Twice in our first hour of her first Friday of after work drinking with the guys from our aisle I make her laugh. It is a big, deep and throaty laugh that throws her head back with its sheer exuberance and ferocity, leaving her neck turned slightly away, her face pink, peering at me out of the corner of her eyes part questioning and part inviting as she recovers.

Two nights later she calls me panicked from a late night conference call, needing help. I jump in, solve the problem, and the next morning find an email from her personal account to my personal account which says, "Now I really owe you." So I schedule lunch for Thursday and she accepts.

On Wednesday she sends an email across the aisle, asking if we can reschedule because she has a 1:00 meeting on Thursday, Friday is wide open, and she doesn't want to be constrained.

I move the meeting to Friday and extend it to an hour and a half. Later in the day, standing in the middle of the aisle, holding the cube walls on either side, talking to the other guys, she laughs out loud, her head back and her hip to one side but never quite taking her eyes off me.

Friday dawns and I am giddy with anticipation, but five minutes before noon she sends an email that she's stuck in a meeting with a technical problem. Fifteen minutes later I ask if I can help. She asks if I have any expertise and I say no, but I can fake it, and head off to her meeting, figuring we'll be out of there soon and off to lunch, but no, the problem is not only technical, but political and much conversation is required. We are seated at computers on opposite sides of the table and during the conversation and the research I keep catching her looking at me over the tops of the monitors and she keeps catching me looking back. People are wandering in and out and at 1:30 we find ourselves alone in the room with the door closed. "Should we just blow this off at 2:00 and go to lunch?" she asks.

"You want my biased opinion? Yes."

She smiles again. "You see what my days are like, and why lunch is so difficult."

"I see, and that's why I'm so persistent."

"Which is a good thing," she responds, and pulls out her cell phone to call her boss, the inevitable result of course being that no she can't blow off the 2:00.

When she finally gets off the phone I continue "and that persistence says more about you than it does about me."

"Thank you," she answers, and throws me an orange across the table. We sit in silence, looking at each other, eating our oranges until other people file back in and the techno-political conversation starts again.

At 3:30 I stand to leave, other women and other meetings calling. "I'll reschedule that meeting later," I tell her as I go.

Back at our desks an hour and a half later I find two more emails from her with technical questions. The first I know off the top of my head, so I answer it, send a second email letting her know I'll look at the second question, and then I reschedule lunch for Monday and dive into the database looking for an answer. Her acceptance of the rescheduled lunch comes back almost immediately with a note attached: "My day is wide open :-)"

"Yeah right," I respond, "I've heard that line somewhere before :-)," and suddenly even more energized I find the query she needs and email it to her.

"That was fast," she hollers, the one other guy in the aisle still there at 5:45 on a Friday obviously wondering what the hell's going on.

"Way too much of my brain is taken up with this data model," I holler back, and her raucous laughter fills the air again.

All weekend I imagine lunch, eyes locked, drinks in hand, driving to the park, making out, making excuses, calling in, driving to her house, fucking our silly little brains all to hell and back. She has the same first name as my wife so as I fuck my wife and think of her I say her name out loud and thrill in the happiness of coincidence and the madness of my obsession.

Monday morning I arrive late at work, well rested, not planning on getting anything done anyway, and her cube is empty. No name plate, no stuff no nothing. I look around in horror, convinced that I have imagined the whole thing, "what happened to her?" I stutter, gesticulating randomly in the direction of he cube, trying not to look crazier than I am.

"She quit," answers the other guy. "Said she'd worked around the clock all weekend and couldn't take it anymore, called a headhunter and he found another job for her within an hour."

Dazed, I boot my computer. check my email, there is at least, an email from her. "Sorry it didn't work out. Thank you so much for your persistence."

It's a good thing I wasn't planning on getting any work done because all I can do all day is sit and stare at my computer.