The Interview (short romance story)

The Interview

V T Turner

Copyright © V T Turner 2013

[email protected]

Also by V T Turner

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Forbidden

1

Shirley was nervous. She showered, tried on half a dozen outfits and then, when the nerves kick started a flood of sweat, she showered again and sprayed herself with an atmosphere-clogging amount of antiperspirant. She redid her hair and her makeup, taking anther hour to set herself before she changed again.

She settled on a casual suit. It fit her perfectly, curved neatly around her ample bust, hugged tight to her slim waist. The short skirt showed off her small bum and her long legs.

She adjusted her appearance in the mirror with trembling hands, looked this way and that; bent this way and that, seeing herself from every angle. She sprayed herself with a subtle amount of perfume, not enough to overpower, but enough for them to smell as she neared.

She retouched her lipstick, plucked a stray eyebrow and gave herself a hardened, stern stare in the mirror.
You can do this
, she told herself.
You’ve got this.
She breathed in deeply, closed her eyes and when she opened them she was set, ready to go to her job interview.

It wasn’t her first and it wasn’t a particularly hard one. She was thirty-two, had worked for much of her adult life and had changed jobs as much as she’d changed outfits, but interviews, regardless of the job or how much it paid, always terrified her. There was something so innately horrifying about sitting in front of a panel of men and women and having them judge you; watching and trying to smile as they perused your appearance and body language, reading from a file which detailed your entire adult working life.

Shirley was a social creature, but when it came to job interviews she would happily be a hermit.

It was an office job, nothing too taxing. She would be sitting behind a desk all day answering phones, making calls and filling out forms and other menial nonsense on the computer. She wasn’t even sure she wanted the job, she still had a part time job in a restaurant, working most weekends and some nights, and she was happy to wait until something better came along. On her way to the interview, driving erratically and trying to keep her mind occupied by listening to the radio, she wondered why she even bothered going, why she was putting herself through the stress. She was fairly confident that even if they wanted her to fill the position, she would refuse.

They
had
asked though, and she had applied. It would be rude to turn them down, and she still clung to the hope that the job would be better than she envisaged; that it wouldn’t be as tedious and soul destroying as she suspected it would be.

She pulled up outside the office block, parked the car and looked up at the imposing brick building with her eyebrows arched into a hesitant frown. It looked like a prison, only the inmates here wore shirts and suits and shared gossip and bullshit around the water cooler. It was a square, unimpressive building that sat in a dark and dreary part of town, around the corner from a busy road that blared a constant wall of noise at the weather-stained three decade old structure; next to a line of smaller buildings that had seen better days and made the office block look like paradise by comparison.

She sighed heavily, slunk out of the car and paused to straighten her skirt and study the building again, hoping it would look better in the open air. It didn’t.

“Shelly Marshall,” she told a stern-faced woman at the front desk, a woman who looked as bleak and menacing as the building in which she sat. “I have an interview?” she frowned, not sure why she had phrased that as a question. She was wondering just how naive or strange she had probably sounded, in no small part down to her nerves, when the receptionist nodded towards a door at the end of a long hallway.

“Through there, take the steps up to the second floor,” she said, looking down at her desk halfway through, as if she couldn’t be bothered to maintain eye contact until the end of her sentence.

Shelly studied the corridor and the stairs that she could see through the glass panel in the door at the end. “Is the elev--”

“Broken,” the receptionist cut in. “The walk’ll do you good,” she added, without raising her head.

Shelly wondered why she had said that. She studied her own appearance for a moment, looked sternly at the receptionist and then shrugged it off, too nervous to start anything. She slumped down the corridor and slowly climbed the stairs. As she neared her destination she could hear the bustle of a busy room; a dozen voices or more all clattering together to create an apprehensive noise which awaited her.

At the top of the stairs she paused before pushing open the door to the second floor office. She took a moment to calm herself and then gently swung it open.

The floor was one large open space, cluttered with lines of desks, each occupied by stressed looking workers in formal clothes. She saw people that clearly hated their jobs: an overweight man with wet patches under his arms, swearing at a computer screen and slamming the mouse on the desk; a middle-aged woman who looked like she was ready to  start a fight with her monitor. She also saw people who looked content and relaxed, including a number of young men who weren't entirely unattractive. Shirley was nervous, tense, not in the perfect mood for flirting, but she did catch the eye of one of those young men and she was sure she saw a sparkle of flirtation in his smile.

She walked down the long aisle that cut through the centre of the office and led to the back. There were number of offices there; these ones enclosed and solitary, with their own doors to shut out the noise from the main room and their own windows looking out onto the street below. There was also a decent sized kitchen, complete with communal cooking facilities for the workers. She sneaked a quick peek, saw that it was empty -- except one man who had his back to her and seemed to be busying himself with a microwave -- and then she walked on. She stopped at the door marked ‘interview room’, a temporary sign on a room that was probably used as a conference room.

