Chapter 4
Four
“We could help each other out.”
To: Paul Andersen
Subject: Summer Schedule
Hi Gwen,
I wanted to check if it’s possible to book some time off in early July? I’ll only need four days, and I can make sure everything’s covered while I’m away. Mia agreed to cover all customer service and admin tasks.
Let me know what works.
Thanks,
Alicia
I hit send and reached for my tea, which had already gone cold.
The sky beyond the blinds was a washed-out silver, the kind that promised more rain and made sure to deliver.
I was probably the only one who didn’t bring an umbrella to the office today.
Thankfully, Mia taught me to always keep a spare pair of loafers under my desk.
Kevin leaned, disapproving, toward the edge of his cubicle shelf when my inbox pinged.
From: Paul Andersen
Subject: RE: Summer Schedule
Hi Alicia,
Wrong Andersen, I’m afraid. Happens more than you think. Some intentional. Some not. But I hope you get that week off. It sounds like Kevin could use the break too.
P.S. What (or who) are you escaping from?
I stared at the screen, blinking.
There was something about the timing of it: the one-minute gap, like he’d been bored with working at the helpdesk.
I mean, how many times can you really answer requests about a faulty printer or someone spilling their coffee over the keyboard?
Or simply used to girls emailing him accidentally, and mine was just another entertaining part of his day. To be honest, I couldn’t blame them.
The tone of his email was light, but the P.S.? Who writes that? What (or who) am I escaping from? Everything. My body, my silence, the ringing in my ears. The version of me that still wakes up some nights, reaching for air and finding skin that doesn’t feel like mine. I didn’t say that.
From: Alicia King
Subject: Re: Re: Summer Schedule
Hi Paul,
Apologies. Yes, definitely meant to reach Gwen Anderson in HR. This was not a clever ruse to initiate a chat with IT, though I now see how that could be interpreted otherwise.
Thanks for the good wishes.
PS. Kevin and I need space.
Alicia
No reply came for the rest of the day. Fine. It was an error, a blip, a one-off moment of office oddity. I would not obsess over it. I couldn’t help but wonder: how much does he know?
He replied at 9:06 the next morning.
From: Paul Andersen
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Summer Schedule
Alicia,
Noted. No clever ruse.
But if it had been, hypothetically, what would you have said?
PS. And where does one escape from Kev?
P
I stared at the email for a long time. Couldn’t find anything smart to say right off the cuff, so I got back to work, a summary of minutes from Tom’s board meeting that day. I replied later in the afternoon.
From: Alicia King
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Summer Schedule
Hypothetically? I might’ve said: “How does one get a cactus to stop judging them?”
Or: “Do systems specialists accept bribes in exchange for faster printer support?”
Or maybe nothing at all, I’m not that interesting—and definitely not good at “hypothesizing”.
PS: Victoria.
Alicia
Victoria: That part was true. I hadn’t told anyone yet (well, except Gwen, who turned out not to be Gwen), but I was planning to go.
Not for luxury, not even a real holiday.
I’d been invited to stay with a friend of a friend who owed my dad a favor.
A chance to clear my head, think, maybe figure out what the hell I was doing with my life.
With less than two paychecks in my bank account and no flying on the horizon, I needed something, anything, to break the routine.
Most days, I felt like I had nothing left to offer anyone. Except maybe sarcasm, a working knowledge of Microsoft Excel, and Tom’s calendar.
From: Paul Andersen
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Summer Schedule
1. Cactus intimidation is a serious issue. There’s a support group.
2. Printer support is handled strictly through a bottle of whisky.
If you’re not interesting, then I’m as interesting as a sea cucumber. I believe you’re more interesting than you let on.
P.S. Listen to this. Might help with the Kevin situation.
[YouTube link: Jazz Playlist from @PChinaski]
P.P.S. Victoria? Intriguing.
I plugged in my earbuds. The first track began with a slow saxophone ripple, low and smoky, the kind that settles into your bloodstream.
It caught me off guard: I was still staring at the spreadsheets, but the music made them blur at the edges.
And it got to me: not because of the music itself, but because he had sent it.
I caught myself smiling and immediately stopped.
Did he send this to everyone? This was absurd.
It was music, from a coworker whom I’d emailed by mistake.
Except it wasn’t absurd. It was… something.
He didn’t ask how I was doing, but he seemed to be listening.
The emails continued: short, strange, sometimes sweet. They never said much, but there was something underneath the words. He never pushed, just offered little things: Do you miss the sky? Do you believe in coincidences? Do you think people can start over?
