There was only an hour left to the normal time I would clock out by the time I finally signed the last document for HR, they wanted every minut detail I could remember written down, verbally confirmed, then signed in triplicate. It seemed like a silly thing for me to have to do when absolutely everything from the first encounter was on tape and every single one of them had been eye witnesses to the second, but I’m sure they were just following to the letter what their lawyers were telling them to do.

“That’s the last one Miss Johnson, please just wait a moment while I get these all scanned in and verify that they’re all legible.” The head of HR, who I knew now was named Cathy, had been taking care of me personally, hovering over every scratch of my pen on paper to make sure I wasn’t ticking any boxes I shouldn’t be or writing outside the lines.

“It’s been so long since I wrote anything by hand,” I commented, rubbing my cramped right hand, “probably not since high school, maybe even before then, most of our work was done digitally.”

“I know it seems so old fashioned, but digital copies can be easily faked and can be a nightmare to prove if someone wants to claim we forged something. Much harder to fake someone’s handwriting.” She swiveled her desk chair to the side and pulled down a stack of documents from the top of a neglected looking piece of ancient office equipment. After blowing off a thin layer of dust from the machine, she pressed a button to turn it on and began feeding my filled out accounts into the machine. “This will only take a moment, I promise.”

I nodded and looked around the room, everyone had pretty much gone back to business as usual, though it seemed like everyone had their personal phones out on their desktops and were pausing to sneakily type on them when they thought no one was looking. I was going to be the very pinnacle of the gossip topics for a while. Patsy quickly set her phone down and gave me her best innocent smile when she realized that I was looking at her, I gave her my own amused half-smile in return. I couldn’t blame her for spreading the juicy inside information, I would probably do the exact same thing if roles were reversed.

“Alright, now just to check,” Cathy said as the machine spit out the last page. Her eyes tracked up and down the screen as she scrolled through the documents. “Everything looks good to me, would you like to check before you sign off on it?”

“I mean, you’re keeping the paper copies, right?”

“Of course, they will be filed and I will make a note of where they’re stored on the digital version of the case.”

“Okay, then I trust if you say it scanned correctly, you know how to do your job to be this high up in HR.”

Cathy smiled and sat up a bit straighter in her chair. “Well thank you for trusting me,” she said happily. “You know there’s a lot of employees that don’t trust us up here. They think we’re out to get them, though that doesn’t make much sense, we’re here specifically to help all of you.”

I nodded and tried my best to give her a sincere smile. I wasn’t above greasing the wheels a bit if it meant I got a good outcome out of this situation, not that I was even sure what that looked like at this point. All I wanted to do was get home and chill out, forget anything happened, and wake up sometime tomorrow afternoon.

“Do you like chocolate?”

“Um, of course.”

She opened one of the bottom drawers on the side of her desk and pulled out a bag of what looked to be a bag of random chocolate bars leftover from Halloween clearance. “Take whichever your favorite, as many as you want. I shouldn’t be eating them all myself anyway, I just have them around for really stressful days.” As if to make a point, she took one of the bars, unwrapped it and popped it into her mouth before hitting the print button her screen and turning to retrieve the paper.”

I took a handful of whatever was in the bag and stuffed them into one of the pockets of my jumpsuit. I didn’t have any allergies and chocolate was chocolate, I wasn’t really very picky about what the flavor or filling was.

“Alright, just sign and date at the bottom, Miss Johnson.” Cathy placed the document in front of me with her finger on the exactly line I needed to sign. She pulled the paper away as soon as I did, verified I had written the date correctly, then signed it as well. “I hope you enjoy your day off tomorrow and you can expect to hear back from one of us in the afternoon tomorrow.”

“Hear back about what?” Instantly I felt suspicious, if they were going to try to turn this into something that they could get me in trouble for I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.

“Oh don’t worry,” she said quickly with a nervous laugh, “I don’t think you have anything to worry about on your end, it’s just protocol to give you a call and let you know what we come up with in regards to our investigation.”

“Investigation? He pretty clearly has just been attacking me at any chance he can get.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it at all,” she assured. For being the head of her department she was pretty bad at keeping what she wanted to say off of her face. It was obvious that she wanted to tell me that it was an open and shut case but couldn’t, probably something to do with the lawyers. “Just go have fun with your day off, trust me, I wouldn’t worry a single moment on this right now, we’ll take care of everything.”

Figuring I wasn’t going to get any more of an answer out of her, stood up, wiped my still slightly greasy hand on the hip of my jumpsuit and extended it out for a handshake. I felt kind of silly and old fashioned for extending the gesture, but it felt like the thing to do in this situation. I must have hit the mark, because she shook my hand with a look of delight and walked me to the door, assuring me the whole way that they would call me and to go relax after a stressful day. As soon as the office door clicked behind me, the factory immediately went quieter as many of the machines at work were suddenly powered down all at once, people must have been watching the door and waiting for me to leave so they could get more gossip if there was any to be had.

