Deploy Me

I could feel his presence through the walls.

The code lines were dancing in front of my eyes. I just finished two deployments and was one of the last in the office. In fact, there were only two of us still working.

But we were not separated just by walls; we were whole worlds apart. I was nobody for someone like him. Alexander was locally born, from a good family, with friends and networks, and, most sadly, very probably had a beautiful wife waiting for him at home.

Moreover, he was the number one in our company. Not the CEO—but who’d seen our CEO in the past five years?—but the man who made the technical decisions, the man who guided us every day.

I stretched my arms, yawned, and closed my laptop. We had a small office on the edge of the bigger open space. The room was empty except for myself, and the open space was already dark. I did not trouble myself to go to the shower or bathroom and changed my office “suite”— black wide-leg trousers and a deep blue oversized pullover — to my cycling outfit right there.

I closed the door and walked quickly through the open space.

On the opposite side, another office still glowed with the dimmed, but colorful light.

And there he sat, in front of the screen, his profile distorted and illuminated by those rainbow colors.

I saw his wide shoulders from the distance, his face filled with smooth and barely visible, yet more and more growing lines, the stamps of his maturity and wisdom.

I forced myself not to look at what—I thought— could never be mine.

In the hot summer twilight, I cycled back to my apartment.

I was crossing the Shoreline Park, and, in a couple of minutes, I would have been home.

Instead, I stopped.

I hoped that I could exhaust my unbearable desire by spinning the wheels, by making my body tired. But I was wrong. I could not stop thinking of him, sitting there alone in his office. That was a chance I did not even know I had been waiting for too long.

I cycled back, even faster than before.

The whole facade of our building was dark, except the company’s name on it—“Sunshine”—and his window. I entered the building and went straight to the first floor.

I knew I was sweaty after a few miles of intensive cycling. I knew men liked the sweet, tiny smell that comes from the bikini zone, filled with my strength and femininity. Some of the molecules probably made their way through my tight cycling shorts. Still not noticeable for the conscious layer of the male mind, the particles were floating around me, ready to bombard the unconscious layer of any male creature that would happen to be too close to me at that very moment.

I stood in front of his office.

It was now or never.

I inhaled and pushed the door open ….

“… If you only knew, how many times I saw someone like you looking at me like you do now. And how many times I thought that eventually that would be honest, but all they wanted was a promotion, advantage, or revenge.”

He did not look up from his screen and kept typing. He tried to sound distanced and sarcastic, but I felt the pain in his words, the pain he had been carrying for many years: the sorrow of being lonely, rejected, used.

A man in power without a power to control who truly loves him and who does not.

I felt his pain going through my body, and I did not blame him for the lack of trust.

It was such a shock to see him so vulnerable. He probably was not even aware of how much he opened to me, much more than he intended. He tried to look strong and he was indeed strong as it takes courage to confess that you had been abused many times in the past.

I stood with my eyes open wide, stood in front of him in my small cycling shorts and an extended sport bra, my long hair covering my entire back, my heart pumping.

I did not want to use his honesty, not even though I believed that we were destined to be together, not even though I wanted to take care of him, to comfort him, not as a child, but as a man who had a life full of hidden fights and struggles no one else would have noticed.

… He typed a few last sentences with a particular ferocity and eventually looked up at me, with an expression on his face that silently screamed: “Are you the one to abuse me too? Is this all I ever deserve?”

He did not look pitiful, no! It was something different: sorrow and curiosity mixed with acceptance.

I had to be strong. I had to find hope in those words of his. I had to fight for both of us.

“I do not need a promotion,“ I said, not sure if this could even in theory sound convincing. “I earn enough for a good life, and I love my job. I do not need a surplus of money to cover for a burnout or doing work that I’d hate.”

He smirked and said nothing.

A new message arrived in his postbox, and he turned back to the screen to study it. He stroked his jaw with his hand, sighed, and started typing a reply.

I had to remind myself again: “It is now or never. You cannot leave now, you cannot start the same conversation ever again. “

I had to act as a man.

I walked toward him with a few quick steps, walked around his table while he was still seemingly absorbed by typing, stopped right behind the back of his chair.

I bowed and licked his neck. Submitting to my power, he closed his eyes, then opened them again and turned his face to me.