When the email popped up, I though it was just another meeting.
"HR Review, 4-5pm Tuesday, Room 1038"
Great, more meetings, I thought. At least I could head out right after this one, and maybe even leave early.
When 3:45 rolled around, I wandered over to building 1. I knew by the naming convention that this room (38) would be in the basement (floor 0) of building 1. It took me a couple minutes to find the windowless corner office in the basement, so I entered right at 4. Already seated on one side of a long conference table was a blond in a dark suit, someone I didn't recognize. She smiled up at me and motioned for me to close the door.
"Hi, I'm Erin Peters, I'm the new HR representative for your department," she said, half standing and reaching out to shake my hand. I smiled back and took my seat. So far she was already quite an improvement over the last HR representative, an ancient chain-smoking relic from the old days of the company. Erin looked straight out of school.
"I've been scheduling meetings with everyone just to get better acquainted, answer questions, and make sure all of the HR files are up to date," she was saying. My eyes were locked on hers, but my peripheral vision attempted to scan the rest of her. The suit she was wearing was very business like, but it was hard to tell if she even wore a shirt beneath it. The cut of the blazer dipped down toward the table and drew my eyes toward her chest.
"Ahem, let's see..." Erin started, shuffling papers and subtly drawing my attention back to her face. She looked up and smiled again. Perfect teeth, platinum blond hair, blue eyes behind dark framed glasses, and creamy white skin...her soft pink lips and bright eyes were the perfect splash of color to offset her otherwise light colored face.
"I see here you've been promoted twice in the last four years - congratulations!" Erin was saying. More paper shuffling - "No reprimands, nothing in your record to indicate any problems."
"So you never found the bodies in my last desk drawer - whew!" I smiled at my joke, but Erin looked up, worried. There was a brief moment before she realized I was joking, and we both started to laugh. "I'm sorry, I'm new to this, I just graduated last month! Guess I shouldn't take everything so seriously!"
"Yeah, you'll learn that when everyone goes with the flow, things work out well around here!" I told her.
Erin was still smiling as she picked up her pen and leafed through some other papers. Then she started to frown, biting her lip and furrowing her brow.
"There's something else, though, that we should discuss..."
She bit the pen, drawing the tip into her mouth...damn, do women do these things consciously?
"Can you explain this?" she slid some papers over to me. I had to mentally shake my head to focus on the papers instead of her mouth. I started to read from the top, then froze. I put the papers down and looked up at Erin.
"Have you seen these before?" she asked, not smiling anymore but not looking mad either - maybe kind of disappointed or, if I didn't know better, looking conflicted.
"What are my options if I say I don't know what they are?"
"Well," she said, taking the papers back, "we could go through the motions of assuming you were telling the truth. We can scan the backups of your files to find out when these appeared on your device and cross check with the key logs to see who was logged on when the file was saved."
At this point we were both staring at each other, and I couldn't hear much over the sound of my heartbeat in my ears. "But we both know that when that happens, we'll find out that you were logged on when this was written, won't we?" I swallowed hard. I was screwed and we both knew it.
"Yeah, I wrote them."
Erin frowned and looked at the papers again. She picked them up and pushed away from the table, pacing back and forth in the small room. I couldn't help but admire her legs, scanning them from where her skirt ended at mid-thigh all the way down to her red-painted toenails. She must have slipped off her shoes while she was at the table. As she walked away from me, I scanned back up - the curve of her calves, her heart shaped ass, the inward curve from her hips to her waist, just a perfect resting place for my hands if I -- dammit, I thought to myself, this is why I got busted...I refocused on Erin's face as she turned around, still looking intently at the papers in her hands and once again biting her lip.
"So what I'm holding here - these stories, this porn for lack of a better word - you wrote these?"
"Yes" I said, my face turning red. No use hiding it now. I don't know if I was more embarrassed at having been caught or being in the same room as someone reading my work.
Still looking at the papers, Erin walked over to my side of the table and sat on the edge, her toes barely touching the ground. She let out a long sigh and looked down at me.
"We have, at the very least, two problems here that I can see. The first is, you're an excellent employee. We can't afford to lose you as we start on the next round of projects. The second problem is that you've clearly violated the employment terms by having this material on company property, and there is no leniency with this kind of violation. The punishment is immediate termination."