Chapter 3: The Third Week

On Monday I was racked by regret and self-doubt. What were my feelings all about? Why did I make such a fool of myself? She was a complete stranger, and what I did was not really flirting. I did not know what it was.

She was a stranger, and I did not want anything to do with her. This was just a stupid fluke, and it would pass. Soon I would be back to ogling the blonde three doors away.

I stayed in my office and kept my eyes on the computer screen or on my desk. But there was something lodged inside my head, and I could not get it out. My muscles worked furiously to keep my head faced away from my office window.

I succeeded on Monday, but not on Tuesday. I had a meeting first thing in the morning, and all the way to the meeting room I cast my eyes about me, searching for her.

For the rest of the day my head swiveled from my desk to the office window and back again, my pulse racing every time the sound of heels came clicking down the corridor. The blonde passed by many times, but I did not really take notice anymore.

On Wednesday I resumed walking. It seemed that everywhere I went, my path led through the accounting department. Strange. I had rarely been there before, but now people who worked there seemed to become more and more familiar to me, as I sought out that one person.

I cursed the person who had designed accounting. For some reason they had decided that these office did not need windows. My heart jumped every time I read a door sign with a female name, but I had not idea which one was hers.

Thursday turned me into a philosopher. What did I want? In my fantasies, what did I desire from this woman?

There had been a lot of love-making in my dreams, certainly. Both wild, panting sex, and slower, more tender sensuality.

But that was not all. What I had dreamed about was doing things for her. The books, the coffee, and every little service and favor I could think of. And she would answer: "Good boy." And smile. And pat me on my head.

Boy. Pet. On my knees. Brow to the floor. Her smile. Her voice. Me. On my knees.

Oh dear. What was this? What had been released in my mind? This was not me. I did not know I was like this. This was not me!

But then I seemed to remember episodes from my life. How much I enjoyed playing a captured cowboy to a flock of giggling Indians as a boy. Carrying some girl's school books some years later. My insistence on being a perfect gentleman for my prom date.

Visions began flickering in front of my eyes. Pictures, explicit pictures, watched on the Internet late at night, showing women wearing leather and men on their knees, and worse. The pictures I had shunned, had felt disgusted by. But now I understood the guilty attraction I had felt. The veil had fallen from my eyes.

But accept it? Accept that a certain dreaded five letter word now applied to me? No, no! It could not be true.

Another thing struck me on Friday. What did she feel? Did she want this ... thing, that I seemed to need so badly? I almost laughed bitterly at the idea. Did she like these things? What kind of question was that? How about: Did she like me? Or even, was she married? How about that?

Though utterly depressed I was unable to stop pacing the corridors, up and down. I even went to the same coffee machine at the same time I had been last week, and waited there for almost fifteen minutes, but she did not come.

Finally I left for home, disheartened and in a black mood. All these thoughts and dreads I had experienced, and I had not even seen her! Still, I would have been relieved had I known that this was the last week in which I would not see her, or not hear her voice.