'Me' Time

         Sal comes over to my desk with his pudgy face all red and stressed out. “You busy, Nikko?”
         He keeps pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose even though they aren’t slipping down, so I know he’s nervous.
         “What do you need.”
         The setting is the office I work at. I’m there to help out during the next few months because they’re swamped, understaffed, and need all the help they can get. The company basically builds products for other companies who then sell their stuff to other companies and so on and so forth. I place the orders for the pieces we need to build the products, and I keep track of all the files and make sure everything is well organized because I’m OCD like that.
         “I need you to place the orders for Costech again, there’s been a lot of changes so you’ll need to start from scratch.”
         “Uh-huh, what’s the priority? Red, orange, yellow, or blue?”
         “What?”
         The idea is everything is color-coded. Red is due within 48 hours, orange is before the weekend or by Monday if we’re late in the week, yellow is within the next two weeks and blue is basically whenever there’s nothing else better to do which is just about never.
         “When do you need this for.”
         “Now. It’s top priority, I want you to drop whatever else you’re doing and work on this.”
         “Uh-huh… I can’t do that. I already have Medtron, Lintec, Ostro and two other orders to work on and they’re all due for tomorrow. I can’t get to it before Wednesday.”
         “I need this absolutely for today. Work it out.” He hands me the file and walks away in search of some other employee’s job to endanger. I open up the file and start flipping through the sixty-eight pages that need to be reworked and approved and signed and stamped and put into the computer system.
         “Hey Nikko, you busy?” If it weren’t a female voice speaking to me I might have flipped the finger. Instead, I look up and there’s Rochelle with her see-through blouse and black bra underneath and pale, pale skin and a form-fitting skirt and black high-heels…
         What makes office-life even more complicated than all the deadlines is all the sex.
         Rochelle is going to be office-lover number eight. Number one was the lady who hired me in the human resources department. Number two was her cousin who showed me how to do her job because she was moving to the States with her fiancé. Number three, four, and seven were moved to another building for various reasons. Number five is currently on sick leave because she burnt out, and number six got fired for doing coke in the lady’s room. Rochelle is a temp and she’s only here for another week.
         “Yeah, I’m busy.”
         “Are you too busy to help me get some binders from the supply room?”
         Just so you know, this is code for ‘let’s fuck’.
         “Get them yourself, I have to piss.”
         Rochelle makes a pouty face that’s meant to be sexy but really isn’t at all. This face she makes is her ‘thing’. It’s her way of saying ‘hey, this is me you’re denying’. I don’t bother with her and I stand up and I walk past her and toward the bathroom near the cafeteria. I choose this one because it has it’s own door and it’s for only one person and it locks and no one can stick their head over the top and look down and watch you doing your business. For the record, I don’t really need to piss and if I did I would use the bathroom across the hall like everyone else.
         The idea here is that I need a break from all the impossible-to-meet deadlines and the impossible-to-please lovers, so I walk in and I close the door and I push in the little silver button and the door clicks locked. I turn to look at myself in the mirror and I look the same as usual. I back away and take a step toward the toilet and unfasten my belt and unzip my pants and pull them down with my boxers, down to me knees and I sit.
         The toilet is cold and public so I know a hundred other people have sat on it a hundred thousand times and froze their ass so they could take a shit. I rest my elbows on my knees and my chin sits in my hands and this is where I spend my fifteen-minute break. This is the only place in the building where no one will talk to me or boss me or fuck me. This is my headspace.
         Every once in a while someone will try the doorknob and wait a minute or two, but no one really insists. They figure if someone needs to use the bathroom for as long as I do, they don’t want to be the person walking in next.
         I look at my watch and it’s been twelve minutes. I start to wonder just how pissed Rochelle is at me, and if she’s still in the mood for sex in the supply room, or maybe the empty upstairs office. I think about her see-through blouse and her black bra and her pale, pale skin and no skirt but keep the high-heels on and…
         I look at my watch again and my fifteen minutes is up. I stand and my ass cheeks feel numb but the toilet seat isn’t cold anymore. I pull up my pants and buckle my belt and twist the doorknob so the little silver button pops up and unlocks. I pull open the door and walk out of the bathroom. I walk toward my desk, past Sal and past his boss and past rows of desks and offices and cubicles and I finally sit down and Rochelle taps me on the shoulder. I look up and she says, “Stand,” so I stand. “Your pants,” she says.
         “What?”
         She puts her hand on my crotch.
         “Let me.”
         “Rochelle, not now. And especially not here.”
         “What?”
         “What?”
         “You’re fly.”
         “What?”
         “You forgot to zip it.”
         “Oh.”
         “You thought I wanted to have sex with you?”
         “Your hand was on my crotch.”
         And there goes what I thought would be number eight, laughing.