It Started at Work
Coworkers have chemistry, but can't get together, until...
From the day I first met her, Jess struck me as the ideal woman, not the pornographic fantasy, but the ideal wife and mother of my children, someone you could build a life with. Don't get me wrong. She was plenty good-looking, but you'd be more likely to describe her as beautiful than hot. It wasn't until years after I first met her that I found out she had no problem pulling off "hot" too, it's just that she didn't like to advertise it. Hot was just for me when we were alone.
Jess somehow managed to look cuter in a sweatshirt and jeans than all dressed up for a night on the town. She was old enough to know a few things, but not so old as to be jaded about anything yet. On top of her looks, she was smart, down-to-earth with a great sense of humor, and easy to talk to. In short, she was the total package.
Those looks, and that way she had about her, are what made her ideal for her job. Jess was a corporate recruiter. She and I both worked for a large international firm of consulting engineers, based in Las Vegas. She fit her job so well at least partly because she seemed to be the literal incarnation of the dream girl not just me, but so many of those guys, in their heart of hearts, saw themselves settling down with. The subliminal message: this is the kind of life you can have if you come work for our firm.
We joked I was the eye candy, central casting's idea of a Product Engineer, more at home in the field than behind a desk, ruggedly handsome and quietly confident. I wasn't all that, really, but I could look the part, and even convince the average potential client that I was that guy, as long as I didn't have to talk to them for more than about 20 min. But in the Recruiting game, or the Marketing game, 20 min. is all you need.
In short, we were the perfect team for the trade shows. We looked the part. We could talk a pretty good game, represent the company in the most positive light possible, and make connections that we or someone else could follow up on later, either for future clients, or possible future employees.
In the last year the bosses had settled on us working these shows together. Experience had shown Jess and I proved to be the most effective team. Contracts following the shows averaged 20% higher when we worked together than they did when either of us worked a show separately, or when they had others do the shows without us.
We even sounded like a team, Jeff and Jess. Out on the road, working out of hotels, we were a team. Back in the office, or in our private lives, we were not. This is the story of how that all changed.
Jess, my dream girl, had a live-in fiancee. I was married, more or less happily. Even though the company was sending us to trade shows together every other month or so, typically for about 3 days at a time (5 if we had to travel cross-country or internationally), neither of our significant others considered us a "threat," and, truth be told, they weren't exactly wrong.
To Jess's fiancee, Ryan, I was a boring, underachieving old guy (I'm 51). To my wife, Maddie, Jess was not only too young to be attracted to me (she just turned 30), but she thought Ryan was a real hottie and incredibly charming. He also came from money. So in her book, in comparison, that was three strikes against me. She figured there was no way Jess would want to trade down like that.
At least that's how Maddie felt when she bothered to care about even the idea of my screwing around on her. The thing is, as time went on it seemed like she was caring less and less about anything having to do with me. Ryan was arrogant enough to not just fail to see me as a threat; he basically never thought about me at all. My guess is even now he has no idea where it all went wrong with Jess and him. That's because he's a clueless tool too stuck on himself to ever consider things from someone else's point of view.
So that was the setup. It played out slowly, as these things sometimes do, until this last May, when it rushed over us like a tidal wave. Of course things really had started before that. Things had been building, although neither of us were completely aware until it was upon us.
Jess and I basically hit it off from the start as coworkers. We knew we had chemistry as a selling team. But it really was all about the work. We didn't even talk about our home lives much. Our significant others had met and formed their opinions at the company picnic and the Christmas party. We didn't socialize together outside work. When we were on the road together, of course the company put us up in separate rooms. Sometimes we even took separate flights if we were combining a trip with visits to friends or relatives or a little sightseeing.
But over time, little bits of our home lives crept into our life as a team on the road. It's unavoidable. It just happens. As it happened to Jess and I, it only served to bring us closer together. At the trade shows, we were there to support each other, and we were really good at it. With long hours of travel and away from home on the road, it was only natural to look for just a little support in other ways too.
Despite having chemistry so great that it made work fun, neither of us was the cheating type. Some people are; some are not. I had a few private fantasies, sure, but with no intention to act on them, so nothing ever happened between us. Well...at least it appeared to be nothing. We never so much as kissed for the first two years we were a team. But there were moments...
After one of the first big clients we landed, Jess had said to me, excitedly, "I just love how our communication is so natural, bouncing off each other like that as we closed in for the sale...it was better than sex!"
"Then your fiancee must not be doing it right," I joked. It was a stupid joke, inappropriate even, but in the moment she had laughed, and she seemed to take it in the lighthearted spirit I intended. But I thought I caught a slight hesitation behind her eyes. Looking back on it now, that may have been what planted the seed, or maybe it was when that seed started to grow. That little remark made her think.
And that slight hesitation was all it took to make me think too. It occurred to me that she'd been engaged for almost three years and I hadn't heard anything about them setting a date. With that remark, for the first time, just as a tiny seed in the back of my mind, I thought that maybe...just maybe...
Before Jess came on board, I'd done a few trade shows. I always dreaded them. The travel was a grind. The hotels and conference rooms all seemed the same. We didn't have a lot of time for fun stuff in the cities we visited. The prospects and potential clients were boring too. I did it because my boss encouraged me to, I did it out of loyalty to the company and the team, but it was never fun.
Jess changed all that. The work was the same, but she made it something I looked forward to. We made up nicknames for the type of people we ran into. We developed a shorthand for the type of approach we would take for each, kind of an outline script. She'd signal me, or I'd signal her, and then the other one would fall into the script, assume the role as we worked together to reel in the clients. We'd improvise too. It was the way we worked together. Jess had noticed it right away. It was the natural communication we had that made it so enjoyable.
We were just incredibly in sync. It started around our product, service, and sales pitches, but it started to bleed over into which restaurants to eat at, conversation topics, all the little stuff too. But still we kept it strictly professional. I was starting to have some feelings under all that, even beyond my initial fantasies, but I tried hard not to show it. I tried not to admit it to myself, either. Was she starting to have feelings too? At some level, I believed Maddie's opinion of the situation. There was no reason for Jess to trade down. I tried hard not to get my hopes up. What was the point, anyway? I was still married, and that meant something to me.
