Expectations
I'd learned to expect nothing. I knew my limitations, my essential insignificance. I'd never dared to dream she was attainable. But sometimes the body will dare more than the head. And fortune favors him who dares.
Carmen was the Holy Grail to the company's young men. Her beauty was petitely, classically Japanese: her skin smooth and golden, her shoulder-length black hair gently waved but otherwise unstyled, her figure delicately feminine. Her dress was simple and modest: a silk blouse, a knee-length wool or linen skirt, and black leather pumps Monday through Thursday; a sweater, jeans, and sneakers on Casual Friday. Her only ornament was a small gold crucifix pendant, worn just below her throat. Her grooming was inconspicuous but flawless. She usually wore a light perfume, but no makeup that I could see.
She was alluring in that indefinable way that defies reduction to its parts. You didn't look at her and see her bosom, or her legs, or her pert little tush, or even her Oriental Madonna's face. You saw Carmen, whole and perfect. And if you were male and young, or even male and not so young, you immediately wanted to take her in your arms. In an engineering firm that employed nearly six hundred men, the majority of them under thirty and single, and barely two hundred women, nearly all of them over forty and married, she exerted an appeal that could have torn the building from its foundations.
But she didn't seem to notice. At least, if she did, she declined to exploit it or play to it. She was courteous toward everyone, men and women, single and married. She didn't flirt. She carried herself with a natural grace and self-assurance that would have done credit to a reigning queen. She wasn't overtly glamorous or sexy; she was merely as close to an angel as human flesh can get.
She didn't encourage any of the innumerable young men who sought to elicit her interest, Indeed, over three years working alongside her, I'd never heard her utter a word that wasn't utterly professional. That didn't stop them from coming at her in waves...and being turned aside, one after the next.
At thirty-seven years of age, a homely, balding also-ran like me had no business even fantasizing about beautiful, poised, talented, going-places twenty-six-year-old Carmen Yoshibi. But that didn't keep my heart from speeding up whenever she passed my cubicle, or my mouth from going dry whenever she looked my way.
I have no illusions about myself. I'm a decent design engineer, but no candidate for greatness. I've run small projects by myself, but I haven't got the temperament for managing large ones. I'm not suited for customer liaison. I'm the sort a company sticks in the corner, feeds a stream of routine tasks, and generally ignores except for an annual performance review and a modest merit raise.
I have pride, but I know my limitations. It's important to know your limitations; the knowledge keeps you from overreaching. If you have no chance of making a big breakthrough or designing a killer product, neither are you in much danger of doing something ridiculous that would embarrass the company or cost it money.
To me, that's responsibility. Realism. Stick to what you know. Don't promise unless you're sure you can deliver. Admit it when you don't know or need help. Advise and help when you can. It teaches your coworkers to trust your abilities, and your management to trust your words. The world might not beat a path to your door, but you can go home at the end of the day knowing that you earned your pay.
How many men can justly expect more than that from life? I didn't. Which is why, when God smiled upon me and deposited the keys to heaven in my hands, I almost dropped them out of sheer disbelief.
I was surprised, and more than a little unsettled, to be offered the lead architect position on the EL-17. I'd never done anything that large or complex before. Despite my years in aerostructures, I had a lot to learn before I could even outline the problem. Harry Toussaint, my manager, promised me a first-class supporting cast, engineers whose several expertises would complement mine. He was so obviously anxious for me to accept the responsibility that I couldn't say no to him.
I hadn't guessed that the first subordinate assigned to me would be Carmen.
Harry asked us to put together a general operating concept for presentation to the customer, told us we'd be alone for a while before the other engineers became available, and assured us we'd have all the support he could provide. Carmen took it with more aplomb than I did. I sat there with my jaw sagging as she drew him out on just how long "a while" might be, and what sort of support, in terms of computers, software, and instruction, he could winkle out of the project budget. When we left his office, I felt as if I'd just survived a nasty traffic accident. Carmen's gentle smile never flickered.
As his door closed behind us, she took me by the arm, pulled me into a small conference room, and breathed a mock-dramatic sigh of relief.
"I thought that would go on forever," she murmured as she seated herself. "Are you as scared as I am?"
I dropped into a chair facing her and nodded, still grappling with the gravity of the assignment.
"Harry's going to expect the document within the month," she said. "I hope your social schedule can stand a little compression."
"I, uh, think I can make room. How and when do we start?"
She dimpled. "How? With pencils, pads, and coffee. When? Now sounds about right."
"This late on a Friday?"
She glanced at her watch and nodded. "It's only four." She cocked an eyebrow. "Do you have a date or something?"
"Uh, no."
"We can get a lot done in an hour or two." She rose and headed for the corridor. "I'll be back in a jiffy."
Five minutes later Carmen was back with a pair of graph-paper pads and two Styrofoam cups of what our cafeteria passes off as coffee. She set it all down on the table, swung the conference room door closed, resumed her seat, and slid her chair toward mine until they were touching. I fancied I could feel her body heat through the layers of clothing between us. Her perfume, which I'd learned to ignore at ordinary conversational distance, swirled through my head, arrowed to the center of my brain and pitched camp there.
My body stiffened involuntarily. She noticed at once.
"Something wrong?" She looked honestly concerned.
"Uh, no, just a...a back spasm." I did my best to smile, hoping it wouldn't look forced. "You seem to have an approach in mind already. Could you outline it for me?"
She held my eyes a moment longer, nodded, and started to sketch on the pad before her, narrating her concept as she went. I fixed my gaze on the pad, struggled to ignore that maddening scent, and started an internal litany:
We're just working together. Nothing more. It's just work, it's just work, it's just work...
But the mind's control over the body is incomplete. At least, it's that way for me. What we were there to do was insignificant next to the fact of Carmen beside me. The incompatibilities of our ages, our positions, and our prospects in the company had faded into invisibility. She was too beautiful, too vital, and too graceful for me to think of her as just a colleague.
I developed an erection. No, that's not quite right. It didn't "develop;" it sprang from my groin like a guided missile, tenting my trousers as it strained for liftoff. I hunched forward a little further, hoping to conceal it beneath the shadow of my upper body. Hoping further that it would subside after I'd had a few minutes to accustom myself to the temptation beside me.
No such luck. It only seemed to get larger and harder. Worse, the friction against my clothing soon elicited a slow leak of seminal fluid. My body was unimpressed with my attempt to treat Carmen with impersonal collegiality.
I started to fidget, shifting from side to side as subtly as I could in an attempt to relieve the pressure. If anything, it had the opposite effect. The drip got worse.
