Part 2: Work Wife #4?

Life went on after my two weeks of training Serena came to an end and I didn’t think much of her or our brief training experience after that.  At least, that was the plan.  Indeed, Carlos had returned from his vacation and I sought refuge on my side of the office.  Serena was all his and I was off the hook.

Or so I thought.

The following week, Serena would seek me out, trekking to the other side of the office, looking to converse and seemingly wanting to continue hanging out and resume “training”.  She wasn’t dumb and I think she was grasping the job well enough, but Netta hadn’t asked me to do this.  My obligation to Netta and to some degree, Serena, was over.  It ended the week before.  I thought I was done.  It turns out, this was really only the beginning.  I don’t know what it was the beginning of, but it was some kind of beginning, the beginning of something.

So from the middle of May, Serena and I paired up and were forming a new team, similar to what I had done previously with three other women.  Yet, this seemed different somehow.  Carmen bonded from our training when she and I first started.  We shared a common experience, that is, learning this job and seeing if this was something we could do.  A supervisor suggested that Christina and I pair up and it worked because I had already known Christina.  Christina made me work side-by-side with Jackie and that worked out very well, being that I knew Jackie at the time, though more on a minimal level.  With Carmen, Christina, and Jackie, I saw it all coming, at least from some distance and with some knowledge as to what was happening.  With Serena, I was blind-sided.  She sought me out.  I don’t know why.  She just did.

This led to me thinking a wide variety of things, as I was overwhelmed by doubt and skepticism.  The biggest and most persistent questions repeatedly entered my mind.  Why?  Why me?  What did I do to deserve this?  In my head, I thought, “I don’t know why she’s here and she keeps coming over here.  I did what I needed to do.  Why does she keep coming back?  This is all so confusing and I’d like to figure out what happened here”.  At the time though, I didn’t feel like asking questions.  This was because I had hoped that things would have just ended on their own volition in the next few days.  Serena would just stop coming by.  She would get tired of the walk and just kind of give up.  She’d find someone else to attach herself to, much like a parasite does a host.  I didn’t need to be a part of this.  If I waited long enough, Serena would drift away on her own and I’d return to my solo career again.

Then maybe, for better or for worse, I gave her my cell phone number and initiated a text message conversation with her.  This was initially because she wanted to maintain close contact with me, so that she could know when I would be heading out into the community, so that she could accompany me.  She didn’t care what I was doing or where I was going.  She wanted to be a part of it.  Serena seemed so eager and though at the time I don’t think I would have admitted it now like I do now, I kind of liked it.  This is because Serena seemed interested in wanting to get to know me, perhaps as more than a co-worker, and more as a friend.  I still didn’t understand why.  Still, I went with it.

I still had a lot of questions that lingered, ones that would take me weeks to finally muster up the courage to ask.  But until I found that courage, Serena and I would spend more and more time together in the office.  It wasn’t all work-related.  Sometimes we would just seek each other out just to talk and converse about nothing, at least nothing that was meaningful to anyone who could hear us.  It just came off as friendly, nonsensical banter, of which I am a master.  We continued to go into the field together and in general, be seen together, which I think finally started to arouse much of the office’s interest and curiosity.  As much as I hated it, I had now attracted attention in the office, attention that I could have done without.  The introvert side of me very much wanted to maintain a low profile and not attract attention.  The extrovert side couldn’t have cared less and had, in some weird way, almost liked it.

As the days and weeks progressed, Serena and I seemed to become increasingly close, closer than I would have ever anticipated.  This all stemmed from our text conversations, which from there, eventually leaked into our actual in-person interactions.  The world of text message suddenly intertwined with real-world conversation and so began our deeper conversations about our respective lives, our life histories, and pretty much everything in between.  Eventually, it came to a point where nothing was off limits and everything could become a topic of discussion.  It was as though nothing was taboo and everything was welcome in conversation.

It was at this point where I first started to ask myself, “Could Serena be #4?”