Intern

I closed my eyes, rested my hands in my lap as the lingering heat of Don's hand on my shoulder faded. All week it had been little touches. His hand on the small of my back while navigating the supply closet. His fingers brushing my hand as he handed me a pen. His thigh pressed up against mine as we ate lunch.

Just coincidence; normal touches in the course of a normal business day, I'd been telling myself. I was pushing forty now and had nothing on the brand new, shiny, twenty-somethings that had been hired at the same time as me.

Intern.

It felt like a dirty word. After an eighteen year career, two kids, and a failed marriage, all I had to show were sagging tits and an internship.

There was no way his touch could be anything but the innocent, unavoidable reality of existing in an office.

How had I even ended up here? Two weeks prior, I had been a music teacher. Kind of. My position had been cut, but I'd been promised a placement as soon as something opened up in another school. When I'd gone to the library to hide and complain to the librarian upon hearing the news, I'd told her I bet they'd find me a new position in no time. She advised me not to hold my breath.

I spent a week in a fog, moping and half-heartedly organizing closets. I probably wouldn't have left the house, but I'd already paid for a ticket to the music teacher's national convention.

***

Walking through the conference halls, I couldn't bring myself to attend the sessions I normally would. The realization crashed upon me that I was no longer a music teacher. The name badge hanging around my neck felt like a lie. I needed to find my next thing.

That was how I found myself standing across from the men at the ChordCanvas booth. That was where I met Don.

The notation software was a tiny offering in a giant music corporation's ecosystem, but beloved by users. Unlike the corporate sales force, ChordCanvas, possibly against better judgment, sent their actual programmers to conventions.

The two men stared at me for a few seconds. I stared back at them. No polished sales pitch here. These two were bonafide nerds, complete with pocket protectors, scruffy hair, and the kind of intelligence behind their eyes that always worked up the butterflies in my stomach.

I told them how much I loved their software and the taller one asked me what my favorite feature was. I hadn't been laid in a while and I really wanted to tell him he was my new favorite feature, but despite the deep blue eyes and the subtle curl to his sandy blond hair, I demurely fell back on answering with an actual feature of the software.

"I programmed that feature!" The excitement in his voice was infectious and the corners of my lips rose in genuine amusement as he described the lengths he'd had to go to in order to push it over the finish line.

"So what you're saying is I should blame you for all those late nights cursing at my computer?" I teased.

His eyes widened before crinkling at the corners. "Absolutely. I live to make music teachers swear at inanimate objects." He unwrapped a cherry lollipop and popped it in his mouth -- a habit I'd soon learn was as much a part of him as his code.

"So, you teach the little ones then?" I almost missed his question as I distracted myself watching the lollipop play about his lips.

"I did. Up until last week when my position was cut. I'm kind of between jobs at the moment." Then, as if my mouth bypassed my brain entirely, words started spilling out. I couldn't believe what I was saying, but somehow it all felt right, true, a strange kind of relief. "I'm actually about to start a computer science degree." A total lie. "I want to be you when I grow up."

Holy shit. What an interesting truth.

His eyes narrowed and he stood stock still for a moment. Then he let loose with unbridled laughter as his companion came over to see if we were ok. Once he'd settled down and caught his breath, he looked at me earnestly. He put his hand on my shoulder in an almost fatherly way, the first of the long series of touches that would soon have me questioning both his intentions and my progressively erotic dreams.

"How would you like an internship?"

The question hung in the air between us, unexpected and tantalizing. A door opening when I thought all others had closed.

Two days later, I went to work for ChordCanvas.

***

My fellow programmers called it "the cave." In reality, it was the basement where they stored the wild cowboys that passed as programmers in this company. Too embarrassing to be housed on the upper floors, but too important to push to an off campus building, the ChordCanvas dev team had a cozy little space beneath the bustling metropolis that worked above.

