Author's note:
This is a lesbian romance, with a lot going on besides just sex. It's rather long, and the sex doesn't happen until the end.
Sumita, the main character, appears in another story called Play Date, set about ten years before this one. Sarah, Meaghan, Jenna, and some other supporting characters appear in Evergreen Kiss. This story stands on its own - you don't need to read either of those to appreciate this one - but they are all connected.
~~~
"I'm really proud of you, Mom," Sangita said, pulling into an empty parking space in the visitor lot in front of building eighty-two on the west side of the huge corporate campus in Redmond.
"It's just a job, Gita," Sumita replied. "I don't even know if I'll be any good at it. It's been a long time since I've done any serious programming."
"It's not 'just a job,' Mom," Sangita said, perfectly mimicking her mother's mild Indian accent and dismissive tone. "You're going to work on software that like a billion people use every day. That's a big deal. And you literally wrote the book on systems programming. You're going to do great."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Gita," Sumita said, "but writing about it and doing it are two different things."
She gathered up her stuff, checking her phone once and her purse twice to make sure she had all the required documents.
"You wouldn't think there'd be a whole checklist just for the first day," she said, fidgeting in the passenger's seat and resisting the urge to check the list one more time.
"Just get out of the car already, Mom," Sangita said. "You have everything you need. Seriously."
Sumita sat up straight, put her phone back in her purse, and took a deep breath. "Here I go," she said, unbuckling her seatbelt. "Wish me luck."
"You're going to be fine," Sangita said. "No luck needed."
Sumita stepped out of the car and closed the door. "Thanks for driving me, Gita," she said through the open window.
"No prob," Sangita replied. "Just call when you're done and I'll come get you and take you somewhere fun for dinner. Now get in there!"
Sumita smiled at her daughter's exasperation and made her way to the visitors' entrance. This whole section of campus was just being built the last time Sumita had been there, researching a book, and she had a hard time orienting herself away from the familiar landmarks. Fortunately, they had sent her very detailed directions. It was a quarter after eight, fifteen minutes before she was supposed to be there. She really didn't want to be late on her first day.
Once inside, there were plenty of signs pointing the way to new employee orientation, and Sumita soon found herself putting on a nametag and sitting down in a large corporate meeting room, the kind she hadn't seen with any regularity in fifteen years. There were trays of fruit and breakfast pastries in the back of the room, but Sumita passed them by. She was too nervous to be hungry.
A Chinese girl not much older than Sangita sat down two seats away from Sumita. They exchanged hesitant smiles and sat quietly waiting for something to happen. At a quarter to nine, a woman in blue jeans and a white silk blouse walked to the podium. The room had filled by then; the few stragglers still drifting in rushed to find seats.
The presentations were equal parts administrative necessity and corporate pep rally, with a few bits of genuinely useful information thrown in from time to time. Sumita paid as much attention to the audience as to the presenters. A dozen of them were in suits, including the nervous Chinese girl, and almost all of them looked vaguely uncomfortable at being so overdressed. The one exception was a handsome middle-aged man sitting front row, center, who wore his custom-tailored suit like a second skin. Definitely not an engineer. Sales exec, probably.
The rest had followed the instructions in the introductory email and worn comfortable clothes, ranging from the vaguely inoffensive 'business casual' to the programmer-standard uniform of blue jeans and a humorous tee shirt. In her long cotton skirt and light summer sweater, Sumita looked like nobody else in the room. Of the forty-odd people at orientation, all but seven looked like they were straight out of college or grad school, and only nine were women. Sumita was not encouraged by those demographics.
The presentations ended and the new employees were turned loose at two o'clock. The HR people stayed in the room for another hour to answer questions, and everyone was encouraged to wander through the company museum down the hall. Sumita already knew plenty about the company's history, and she wasn't in a mood to linger, so she stopped to ask directions to building eleven and left.
Her nerves calmed outside in the sun. The sky was a brilliant early summer blue and completely clear save for a few clouds scudding across the horizon to the south. Perfect weather for cricket in the evening, she thought, and then immediately stopped herself. She redirected her mind by going over the insurance options from the afternoon benefits presentation in her head. Some thoughts were better left alone.
~~~
Sumita followed the sidewalk across the freeway overpass and around the traffic circle - more new construction since she'd last visited - and felt a sudden relief when she knew exactly where she was. Ten minutes later, she was across 156th Ave, past the old soccer fields, and crossing the street to the building where she'd be working. She'd never had an office in building eleven when she was at the company the first time, but she'd been there for plenty of meetings. On the outside, at least, it hadn't changed at all.
She pulled out her phone when she walked into the lobby, scrolled to find the email from Tamara, the team admin, and walked up to the reception desk.
"How can I help you?" asked the young man behind the desk.
"I'm here to see, um, Sarah Oda," Sumita replied, looking at her phone again to double check.
"Sure, I'll just give her a call," the receptionist replied. "What's your name?"