I never gave full answers: just enough to keep the thread alive and enough to feel like maybe someone saw me.
And slowly, I stopped thinking about him as the guy with a reputation or “printer guy”.
The emails had a surprising texture: poets, writers, jazz standards—things I never gave a second thought to, but I was eager to learn about from him.
The way he knew what words to use, not flashy, not eccentric, but right.
He quoted a line once I didn’t know: “The free soul is rare, but you know one when you see it.” And that’s how I learned about his obsession with Bukowski and his alias, Chinaski.
Most of the reading I did related to flight manuals, aerial navigation, and, recently, the occasional ferry departure schedules.
After a couple of days of exchanges filled with literary references, dry humor, and restraint, I found another thread:
From: Paul Andersen
Subject: Eyes
You keep dodging the IT room like we’ve got lasers in the carpet. I think you’re afraid of eye contact. Want to try something? Walk by. Look through the glass. Find me. Hold it, just a few seconds.
P.S. They’re blue, by the way. But not the nice kind: more like an ocean in a storm. Tell me what you see and what it felt like.
P.P.S. Don’t do it if it scares you.
I stared at the message. Was I afraid of eye contact?
Probably. And he knew. I wanted to roll my eyes, to laugh, to write something flippant back.
But instead, I sat perfectly still, letting the heat rise up my neck.
What was this? My first instinct was panic: that my body wouldn’t cooperate, that my face would betray me, that I’d be exposed in a way I couldn’t control.
I hadn’t let anyone look at me too long since the accident.
But there was something in how he’d written it: a tease, yes, but gentle.
Maybe for the first time in a long time, someone didn’t want to look past me, or around me: he wanted to look at me and wanted me to look at him.
That’s what made me want to say yes. It took me 58 minutes to locate all the emergency exits, write a mental resignation to Tom in case I decided never to come back, say all the prayers I vaguely remembered from childhood, start walking, and hide in the washroom.
On repeat. This was ridiculous. Everybody goes to that room, on a dare, to look into the eyes of an IT guy. Right?
I quadruple-checked that he was alone. At 3:14 p.m., I walked past the IT room, turned slowly, and looked through the glass.
He was there, already watching me, and our eyes met for five, maybe six seconds.
I saw something there: curiosity, stillness, and recognition.
I was half-expecting him to smirk, to say something cocky, but he didn’t move at all.
What could he possibly have seen in my eyes?
Warmth that I wasn’t sure I still had? Sadness that had nowhere else to go.
Gold flickers of hope I hadn’t meant to show.
From: Alicia King
Subject: Re: Eyes
Done.
And I’ve done scarier things in life, trust me.
What did I see? Everything.
From: Paul Andersen
Subject: Re: Re: Eyes
You didn’t blink. Most people do. I don’t know what I expected…
But your eyes: they’re not just hazel—they change. Honey—then fire.
For a moment, I forgot where I was.
And I saw something else: you touch your thumb when you’re nervous, you tremble slightly. And still, you walked into that moment like you meant it. Me too.
P
The next day, I found myself in the office kitchen just after 4 p.m., kettle in hand.
He came in just as the water started to boil.
No one else was there, just fluorescent lights buzzing softly and the loud hum of the vending machine.
We didn’t say anything at first. I turned slightly, sensing him move closer, shoulder to shoulder.
“I was starting to think you were bluffing,” he said softly.
“You dared me,” I said, without turning.
“I did. And you showed up.”
His voice was even quieter now. “That was… unexpected.”
“Because I don’t look like someone who takes dares?” I asked.
“Because you didn’t just take a dare,” he said. “You stared right through me.”
He reached for the kettle just as I did, and our hands brushed.
I pulled away, too fast. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he replied. “You just looked… different. Stronger than I thought.”
There was a long pause.
“Has it ever occurred to you,” he added, “that maybe we didn’t end up in this place by coincidence?”
“What do you mean?”
He gave a small smile. “Not sure yet. But we’ve both been surviving something,” he continued. “I don’t know, perhaps we could help each other out.”
It wasn’t a line. There was no smirk. He wasn’t asking for a fling, he was asking for a connection.
Maybe I was, too. And that was as much as could give him, I believed.
Two women from sales walked past the open doorway, one of them raising an eyebrow.
“Well, well. King and Andersen, having a little rendezvous.”
We both smiled: not at them, but at each other—and for a second, I didn’t mind who saw. Because this? Whatever this was, it already felt like something I wouldn’t walk away from unmoved—or unbruised. Could we help each other out?