The air down here smelled of coffee grounds, pizza boxes, and the faint metallic scent of overheating laptops. Dim overhead fluorescents had been supplemented by strings of multicolored Christmas lights that someone had wound around exposed pipes, casting the room in a perpetual twilight glow. Desks were arranged in clusters, each developer's space personalized with action figures, stupid mugs, and at least one wilting plant given up for dead months ago.

Whiteboards covered nearly every vertical surface, filled with incomprehensible diagrams, half-erased architectural plans, and the occasional crude cartoon. On the back wall, someone had meticulously painted the ChordCanvas logo over a mural of musical notes dancing across staff lines. A mini-fridge hummed in the corner next to a collection of energy drink cans arranged in a precarious pyramid.

"Welcome to developer paradise," Don said, sweeping his arm across the dimly lit basement on my first day.

"If this is paradise, I'd hate to see purgatory."

"Oh, that's the HR department," he grinned, cherry lollipop clicking against his teeth. "Never go there without backup."

My first day consisted of applying for a computer science degree at the local community college, company-paid. As I progressed through classes, they'd increase my responsibilities. It beat waiting around for the school system to remember I existed.

But now I was sitting in front of a giant curved screen, thousands of lines of code in front of me. My ass was planted in an uncomfortable office chair and I squirmed trying to find a position in which my neck and shoulders wouldn't seize up if I turned my head wrong.

The Christmas lights had burned out in my corner, leaving me working in the blue glow of my monitor and the soft amber from a salt lamp someone had abandoned on a nearby shelf. The walls seemed to close in at this late hour, the cave becoming truly cave-like as the night deepened and the other programmers trickled out. Sound behaved strangely down here--sometimes a whisper from across the room would carry perfectly, while a shout from three feet away would be swallowed by the acoustic foam panels haphazardly mounted to dampen the constant hum of server fans.

A tower of technical manuals served as my impromptu monitor stand, with titles like "Beginner's Russian" mixed in with "Working Effectively With Legacy Code" and "The Definitive Guide to Algorithm Optimization." Someone had strung a hammock in the far corner for emergency naps, and the coffee machine--the cave's true holy relic--gurgled and steamed perpetually, attended to with religious devotion by whoever noticed it running low.

It didn't matter that I had no idea what the code meant, my job was translating Russian words peppered throughout the files. ChordCanvas had just bought a small Russian company that had a feature they wanted. The problem was as soon as the deal was done, they'd discovered the biggest mess of a code base anyone at ChordCanvas had ever seen. It was going to be a monumental project to figure out what the code did and clean it up.

An army of junior engineers had been brought on to help with the task, with two senior programmers in charge, Don and Leslie. Leslie was a plump, older man with a bit of absent minded professor to him. Don had the wildness of Don Quixote and the looks of a middle aged, scruffy James Spader. A self-taught programming prodigy who'd dropped out of MIT in his second year, he had a reputation for brilliant code that no one else could understand. I was his pet project and he immediately took me under his wing.

A small notebook on one side of me, a Russian dictionary on the other, my work continued late into the night, long after most of the programmers had retired for the evening. I shifted on the office chair, my back aching, my butt having fallen asleep two hours ago. Don sat at the table next to mine, typing away, seemingly oblivious to the fire building in my back from the horrid chair. Don glanced at me and I languidly stretched my arms over my head, arched my back, my breasts threatening to spill over the top of my fuzzy sweater. I had been subtly teasing him since I started wondering about his elusive touches. His eyes bugged out satisfyingly. I don't think Don was used to having women down in the cave.

As the clock ticked past midnight, the cave took on an intimate quality, as if we were the last two people in the building--perhaps the world. The hum of computers provided a white noise backdrop as we worked in companionable silence, broken only by occasional sighs or the clicking of keys.

Eyes back on the screen, teasing over for now, I picked up the Russian dictionary. I had method names, comments, and file names to translate, and a tight deadline. Once I'd translated a file, Don would look over my shoulder and try to make sense of it. Then he'd move to the white board and scribble unintelligibly in colorful code diagrams that could have been magic spells for all I knew.