“How’d it go?” Andy asked as I reached the bottom of the stairs.

“About what you’d expect,” I answered, “they will call me tomorrow.”

He raised his eyebrow and shrugged his head. “Alright I guess, hopefully that doesn’t mean anything bad.”

“Doesn’t seem like it, I don’t think they’d want to fire me with it on record that I was almost assaulted.”

“One would hope,” he said with a small laugh. “By the way, Christa, I really want to apologize for not taking some kind of action when that happened. I froze and I really should have stepped up. It wasn’t right that most everyone stood back and let it happen.”

“It’s fine, I didn’t want any of you getting involved anyway, no sense in letting him get leverage saying that he was actually the one assaulted. It was for the best that you didn’t get yourself even more involved, I’m sure you’re about to spend the rest of your afternoon and maybe even part of your evening filling out paperwork.”

“At least they’ll be forced to give me overtime, always a silver lining.”

“Then I guess write slow,” I joked and gave him a playful punch on the shoulder as I walked past him to the rest of the team so I could gather up and put away my tools.

My team seemed to have gotten back to work, except for Joey who was talking to a couple of the higher ups in management and one of the security guards. His face looked strained, but not overly concerned, so I decided to leave it alone and instead focus on packing up and getting home as soon as possible. Someone had gathered the tools I had been using at the time in a pile next to the lift system so all I had to do was make sure they were clean and ready to go for the next time before putting them in storage. It was a simple task and I was done quickly, but I stalled for a bit, looking over each tool closely and scrutinizing it for any speck of dirt or imperfection as I waited for Joey to be done with whatever they were talking about. I wanted to get home, but I wasn’t just going to disappear without thanking him for coming to my aid. After a few minutes more, they finally all shook hands and management left him looking a bit frazzled.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Nothing to worry about,” he said with a smile, “they were just telling me that it was stupid to give him any ammunition, but they’ll back me up if he tries anything.”

“It was stupid,” I said with a light chuckle, “you know I didn’t want you to do that. He wasn’t going to do anything anyway.”

“You don’t know that, guys like him can go full scorched earth once they finally go off the deep end.” His voice was serious and a worried expression crossed his features. “There was no way I was going to stand there and watch you get hurt, I would have never forgiven myself.”

I was very, very good at separating my work and home life and typically I achieved that by never really taking in what any of my coworkers looked like, which was further assisted by the fact most of the teams I had ever been assigned to were mostly comprised of older, married, and usually just simply not my type kinds of men. Unfortunately it seemed like I was now seeing Joey with fresh eyes, he wasn’t half bad to look at, lightly tanned with russet locks that fell just to his ears that were always tussled and disheveled from being mussed by the welding helmet all the time, and deep brown eyes that now if I looked too long at I felt myself being pulled into. As if a work crush wasn’t the very last thing I needed right now.

“Still,” I said, concentrating very hard to keep a flush from my face and my body language as neutral as it always was, “I am going to be pissed if you find yourself in trouble for it.”

“I really don’t care either way,” he said with a smile. “Legally he will have no leg to stand on, no judge or jury on Earth is going to take his side given all the eye witnesses and honestly, if they did decide to fire me for this, I don’t want to work for a company who just wants me to stand around while my coworkers get hurt.”

“Still, I think we’re more than even for me taking your spot, I’ll take all your hard welds for a week once I get back.”

“No you won’t, not going to let you when all I was doing was the right thing.”

Seriously, it was like he was trying to make me have a huge crush. I knew he was a generally good guy, but he had really shown his character and true colors.

“We’ll see about that,” I said playfully. “Anyway, I’m going to head home now I think, get a head start on my three day. Happen to have seen Joannie sulking around anywhere?”

“Her team got moved to the other side of the ship earlier, she looked pissed that she was losing her front row seat.”

“I bet, well, if she comes looking for me, will you tell her she can text me for the dirty details?”

“Sure, have a good mini vacation, you’ve earned it.”

I gave him one last look to take him in and consider if the crush was going to stick, decided I was doomed, then punched him lightly in the arm and made a beeline to go clock out. All eyes were on me as I crossed the factory, people nudging each other and pointing towards me as they gossiped. I felt a bit exposed by all the attention, I kind of liked keeping my head down, putting in my work for the day, then disappearing to a totally separate existence, now it seemed that everyone was probably going to know my name and who I was. The loss of anonymity was disconcerting for some reason, though I had no logical reason why it should be, so I tried to shrug it off and remind myself that in a month or two it would all have died down and things would go back to normal. While this was definitely a big deal, nothing lasts forever, even juicy gossip.