A night out with Divinely Ordained Crush, pt 1

I’d been playing it pretty cool with Divinely Ordained Crush recently. Well, only in the sense of being out of the country on holiday. But for me, that’s pretty cool.

We’d bumped into each other a couple of times since I’d got back and both times I saw him in relatively advantageous circumstances: once, when he was making other people laugh, and once (*swoon*) when he was single-handedly saving the entire office’s computer system from meltdown.

No, I didn’t know IT could do it for me either.

Perhaps I was intoxicated by election fever, perhaps by the pungent stain remover they’ve been using to clean our carpets. Either way, lightheaded, I emailed DOC to suggest he come along to a colleague’s leaving party on Friday evening. This was a particularly daring move as she works in a different building to us, we have no friends in common, and I knew for a fact he had only met her once. So if he came along, he’d be forced to talk to me.

Put that way, I supposed it does sound a little like a trap.

Anyway, I think it’s a mark of the man that he said yes, and kept his word at the end of what turned out to be a 11-hour shift for him. He wasn’t, however, as tired as me. The previous night, after all, had been the election, and as tradition now dictates, I’d spent it with a bottle of wine in one hand and my head in the other. I’d managed three hours of sleep before dragging myself to the office and by 4pm, having succumbed to a variety of fatigue symptoms including violent mood swings and the shakes, my only hope lay in chain-drinking Coke and hazelnut latte.

By the time I got to the pub I was so wired I had nearly poked my boss’s eye out with one of my increasingly wild hand gestures…