"One of you has to work late tonight, so who's it going to be?" Denise asked.
Sherry and Rob looked at each other from their office chairs, and then each twisted their head toward Denise and said, "Not me."
"Shit," Rob said.
"There's no way I'm working late tonight," Sherry said.
"I'll leave you two to work it out amongst yourselves, but one of you is staying,"
Denise said, holding first Rob's gaze and then Sherry's. "Have fun," she added and walked out of the little office Rob and Sherry shared.
They started to speak at once and then stopped. "Okay," Sherry said, "you first."
Shit, Rob repeated internally. His buddy Steve had set him up on a blind date with a friend of Steve's girlfriend. Rob had been leery — in fact, his immediate instinct had been to tell Steve to go screw himself — but then Steve had shown him a picture of Beth, and she was a knockout: long blonde hair, skinny, a thousand-watt smile.
"I have a date," Rob said.
Sherry turned her head to the side and smiled skeptically. "Really?" she said, letting the word do more work than Rob would have wished.
"Really," Rob answered.
Sherry and Beth couldn't have been more different. Sherry had hair so dark it was almost black and a face that struck Rob as either cute or downright gorgeous, her moods always somehow shaping her appearance in ways that mystified him. She was big, really big, fat, Steve would have said, but Rob couldn't ever stop looking at her. He was in what most would call good shape from having played tennis since he was a child, and he'd never even given a second glance to someone near her size, but since the first day they'd started working together a few months before, confined in their little office for eight hours a day, he'd sneaked looks at her every chance he got.
"I'm meeting my sister for dinner," Sherry said, definitively, as though she'd just laid down the law.
Rob threw up his hands. "Dinner with your sister? I have a date!"
"Sure you do," Sherry said. "Who is it?"
Rob opened his mouth but didn't say anything. Sherry had turned her chair toward him, her hands on her armrests, looking serious. Her legs were parted and her loose black skirt fell about six inches short of her knees. Rob couldn't see her panties, just a hint of thick thighs leading into shadow. "Well?" she prompted.
He looked up, blushing, and she smiled wickedly. Did she know he'd been looking up her skirt? "It's a blind date," he conceded.
Sherry laughed, and Rob's chest warmed. She had an honest laugh that he always appreciated. Any time he made her laugh, he knew he'd earned it.
"It's still a date," he said.
"Barely," she said through her laugh.
"But a date nonetheless," he pressed, smiling back.
"Let me guess," Sherry said. "Blonde, skinny, big tits?"
Hearing her say the word tits in the office sent a shiver through him. "Her, uh . . ."
"Go on," she said.
"Her tits aren't that big," he said, and she laughed again, and he laughed with her.
