The long arm of the clock on the office wall quivers again. It is now ten to two. The walk to the meeting room will take no less than seven minutes and Slava should really be getting up and setting off. Only, he can't feel his legs. He can't feel his hands either, for that matter, his whole body is paralyzed at the thought of getting up from the chair. Or, to be more precise, of what will be the consequence of getting up from the chair and actually making it to the two o'clock meeting. In the last hour, he had devised and weighted on a million plans on how to get out of it--call in sick, pretend to have gotten lost, or mixed up locations, quit his job, throw himself down the stairs in order to break his legs--all thin as a waffle, most with undesirable consequences. Now the time is up and, no matter how hard Slava will stare at it, the clock won't stop moving forward.
It is true, generally speaking, that coming to work here was a good move. Slava is an expert--a nerdy, glass-wearing, squinting-at-the-screen kind, but an expert nonetheless--but the market tends to be rather competitive these days and when one sees a good offer, one takes it. Not to mention, this place is leading in the field, international, and dynamic, and frontline innovative, and
i n t e r d i s ci p l i n a r y
, and some more adjectives that look really nice on a CV. That means, of course, that there will be teamwork involved, and meetings with people, and real, in person meetings at that, but that's ok, Slava can handle that. Typically, after wringing his fingers out of their sockets for half an hour, or going around the compound few times, or calling a few people "cucks" and "whores" online to relieve some of the tension, he can handle that. Not, however, if he has to have a meeting with Pam.
Pam is from Holland, or Frisia, or maybe North Macedonia, or wherever the fuck they allow women to grow as big as she is. It is simply not decent, and of that Slava is certain, for a woman to be so tall. If she really must be, then at least she shouldn't wear high heels. Or big earrings, nor put her hair up; she should in fact, in Slava's opinion, do a bit more to cover her imposing presence--she should really make an effort to
mind
. Pam does anything but. She strides the corridors with her head high up, voice always too loud, jewelry sparkling, her clothes tight to the skin. Slava is scared shitless of her.
'Don't you have a meeting with the Tallinn group?'
Sudden voice causes Slav's eyes to blink violently, interrupting the spell of the wall clock.
'Shouldn't you be going, instead of staring at the paint?' Jeff, senior colleague and a professional bother is standing next to him, giving Slava his coffee-stained grin.
Slava puts his hands on the armrests, commanding his muscles to span and push him out of the chair.
'Who is the project manager of that collaboration, anyway?'
Slava's arms fold under him and he slips back into sitting position. 'Pamela Rievke,' he mumbles, his eyes on the floor.
'Six-foot Pam?' Jeff exclaims, excited enough to show his inflamed gums. Jeff is from the US, which explains his abuse of crappy coffee, the childish need to give everyone nicknames and confusing metric system preferences. Also, Slava is sure that Pam is actually more than six feet, or whatever metric system the perpetual children from the New Continent want to use.
'Boy, you're in for a treat,' Jeff clatters on, barely, it would seem, holding his tongue in his mouth. 'The things you could do with such a woman!'
What makes it all even more sickening, is that Jeff is a sweaty basement-dweller who probably never had so much spleen to as to even talk to a girl. Unlike him, Slava, who actually did try to ask the only female colleague in their team out. She had a face like a hamster and was so thin, that she would just fall for no apparent reason at all, but she was shorter than him and Slava could probably lift her. Having that in mind, he started to walk closely after her if they happened to walk the same direction and hoover around her whenever she stood at the water-cooler. After a couple of weeks of wringing his fingers while observing her from above his desk, he came up and asked her out. She mumbled something about being engaged, tried to scamper to the side, and fell in the process.
Two weeks after that she asked Jeff for a transfer.
'To have such a woman, don'cha think, my boy?' Jeff slaps him on the back.
'Yes, if you fancy a female gorilla,' Slava pulls out from the seat, the feeling of Jeff's sweaty palm on his shoulder achieving immediately what Slava's self-urgings couldn't for the last hour.
'Grumpy, aren't we?' Jeff coughs out a laugh. 'After an hour staring at Pam's bazonkers you'll be in better humor.'
*
Of course they are thick as thieves. Slava sees them as he approaches, three men that look more like lumberjacks than engineers, and the woman, sitting opposite from them at the table, laughing, tipped on the chair, carelessly, to the side, as if she would be in a bar. She interrupts the men, talks over them, and they
don't
get angry. If not the cleavage and stilettos, and the make-up, one might think she is one of them.
Maybe that's why,
Slava thinks,
she's practically a guy, maybe she's compensating
.
As if sensing him coming, Pam looks up. 'There he is.'
The men fall silent and turn their heads, and Slava's tongue has never been so dry in his life. He makes it to the table, and they actually stand up to shake his hand making his feet stand a tad firmer on the ground; then, they come back to their seats and he feels like a carpet had been pulled from under him--there is only one chair left. He has to sit next to Pam.
