Monday
"Hey!"
Robin looked up from her desk. She deliberately raised her eyebrows further than necessary to convey her dislike, as Mike leaned into her cubicle. While he wasn't intruding on her personal space, per se, he was definitely toeing the line while also putting himself in a position to stare down at her and down her shirt. He was trying to take the power position, leaning too far over her for comfort.
Not that her comfort would be at the forefront of his consciousness.
With practiced professionalism and a sigh she could barely contain, Robin weaponised her body: first by shifting her shoulders backwards, and second by pushing out her chest. It drew her blouse higher and tighter so there was less slack near the middle. She was adept at manipulating body language. She looked at him, over the rim of her glasses, and said, "Yes?"
"Oh!" Mike said, startled like he'd lost track of his purpose. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "They're starting to gather in the training room! Are you coming?"
"I'll be there in a minute, " Robin said, smiling patiently. "Thank you, Mike."
Mike bounded off with a smile, and she shook her head.
As the HR manager, Robin was responsible for planning and executing almost all of the office events; this one was no different. She'd bought the cake. She'd bought the card, and secretly carried it around the office to make sure it got all the signatures. She'd been the one behind the camera taking the video footage of people saying goodbye. She knew very well when the party started.
Once she had finished her email, she stood and smoothed out her skirt. It always took some finessing, and sometimes a little tugging on the hemline, to get it back into the right position. The way her hips moved when she sat caused her tighter skirts to ride up, or bunch, and this skirt was most definitely one of the tighter ones.
"
All my girls with hips
," she mumbled to herself, "
lemme hear from ya
."
She stepped back into her heels, which she never wore while sitting at her desk, and composed herself.
The training room was just down the hall from her cubicle, and the voices she heard while still only halfway there said quite a few people had knocked off early for the day and wandered down to eat. That was always the case. It was usually the same group too. The ones who looked for any excuse to sit in on meetings they weren't needed in, especially if there was the chance of food, were also the ones more practiced at looking busy than at actually doing any work. When she turned the corner, none of the faces were a surprise.
Robin busied herself with the preparations, pulling plates and forks and knives from the cabinets. She made a mental note to herself that, once again, all these items had been taken from the second-highest shelf, the highest one she could reach in the heels, to the lowest shelf. She'd moved them several times to different areas in the neighboring break room, but in the end they were always put back low, where she had to bend over or squat. She had her suspicions about the persons involved, but her petitions to restrict access had fallen on deaf ears.
In due time, the training room filled up around her while she hung some last minute decorations. Right on time, which is to say five minutes late, the guest of honor arrived to a long round of applause. Bill, CEO and owner of Koenig Magnetics, a man whose family had started the business three generations before, was retiring.
He was a pompous ass.
Robin smiled and clapped at the appropriate moments, when the assembled group was sufficiently awed by his showmanship, but she'd been his executive assistant for a number of years and did not miss the touching. It had never quite descended to groping, but hands on her shoulder and upper back were so common she'd almost stopped twitching by the time a position had opened up in another department, and that was a bad sign. He was not a threat to her, but his natural charisma and gregarious interpersonal style relied on a lot of touching and close proximity.
As the party went on, Robin deftly worked her way around the room in an effort to stay away from him. He wasn't the only one she avoided, but his impending retirement had burst the dam wide open and he was hugging people left and right.
There were two small groups of women in the back, and she stopped to check in with them. The conversation with both was the same. They looked nervous, and she had no news for them. She tried to give them hope but couldn't be sure if any of them bought it, least of all herself.
A hand on her elbow broke her concentration, and she twitched away from it.
"Hey," Mike said, handing her a plate with a slice of cake on it. "This all turned out really great!"
"Thanks," she replied, having little recourse but to accept the plate. "I wish that organizing these things wasn't such a large portion of my job, but it's good to know that I'm doing it well."
"Have you heard much about the new honcho?"
Robin shook her head. "I think I saw her touring the building a couple weeks ago, but Bill was keeping her at a brisk pace. She didn't stop or meet anyone for more than a few seconds, as far as I saw."
Bill's daughter, Turner, was taking over for him, and she was mostly an unknown quantity.
"I've seen that kind of thing before," one of the engineers, Jerry, said, leaning over to contribute. "Bill's hiding something. They blew through one of our meetings, showed her the two designs we're working on for Fairvine, and whisked her off to something else. That was three weeks ago, and I ain't seen either one of them since."
"What do you think she's hiding?" Mike asked eagerly. He was as bad a gossip as any woman she'd ever known.
Gail from Finance, who had been talking to Jerry, turned toward the rest of them and leaned in. "More like where would she start? The woman's a walking mystery."
Robin saw the light at the end of the tunnel. A little more involvement from others and she could extricate herself completely. She took one discreet step back and then another, but Mike reached out and touched her arm again.
"Oh that's right," he said, as he held her elbow. "Alex T. was looking for you. Did he find you?"
"When?" She took a step away before stopping, and folded her arms together.
"I dunno," he said, recoiling. "Twenty minutes ago?"
"What did he want me for?"
"I dunno."
"Was it important?"
"
I dunno!
"
Robin was almost glad for the opportunity to leave the party, but the only times the plant supervisor wanted her was either as a witness for someone being written up or a jobsite injury. She set down the plate and the cake, still untouched, and strode back to her desk. It was impossible to miss, when she turned the corner into her cubicle to grab her safety glasses, that Mike had partially followed her out into the hall and was pretending to not be staring at her backside.
***
Robin took off her glasses and pinched her nose. "This is the third time," she groaned, "in less than a year."
"What do you want me to tell you?" the large man asked, gruffly, as he leaned back and knitted his fingers together behind his head. "The signage is very clear. In the past, we'd go
years
without this happening. Not once."
"So what changed? What's the difference?"
