Chapter 11: Seeing Red
What had I done? I sat in the taxi heading back home with tears running down my face. It was a poor end to what had started as a great evening.
I had met Tony a few weeks ago at a conference. He was good company while we waited for one of the boring speeches to start. We exchanged whispers about the quality of the delivery while the speaker droned on and on. We just stayed together in the interval. By the end of the day we had exchanged office telephone numbers and email addresses. If nothing else we could be useful contacts for each other. We weren’t working for competing companies but our problems, failures and successes could be useful information because we were in similar fields.
One thing led to another and we were conducting an internet flirtation by the end of the week. It was better than previous ones I had tried because we had met and enjoyed each other’s company. I knew Tony wasn’t a nerd pretending to be something he wasn’t. I presume the same applied to him. He knew what I looked like, what I sounded like, how I dressed at least while at work, that sort of thing. It made the flirtation less forced.
He invited me out for lunch the following Wednesday. It fitted with my diary so my acceptance was in his inbox almost as soon as he’d asked. Had I been too quick? Had I seemed too eager? Was that what went wrong?
We went to a pasta restaurant. The food was acceptable. The important thing was that the service was fast. Both of us really didn’t have time to spare for lunches that weren’t working lunches. We talked mainly about work and office politics. He didn’t say anything about me or us. I was disappointed because it was unlike his emails. Apart from that I enjoyed the lunch. We had a similar sense of humour and a healthy disrespect for our bosses. If we had both been female I could have understood but there was none of the intimacy of his emails.
Back at work that afternoon I was so subdued that my colleagues noticed. There were no emails not even a reply to mine thanking him for the lunch. I left work confused and rather sad for what might have been but didn’t seem to be happening.
The next morning there was a long effusive email from him. He’d been caught by his boss on his return and dragged into an unscheduled meeting that lasted late into the evening. He was sorry that he hadn’t replied to me yesterday, but you know how it is? I did. I’d been there. Bosses seem to think that their staff have no homes to go to and no outside interests that could possibly be more interesting than work.
I responded by inviting him to a pub halfway between our offices after work tonight. He accepted and I was happier all afternoon, too happy, because people noticed the contrast with yesterday afternoon and drew the correct conclusion that a man was responsible for both moods.
At the end of the evening I was still not sure about Tony. He had been great company and we spent a lot of time laughing at each other’s jokes. Did he know I was a woman? Did he care? Did he like what he saw? I had changed from my power-dressing suit into a slinky black dress that I kept carefully rolled up in my desk drawer for emergencies but it seemed that I needn’t have bothered.
I showed him some leg. He seemed disconcerted by a flash of thigh. My thighs are great. I have had experts tell me that they are. I know that rolls of fat or hairy legs couldn’t have repelled Tony because I haven’t got either. I would have risked some cleavage but refrained after the failure of the thighs. That would have been the end of a potential affair until I idly asked him whether he had heard of a sales representative who had visited me that afternoon.
I pulled the rep’s card out of my handbag and handed it to Tony. He looked sheepish then reached inside his jacket to get out his glasses. The thickness of the lenses told me that his unaided eyesight was poor. The poor mutt probably couldn’t see me without his glasses on. When he started to take his glasses off I stopped him.
“Tony,” I said, “You need those glasses. I bet you can’t see me properly without them. I wear contact lenses.”
“Oh,” he said, putting his glasses back on. “I didn’t know you wore contacts, Alison.”
“I’m sure you didn’t. Can you see my face without those glasses?”
“No, Alison. All I see is a blur where your head is.”
“Then don’t be so stupid. Leave your glasses on and tell me what you can see of me.”
He settled the glasses on the bridge of his nose.
“Let me see…”
“You can see now, you idiot. You couldn’t before.”