There was a chair outside the room but no one around to tell her to sit in it. She tried to peek through the large windows that looked into the room, but the blinds were drawn. Just as she was about to sit down, to wait in the hope that someone would come and tell her what to do, the door opened and a woman with short stumpy legs, huge breasts and a fake smile exited. She was followed by a man in his thirties wearing a smart shirt and tie. He was also smiling, his smile seemed more genuine, less exaggerated.

The woman gave Shirley a contemptuous look as she passed. The man stood in the doorway, said a final goodbye to the departing woman and then cringed slightly when she replied with an over exuberant squawk.

He turned to Shirley. “Shirley Marshall?” he asked, his voice soft and soothing.

Shirley nodded, made a move to stand and then hesitated.

He stepped aside, showed her the doorway. “Please come in,”

She stood, tried to hide her earlier hesitancy with a repositioning of her skirt and then brushed past him, throwing him a smile as she did so.

There were two other interviewers waiting for her in the room, neatly space behind a rectangle desk with papers in front of them. The man who had greeted her closed the door and joined them, then the oldest one, a man in the middle who had a professional look that attempted to be friendly and informal, but failed horribly, seemed to take control.

They asked her the typical questions and she gave them the typical responses, ones that she had rehearsed time and time again, ones that she had given plenty of times to plenty of panels like them. Despite her experience in interviews she still struggled, feeling tense, like she was going to explode in a fit of hysterics at any moment. She maintained her calm though and did her best not to look like the wreck she knew she was.

She warmed up as the interview progressed, felt a little more human when it came to a head. By the time it was over, when they asked her their final questions, then asked, as they all did, if she had anything to ask them -- the one question that usually stumped her, and one she usually responded to with a polite smile and a shake of her head -- the interview was over. They seemed happy with her, Shirley didn’t know if that was because the competition -- like the crazy woman with the short legs and loud smile -- were useless or because her practiced manner had won them over.

They seemed ready to offer her the job but stopped short their eagerness when they noted the apprehension on her face.

“Why don’t you have a look around, mingle a little bit if you want,” the main questioner said. He checked his watch with a smile and a flick of his wrist. “Most of the staff will be starting their dinner break around now, so you can talk to them, get it straight from the horses’s mouth,” he said with a grin, adding, “you can make yourself a coffee in the break room if you’d like.”

Shirley nodded. “I might just do that,” she said. If she wasn’t going to take the job she didn’t really think anything would change her mind, but after the morning tension, she felt like she needed a coffee.

She shook their hands, left them with pleasant smiles and then shifted out of the room. The remaining tension rushed out of her like air from a deflating ballon. She sagged into a hunchback, groaned delightedly and grinned.

There was only one person inside the kitchen. A man sitting alone, looking boredly into a steaming cup of coffee. She thought it was the same man she had seen when she walked past, the broad back hunched over the counter. He was thickly set, his biceps prominent through a slim fitting blue shirt that hugged his muscles. He looked up at her when she entered, smiled broadly. She melted. She didn’t know if it was because her heart was still beating fast, if it was because she was still deflating from the tense interview and he was the first man she had seen since returning to normality, but as soon as she set eyes on him she couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop admiring him. He had a gorgeous smile, handsome with the right amount of mischief that curled the corners of his lips and indented a slight dimple on his right cheek. His dark eyes were deep and suggestive. He was a good ten years younger than her, but his stubbled chin and rough, wavy hair suggested a hard working, hard living man.

She sat down opposite, her eyes never leaving his.

“Hey,” he grinned.

She tried to reply but her words caught in her throat, she just smiled instead.

“Coffee?” he asked after a few moments of silent staring.

She snapped out of her trance, nodded and then moved to drink her coffee, before realizing she hadn’t actually made any. She stood up, but he bolted up before her and held out a hand.

“Allow me,” he said, gesturing for her to sit as he wandered over to a coffee machine.

“One sugar or two?” he asked as she stared at his broad back, at the way the cotton fabric of his shirt seemed to stick to his muscles.

“None, please.”

He looked at her over his shoulder, gave her a cheeky wink, “Sweet enough, eh?”

She nodded, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. She tried to tone it down with a smile.

He came back to the table, put the cup down in front of her. She wrapped her palms around it, thanked him with a smile and then they returned to their stare; him with his hands clasped on the table; her beaming over the steaming cup of coffee that she held close to her lips. She instinctively, almost inadvertently, began to kiss the rim of the cup, her bright red lips toying with the heated edge of ceramic as she stared into his eyes. He watched her lips, watched as she took a small sip of coffee and then set the cup to one side. They stared at each other again, she moved her eyes to his lips, licked her own heated lips and then dove in.