Hypotheticals

I sat there at my desk, elbow on the arm rest of my chair, chin propped on my hand, blank look on my face, deep in thought.

Sal had left the office early. Usually my best friend’s cheery, garrulous nature kept me focused on the task at hand – focused in the sense that I chatted with her while shoving the task at hand to the back of my mind. With Sal gone so early, I slipped in and out of conscious awareness instead of reading the article in front of me.

I was so lost in my own mind, I didn’t realize John was standing beside me until I felt his hand on my shoulder. I must have jumped three feet.

“Jesus!” I exclaimed, startled. Looking up, it took much dazed eye-blinking before his concerned, and somewhat amused, face came into focus.

“John. Oh…Hi.” I unfolded myself and forced the wheels of my brain to start working again. “I’m sorry. I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I knocked,” he informed me as he sat down on the opposite side of the small room.

The fact that I hadn’t heard the elevator, always deafeningly loud at this time of night, his heavy, Frankenstein-like walk, or his knock concerned me. I hadn’t drifted off that deep in quite a while. I tried to hide my concern under the pretense of organizing the already hyper-organized piles of papers on my desk.

“What were you thinking about?” came John’s voice from across the room.

You. I had to bite my tongue before it escaped; even then I almost wasn’t quick enough. I darted a glance at him and shrugged. “Human nature.”

His eyebrows quirked up, but the rest of him remained still. “Oh? What about human nature?”

I picked up the article I was supposed to be reading, very obviously (I thought) avoiding eye contact. “How people always want what they can’t have.”

“What do you want?”

I wasn’t looking at him, instead staring at the article in my lap, but when he asked my head shot up and I was afraid he’d catch the flash of confused fear in my eyes: confused because he asked and fear because he was leading me to tell one of my biggest secrets in months.

Again, You almost popped from my mouth. I looked at him long and hard. Sitting across from me, no more than five feet away, but still on the opposite side of my small office, was the guy whom I had wanted for months. His general burn-out appearance would have driven my mother nuts, but underneath the exterior was one of the nicest, funniest, most creative, most fun individuals I had ever met. I loved the way he tickled my brain with random trivia, the way his face lit up when he laughed, the way I felt when I read his writing. His butt in those jeans wasn’t bad either.

The problem was that John already had a girlfriend. For the last three years. Despite the length of time they had been dating, no one knew why there were still together. John and Jo were complete opposites, and not in the “opposites attract” way. They even seemed to fight more than anything else. Still, he was taken and that was that.

Worse, I hadn’t felt like this towards someone in a long time, and the girlfriend factor and my strong attraction to him were what had occupied my mind between Sal’s leaving and his arrival. I was smack-dab in the middle of working myself into a good old depressed funk, the kind I usually reserved for weekends full of chocolate and old romantic comedies, when he had interrupted.

He picked a great time to be curious.

Fine.

“Let’s just say…I want something, but it technically belongs to somebody else. Therefore, I want something I can’t have.”

“Well can’t you just buy one?”

Great, now he was being helpful. “It’s not something you can buy.”

“Is there some way this person would lend it to you?”

“When did this become anything other than hypothetical situation?” I snorted indignantly. But I gave in before he could answer. “She tends to be a little…overprotective…of her possessions.”

John’s brow furrowed in thought. “How important is it to you?”

My eyebrows rose and the corner of my mouth went up in lop-sided, skeptical smile. “Well, I spent the last few hours dwelling on it.”

“Is there any way you could steal it from her?”

“John!” I laughed, then went on teasingly, “I didn’t think you had such law-breaking tendencies.” I turned serious. “I think I could,” I said slowly, thinking it through like a chess game. I shook my head. “But it could come back to bite me in the ass. No, the risk there would be too great.”

“Why?”

I looked back down at the article in my lap, my fingers playing with the staple holding the papers together. “Because it needs to come to me out of its own free will.”

“Who is it?”

Even as I gaped at him in disbelief, I felt the flush crawl up my face. I considered myself good at keeping things from people, especially emotional things and especially so certain people wouldn’t ever find out. And everybody, even his best friends, thought he was oblivious.

“You can’t be serious.” I stared at him, eyebrows raised. “John, I should think that you know me well enough to know that I don’t tell people stuff like that.” And back to the article.

I felt, rather than saw, his long, assessing glance. After a long moment, he eventually spoke. “Yeah. I suppose.”

When I finally looked up, John was still looking at me. Expectantly. I let out a sigh of exasperation and rolled my eyes. “Fine. Let’s just say…hypothetically…that I met this incredible guy a few months ago and I love everything about him and I want him, but he’s got a damned girlfriend!”

My voice had risen almost to a yell during my speech and now I scowled and crossed my arms. I must have looked like a pouting six year-old. Hell, I felt like a pouting six year-old. I was angry. I never share emotional information and I hated feeling vulnerable, and here I practically went and told John that I wanted him more than I had ever wanted anything and that I thought about him practically all day and dreamt about him at night.

I heard him rustling as he checked his watch. It must be about time for his night class. My scowl faded and my arms dropped as anger turned to depression. I couldn’t even muster up enough energy to act cheerful, an unusual occurrence for me.

“I suppose you’ll be off then,” I state quietly, without looking up.

I heard the rustling stop and his, “Yep.”

Picking up the article from my lap, I looked at it, seeing the words, but not comprehending them.

As he walked out, he stopped next to me, waiting for me to look up. When I didn’t, he touched my arm. Sighing, I raised my head. He held my eyes with his clear blue ones. The beige walls and brown metal desks blurred as they did every thing we made eye contact. Then, still holding my eyes, he spoke.

“I know how you feel. There’s something I want that I can’t have, too.”

His hand came down to tuck a lock of hair behind my ear. His eyes panicked, then hardened in decision. The hand lingering by my ear made its way into my hair. He bent down, his long blonde hair falling on either side of my face. At the last possible moment, he turned his head and his lips met mine. My eyes closed and my head tilted back. The kiss seemed to last forever, though it could not have been more than a few seconds. Then slowly, ever so slowly, he pulled away. For the briefest of moments, his gaze met mine. With that, he left.

Now, all too well even in my dazed state, I was tuned in to his heavy walk down the hallway, the piercing beep of the elevator call button, the elevator’s arrival, his pushing of the second floor button. I was frozen, sitting there.

Shifting in my chair, the article still lying in my lap was brought back to my attention. I scoffed as I threw it onto the desk. Yeah, like I was going to be able to concentrate now.