Internet Interlude

An arrogant cad and self-proclaimed eternal bachelor meets his match. He cuts his swath through dating sites, the bar scene and at work flirting, playing and repeating. He has always been careful, avoiding temptation and entanglement. On the tail end of a business trip, he lets his guard down. Then she walks though his doorway. He does not know that the hunter is about to become the hunted.

~~~~~ Excerpt ~~~~~

I'm about ninety-five percent done with this stupid policy letter. I'm pretty much doing it on autopilot, just rattling off the points I want to make about 'this-n-that' in the office before sending it to my office manager for her to read through, finalize and enforce. I just need to get the major points down and I'll let her attach her name to it, that keeps her credibility and power in the office, which means since I trust her to run things when I'm not there, she can run things without having to call and bother me with minutia every five minutes. It took years to find someone with the brains and confidence I needed to fill that role, and months to teach her to do it right. If I was a little more desperate and a lot more stupid I might have hit on her, but good looking as she is, I don't piss where I work. Otherwise with all the hot little pieces of ass walking around I'd have fifty paternity suits against me, I have to be a damn monk at work and suddenly turn that off the second I leave, as I finish the last few points on the 'sexual harassment and fraternization' policy memo I'm finishing. The last paragraph is the dagger making the correction to that sexy little nineteen year old who threw herself at me the week prior, before my manager caught her and metaphorically slapped the shit out of her sending her on her way with her tail between her legs.

Then there is a knock at my door.

I hate it when people pester me when I'm working. It's like they cause a train wreck in my head when they derail my train of thought. I curse profanely and slap my phone to check the time. I mutter aloud, "Shit." It's later than I thought. It's past my dinner time and I'm still working on the time change from the next time zone to the West. I slap the touch pad telling the stupid inadequate machine to save the document before standing.

I compulsively save every time I stand from a document; it's just one of my neuroses.

I push myself back from the desk with a frustrated sigh wondering if this is some idiot who wants to borrow my ice bucket and not return it again. I've still got my khakis and polo on, but I've long since dropped my shoes in favor of the ridiculous five dollar Wal-Mart rubber shower shoe sandals. I navigated around the day old alcohol spill. Then I pass through God knows what sticky crap infests the carpet between the spill and the mattress, spending just long enough from spill to door to consider what could be nastier than the spill I made the night prior that it sticks even after the hotel room's tenant who made that spill is so long gone. The messed-up thing is that unless the place is in a grand opening, no matter the price of the hotel room, I've found some nasty spot somewhere in every room I've ever stayed in, not that this is a 'roach motel' by any means, at a few hundred dollars a night on week days.

I slap the hook handle, slamming the bolt back into the door and rip it open ready to rip someone's ears off for not returning my ice bucket.

There stands my little internet plaything, fussing and entwining her fingers as she rolls them nervously. I'm in shock, silent. She's cuter than I thought she'd be. Not that I haven't seen her in her entirety undressed, but that's over the internet and that's not really real. Her long brown hair lies loose across her shoulders, down her back. Her green eyes look a little nervously up to mine, as she mutters something about, "Sorry I'm late. I got really lost on the way and ended up in the wrong town somewhere. My directions sucked and I well…"