I'm Caroline, and I've always had a weakness for a certain kind of man.
Tall, wiry, dark hair shot through with gray, glasses, sardonic sense of humor with a wry smile. The type that looks as though they were born to be dressed in a navy suit and sober tie. Think Stephen Colbert, John Oliver. Add a pinch of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch and I'm stirred.
I blame it on watching too many episodes of 'The West Wing' at an impressionable age.
I've spent most of my professional life in DC, where such specimens are particularly thick on the ground. They usually come accessorized with a security pass on a lanyard around their neck.
That was how I made the acquaintance of Patrick.
We worked--not directly together, but in sub-departments with aligned functions (so DC) at a government agency. Which one is not material to this story. (Except that it's not that one. No, it's not the other one either. Don't worry about it.)
Having recently emerged from a marriage that had been on life support with no hope of recovery for far too long, I was overjoyed to regain full control over my life. Part of achieving this was moving into a rental in a condo building overlooking the river. I could walk to work, which was nice; I had only as much space as I needed and it was wholly mine, which was even better.
Sometimes you just click with someone--put it down to a similar sense of humor, or the right combination of pheromones, or shared knowledge of a particular reference. You look up and there's a flare of recognition in their eyes, an invisible thread floating in the air between you. The question then becomes what your dynamic may grow into. You may have met your best friend and platonic soulmate, or someone whom you won't ever see again but will in one conversation change your thinking forever. Or, if it's a particular type of attraction, it might even result in the hottest sex you've ever had.
Not every spark becomes a fire. Every blaze, without fail, starts out as a spark.
The first time I remember meeting Patrick, we glanced at each other across a conference room table some weeks into my new job. After the meeting--it was about tech infrastructure policy, how's that for erotic--he showed me the way to my next appointment, holding the door of the crowded elevator open and compelling the other occupants to clear a space for me just by his presence alone. I felt slow flickers licking up my spine.
A couple of days later, a visitor forgot to take their papers following a meeting--a big no-no in government work--and before I could resolve it by putting them in the secure bin to be shredded, Patrick took off like a puma across the outdoor secure space to catch them up, documents in hand. My jaw must have dropped, because our colleague casually said "Oh, he's a Marine, that's how they do."
It made me wonder what else his body was capable of.
Whenever we saw each other on site, we stepped aside to talk--I had a vision, a good one, for what our departments could achieve by working on a more integrated basis, and so we checked in often. That was how we slowly, shyly offered each other knowledge of ourselves, bit by bit. Patrick had served twenty years in the Marine Corps with a number of combat deployments, followed by civilian roles in other areas of government. He was in his fifties and divorced, living in a big house out in Virginia. Kids grown and out in the world. A life he had built around interests he enjoyed. I felt as though I could learn from how he had directed his own midlife act.
Patrick saw the world in terms that were more structured than I did. He could rhapsodize about systems planning templates and the beauty of color coding. It was part of his charm: this Clark Kent-looking tall drink of water with a flash in his eye and a sense of humor that sidled round and round the conversation until I realized that I couldn't stop laughing.
Despite being comfortably into my forties, I guess I had developed a little work crush on Patrick--what harm?--but I had no idea whether he felt the same. I had no interest in ever marrying again: my independence had been too hard won to consider giving it up. I just focused on enjoying the small flutter I got when I saw Patrick. It was plenty. He did occasionally play a role in my private fantasies, but whose work crush hasn't?
In the run up to the election--before the slower pace forced by the final days of the campaign and the transition period to come--we had a week with a particularly crammed slate of public events. Needless to say, being a government site, our facilities for staff to rest, shower, and otherwise recharge were spartan. On one particularly punishing day with a two-hour break between the afternoon and evening programs, I thought of Patrick's lengthy commute and invited him to relax in my nearby apartment for that brief window.
One of the ways I enjoyed redefining myself in this new stage in my life was by wearing beautiful, fanciful shoes and lingerie. Nothing beneath a four-inch heel height would do, and the more intricate the fastenings, the better. It was for my enjoyment alone. Most of my colleagues wore sturdy flats in determined neutrals, but I loved my impractical shoes and carried them with me to work each day in specially purchased individual linen shoe bags. I pampered my feet each night with warm baths followed by mint lotion and did it all over again next day.
