Chrissi worked the early shift. Since I'd been hired I'd been drawn to her, though she wasn't a conventional beauty. She was roughly 5'7" with straight, ruddy blonde hair which fell just beyond her slightly slouching shoulders. She always wore a long-sleeved shirt under her uniform polo; this pressed her large tits close to her frame and made them appear fuller. Her ass - always beneath tan corduroys - was tall and flat; somehow I couldn't keep myself from watching it sway when she walked. Her lightly freckled face was round and rolled to a weak chin. Her sunny blue eyes and innocent smile were offset by the parted pout of her full mouth. There was something unusually provocative in the way she carried herself. Perhaps it was because Chrissi was a mother of one and staunchly conservative at her core that I so enjoyed envisioning her in wanton coitus. But it wasn't that I wanted to defile her - I pondered this long and deeply for three and a half months. It wasn't the thought of Chrissi's humiliation or subjugation that aroused me, it was that of the nature which her Christian demeanor concealed being freed by my advances. I worked with many women, a good deal of them universally attractive and openly sexual; but it was childish, closed-up little Chrissi who moved me most. But I never moved upon her.
Before her I was a coward.
One afternoon in December, I was clocking out and overheard a conversation about two of my co-workers. The employees in question had been fired after having been discovered inside a shelter they'd built outside near the fenced-in retaining pond. The talk I heard was all negative, but I found those recently-terminated co-workers' ingenuity fascinating. I resolved to find this shelter and have a look inside.
I lived in an apartment complex behind the store. As I left the parking lot that day on my way home, I saw, Karen, one of my team leaders standing on the other side of the fence which encircled the retaining pond. It was snowing lightly, and she was hugging herself for warmth. I guessed she was standing near the shelter and figured she had probably had the same inclination as I. I waved to Karen and approached the fence to find the gate open.
"Hi," I said.
"Are you off?" Asked Karen.
"Yeah. I'm on my way home."
Karen grinned. "Have you seen the shelter?"
"No," I replied, "but I heard someone talking about it. I wanted to come out here and look at it."
"I didn't even know it was here. Chrissi and I just came out to find it."
I looked at the shelter. It seemed little more than a leafy hump in the reeds. "I walk this way every day and I've never seen it," I said, "It's pretty smart, actually." Karen only rolled her eyes in my direction and offered me a grimace that said she wasn't so sure about that. "I'm gonna go inside," I said. But now Karen was walking back across the parking lot toward the store. I shrugged, stuck my hands in my coat pockets, and crouched to fit through the low entrance of the makeshift shelter.
There, I found Chrissi. She was hunched with one hand on the bare earth before her. A flashlight had been pushed into the ground. It was on, and in its meager light our shadows were huge.
"Hey," I said, a little surprised.
"Hey," chimed Chrissi. She fixed me with a wet-eyed grin. Her face was rosey with the cold.
"I just heard someone talking about this. What do you think?"