Consent_A #MeToo Romance

by Jason Letts

  “The thing about Connoisaurus is they’re really aggressive about moving into new markets. The logo looks like a dinosaur with an apron, but if you look at it again what else does it look like?”

  I stared at the funny shape on the screen for a few seconds.

  “It’s a bulldozer! I never noticed that,” I said, laughing.

  It was another good joke, and that got me suspicious because his off-hand jokes the day before were pretty horrendous. Were these comments rehearsed or recycled from previous attempts? Either way, I knew I was going to have to check my enthusiasm or else the running recording might suggest that I was receptive to some kind of personal advance.

  A little while later another guy walked by and casually said to Martin that he was wearing different-colored socks again. He clenched his fists like he’d been gotten and turned to me.

  “I need to just start telling people I’m colorblind,” he said.

  “That’s a serious condition and you shouldn’t joke about it,” I said, monotone. My attempts at humorlessness were as lame as his spontaneous quips.

  The morning went on like that, quiet periods of working with intermittent exchanges. I tried to focus as much as I could on what I was doing, never initiating and always ending interactions after a brief remark. The only time I was really distracted from my work was when Mr. Roche walked past us and interrupted another guy at his desk. Roche was always the only one who didn’t wear jeans, and there was something about his presence, or his brutish almost-swagger, that made my breathing heavier.

  “Hey Vince, what is going on over here? What did I tell you about that layout?”

  I shamelessly listened in, completely ignoring what I was supposed to be doing. Vince muttered something but was quickly cut off.

  “How hard am I going to have to ride you about this? You know it doesn’t look good on mobile. We need to slim it down and simplify. Get rid of all this clutter. Bury it in the footer.”

  It was impossible not to take a little bit of pleasure in watching him chew out his subordinate before storming back to his office. I must’ve been smirking because of course Martin noticed it.

  “You’d better hope you’re not on the receiving end of one of those,” he said, serious this time. It was hard not to think of what Chelsea said about him and wonder if Martin knew how brutal he could be.

  We worked silently for a while until lunchtime came along. I’d caught wind that Martin had another afternoon full of meetings and conference calls. I was mentally halfway through a tofurkey dog from the cart down the street when he took his hands off his keyboard and swiveled to face me directly.

  “I think that wasn’t too bad, was it? Had a little fun.”

  I did the thing where I nodded yes and shrugged no at the same time, already dreading where this was going.

  “There’s something going on this Friday I wanted to tell you about. We’re having our annual holiday party…”

  “Oh, I really can’t stay late from work. I’m not really big into the holidays anyway, and I’ve got a long drive to my sister’s,” I said quickly, ready to elaborate on my alibi if need be.

  Martin blinked hard.

  “The party is the last hour of the workday. Snacks, punch, cheap Christmas decorations. No one’s going to tell you to stop working if that’s what you really want to do, but none of the rest of us will be. Just thought I’d give you some advance notice about it so it wasn’t a surprise,” he said before turning to go.

  “Oh, thank you,” I said after him. OK, maybe that wasn’t the come-on I was sure it was going to be. Some guilt over my behavior crept in. Had I been surreptitiously recording an awkward but well-meaning guy making innocent small talk?

  I almost shut my phone off right then and there, but I was glad I didn’t. Hendrick from the front desk came over to join me at my workstation after returning from lunch to talk about traffic flow and analytics with the intention of occupying the entire afternoon, but after about ten minutes he broke off and started rubbing his eyes.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” he said, grumbling with his head back and mouth wide open.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked.

  “I can’t go on talking to you about this stuff when what I really want to be talking about are your moonstone eyes or your nutmeg hair,” he said, gazing at me like I was a work of art.

  “I think we should keep talking about this stuff that we’re working on,” I said. It didn’t help that Hendrick was at least seven or eight years younger than me, wore a t-shirt with the logo of a band I’d never heard of, had holes in his jeans, and had come to work without a coat or jacket of any kind even though it was about ten degrees out.

  Hendrick moved his arm a tiny bit and curled his fingers as if he were fighting the urge to touch me.

  “Why don’t I come over tonight? We can talk and just see what happens,” he said. I was taken aback at his brazenness.

  “Hendrick, I need to tell you as clearly as possible that I’m not interested in pursuing any kind of a relationship outside of work with you.”

  “It doesn’t have to be a relationship and it doesn’t have to be outside of work,” he said, undeterred.

  “The answer to everything is and always will be no,” I said. Mercifully it got through to him. The kid glanced around before standing up and clearing his throat.

  “I think you’ve got a good handle on this stuff and can manage it yourself,” he said more audibly while looking at some of the other workstations. He returned to the front of the office but I was aware of him twisting to cast looks in my direction several times throughout the afternoon.

  I thought I was in the clear to make it through the end of the day when my computer froze up about five minutes before five o’clock. I stared at the words I’d been writing for the past half an hour, knowing that they were likely to be lost as soon as the machine became operational again. I banged on the keyboard in vain to quit the program and reached down toward the tower when one of the programmers walked by and stopped.

