Working a post-college job at a call center for a local pizza chain empire is not the most glamorous of jobs. Especially when your primary responsibility is to listen to customers calling back after their order with some kind of complaint. Nobody wants to spend their Thursday night talking to some pissed off customer who claims to have found a dirty band-aid in their calzone, or immediately got the runs from eating some chicken alfredo. Especially not when you're 23 years old and itching for a life a bit more exciting.
There I was: young, fresh out of school, a head full of ambition and energy and goals, wallowing away in a job with virtually no upward mobility. I had started working for this company when I was a high school sophomore. At that time it was a great job to have when you were a teenager needing money, but not a whole lot of time to earn it. The hours were flexible, always after school, and all you really had to sacrifice was one weekend night a week working til close. The other nice thing was that plenty of other kids from my class worked at the same place; or you got to meet and hang out with kids from other area schools. Working there was boring and tedious, but you could usually pass the time quickly with some good laughs and good friends.
I left for a while when college started, vowing never to return, but ultimately fell back into the work after my campus job dried up. I had to start all over at the bottom of the ladder, but quickly moved my way back up into the customer service department. Fortunately, several of the people I had started with back in high school had remained there throughout, so once again I was finding the time going by quickly thanks to goofing off with fun people. The stories I was beginning to compile from irate or ridiculous or irrational customers were always a good source of entertainment as well. It was especially fun working a late Friday or Saturday night and listening to the drunks call in claiming that their large pizza had been delivered covered in pubes or shards of glass or used needles - anything to get a free credit for their next meal.
Being a young guy looking for flexible hours and steady pay, the job had its perks. One of the other obvious perks was getting to work with young, cute girls. When I had first started in high school, it was a good place to meet new friends, including girls my own age I wouldn't otherwise have met. Maybe they hung out with different crowds in our class, or went to a different school altogether. The lulls in call volume provided good windows of opportunity to chat with the opposite sex, and try to improve my innocent and fledgling flirting skills. My social life wasn't exactly 'on fire,' but I was lucky to generate a few dates from working there.
When I went back to work there after a few years away, I was happy to see that the same was still true. Girls I had worked with as a teenager were now women growing into their prime, and still the influx of younger, attractive girls from the area high schools - a bit outside my age preference, but nice to look at nonetheless.
One of the girls I had met and worked with during my first stint there was one of those who had grown into a sexy and intriguing woman when I went back. Maggie and I had stayed friends during my time away. She was a year younger than me, so we had common ground of education and life experience to go on. We had also been flirtatious with each other when I first worked there, and that only continued with the increasing popularity of online instant messaging and phone texting services.
She was cute in that girl next door kind of way. She didn't go overboard and spend money on high class clothes and shoes, or spend hours in the bathroom perfecting her makeup. She didn't have to work hard at looking pretty, and her confidence in herself took her appeal to the next level. Maggie was also a bit intimidating to me. She casually smoked, for one thing. When we were in high school this was something I always associated with a rebel kind of crowd, "too cool for school" and all that. But Maggie passed it off like it was no big thing; with her it just made her seem more mature and even more appealing. She was open and flirty and casual about sex, too. Not necessarily that she was an expert at the actual practice of intercourse or a whore, but she was eager and willing to talk about sex, to discuss her fantasies and desires, not to shy away from the subject as some kind of taboo. She could have been a virgin for all I knew or cared - she was erotic and exciting and I looked forward to the teasing she gave the more naive and innocent me.
Maggie and I made out a couple of times at a work party here or a meet-up there. Nothing that ever amounted to anything serious, and I was always too intimidated and chicken shit around her to escalate it too far. She made me nervous and excited and turned on and scared all at once, to this day the only woman who has done that to me. I loved flirting with her and more often than not purposely steered our messaging conversations towards the taboo any chance I got. I wanted to hear her thoughts and glimpse her imagination. She may have been completely honest when she described the things she'd like to do to me, or just trying to get a rise out of me - I didn't care one bit. I was a teenager living a boring, sheltered life and she was the caffeine kick I craved. When I came back to the job I had put a few notches on my belt in college and exposed myself to a few sexual experiences, but still Maggie intrigued and excited me.
During the summer of 2005, my charm had seemed to go into overdrive and social opportunities with the fairer sex were presenting themselves at a rate I had never experienced before. I spent some time talking with an ex-girlfriend for a while, attempting to see if there was any spark left in our relationship. While a member of a friend's wedding party, I met and started talking with one of the bridesmaids. During a vacation I met a local who worked at my favorite hiking gear shop and ended up spending most of the week with her. The year ended with me dating a different woman I worked with, a few years younger than Maggie and me.
Through all of it, Maggie and I always seemed to be circling around each other, flitting in and out of each other's lives through work, texting each other, parties, etc. Goofing off with each other, having heated political discussions, me admonishing her horrible taste in music, her always making fun of my bland clothing style. We got along great, regardless of the constantly mounting sexual tension. At social gatherings we would always seem to know where the other was, always making eyes at the other when we came into focus. Occasionally, an opportunity for sneaking off to a dark corner presented itself and she would pull me aside for an intense few minutes of making out. Our tongues would fight for room in each other's mouths, hot breath catching and panting between us, our bodies pressed tight together trying to get at every inch of each other, one of her arms around my neck while the other clawed at my back, one of my arms supporting her and the other gripping her tight jeans-covered butt.
And then, like the snap of a finger, we separated as if nothing had happened. She would be flushed and breathing heavily. I would be slightly sweaty under my shirt now in disarray, fully aware of the growing bulge in my pants.
That was as far as it ever went between us, though if you read our instant messages or brief texts you would think that we were passionate lovers or even seasoned actors of only the sexiest and most heated forms of pornography. My imagination would run wild with thoughts of her doing to me the things she described in our conversations; I did my best to try to fill her head with the same. It never failed that after just five minutes of chatting with her online at night, I would be forced to relieve the pressure of my erection, masturbating furiously to her words or the scenes they painted in my head. Only then could I hope to get any amount of sleep, if not to just end up waking up sometime later or the next morning in dire need of more release thanks to Maggie.
Our flirtations weren't relegated just to online chats and texts when we were at our separate homes or together at a party. There was an inter-work messaging service the supervisors all used to communicate with each other while handling various phone calls and issues. For the most part it was used solely for its social aspect as well as an easier means to get a dinner order together. She and I ended up using it to continue our flirting and sexting whenever work got too boring. I might comment on how good she looked in the low-cut blue shirt she was wearing. She might comment on how nice my butt looked in my jeans. I might comment on how long it had been since I'd last tasted her lips. She might comment on how she had the only key to the locked storage room. And on, and on. It was fun and sexy and exciting, and a great way to make the time go by.
