MY COWORKER INVITED ME TO HER PLACE FOR DRINKS – HER BOYFRIEND HAD OTHER PLANS
It started off innocent. Patrice from the office texted me last Thursday with a bottle of Malbec and that wide, jittery grin she always does when something’s not quite right. I’d been meaning to sort through the boxes in my spare room, but I figured – why not? I hadn’t had a proper catch-up with anyone in weeks.
She said her boyfriend, Darren, was away on a work trip. Again. I didn’t think much of it, even though he always seems to be “away on a work trip” when she has me over.
We sat at her kitchen table, watching the candles she’d lit burn down as the evening got dark. She got a little loose, started going off about their relationship. Money stuff. Trust stuff. “Darren keeps a second laptop under the bed,” she said, half-laughing like it was nothing. I didn’t even know he had a first one.
About an hour in, I went to use the bathroom down the hall – and that’s when I heard something in the back bedroom. Not a creak. Like actual footsteps. I stopped moving. She said he was gone.
When I came out, she was in the kitchen, opening another bottle. I casually asked, “You sure Darren’s not home?” She looked up like I’d just caught her at something, then forced a laugh and said, “Oh! He might’ve come back early. I’m honestly not sure.”
That’s when I knew I needed to go. I told her I had an early appointment the next morning and picked up my bag. But as I was heading toward the front door, Darren came out of the hallway. Shirtless. Just a pair of gym shorts low on his hips.
He didn’t look surprised to see me. Not even a little. He just smiled and said
The Smile That Told Me Everything
“Hey, glad you could make it.”
Not oh, I didn’t know you were here. Not sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt. Glad you could make it. Like I was a guest he’d been expecting. Like my name was on some list I hadn’t agreed to be on.
I looked at Patrice. She was looking at the wine glass in her hand.
I said something like, “Yeah, I was just heading out actually,” and I kept moving toward the door. Darren stepped slightly to the side, not blocking me, but not exactly clearing the way either. Just standing there in the hallway, arms loose, that smile still going.
“You sure? It’s still early.”
It wasn’t a threat. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. It wasn’t aggressive, wasn’t weird in any way I could point to directly. It was perfectly friendly. That was the part that made my stomach do something.
I said I was sure. Patrice still hadn’t looked up.
I got my jacket off the hook by the door, said goodnight to the wall somewhere between the two of them, and left.
The Walk Home
I live eleven minutes from Patrice’s apartment. I know because I’ve walked it a dozen times, usually after a normal evening, usually replaying some funny thing she said about someone in the office. This time I walked it in maybe eight.
It was cold. Late October, that specific kind of cold that gets into your collar no matter what you do. I kept my hands in my pockets and didn’t look at my phone until I was inside my own building with the door shut behind me.
Then I stood in my hallway and just thought about it.
The candles. The second laptop. He might’ve come back early. I’m honestly not sure. Darren, not surprised. Darren, smiling. Glad you could make it.
I’ve known Patrice for two and a half years. We started at the company within a few months of each other. She got me through the first bad performance review I ever had, sat with me in the break room while I ate a sad sandwich and told me the manager who gave it to me was a known idiot. I like her. I genuinely like her.
But I kept thinking about all the other times Darren was “on a work trip.” And whether those evenings had ended differently. And whether I’d just been too oblivious to notice what the setup was.
What I Actually Know About Darren
Not much, honestly. He came to the office Christmas party two years ago. Tall, good-looking in a way that seems like it requires effort. He spent most of the night at the bar talking to Steve from accounts, and I remember thinking he seemed a little bored by Patrice’s work friends.
The second laptop thing stuck with me. I don’t know why she mentioned it. Maybe the wine. Maybe she wanted me to ask about it, to open that door. I didn’t.
But I started thinking about what you keep on a second laptop that you store under a bed. And I started thinking about a man who comes out of his own bedroom shirtless when his girlfriend has a friend over, and isn’t even slightly caught off guard.
There are a few ways to read that scene.
I’ve been turning them over since Thursday night and I keep landing on the same one.
