Behind the Monitor

Behind the Monitor

“You know you're deep in the friendzone,” Mina told Theo.

He stood at the corner of her desk with the revised client figures open on his laptop. His eyes had travelled down the green skirt she had worn for the presentation before returning to her face.

“I know.”

He turned the laptop towards her. “This total is still wrong.”

Mina looked at the figure he had highlighted. He was right. She corrected it while he waited beside her, close enough for the clean scent of his shirt to reach her whenever she breathed in.

Theo did not ask why a man confined to friendship was allowed to tell her she looked incredible. He did not bargain for a drink, a kiss or another category. When Mina finished the correction, he took the laptop and returned to his desk.

That was why she could keep enjoying him.

They had worked together for eight months on the same customer team, reporting to the same team lead and handling different parts of the same difficult accounts. Mina dealt with clients who wanted confidence before evidence. Theo found the evidence and removed the errors before confidence became expensive.

By spring, she could tell from the way he rubbed one eyebrow that a client was lying about having read an email. He knew when she needed him to take over a call before her patience became audible. During meetings, they exchanged the look that made a pompous sentence bearable. At lunch, they often carried their food to the leisure floor, where the company had put a pool table, two tired sofas and a coffee machine nobody trusted.

What mattered was that Theo made the working day easier. She could send him a screenshot of a ridiculous message without explaining which part had annoyed her. He could sit at the edge of her desk in silence while she finished something. On bad afternoons, they went upstairs and played one quick game of pool badly enough to reset both their moods.

He was her closest friend at work. The phrase was accurate. Mina liked the safety of it and the small pleasure of saying it to a man whose attention had never felt entirely safe.

Once, after Mina accused him of flirting through an entire game of pool, Theo rested the cue against the table.

“For the record, if you ever want to fuck, I'm interested.”

Mina stared at him.

“You don't have to answer,” he said. “If this is all it ever is, I like this. I wouldn't make it weird at work.”

He took his next shot and missed.

Mina never gave him an answer. More importantly, Theo never asked for one. The following morning he joined the team call, corrected an error in her notes and behaved exactly as he had before.

After the green skirt, she began noticing how often he looked.

Theo did not glance at every woman who crossed the office. With Mina, the concentration was different. If she stood to present, his gaze caught briefly where the green skirt ended halfway down her thighs. It was longer than the denim shorts she wore on hot casual Fridays, but short enough to make him follow the length of her legs before returning to the screen. When she leaned across the meeting table to move somebody's abandoned coffee, his eyes found the pull of her top before he made himself look away.

Mina caught him once and held his gaze.

Theo looked neither embarrassed nor triumphant. His mouth opened, then closed before he found anything useful to say. The meeting continued around them.

Friendzone was too polite a word for the way he eye-fucked her across that table.

Mina could have pulled her cardigan closed. Instead, she left it hanging over her chair. She asked a question about the renewal figures and watched Theo take a second longer than usual to find the answer.

The looking changed her working wardrobe by increments she did not confess to herself. She still dressed for the office, except on casual Fridays when a thin black tank made even her bra incapable of hiding her nipples. Theo became warmer on those days. He found reasons to stop at her desk, stayed beside her during coffee breaks and let compliments arrive without their usual disguise. Mina simply became more selective when she knew he would be opposite her.

Theo noticed. He did not reward every choice with a compliment. Sometimes Mina only saw his hand become still on the table.

The renewal presentation took three weeks to finish. On the final afternoon, their team lead returned the deck with another page of changes and then left for a meeting on another floor. Mina crossed to Theo's desk, directly opposite her own, and leaned past his monitor to ask another colleague whether slide twelve had moved again.

“If she moves slide twelve again, I'm deleting slide twelve.”

Theo remained seated. While Mina waited for the answer, he lifted one hand, cupped her nape and pressed his thumb into the tight muscle beside her spine.

Mina forgot to breathe.

Theo's hand paused. Mina lowered her head. He began again, kneading slowly while she finished the conversation over his monitor.

The office remained busy. A call ended two desks away. Somebody laughed near the printer. Mina stood beside Theo's chair while his thumb found the ache and stayed with it until the pressure spread warmly across her shoulders.

Other men had touched more of her and made her feel less.

When his fingers moved beneath her hair, Mina let her head tip towards his hand. Theo's grip tightened, not enough to hurt, and she heard his breathing change below her shoulder.

He could have drawn her closer from there. The thought arrived so clearly that her nipples hardened against the thin black fabric.

Theo finished the massage before either of them made the contact impossible to explain. His hand lifted from her neck. Mina stayed still for a second, feeling its shape after it had gone.

“Slide twelve,” he said.

She opened her eyes. “Delete it.”

Mina returned to her desk across from him. Most of the team had left. Theo waited until she looked up.

“Did you enjoy that?” he asked.

Mina rose and moved into the narrow gap beyond his monitor.

The screen hid her from the waist down and blocked most of the view from the aisle. Theo could see the hard points of her nipples through the black tank. Mina drew her shoulders back enough to make the answer unmistakable.

Theo stared.

She gave one startled laugh at the nerve of what she had done.

“That's your evaluation.”

His hand slipped from the mouse. He caught it before it reached the desk, but he did not look away from her breasts.

Mina left him there and walked back to her own screen.