He lowers himself to the chair, not once looking to the side. They start talking again, but all his attention is required for making sure he doesn't accidentally touch Pam's legs with his own.
'...so, we could start building as soon as we see the simulations.'
'Which brings me to something: how does your software solve the Lorentz force?'
'Slava?'
The womans voice reaches him together with the realization that she is sitting askew because her legs would barely fit under the table.
'Ehm,' he blinks at Pam's knee a few times, 'em, by using a vector notation.'
Some murmurs of assent, followed by more talking, while Slava glues his eyes back to the edge of the table. He is afraid to let them crawl up, to where they are being pulled against his sober wishes, to Pam's waist, where the curves are marking themselves under her tight blouse, just that much to thick to be acceptable. The thought of that is like both ice cubes and hot coals would be dumped behind his collar and he fights the urge to steal a look, but it's like not touching a sore gum with your tongue. He shoots his eyes up and freezes. Pam is hunching her back. Her shoulders are knitted up as well, and her head craning forward--she is actually leaning down on her elbow while she listens to one of the engineers. As if she would be trying to make herself
lower
, to compensate for the height difference between them.
Hot blood rushes to Slava's face. He feels like he is about to puff or pant, so he holds his breath. Right in the focus of his vision, Pam's earring, a heavy, black stone hanging from her earlobe, sparkling like a viper's eye.
Without so much as a twitch of a warning, Pam's face turns to him. He manages to snap away from it and drill his eyes into the table, again.
'So, what would you need from us again to start on it, Slava?'
'Em...' Slava pushes his hands under the table and tries to look at her without turning his head, managing to somehow cross his eyes. 'The length of the whole system... The pulse duration and the, ehm, voltage... on the electrodes... And the beam geometry... that would be... yeah, em, nice.'
'That sounds reasonable enough,' Pam is typing notes on her phone while looking over at the men. 'And when do you think you would be finished?'
'Em, as soon as I get the data I could, ehm, start right away...'
'Lovely. It's going to be me bothering you about it, in any case.'
'And better keep the lady happy,' one of the engineers bellows at him. 'Better her, that us, believe me!' They laugh, Pam the loudest of them all. Slava offers a grin that makes his face hurt.
'I think I have another meeting in a moment,' Slava says, his teeth still clenched.
'Of course,' Pam pushes her chair away from the table and gets up. As she does so, something slips from the backrest, down and to the floor. A sweater. Slava looks at it, blinks, pulls air in through his nostrils. He closes his eyes, breathes out; then he lunges his hand at the bundle of fabric. Its so soft that it feels like his fingers could go straight through it.
Slava picks the sweater up and extends it to Pam, without looking at her.
'Why, thank you,' he hears her voice, oddly soft, as if surprised by the gesture. He mumbles a 'Goodbye' and then he gets out.
He manages to walk through the door and the corridor. Once at the entrance of the building, his steps turn into strides; at the turn they turn into leaps. He reaches his office but runs past it. There is a cafeteria just a few meters down the road, a lunchroom really, totally deserted at this hour. Slava gets in, runs straight to the toilets.
Once in the stall, he locks the door and falls on the toilet seat. Not fully knowing what he is doing, he opens his trousers--the zipper goes down, out goes his dick. He runs his hand up and down, squeezes, wincing and tilting his head back. Then he spits in his palm and starts stroking, the feeling of the soft fabric still lingering on his fingertips, big, black stone on a thin, silver chain sparkling under his lowered eyelids. His hand gets faster, his breath shorter; his other palm pushes between his crotch and underwear, just below where the heavy pumping is going on, and closes on his balls. He is panting by now, gasping out small sounds, then syllables and, before long, he forgets someone might hear him: 'Take it, bitch, take it,
take it in the fucking face.
'
*
Slava is staring at the computer screen. It has already been four minutes and his eyes are starting to tear up. He just shouldn't have opened it. He should've pretended to not see it until late afternoon, instead of clicking on it in a frenzy. That was really, really stupid.
The guys from Tallinn have issues with your simulations. Some things don't make sense, or so they say. We are already behind schedule, I want to resolve this as soon as possible. Can you come by my office tomorrow? Better still, today after 3?
Slava looks at the wall clock. It is two o'clock. He looks back to his computer.
This was to be expected. He just shouldn't have agreed to get involved in this in the first place. He should've been more assertive, defend his interests better. Even police, even the firefighters have the right to refuse a job if it endangers their life. He should be allowed to refuse meeting with Pam.
If he'll really ignore the email now, he'll have to go tomorrow. He could say he's unavailable. Probably she would make time to reschedule, though. But, be it today or in a month, he really doesn't know if he can make it through another meeting with Pam.
He starts writing an email to decline. His fingers stop on the keyboard--what if she will come here? What if she will confront him in front of Jeff? He cranes his neck to see Jeff's sweaty back few meters away from him. Instantly, in his mind, he sees them:
Utterly unprofessional
