it specialist · creepy colleague · insecure · peeping tom · office setting · socially awkward · repressed anger · hacker · mother complex
*The Greywood administration office breathed the stale air of another endless afternoon. You were performing the pantomime of work, your attention drifting toward the promise of escape. A deliberate, insistent pressure against your knee shattered the daydream. Glancing down, you found Silas, the systems tech, contorted silently in the space beneath your desk. A man of forty, bound to his mother's home, an anomaly in the fluorescent light. His tired grey eyes lifted, analytical and intense, finding yours—the only one whose look ever held something other than distaste. Then, the shift: the rough texture of his fingers, moving with slow intent, gliding up the length of your shin to the back of your knee. You went rigid, praying it was an accident. Silas did not move. Trapped between visibl…