Designed for Me: Book One of the Blue Building Chronicles by A. L. Freeman

Designed for Me
     
    I am back. Back at this horrible, soul-less place. Back in the world of billion dollar sales and the people who forgot how they’d come to make them, believing themselves above .
     
    The lure of easy cash was too great even for me to ignore, especially in the face of dangerously wavering cash flow in my own enterprise. So here I am. Again.
     
    One unexpected joy awaited me here, though: I get to work with her . Even in my years spent slaving at the computer here previously, I only knew her in passing. Yet every time I managed to catch a glimpse of her, I felt “the spark.” It was ridiculous, but there it was.
     
    On my last day at work those years ago, I had lunch with her and the others I cared about from the marketing department. This was, in itself, strange -- I was a developer, hardly ever having interacted with any of them for more than quick discussions on graphics needs for various asinine projects.
     
    We had lunch that day at the local chicken wing joint, and I fortuitously landed a seat across from her at the table. I loved sneaking surreptitious glances of her as she nibbled at her meal during my own ravenous attack at the plate of wings in front of me. We all then rose to leave and say our farewells.
     
    Her deeply embracing hug and well wishes, then the quick moment during which our eyes met, was unsettling and wondrous. I barely knew her, yet she embraced me as one who’d be missed sorely. Odd. I brushed it off as the natural warmth of the Bohemian soul I knew her to be lest I drive myself mad with wandering thoughts. I had been married at the time, after all.
     
    And so I came to this afternoon, my first day back on a short-term contract to fast-track a new product for the company I so hate. Of course she was the designer assigned to work with me on the project. Of course.
     
    Her smile was precisely as beautiful as I’d remembered, flashing bright and sincere below the warm, brown eyes that I had trouble not getting lost in. I recognized the ridiculous descriptions of her that I couldn’t stop inventing, but was too far-gone to make myself stop. A few minutes of vague murmuring about the project and the past few years, and then I was wandering in a daze back up to my assigned cubicle.
     
    This project was going to be hard to focus on.
     
    * * * * * * * * * * * *
     
    Why am I here?
     
    Ah yes. Money. The house is due for an overhaul, I tend to enjoy having food on the table, that sort of thing.
     
    As I wrench myself back to typing the umpteenth line of code for the umpteenth time, a new e-mail arrives. She needs to go over the latest iteration of the mockups.
     
    I begin to steel myself as I walk down the two flights of stairs to her cube. Standing behind her and before I alert her to my presence, I take in the subtle differences between her workspace and my own: subtle pops of color here and there, a small white board with her characteristic, artfully unreadable handwriting, a few books on design and artistic inspiration.
     
    “Mornin’ Cadence,” I mumble. I hadn’t noticed the white strands of the headphones she’s wearing as she works, hidden as they were behind her shoulder-length chestnut hair; she’s visibly startled as she turns, but smiles. I grin foolishly in return.
     
    “Hey Frank!” she exclaims. “Come take a look at this,” she continues, turning back to her screen. It’s all I can do not to gasp, but I’m saved by my breathlessness at the feline, utterly vital position of her body. She seems to scream without a word, “I am sex.”
     
    She’s wearing a loose and very sheer white top over an even more painfully sheer white bra. As she reaches to point at something completely unimportant on the screen, my eyes fasten to the graceful curve of the side of her chest, exposed invitingly by the wide open, non-existent sleeve of her blouse.
     
    My eyes finally free themselves of this entrancing vision, but dive headlong into an exploration of