Alpine

Gambit 1 - Knot

In the end, I took more than Thursday afternoon off. I went straight to the library from work. Filled-out the harassment form. Scanned it. Emailed it to HR. Went home. Crawled into bed. Stayed there.

On Friday, I called in sick to avoid any repercussions. The sick excuse was only half a lie. I was so stressed that it felt like I had food poisoning. Over the weekend, I started feeling better. And Monday was a holiday.

I should have taken that day off like I was supposed to. However, the other constant stress in my life, falling behind at work, screamed at me. I was well-rested, and no one would be in the office. I thought it was the perfect time to get ahead. Or at least catch up.

When I arrived, the parking lot was empty. I glanced at the garage. Also empty. Of course it was. I only looked because I compulsively checked the spot where he smoked any time it was within view.

With a keycard swipe, I enter the building and went to my desk. Strange how comforting the quiet space was. Silence had eaten me alive when my colleagues stopped talking. Silence caused by emptiness felt safe. It made it easy to get in the zone. To complete my tasks. I finished more work in those few hours than I normally do in an entire week.

I got so focused on my code, that I was oblivious to his arrival. As I pecked at my keyboard, he put down his things. Wandered into the break room. Poured himself an iced tea. Settled into his chair to watch me. His glass was half empty by the time he spoke up. "It's nice to see you again."

Jumping out of my goddamn skin, I spun my chair around to face him. "When-did-you-get-in?"

He shrugged. "Maybe 15-20 minutes ago? Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you. I thought you would have noticed me already."

"No..." How had I not? Wait. That was how he avoided detection: no smoke smell. Where had it gone? Had he refrained from smoking all day to stay off my radar? This was no chance meeting. He planned it like this. But how did he know I was here?

"Well, anyway, it's good to see you working again. Do you feel like you've been productive this morning? It looks like you were."

That was how he knew: I had made several pull requests for new features. He had access to the Alpine code repository. He was using the timestamps on my commits to track when I was in the office. Since when did he knew enough about programming figure that out? That little detail's gravity prevented me from responding to his meaningless question.

He shifted position. "Look, let's talk about what happened with Ryan."

I felt the heat leave my fingers and shook my head. "No."

"Please, I'm really, really sorry about what he did. I don't think I need to tell you that he's a little bit protective of me. I hadn't intended for him to know about what we did."

"'We?'" I parroted back.

"He saw the scars, I told him to drop it, and he made some assumptions. Things got out of hand."

"We."

"Listen, I talked to HR and smoothed everything out. Ryan will still get a mark on his record, because he shouldn't have hit you. Even if he did think he was doing it to protect me. You're not going to get in trouble for what happened between us, though. It's all been put down as a big misunderstanding." He sat back in his chair. "Can you find it in your heart to forgive him? I'm worried he might get fired if you don't."

Ryan had freely chosen to clean my clock, but, honestly, I felt no ill will towards him. I got it. He was fooled by Switch's camouflage. Ryan saw him as a sweet guy trying to take care of everyone and not be a burden. A rare breed of truly selfless person met once in a lifetime.