Rachel Works with Me

  I have to admit, by this time I was hitting a bit of a dry spell in the relationship department. I was hanging out with a lot of girls but not seeing any of them. A lot of them had other guys they were already interested in or already dating. Even the few girls I had been chatting on the Internet seemed to be happily involved with love interests. Granted, one of them lived in Canada, so it wasn’t like anything would come of that, right?  I was happy for all of them, not so much for me.  

  Alan did end up hiring Rachel to replace the crazy woman. What made it even better was that because my desk was generally always a mess, they switched me with Claudia I moved from the corner office up front into the back room a few months before. Now my desk would be right next to Rachel’s.

  At first, things were really casual. We made small talk and would communicate via e-mail with quick quips even though we sat next to each other. She had a boyfriend and I reminded myself of that constantly.

  Shortly after Rachel was working with us, Lori and I hosted a Mardi Gras party at my house. It was really the first time Rachel would get to know some of her new co-workers in a more social setting and I would get to meet her boyfriend for the first time. Everybody loved Rachel and everyone disliked her boyfriend. He seemed okay to me, but then again I was fighting the urge of automatically not liking him. After everyone told me how he was behaving at the party, I didn’t like him. He was cocky, chauvinistic and rude.

  Now that I didn’t spend most of my interaction with Rachel chatting online, she and I became extremely close. We would go out to lunch together every day. Sometimes we would go out for food and sometimes we would go back to my apartment and hang out. We would hang out after work as well. I was always free and her boyfriend, Justin, worked until 11 or 12 at night and she was tired of spending nights at home alone.

  The two of us talked about everything and anything and on a quite intimate level. It was almost unhealthy because I was falling for her hard and others around me felt she was leading me on. In reality, I knew where we stood and she had as strong of feelings for me as I had for her. Rachel’s relationship was complicated.

  In the span of the first couple months we had gone too far on more than one occasion. Unfortunately, I admit that it gave me false hopes that something would come out of it. And when this happened, Rachel would back off and be cold toward me. In turn I would be crushed. I understood, or at least clamed to, and we would follow this pattern.