Page 6 of Glitter
Chapter 6
“Benny, Benny, Ben, Ben, Ben.” The gratingly loud voice of my coworker, Dennis, preceded his arrival next to the open side of my cubicle.
Thankfully, I wasn’t on the phone with a customer at that particular moment—that would have been uncomfortable for everyone involved. Well, except for Dennis. I don’t think he has enough social etiquette to know he should feel embarrassed about coming across as unprofessional while at work.
Unfortunately, what I was doing was using my work computer for nonwork-related activities—scrolling through the generated results of an online search I’d done for names for shades of green.
It had been bugging me, not knowing what word to use in my head for when I was thinking about the subtle flecks of pale green in my angel’s blue eyes. Not that I should be thinking about his eyes while I was at work, although I’d already swallowed down my guilt over that. It’s not as though I’d been doing much of anything over the past two days other than thinking about my angel.
But I certainly shouldn’t be wasting time that I was getting paid to answer customer questions and complaints, by electronically scratching at the need itching away at my brain to commit every tiny detail of him to memory, complete with accurate and specific descriptors.
“Dennis,” I greeted him back, politely if unenthusiastically.
Hoping he wouldn’t notice what I’d been up to on my work computer, which he would immediately hound me about incessantly until I told him everything—and then make fun of me for anything I told him—I exited out of the tab I had open on the monitor.
The search hadn’t been that helpful anyway. Who came up with some of these color names? Silvery bog? Shadow lagoon? Mysterious celery? What were those names and how can celery be mysterious? And not one of the squares accompanying the odd color labels had come close to the particular shade of green I remembered. Too gray, too close to blue, too… celery . Tea green had probably been the closest, which puzzled me as I’d always thought of tea as being a darkish brown color, not green. But even that had only been close. Maybe I should just mentally label it angel green and be done with it.
Although, that might get confusing as I’d already been thinking of the light sky-blue of his eyes as angel blue.
“Benjarino. The Benjinator,” Dennis continued, volleying more irritating and made-up nicknames at me. “You, Benny-hana, look like you had a good weekend.”
The sly emphasis in his statement and the over-the-top wink he sent my way told me that this man, who had a cubicle three down the row from mine and was about as emotionally sensitive as a brick, had somehow divined that I’d had sex between last Friday and today, Monday, the beginning of another brand-new workweek.
“Whoever she was, hope she didn’t leave you with anything more than this glitter,” Dennis said, brushing his hand heavily and roughly over the shoulder of my blue polo shirt. “Something you’ll have to take antibiotics to get rid of, if you know what I mean.” This boisterously jovial statement was accompanied by another series of winks.
I shouldn’t have any glitter on this shirt; the clothes I’d worn to the club on Friday and Saturday had immediately gone into the hamper when I’d gotten home. And yet…Dennis was making jokes about glitter and pretending, or not pretending, to brush some off of me. Which means either he made a really, really lucky guess or…
As subtly as I could, I tilted my head to peek at my shoulder where Dennis had touched me. Sure enough… Shit, glitter really does get everywhere. A few flecks of sparkly pink and lime green glittered beneath the industrial LED lighting in our office space.
Had I brushed up against my clothes hamper this morning and the glitter had drifted up to settle on my shirt? Had the glitter that had stuck to my skin from touching my angel somehow managed to avoid getting washed down the drain through multiple showers and then been transferred by me while getting dressed?
Or was glitter like some sort of a plague, sneakily infecting anything and everything within its vicinity? The stuff would probably survive an apocalypse, just like a plague, right alongside cockroaches. Huh. Glitter-encrusted cockroaches.
Thankfully—or maybe not so thankfully—Dennis didn’t give me time to respond to his not-so-funny joking. “Oh, wait, no,” he said, an exaggerated grimace taking over his face. “You’re one of those guys in the rainbow alphabet, right? A G, or a B, or a P. Nooo…there’s no P in there. It’s LGBTQ…something, something, something.”
His last few comments were muttered, clearly more intended for himself rather than me. On the plus side, Dennis’ unhappy expression seemed to also be aimed at himself. Not being able to recall what sexuality I identify as and the exclusion of the letter P for pansexual in the acronym for those in the queer community were apparently upsetting to him. For as loud and annoying as I found the man, I had to say, he’d never come across as being a bigoted asshole.