"This code can suck my cock, like Evan sucks at Halo." I forced my voice into a sultry purr, totally inappropriate for the vitriolic comment I'd just translated. I could not stem the fit of giggles that followed.

"Oh yeah, that's almost as good as the ascii unicorn with the giant cock you found in the String Utilities file." Don gave the barest chuckle as if this was all common place and all code bases were full of dick jokes and swearing.

He leaned back in his chair, unwrapping another cherry lollipop. "And here I thought Russian programmers would be more... poetic."

"What, you were expecting Tolstoy? 'All code is the same; each line of buggy code is buggy in its own way'?"

He snorted. "More like Dostoevsky. 'The secret of man's being is not only to debug, but to debug for something.'"

I turned back to my screen, dictionary in hand, ready to translate more files, but Don put his hand on mine, pushing the dictionary to the table. I hadn't realized how dry my eyes had gotten until I looked up into his and it felt like I was coming out of a long dry desert walk. I yawned again, trying to get some oxygen back into my system.

Don stood up and pulled me up with him, his hand enclosing mine. I hadn't realized until that moment exactly how strong his hands were. Each of his fingers pressed firmly into my hand, his palm warm and dry against mine. Maybe my stretch earlier had finally broken some barrier between us, his thumb caressed my hand as he led me away from the desk.

"Come sit here, you look really stiff." He pulled a chair out in front of the white board and motioned for me to straddle it. I wasn't tired, but I was weary, and something about opening my legs to straddle the chair got the butterflies in my stomach all worked up again.

"That chair should be classified as a torture device," he observed, watching me squirm throughout the day.

"Pretty sure it violates the Geneva Convention," I muttered, rubbing my lower back.

"You know what they say about programmer ergonomics--we only care about our wrists because they're directly connected to the keyboard. May I?" Don asked as his hands alighted lightly on my shoulders.

"Mmm." He took it as an affirmative and began kneading my shoulders, working out the knots from long hours hunched in front of the screen. My entire body relaxed as his finger tips dug into the flesh around my neck, worked their way to my shoulder blades. I couldn't remember the last time someone had helped me work out the tension of the day.

Don continued massaging my shoulders, my back. My arms and head hung limp in front of me, a ragdoll for him to manipulate. The warmth of his hands traveled down my back, lower and lower, as he released tension I hadn't even known I'd been holding. Was I moaning? Yeah, I think I was.

Warm breath tickled the side of my cheek. Breath against my ear held a hint of chocolate, an under current of bold coffee, and the ever present cherry lollipop. He didn't speak at first, just allowing the closeness of his mouth to register. I listened to his breathing, my insides beginning to stir as his hands worked magic on my lower back.

"If we cleared off that table, I could lay you down and really get to work on you." His breathy whisper and words sent a tingle of electricity down my spine and in my wit addled state from the intense mental load of the day, his proposal sounded like the most reasonable thing in the world. I raised my head just long enough to nod at him before letting it drop bonelessly in front of me again.

"Up you go." The power in his voice intrigued me. My body was limp against the chair, totally relaxed from the massage and I didn't want to move. But I wanted to comply. I didn't want to think, I wanted to be taken care of.

I stood and made my way to the table, Don clearing off papers and a few wayward coffee cups. He faced me and we stared at each other for a moment. A second went by. Another. His eyes held mine, but slowly traveled down past my collar bone, stopping briefly on my breasts, continued past my abs, and held at my thighs.

"May I?" The repeat of the question echoed through my head, but this time, he had the bottom of my shirt in his hand. A giggle escaped my lips as I briefly considered what he was asking. He wanted to lay me, the intern, out nude on the table and what, massage me? Fuck me? I wasn't sure, but it seemed like such a cliche. Senior software engineer fucking the intern on the office table after a long night on an important project.

