, questioned. But there was more. She smiled and reached out to shake my hand. Her eyes lit up as if she had turned on a switch. I was mesmerized! She was enchanting and I was enchanted. And then it happened.

Our hands touched. She shook my hand in a friendly business-like greeting, but I was suffering from sensory overload.

I need to interject a crackpot theory I've been working on. It's a theory I developed because my most sacredly held beliefs are now being challenged, and I need something to meet that challenge head-on or I may see the total destruction of my belief system.

It's a chemistry thing. That's what it is. It must be; chemistry and physics, too. Electricity comes in there somewhere. Our hands touched and it was like I had come home. A simple hand shake, but every point of contact seemed to be an energy source. Her skin is like velvet: soft, very soft, smooth and tanned: velvety. Something in her skins cells, some chemical, some DNA thing, some hormone or whatever, attracts like-minded somethings in my skin cells.

My theory is this: certain people are chemical attractors to certain other people. Their body's chemistries are meant for each other, attract each other like iron to a magnet: some kind of endorphin thing, maybe. Her endorphins fit into my receptors. Something fit into my receptors, because I was receiving big time.

That touch was the most exciting instant I had experienced in my life. I didn't know what had come over me. This was a simple damn business meeting with a person who might have life or death power over my job, and I was acting like a love struck teenager. I could feel myself flush. My breathing became a little labored. I was lost in her eyes, holding her hand. Worst of all, my erection went from 0 to 60 in five seconds. If she had been standing any closer to me it would have knocked her over. As it is, I think she had to jump to get out of the way.

I was in a situation here. I couldn't seem to let go of Deirdre's hand. I have no idea if I was saying anything to her or was merely making little gurgling noises in my throat. My ears were buzzing, so I couldn't hear much anyway.

Deirdre gently removed her hand from mine and sat back down. I came to my senses and took a seat opposite her at the conference table. Checking her out I could see that she was older. I couldn't guess her age. She could be a mature twenty-five or an extremely well-preserved forty. Somewhere between 25 and 40 was my guess. She got right down to business as if she weren't facing a semi-crazed stranger with an erect cock.

I could see instantly she was way out of my class. I had absolutely no hope of getting close to this woman. She was beautiful. She was smart. She had a big time job, probably making four times as much as I made. She had those eyes. But she was out of my class. I felt like the high school nerd looking at the head cheerleader with envious eyes, knowing that he had no chance to ever get close to that magnificent creature.

I knew she was unattainable and that helped me regain my self-control. Okay, I said to myself. Okay, enjoy being around her. That's all that can come of this. You can spend some time with the most magnificent thing you've ever been around. Just don't get involved, because no involvement is possible. Talk about whistling past the graveyard.

We talked. We talked business. I had trouble concentrating at first, but then I learned I could effectively focus on the business information we were trying to glean while at the same time keeping my total attention on Deirdre. We sat there all morning talking about this department or that, various reports that I had given her and the meaning of some of the trends those reports highlighted. And the whole time, through it all, I maintained a hard-on.

My face was stoic through it all. I never let my emotions show on my face. I've been studying Mr. Spock since I was a kid, and I know how to turn a Vulcan face to things. After my first indiscretion of acting like a child (well, a child with a hard dick) when we first met, I thought I had done a good job of staying on task, giving her the things she needed for her to do her job properly.

But it was hard. She was a continual distraction to my attention. I wanted to memorize everything about her. From her point of view, I was a little kid with a questionable education, and maybe she was thinking that I've risen as high on the corporate ladder as I was ever going to rise. It took me a while to integrate my logical cogitations of things into my emotional being. But I finally did it. I finally knew deep down that she was desirable, eminently desirable, but entirely unreachable. My entire body finally understood that. Well, all of my body understood it except one 8-inch tube of unquenchable lust. It just wanted to fuck her.

Two days passed. We were making progress, but I could tell she was getting uneasy with my distractibility. And I had maintained an erection for the entire time she was in the room with me. I couldn't help it. On Tuesday and Wednesday I wore looser fitting pants, just so it wasn't so obvious what was going on down there. It didn't make any difference. It was obvious anyway. I was hard. Nothing could change that.

