u s e y o u r h a n d s

Cliff returned to his desk and sat down. Papers covered in perfect longhand script peeked out from under him. The echo of Bethany’s voice hovered in the office’s shattered quiet. She would be by in an hour. Cliff spent 15 of those minutes staring down at the blotter on his desk. The complimentary blotter from his company, also a calendar, was free of any ink or pencil markings, but peppered with soft indentations. He tried to make sense of the little scratches, but he failed to form letters from the traces.

He spent five minutes methodically plucking lint from his worn brown sweater. Cliff piled up the tiny balls together. When the fuzzy mass reached the size of a quarter, he picked it up and dropped it into his wastebasket. It spun counterclockwise to the bottom, next to a crumpled napkin and empty bottle of white-out.

Twenty minutes dragged by as Cliff shuffled around gathering up the mess, sheet by sheet. He bent and reached with his left arm and kept the growing sheaf tucked in his left. The papers formed sharp corners. One corner poked him rather painfully in the stomach. When he reached down, the pain got sharper. After Cliff collected the entire mess, he piled it carefully on the desk. The tower measured at least four inches high and so precise as to literally make Cliff hold his breath lest it be disturbed. His body eventually kicked him back into respiration.

Until the last twenty minutes of the hour, he’d not thought about what had happened or what would occur that night. However, in the last third of the hour, Cliff came as close as he ever came to being nervous. He wondered if Bethany would be early or late. What was she doing in this last hour of the day? Cliff doubted she was standing still looking at the clock, but he imagined her doing just that. He imagined her at her desk, maybe looking out a window at a tree. Cliff thought Bethany might be staring at the fluttering leaves until the motion became one blur. The hem of her dress might sway slightly as it felt the shockwaves of her breath and beating heart.

At 4: 59, he rose and faced the door to his office. A slow tingle built from his knees to his throat where it buzzed mightily as the seconds fell by. Cliff heard footsteps approach his door, but they walked by and faded. Were they hers, he wondered. If he opened the door, would he see Bethany swishing away? The note in his pocket blazed. But he heard shoes again, and he was sure they were hers. He was not accustomed to sound, but even to him, this particular clacking sounded delicate and hopeful.