"Oh," Sumita said. "Ah, Sumita. Sumita Desai."
The young man made the call and Sumita wandered around the lobby while she waited. There were a few modern, uncomfortable-looking chairs in one corner and some strange artwork on the walls, but otherwise it was just an empty expanse of carpet. The ceiling was quite high, and an alcove off the second floor atrium was visible above the reception desk, stocked with foosball and ping pong tables. The lobby wasn't a very welcoming space, but Sumita didn't imagine the building got many visitors.
After about two minutes, a door opened behind Sumita, startling her, and a very small, very young woman came out. Sumita turned around.
"Are you Sumita?" she asked.
Sumita nodded.
"Hi, I'm Sarah," the woman said with a smile. "Come on up."
Sarah went back through the door, holding it open for Sumita, and then walked up the stairs to the second floor. Sumita followed, wondering who exactly this Sarah was. She looked vaguely Asian, with a fresh, pretty face and long, straight black hair. In her blue jeans and white polo shirt she seemed barely older than that the college grads at orientation. Was she Sumita's new lead? The thought of working for a girl who was barely old enough to drink brought all of Sumita's misgivings from earlier in the day flooding back.
"I was really excited when Bhavesh announced you were coming back to work," Sarah said. "Your web applications books got me through my senior project in college, and Modern API Design is required reading around here."
Sarah's voice was polite and cheerful, and if she sensed any of Sumita's apprehension, she didn't show it. Somehow, that just made Sumita feel worse. "Um, thanks," she mumbled, blushing.
"Bhavesh told me about your husband," Sarah added respectfully. "I'm so sorry."
Sumita just smiled the bland, empty smile she'd been practicing for the past ten months. That, at least, was something she was used to.
They turned a corner into a maze of hallways and offices and walked to Sarah's office. She had a window that faced into the courtyard between buildings eleven, twelve, and fourteen. Sumita found that odd - windows were usually a privilege of seniority.
"I'm really sorry, Sumita," Sarah said, "but I have this email I absolutely have to finish. Give me like five minutes, and then you'll have my full attention."
"Um, sure, okay," Sumita replied. "Whatever you need."
Sarah sat down at her desk and resumed work on the central screen of the five arrayed around her keyboard. The whole setup looked like some sort of underground command bunker. Sumita had never seen anything like it, even in her own days at the company.
Sarah was totally absorbed in the task at hand, sometimes cursing the stupidity of unseen colleagues under her breath, sometimes looking up code or reference documents on other screens. Sumita sat quietly in the guest chair next to Sarah's desk and took stock of the room.
The desk was wedged into one corner, leaving the rest of the office open. Most of the other offices had desks in the center, keeping visitors at a distance. Sarah's office invited them in. On the desk next to the far left monitor, Sarah kept two framed photos. One was an older Japanese woman with kind, lively eyes and long black hair shot through with white. The other was a young woman, maybe mid-twenties, with short red-brown hair and an expression of perfect happiness. Sumita wondered who she was. Definitely not a sister, unless she was adopted. Probably a best friend, like Julie had been for Sumita at that age.
On the windowsill right behind her, so that she had to twist in the chair to look, Sumita saw sixteen black marble cubes lined up in a row, which she knew from past experience represented patent applications, along with a pair of crystal spires. They looked like some other sort of corporate award, but she couldn't get a closer look without standing up, and she was doing her best to avoid drawing any attention.
A bookcase stood near the door, the lower shelves neatly stacked with tech books, the top shelf displaying random geeky doodads, including a stuffed Dogbert and a Lego X-Wing. Sumita recognized three of her own books on the shelf. All pretty normal office decoration.
The walls, though, were different. Four framed paintings hung around the room, each one beautiful in its own way, and none anything like what Sumita expected to see in a programmer's office. Above the bookcase, there was a print of a hypnotic fire scene, thick gray smoke and neon yellow and orange flames devouring a dense evergreen forest. A cartoony tanker plane with a determined look on its face flew in over everything to save the day. Next to that was a different scene in the same style: an adorable cartoon octopus squeezing through a shipwreck porthole in a dreamy underwater world. Sumita couldn't help smiling at them.
The painting over Sarah's desk was obviously the same artist but a very different form - an oil painting without a foreground figure at all; just light and dark and color. Sumita recognized it as the dying light of a winter sunset over Puget Sound, seen from somewhere high up the hillside in Seattle, with a storm coming in from the northwest.
The final painting, on the wall opposite the desk, was completely different from the rest. There was nothing at all realistic about it; at first it just looked to Sumita like a haphazard jumble of soft colors and shapes. She could make no sense of it, but she couldn't stop looking at it. She stood to get a better view, forgetting all about Sarah, and suddenly she saw it, clear as the sun in August. There was a somehow woman in the middle of that jumble of shapes, looking back over her shoulder as she ran away. Sumita found it to be the most sensuous thing she had ever seen, and one of the saddest, evoking the kind of raw, aching desire that she had forgotten was even possible.