“Either way,” he continued, “it would’ve been a man, right, that left you with that got you some something-something glow?”
“Er…yeah,” I hesitantly confirmed, not really wanting to discuss my sex life—not even whether I do or do not have a sex life—with my coworker. Particularly this coworker. “It was a man. I mean… Yes, I met a man this weekend.” I didn’t intend to offer up any more details than that, but I couldn’t help adding, with a besotted sigh, “An angel. He’s my angel.”
Dennis looked thrilled with even that small amount of information, the large obnoxious smile returning to his face. “Well, whoever he was… Next time you see him, angel or no, maybe tell him to lay off the glitter. Or else, you’ll be finding that stuff everywhere—on you, your clothes, on your furniture, in your car…everywhere—from now until doomsday.”
I had no intention of making a promise like that. My angel was perfect just the way he was—glitter and all. And even though the resulting physical transfer exposed me to uncomfortable and embarrassing conversations such as this one, I also sort of liked the tangible proof that it hadn’t all been in my head.
Nonetheless, I mumbled, “Er, yeah, sure. I’ll…make sure to do that,” in the hope it would get Dennis to drop the subject. To double down on ending this line of conversation, I pointed to the blinking light on my phone and said, “Looks like we’ve got more calls coming in. Should probably get back to work.”
“Yep, guess so, Benarito. Fuck knows the customers aren’t going to help themselves. If they were, they’d have all read the instructions that came with their products in the first place. Am I right?”
With a loud laugh, Dennis mock-punched my shoulder, as if to invite me to join in on the joke.
The truth of the matter was that probably about half of the phone calls we received on a daily basis wouldn’t have to be made if the people who bought our products did read and follow the instructions that came with them. It was something all of us in the customer support call center resignedly complained about on a regular basis. One of the first prompts in our scripted customer interaction dialogue was even to ask each caller whether or not they had a copy of the instructions and had reviewed them.
But as somebody who had their own problems with any sort of hands-on projects—as multiple collapsed childhood birdhouses and an unknown quantity of injured birds could attest to—I’d always had a fair amount of sympathy for the struggles of the customers I talked to for my job. The instructions weren’t always written clearly, and following along with them wasn’t always easy.
So, my answering laugh was half-hearted at best—enough to come across as collegial but not so much that I’d feel guilty over being part of essentially making fun of the people we were paid to help.
“Yeah, you’re…totally right, Dennis.”
“Hell yeah, I am. But you’re also right, Benny—those calls aren’t going to answer themselves. Which is why…we’re going to have to wait until lunchtime, when we can head on down to the café, and then you can tell me all the details about this angel of yours. And I do mean all the details. Including when you’re seeing this guy again. Friendly minds want to know.”
As Dennis waggled his eyebrows, while pointing a double set of finger guns at me, then strolling away from my cubicle as casually he’d approached it, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that I wanted to do less than rehash my encounters with my angel again. Not with Dennis. Not with any of the other coworkers who were sure to be in the store café scarfing down lunch and eagerly eavesdropping on what everyone was talking about. No one. I wanted to hoard those moments to myself, tucked away like the treasure they were.
Great, now I was going to have to avoid the cafe and make do with vending machine snacks for lunch. Dammit. And I'd really been looking forward to splurging on some Swedish meatballs today.
I’d figured that I deserved the extra calories. I had to have burned off more than I usually did over the weekend. And the extra-filling meal could’ve come in handy for tonight. Which just meant that I had to make sure to scarf down something more substantial than a salad for dinner.
Because, while I normally didn’t venture out at night during the workweek, I’d already made up my mind to hit up Glitter again tonight. There’s no way I’d be able to stay away.
There were no guarantees that my angel would be there tonight, but I had a feeling he would be. Thus, so would I.
I just had to hope—in addition to my initial, heaping mountain of hope that he would be there—that, if he was there, he would be as happy to see me as I would be to see him. And not have already turned his beautiful blue eyes to any of the other men that would also gladly endure any level of proximal glitterization in order to get close to him.