  “Are you having trouble?” He was carrying a folder that appeared to have nothing inside of it.

  “Yeah, this computer just froze on me.”

  He set the folder down and kneeled next to me.

  “There’s something about this one. It does that sometimes. Let me take a look and see if I can figure it out. I’m Eduardo, by the way,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said. “Do you think there’s any way to save any of this?”

  He hit the power switch and the monitor went black. A sense of weariness hit me at all of the work I’d lost.

  “No, I’m afraid not. But if you give me a minute I should be able to get it back up and running.”

  He produced a small set of screwdrivers from his pocket and proceeded to pop open the casing on the computer tower. I watched him as he fiddled with the different parts, prodding there and blowing here. Our coworkers started heading for the exit.

  “If you need to go I’m sure we can get this sorted out tomorrow,” I said, anxious to join the departing group.

  “No, it’s no trouble. Hold on,” he said, flashing me a bright smile. Another one of the guys patted Eduardo on the shoulder on the way out.

  A few minutes of tinkering passed, the last of our coworkers left, and I began to feel awkward standing there as his fiddled with the machine.

  “I’ve got to get going though. Thank you for your help,” I said, standing up with my bag.

  “There we go!” His enthusiasm was unmarred by any note of irony. For all I knew the only thing he needed to do was push the power button again. “Just had to rewire the processor. Pretty cool, but it’s no big deal.”

  “Hey, hold on a sec,” he said with a sheepish grin. The least you could do is tell me a little bit about yourself. Have you lived in the city long? How did you end up here?”

  “There’s not much to say really. My name is Sarah and I went to NYU.”

  “NYU? Wow. Smart girl. I went to CUN
Y. You probably think I’m an idiot,” he said, scratching behind his neck.

  “No, I don’t think that.”

  “That’s a relief,” he said quickly. “Hey, I happen to live right around the next block over. There’s something cool I want to show you. I’m right by the subway stop anyway.”

  “No, thanks. I really have to be going.” I wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic about having this conversation as he seemed to be, and I wondered how much more I was going to have to sit through.

  “Don’t you even want to know what it is?”

  “No, not really.”

  “I’ve got a football signed by players on the Giants!”

  “Oh, nice,” I said, monotone. Even Eduardo seemed to be sensing that this was going nowhere.

  “See you later,” he said, looking me in the eyes. I nodded and stepped by him to get into the aisle. The back of his hand brushed against my hip as I did so, leaving me with another one of those split-second decisions about whether or not to make a scene.

  “Did you just touch me?”

  “No, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “You know you did. It was not welcome and you should never do it again.”

  The feeling of something crawling under my skin followed me all the way to the elevator, where I mercifully got in alone and had the space to myself. In some way, having the recording on pushed me to say everything I knew I was supposed to say, when otherwise I probably would’ve just kept my head down and ignored the touch.

  My thoughts then drifted to how this couldn’t have been real. Chelsea must’ve been trolling me by getting all of these guys to hit on me one after another. It might’ve been some kind of unpleasant hazing ritual. But as I reached home I couldn’t shake the certainty that for pretty much everyone at work I was just a sexual object.

  The next days continued in the same way. I collected data with my phone while turning myself into what I imagined to be Zombie Sarah who showed no emotion and was as disinterested in any kind of interaction as possible. Instead of eating brains, all she wanted was to be left alone to do her work.

  My audio recorder wasn’t even able to document all of the pick-up attempts. One guy in the office named Travis was helping me with login ID’s and passwords for everything via email. I didn’t even know which one in the office he was. On Thursday I responded to a message about a network with a rotating password and got a one-word reply within a minute: “Dinner?”

  I stared at it blankly, wondering what was going through someone’s mind to write this and think it would work. None of the correspondences contained any attempt at getting personal or showing any personality, which made this one so unexpected.

  I ignored it only to receive a follow-up message thirty minutes later asking me if I’d gotten it. There was a snide little comment in there about making sure to check work email on a regular basis. I responded with one word, no, and got another message a minute later asking me if I was saying no about getting the previous message or no to dinner.

  My hands gripped the sides of the keyboard, ready to try to crack it in half.

  By the time Friday rolled around, I had serious doubts about whether or not I would be able to make it through an entire couple of weeks to see if I’d get fired. It also made the upcoming trip to see my sister for Christmas that I was ambivalent about much more appealing.

  But I was surprised upon reaching work that Martin was in his office and didn’t show any signs of needing to assist me or make attempts at entertaining me through the morning. In fact, no one bothered me at all or even said a word to me. It made me wonder whether I would end up like Chelsea, a sort of office pariah who worked alone around all these people. I had to admit that office pariah sounded a lot better than office slut or office constant pick-up target.

