he doesn’t notice. He makes me so nervous! God, Steve is amazing. That look in his eyes as our eyes meet tells me that he knows exactly what he would do to a woman. I can only hope he can’t see what I want him to do to me.
* * *
“Mom! Mom! Where’s my Iron Man?!” Ethan screams as he comes barging into my room, shaking me awake the next morning.
Mom is the best and the worst word ever. Usually the best, but I have to admit, I’m not particularly fond of any word I hear before my alarm clock goes off. I begrudgingly roll myself out of bed, fifteen minutes before said alarm is set to go off, to search for the infamous action figure that is apparently a matter of life or death for Ethan this morning. Oh, the traumatic life of a six year old. Sometimes I’m envious of how simple his life is, and I fight my hardest to keep it this simple for as long as I can.
My search for Iron Man is half hearted because I can’t seem to get yesterday’s run in with Steve out of my head. It’s all I’ve been able to think about since then. It wasn’t a graceful, attractive, “Oh, Hi Steve, How are you today” run in. Not a run-in with a seductive flip of my hair and bat of my eyelashes. That kind of run in, the kind I wish it had been, is the kind that I had envisioned having since the first time I met him. Unfortunately for me, it was a “run-in” in the most literal sense of the term. Usually I’m acutely aware of his presence in the office. I can’t count the times I’ve found some stupid reason to walk by him, to be in the same room, in the hopes of finally working up the courage to talk to him even though I always ended up chickening out. That day, I’d been much too busy preparing for an important case coming up to notice he was there. I was too busy that even if I had known he was there, I still wouldn’t have been able to see him.
Still, not even knowing he was in the office, I instantly knew who the toned, attractive, masculine smelling chest belonged to. The chest I ran full forced into. I would rather it had belonged to anybody else; literally any other person that had ever entered the office. But as my luck would have it, it belonged to the chest of the man I’d had a crush on since the day I met him.
Steve isn’t my client, but I see him regularly. He is a client and friend of my bosses, and as such we run into each other rather frequently. I’ll see him in the halls, at company events, the occasional cocktail party at Scott’s house, the divorce party following his second marriage, and the subsequent third wedding. There has always been something about him that I’m just drawn to. He’s tall, if I had to guess I would put him around six foot two. He’s muscular but not in a gross way, it’s just enough that you can see the bulge of his bicep through his suit jacket. His brown hair is short on the sides and a little longer on top. It always looks like he just ran his fingers through it. It’s never combed to perfection, and the tousled look always makes me want to tug on it even more. Every time I see him he has a five o’ clock shadow, but honestly he probably shaves every morning. He is just that manly. The kind of man that knows how to take care of himself, but in a way that never leaves you questioning his sexuality. My best friend and college roommate, Hannah, affectionately refers to him as my polished lumbersexual based on my very vivid descriptions of his masculine ruggedly dominant sex appeal.
He carries a certain authority to him. When he walks into a room, you know that he is the boss. He is always polite, good natured, usually smiling, but there is something powerful and possessive about the look in those eyes. There’s a magnetism created by his confidence and the pull it has on me is terrifying. This is why I’ve always tried to get close but ended up deciding to keep my distance instead –