“Sir, if you could...”

“But you...”

“Can you just list...”

Gabriel, who was now regularly called Gabe thanks to a few friendly co-workers, could hear his manager’s voice starting to gain a jagged edge of stress. He hadn’t had the opportunity to spend much time with Reta in the last two weeks; the backlog of work and status update meetings from her leave of absence kept her busy. They had exchanged names in a perfunctory onboarding meeting, but since he’d spent a good month and a half coming up to speed, the meeting scheduled for a full hour had been completed in a bare handful of minutes. In the tradition of software engineers everywhere they had shared wry smiles, called the meeting’s length a blessing, and got back to work.

Their meeting may have been short, but it taught him many things. He learned that he liked the shape of her smile, her smoky tenor voice, and her brown hair which had been cut into a short bob that looked remarkably cute on her. His initial interest, driven by the curve of her hips and the swell of her breasts, had only been reinforced. But he had also seen her, and he wasn’t yet ready to dance around subjects they both knew yet couldn’t, or wouldn’t, talk about.

Even as his innate need for secrecy warred against more primal thoughts, the tenor of the call continued to sour. A look at the others he now called coworkers confirmed that they also shared his concerns about Reta’s call. Their concerned looks told him that this was a pattern, instead of a single time event. Gabriel couldn’t help himself, he pulled up their customer management system. While uncommon, customer support calls were occasionally escalated to their group, a function of a small company who catered to a highly technical customer base.

The system told him that she was indeed talking to a customer, and a quick perusal of the notes they kept about prior contacts showed that it was one of their more... troublesome customers. The customers were known abusers of the company’s software, and their primary contact with the customer was known to be abrupt to the point of rudeness. Reta’s voice was now edging towards tears, and that was something that Gabriel was not ready to hear. He left his chair and strode towards Reta’s cramped office.

She didn’t see him enter her office, not because he was moving with any kind of stealth, but because she was unable to pay attention to her surroundings. He could see that her irises were blown wide open by adrenaline, her hands were shaking, her mouth was frozen open despite not uttering any sound. She wasn’t a fighter, she couldn’t fly away, so she had taken the one avenue left to her: staying very, very still in the hopes that the predator attacking her would leave, thinking her dead.

Of course, that tactic doesn’t work when someone is intimately connected to your ear by way of a phone call. Gabriel considered his options for a moment and then took the most direct course of action, even knowing that he was about to make her mad. But mad? Mad - even a mad directed at him - was a lot better than tears. He took his index finger and tapped her on the tip of her nose, then reached past her to transfer the call across to the phone on his desk.