Frankly I tried to mitigate Deirdre's effect on me by jacking off as much as possible. Well, actually, I just HAD to jack off or I was going to die of a terminal case of blue balls. I jacked off before I came to work, thinking it might take some time for me to rejuvenate. I rejuvenated in the time it took for my eyes to take in Deirdre's entire body.

I want to tell you this was not fun. I was in an agony of unfulfilled arousal. Wednesday morning was a replay of Tuesday and Monday. I was distractible, nervous, ill at ease, and generally doing a less than perfect job as an interface between the company and BRMC.

Deirdre had lunch with another BRMC person who was working in another area of our building. I sat at my desk with a sandwich and wished I was dead.

We met again in the conference room after Deirdre had come back from lunch. I was waiting for her when she entered the room, sitting at a laptop trying to get some numbers together while I was free to act outside the range of Deirdre's female pulchritude. She came into the conference room, gave me a wan little smile, and then closed and locked the door. Uh, oh, I thought. Here it comes. She's had the shits of me.

Deirdre looked at me, not unkindly and said, "Andrew, we have to talk."

Everyone calls me Drew. I guess the only person in the world that calls me Andrew is my mother. And now Deirdre calls me Andrew. It was one more distraction I didn't need. I tried to get my head together.

"What's the problem, Deirdre?"

"Andrew would you rather not work with me? You've been a bundle of nerves since Monday morning. I've been assured by your business associates that you are normally a calm and confident person. I enjoy working with you, but I get the feeling you would rather be anywhere in the world than here."

I quickly shook my head. "That's not true, Deirdre. I enjoy working with you!" Wait a minute. Maybe I said that a little too forcefully.

She gave another sad little smile. "We have to talk, Andrew. I need to know what the problem is between us. We've got a big job to do. There are a lot of people depending on us. We can't allow some small conflict between us interfere with the progress of our project. If you don't like me I can deal with that. I talked to Bob Simon over lunch, and he agreed to exchange liaison people if we feel it necessary. Melissa Thomas could work with me, and you could work with Bob."

I felt a surge of panic. I was screwing this thing up so badly that Deirdre couldn't even work with me anymore. That will look great on my record. Worse, it would mean I couldn't spend my days with Deirdre. Talk about a disaster of biblical proportions!

"Deirdre, it isn't like that at all. There is no one I would rather work with than you."

There. That didn't sound too bad. I wasn't falling all over myself slobbering on her like a schoolboy. I'd made a simple statement of fact, spoken with practically no inflection. I wasn't throwing myself at her. I merely was saying that I liked working with her and would prefer to keep it that way.

I could tell that Deirdre wasn't buying. "What's the problem, then? Either you are the most nervous person I've ever met, or something else is wrong. Little boy, I'm told that nervousness isn't your problem. So what is?"

I was in a corner, looking for a way out. Coming clean with this woman just wasn't an option. First, she's way out of my league. Second, we are business associates. Third, there is such a thing as sexual harassment. That's three strikes. All I could do was look unhappy and claim that everything was fine.

"Andrew, you've got to talk. I don't want to switch partners with Bob, but I will if I have to. This job is too important."

I guess I looked miserable. I said, "Deirdre, I'm afraid that my problems aren't work related. They have nothing to do with the work that we are doing. They certainly aren't caused because I don't enjoy working with you. It's just something I will have to deal with myself."

"Now Andrew, we've known each other for weeks. I know we only met in person the other day, but don't you feel enough confidence in me that you can let down your guard a little? I promise that whatever you say will be held in the strictest of confidences. I won't hold it against you."

I muttered "Yeah, sure." I knew better. But what could I do. I was damned if I did, and damned if I didn't. Nothing I could do or say or not do or not say would make this situation better. It's difficult to speak when you know that what you say is going to make you look like a complete jackass.

Chapter 2 »