  Lunchtime passed and it looked like I was in the clear to make it to the party, where I expected to suffer at least a little chitchat before excusing myself for personal reasons and vanishing without a trace. Then an alert popped up on my computer about a meeting with Martin in his office in fifteen minutes. There was no explanation about what it was for, which left me with plenty of time to develop one hundred different theories about what it would entail.

  When it came time to go to Martin’s office, he opened the door for me and gestured for me to take a seat. His desk was already at the appropriate height to look at me over.

  “I just wanted to get a sense from you how you were feeling about everything here,” he said, leaning back. I noticed his monitor had been turned off. He didn’t even turn it off when he left work.

  “I think it’s been good. I’ve been glad to get to stretch my copywriting skills in a new direction and think some of the work I’ve done has really been pretty excellent. You must’ve noticed I’ve been making progress with some of the web applications you said were required of me. I was able to do everything this morning pretty much by myself.”

  He nodded but shook his finger a little.

  “What about with the rest of the staff? How do you feel about the team?”

  I paused, trying to sort out what to say.

  “There are some really talented people here I could learn a lot from.”

  Martin lowered his eyes and took on a somber expression.

  “There’ve been some complaints from people around the office that you’re a tad unfriendly, which was a huge surprise to me I have to add because we have such an amazing report, right? But they’re saying you’ve been short with them, even a little rude.”

  I couldn’t help but gasp at the unfairness of it. Which one of my would-be suitors got spurned and decided to get me in trouble? Or was this just a part of the game Chelsea explained? Oh, your project ended and you didn’t really fit in anyway, so you might as well go.

  “You hired me to do a job and that is not what whoever talked to you was talking to me about. I’m sure of it,” I said.

  Martin put his forearms on the desk and leaned toward me with sympathetic eyes.

  “I know what’s been going on and what they’ve been putting you through. I’m sorry about it. Some of the guys here can be overzealous. Some just plain don’t have much experience with women, certainly not a woman like you.”

  I didn’t feel it was necessary to ask exactly what kind of woman they thought I was.

  “Do you have any company policy forbidding office romances that could be enforced?” I asked.

  Martin grimaced.

  “We’re a new company and haven’t had the time or necessity to work through anything like that, but I promise you we will,” he said. I wasn’t going to hold my breath. “But in the meantime I think I have a solution that will intrigue you.”

  “What is it? You could just say you now have a policy and that they need to follow it.”

  Martin laughed, leaning to the side against his black swivel chair.

  “Where’s the fun in that? This’ll be even better and solve the problem completely. Let’s tell them you and I have started seeing each other. Wait, hear me out. I’m pretty well respected around here, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. None of the guys would try to step on my territory. We carry on working as we have been. Sure, we get together for dinner or something every once in a while to snap some selfies as evidence, but mostly we continue working as usual and continue to follow through with our professional obligations.”

  I sighed, feeling like I’d finally figured out what was going on. Except for Roche, Martin was in charge and could call me into his office any time he liked. He set my schedule and knew it was impossible for me to avoid giving him as much of my attention as he wanted. The other guys didn’t have that luxury and had to rush to take their shot as soon as they possibly could, even when it was glaringly unadvisable. Martin was really no better than the rest. He just had more control and could afford to play the long game, which seemed to include the literal game he’d suggested.

  I must’ve been nodding slightly as I drew my conclusions because Mar
tin started to grin.

  “Pretty good, right? I can go ahead and let it slip to a couple of guys. You don’t have to do anything. Then we can talk later about what we want to do,” he said.

  I had to remind myself the recorder was on and that I needed to say the right thing. No hemming or hedging like I was tempted to do to squirm out of an uncomfortable offer.

  “I appreciate you trying to devise a solution to help me, but I’m not interested in participating in any falsehoods that might give any of them or you a mistaken impression of what is going on. I respectfully request that you create and enforce a company policy that forbids the kind of behavior you said you understand I have been subjected to,” said Zombie Sarah in a voice resembling mine.

  Martin lowered his eyebrows. He looked as though someone had just scratched his car.

  “I think it’d do you good to warm up a bit. If we’ve got to work together we might as well get along. The party will be a good opportunity for you to break the ice and feel more comfortable opening up,” he said.

  I pointed to the door and he nodded, allowing me to leave. I shut my eyes as the glass door swung closed. Maybe it was the technology sector that naturally attracted such horrible people. Whatever it was, I didn’t plan to be a part of it for much longer. At least I’d have something to tell Jenny the next time we met up at a cafe, that and a lot of fodder for blog posts.

  Feeling like the day couldn’t get any worse by the time the party started, I noticed how Zombie Sarah gradually got a stronger grip on me. It affected the way I walked, how I tried to keep my head down, where I stood. A few workstations had been cleared of computer equipment and outfitted with snacks and punch bowls. Half the lights and most of the computers had been turned off, giving us a better glimpse of the beautiful city lights in the buildings around us.

  If I had to socialize, I figured I was down to one realistic option. Chelsea had secured a bowl of pretzels and a red plastic cup filled with soda before returning to her desk. She had on one of those ugly Christmas sweaters this time.