The girl has a temper. I wouldn't want to live with her, but from the outside it's fun to watch. When she first came to work here she was reserved, uptight, friendly but just barely. She smiled at me sometimes, laughed a little seemed, deep down, to want something, seemed to appreciate me noticing her.

When she moved in to the cube next to mine she started running everything past me, was this approach OK, was that approach OK, how would I do it, if I was her? Which I would mentally translate as "how would I do her, if it was OK?"

A year passed. We grew comfortable with each other, ate a few lunches, exchanged some mildly personal emails, every now and then passed a look that seemed to promise more. Around us work heated up, the company won contracts, brought in contractors, had us working nights and weekends, giving us more opportunity to work together, and less to socialize, but still we managed to incorporate the contractors in to the team, made new friends, and functioned well together.

This morning, on the last day of work before Christmas, the employees got Christmas gifts from their bosses for a job well done and the contractors got verbal pink slips.

I'm hunting around for a bag to put my gift in, and taking the opportunity to throw away and sort all the paperwork that had accumulated on my desk during the quarter when the guy across the aisle asks half jokingly, "what, you packing up too?"

An anguished guttural cry erupts from the cube next to mine. "Why is he packing?" she screams in panic, jumping from her chair.

I have to laugh. She stands, flustered, eyes blazing, then smoldering, defiant.

We wait. The day grows dark, the people in the cubes around us stand and leave. The office is empty. The conference room is empty. We are in each other's arms, her slender body against mine, as warm and firm and angular as I had imagined, her lips as I had dreamed, her clothes as easily removed.

Seated on the conference table, naked, thin, exposed to the soul by her earlier panic, but not vulnerable in her exposure, if anything, more powerful, I surround her with my arms, kiss her again, tongues touching, her legs around me, waiting, wanting to hold the moment but there have been too many moments already, too much frustration, too little said, and I enter her, feeling as though I am filling all of her, that she is part of me, an extension of me, but the pleasure, the incredible pleasure wipes all intellectualization from my mind and I begin to move, hip to hip, in and out, heads almost touching, her legs moving with me in the slow and steady rhythm of our oneness, in our recreation of the tension that has built between us, in our recreation of her emotional explosion as she begins to tense and quiver and anticipating another scream I both quicken my pace until the slam and the slap of our bodies against each other is loud in my ears and I am covering her mouth with mine to muffle us both as we come.