199

Chuck

Rachelle made Chuck quiver, and being introverted and introspective he rarely found the nerve to do much more than mumble “G’morning” or “G’night.”

One unusually brazen Monday he asked her in the lunch room how her weekend had been, but she neither turned her head nor answered, which Chuck took as a not unexpected (or undeserved) snub, but which in reality had had everything to do with too little volume on his part and too much on the microwave oven’s—Rachelle being, at the end of the day, an attention-seeking missile.

Her fragrance did much to fuel Chuck’s ardor, too. It lingered in his nostrils and then in his libido long after every encounter. And when he overheard her telling Crystal that her perfume was called Obsession, he thought it less an amusing coincidence than a warning from the gods, because Chuck had no doubt that a heavenly body like Rachelle could provoke jealous ire even on Mount Olympus.

And thus it was that Chuck interpreted the unisex-lavatory episode as Divine Intervention—as opposed to Dose of Reality—when he stepped in one day to a blast of Obsession waging fruitless combat with the asphyxiating fumes of a massive dump.

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