John thought he was the only one left at the office, having seen even Maritza, the night cleaning lady, come through vacuuming and emptying trash cans. Ah, Maritza – she must have been a looker 15 years ago! With long black hair, thick and rich even now, and breasts that looked like her bra could just barely contain them, she already had five kids and her body was fleshy – it gave you something to hold on to, never mind that he’d only ever seen her in her chambray blue uniform, altogether the wrong color for her dark skin and dark eyes. Just thinking about her made him restless, which made him think he must be really hard up – er, no pun intended – because she was not his usual type.

He got up to go to the office kitchen, not because he really wanted water but because he needed to move. That was when he passed Jane’s cubicle as she was just getting her gear together to leave.

“Hey,” he called out to her, surprised that she was still there.

“Oh, hey,” she answered, pushing her thick, unfashionable glasses up her nose. Well, they probably had been fashionable back in the seventies, John thought.

“Didn’t realize anyone was still here,” John said.

“Yeah, me neither. Working late?” she asked absent-mindedly as she was throwing things into her book bag. Like a true geek, Jane never went anywhere without her book bag – it was as if she’d never heard of anything so delicate and feminine as a purse! He was sure she’d even show up to an evening party wearing jeans and carrying her book bag on her back.

“Um, yeah,” he lied as he checked out her mousy-brown hair and plain face. He wasn’t about to admit he hadn’t been working at all but just surfing the net and playing computer games. No way in hell would he admit to Jane that he just didn’t have anything to do on a Friday night. Funny, he thought, but she and Maritza were about the same height and weight, but it looked so alluring on Maritza while it just looked frumpy on Jane. Frumpy Jane, he thought. Yup, that about summed her up. She bulged in the wrong places, her coloring was all off, her style was about 30 years old, and she wasn’t even such a good geek! She took forever to write a little bit of computer code or update a client’s website, something John could do in his sleep – like today, for example: he’d finished his work long before 5 but he’d stuck around just to show face-time so his bosses would think he was hard at work. He was definitely under-challenged and underpaid, he thought for the millionth time that day.

“Yeah, I’m finally out o’here,” Frumpy Jane said, looking up from the computer she’d dutifully shut down.

He didn’t want to talk shop with her, he decided; that would make him want to tear his hair out. But he didn’t necessarily want to see his only in-the-flesh-for-real companion leave either. He leaned against the flimsy little bulletin-board wall that separated her cubicle from the rest. “So,” he said, searching for something to talk about. “So, um, I guess you and Bill have plans tonight, eh?” He watched her turn red, as if he’d said something lewd and audacious.

“Yeah,” she smiled into her bag lying there on the table waiting for her to haul it onto her back. Amazing, he thought. When he’d first been hired on just a few months ago this girl had had the biggest crush on him