Friday at the Office
Patrice was in before me. She was at her desk with a coffee and her headphones in, which she almost never does before ten. I said good morning when I walked past. She pulled one earbud out, said “morning,” and put it back.
That was it.
I sat down at my own desk and opened my laptop and pretended to care about the eleven emails that had come in since the day before.
By lunch she’d moved to the small conference room to work, which people do sometimes, it’s not unusual. I ate at my desk. Around two she came back, and we had a totally normal conversation about a project deadline, the kind of conversation where everything is fine and nothing happened and we are just two colleagues who work near each other.
She’s good at that. I’ll give her that.
I kept waiting for some version of hey, sorry about last night, that was weird, or even just a look that acknowledged the thing we were both clearly not talking about. Nothing. She was smooth. Smoother than I’d have been.
I went home thinking maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. Maybe Darren really had just come back early. Maybe the smile was just how he smiles. Maybe I was reading a script into a situation that was just a slightly awkward evening.
Then I got a text from her at 8:47pm.
The Text
Hey. Sorry if last night was weird. Darren and I have been going through some stuff and I think I handled that badly. Can we talk?
I stared at that for a while.
Sorry if last night was weird is doing a lot of work in that sentence. If. Like there’s a universe where it wasn’t. Like she’s leaving the door open for me to say no no, it was totally fine, don’t worry about it.
I typed three different responses and deleted them all.
What I wanted to say: What exactly were you hoping would happen?
What I also wanted to say: Darren knew I was coming, didn’t he.
What I actually sent: It’s okay. Maybe not right now but we can talk soon.
She sent back a thumbs up. Just the thumbs up. Which somehow made it worse.
What I Think Was Going On
I’ve talked to two people about this. My friend Greta, who I’ve known since university, and my neighbor Phil, who is 58 and divorced and has strong opinions about everything.
Greta’s read: Patrice and Darren have some kind of arrangement, and she was testing whether I’d be open to it, and Darren coming out like that was the actual ask, and when I left they probably had a whole debrief about it.
Phil’s read: Darren is controlling, the whole thing was his idea, and Patrice is not entirely a willing participant in whatever that was.
I don’t know which one is right. I’m not sure those two options are the only ones either.
What I do know is that nobody told me what I was walking into. Whatever it was, whatever they were hoping for, I didn’t get a say in being part of the setup. I just showed up with a jacket and nowhere to be, because a coworker I trusted texted me on a Thursday night.
That’s the part that bothers me. Not the weirdness of it. The weirdness I can shake off. It’s that I was a piece being moved around a board I couldn’t see.
Where Things Stand
We’ve talked since. Sort of. She came by my desk on Monday and said she was sorry, properly this time, and that she’d explain everything when she was ready. I said okay. I meant it, mostly.
I’m not angry at her. I don’t know enough to be angry. And I do actually like her, which is the annoying part of this whole thing.
But I’ve been turning down her invites for a few weeks now. Not dramatically. Just busy, another time, maybe next week. She hasn’t pushed it.
The boxes in my spare room are still unpacked. I’ve walked past them every day since Thursday and thought about how I almost didn’t go that night. How I nearly just stayed home, put something on TV, made pasta, gone to bed at a normal hour.
Small decisions. You never know which ones you’ll still be thinking about ten days later.
Darren’s smile, though. I keep coming back to it.
Glad you could make it.
He knew my name. He said it on my way out, just as the door was closing. “Take care, Renee.”
I’d never told Patrice to introduce us. I’d never met him properly before that night. And she’d never once mentioned my name to him, as far as I knew.
But he knew it.
—
If this one’s been living in your head rent-free too, pass it along to someone who’d get it.
For more unexpected encounters that take a wild turn, check out The Trucker Tapped My Window and I Couldn’t Move My Hands or read about what happened when I Asked the Tired Kid at the Laundromat Why He Was Alone – I Wasn’t Ready for His Answer. And if you’re in the mood for another surprising discovery, you won’t want to miss The Dog I Pulled From the Flood Had Something Sewn Into Its Harness.