But the cliche ended there. I wasn't one of the twenty somethings. I was likely a few years older than Don. He was my senior in the world of programming, but I had two kids, an ex husband. If I did this, I had no excuses that I was being taken advantage of by an older, powerful man. If I did this, it was because I wanted to be fucked on the conference room table in "the cave."

I nodded and Don pulled the sweater over my head revealing the simple white button up below. His fingers deftly unbuttoned each pearly white disk, my eyes locked on his hands.

How many women had he done this with?

Then I felt a little stupid asking myself that. How many women had he fucked? How many had he undressed in the cave and ravaged on the table where morning meetings happened? It didn't matter. I was a big girl and I hadn't been laid properly in a long time.

Don stepped back and smiled, his eyes lighting up as I unhooked my bra and let it fall to the floor. Shyness had been long beaten out of me by doctors appointments and women's locker rooms, but there was still an air of danger disrobing in the place I was supposed to be professional. Leslie could walk back in having forgotten a pencil. The boss could come back any moment, looking for reports he'd mislaid. Hell, a cleaning crew was probably scheduled for sometime tonight, although you'd never guess that by the typical state of the cave.

The conference table was littered with empty Red Bull cans and protein bar wrappers. A stack of printed code was pushed to one corner, secured by a plastic dinosaur figurine. Musical instruments decorated the walls--guitars, a small keyboard, even a battered clarinet--as if to remind everyone of the actual product they were creating. A half-finished game of chess sat abandoned on a side table, the white queen poised for a kill that would never come. In the ceiling, one panel had been removed, replaced by a small disco ball that caught the light from a nearby desk lamp, sending tiny reflections dancing over us.

I pushed the various detritus out of the way and laid on the table face down, Don standing over me. I concentrated on slowing my breathing, anticipating the feel of his hands on my naked flesh. He started at the small of my back, small circles, then long strokes up to my shoulder blades. Moving my hair out of the way, he kneaded my shoulders, the base of my neck.

"You know," he said softly, his voice husky with something more than just the late hour, "I knew from the moment you talked about our software at the convention that you'd fit in here. Most people just see the interface, but you actually understood what was under the hood."

His words surprised me almost as much as his fingers working at a particularly stubborn knot beneath my left shoulder blade.

"Is that why you offered me the internship? Because I understood your code?"

"Partly," he admitted. "But mostly because I've never met someone who looked at a challenge the way you did. Everyone else who's been laid off just looks broken. You looked... hungry."

I stretched my arms over my head, then folded my hands under my cheek. I closed my eyes, relaxing into the rhythmic pressure of his thumbs moving lower and lower along my sides.

He paused for a moment before taking the plunge from massage to more. He kneaded my ass and continued down my thighs, calves, feet. He lingered at my feet for a moment before massaging back to my thighs. He pushed my legs apart gently, rubbing my inner thighs, getting closer and closer to the ever moistening junction between my legs. His hands were on my ass again, rubbing, separating the cheeks. A finger traced my asshole, glided up and down, circled.

His hands were between my legs, gliding over my outer lips, rubbing my arousal into my thighs. As his fingers sank into me, I reached for his zipper. Two fingers thrust in and out of me while his thumb circled my clit. His fingers inside me, his thumb working my clit had me cumming before I'd released his cock from his pants. I rode the waves of climax, pulsing around his fingers as I brought his cock to my mouth.

Turning onto my side, he kneaded my breasts as I circled his length with my fists. I fit as much of him into my mouth as I could, licking and sucking as he grew harder and harder in my mouth. He pushed me back onto the table, guiding my legs onto his shoulders.

I took a moment and appreciated the absurdity of what we were doing. Here I was, spread out on the conference table where I'd be drinking coffee and attempting not to blush in the morning. Don was kneeling before me, foam keyboard wrist supports saving his knees. I had grey in my hair, he had a little Dad belly. In that moment, he looked down at me and we both started laughing.

"Best internship ever," I said as he thrust into me.

"God I love interns," he answered.