Hanging from the office lights, I casually snipped off and conked the HR guy, Gavin, on the head with a freakishly large, size eleven boot.
It was his boot.
He was trying to get me to give his boot back to him. He’s so tall, you’d think he could jump higher, but reality isn’t always as you think. He jumped, but he barely left the ground. Then I let go of the lights and knocked him out. To play fair, I left his boot by his unconscious head. He’ll find it easily.
Teasing him is my habit these days. There are things about him that make it seem like he is absolutely begging to be teased. For one, he’s noticeably cute. He’s tall and very much a man. I’m very much a woman, so there’s that between us.
He also likes to wear hats. Stupid hats. He thinks they make him look like something other than what he really is. He has his wide-brimmed “adventure” hat. He has his bowler and his stovepipe and even one of those hats like the guy in the band Cake wears. It doesn’t make him look like the guy in the band Cake. It doesn’t make him look like anything to me except a target.
I stole his hats whenever I got the chance. I still steal them. And when he left his boots on the side of his desk while he was clipping his freakishly large toenails—that was nothing more than blatant temptation. How could any self-respecting tease pass up such an opportunity? How could anyone not see those boots sitting there like something more likely to be found in a dry dock? Anyway, I stole one while he was looking and he chased me for it. You know how that ended. While he was out cold, I stole another hat.
People in the office have called me “floozy” and “tease” and some other things not worth repeating. “Dum.” They call me dum. I’m no ladder-climber. I’m just in the office to do my job. Like teasing Gavin.
Don’t get me wrong. The teasing is not all one-sided. He can send the tease right back at me. He isn’t one of those who can’t take the bug—he could return the bug with style, if he wants. He told me once about how dum my spandex is. “Who wears stretchy pants to work?”
I do. It’s dum, like dum-dum dum, you know? It’s goofy and self-aggrandizing, but I’m addicted. Addicted to spandex. Is spandex a brand name? Should it be capitalized? I don’t know. I’m dum, remember?
Back to the point, though: thank goodness he never stole my pants and hid them behind the break room refrigerator. That could’ve been really embarrassing. And that would be where he’ll find his bowler hat if he thinks to look there. Behind the break room refrigerator.
His “adventure” hat is having its own adventure out on the fire escape ladder. He might not know to look there either.
He stole my coffee cup not too long ago and hid it on the mail delivery cart. I found my cup and stashed his stovepipe hat there in return. Do you think he’ll find it?
His Cake hat? I bet you can guess where that is. It’s in my spandex.
The other people in the office say I’m showing off my butt when I wear stretchy pants to work. What will they say when they see this odd lump on my rear? Will they even care? Will they tell me I need to go to the doctor and get the lump checked? Will they tell me to stop teasing Gavin? What will they say when Gavin wakes up? Will they tell him they’ve seen a hat shaped lump somewhere, but they can’t say where exactly? Maybe they’ll give him a clue. Maybe they’ll play that game Hot-and-Cold. I’ll have my deepest girly thrills if they do. They’ll all be saying, no, they’ll be ADMITTING, that my butt is hot.
Xenosthesia.com 