Happily Ever After_ - Benison Anne O'Reilly [56]
Anyway, in case you flunked maths at school, I have a much simpler formula - devised by me and Melanie - that even you dunces will be able to understand:
Marketing position + good looking man = wanker
Now once again, this formula is not foolproof. In fact it’s only correct about eighty-five percent of the time. However, statistically the odds were heavily stacked against Alex Andersen.
He surprised us both by proving to be an outlier.
Yes, it’s a curiously inadequate word, but Alex turned out to be nice. Actually he was quite like Edward really, although infinitely hotter to look at. He was courteous and friendly and acknowledged another’s good work publicly, and didn’t try and claim other people’s ideas as his own, and took responsibility for any mistakes that were made, sometimes even when they weren’t his fault. He was the anti-Amanda. After guarding our flanks for so long it took us a while to get used to our new situation.
Since we’re on a science theme, some interesting behaviour followed the appointment of Alex to lead our Erecta team, apart from a huge sigh of relief that we were finally rid of Amanda, that is. If an anthropologist had been observing us they might have recorded this as an intriguing example of human primate mating rituals. With the arrival of a handsome new buck male in our previously all-female colony, we began taking more care with our grooming. This didn’t quite extend to us sitting around the tearoom combing through each other’s hair for fleas; it was a bit more subtle than that. In my case I started getting up ten minutes earlier so I could actually blow dry my hair properly, rather than crossing my fingers and leaving it to air dry during the journey between home, preschool and work. This gave me time to put mascara on at home too, rather than squinting to apply it in the rear-view mirror while stopped at red lights. Melanie toned down the worst excesses of her clothing and began wearing more appropriate nail polish colours and Karen - well she always looked perfect, but I’m sure she did start using more lip gloss and blusher. It was not as if any of us had ambitions. Melanie and Karen were happily partnered, I less so, but there was something about having Alex around that made you want to try harder.
Nice - it’s such a loaded term. I share a common female distaste for the sensitive new age guy type. As a matter of fact, if they are too sensitive I get a bit suspicious that beneath that SNAG-like exterior there may actually lay a raving misogynist - a wolf in sheep’s clothing as it were - terribly prejudiced, I know, but there you go. No, I could never detect anything cultivated about Alex’s manner and in spite of (or more likely because of) his pretty boy looks he was quite blokey in his way: a beer-drinking, sports-loving guy. So whilst all the girls wanted to sleep with him, all the men wanted to have a drink with him down at the pub. The entire sales and marketing team appeared affected by a collective crush.
Still, there was a certain distance about his friendliness, as though he was keeping everyone at arm’s length. He would joke and chat with you well enough, but he was not a person to divulge much about his personal life and I often wondered if he was not secretly summing us all up and finding a few of us wanting. In my more fanciful moments I used to like to imagine he was perhaps an alien who’d been beamed down to spy on us silly humans (and if he was looking to observe the whole gamut of human frailties he couldn’t have picked more fertile ground); certainly his eyes had an other-worldly quality. Although, to be fair I had come across his type before. In my assessment there are two types of people in the typical office setting: those who like to tell anyone and everyone about their private lives and those who like to keep it all to themselves. There was actually a woman in my former department who went off one weekend and got married to