Dating My Growing Crush: Chapter 4(Illustrated)
Three years later…
Working life is a scam! This, Calvin, had deduced after working for two and a half years in a company he didn’t give one crap about. It was work after work after work. He could put together a report, create astounding spreadsheets, analyse data, and so many other things that, for some reason, had nothing to do with him.
Calvin had graduated with honours and gone on to find himself a job where his life began to take on a routine. He tried spicing it up with intense gaming sessions on the weekends, and his friends tried getting him out of his shell every once in a while with a few hangouts, but the black hole that was his job was proving quite powerful.
His enthusiasm for the effects of the Fertility Pill had faded to a passive acknowledgement of the drug’s power in his everyday life, its role in the creation of mouth-watering pornography, but nothing beyond that as he deduced that it really hadn’t done much for him besides add a few inches to his manhood, a change he found mild compared to everyone else he knew.
As such, his life outside the games and hangouts with his old friends was quite dull.
Fortunately for him, tonight was a party to celebrate the merging of two companies, one of which he was a part of.
He was currently standing with a group of fellow colleagues, listening to the random bits of gossip that were milling through them, and taking on the sublime art of admiring the fruits of the Fertility Pill’s labour(women, of course).
“This place is packed!” Trent, a man who enjoyed bossing his colleagues around more than working, commented. He was a large, handsome man, with an ego clearly born from the glorified image he had of himself.
“It sure is,” Jessica answered. “A little bird told me the company paid North of a quarter million dollars to secure this reservation.”
Calvin was of the opinion that Jessica liked Trent, given that she always agreed with him. Now, while the woman herself was a prime example of beauty by the Fertility Pill, her personality made him sigh and keep his distance, not that he could pull the moves on her anyway.
“That’s a little cheap for an establishment of this calibre,” another colleague answered. Dressed in a suit, this particular individual, Barry, was known for spending quite a bit of money on himself. Rumours had it that he held his job as a formality and that he was actually from a very rich family.
“How much do you reckon they paid?” Trent asked him. There was a glint in the egotistic man that only ever appeared when he was talking to Barry, HR, the Finance Manager during Salary Week and the CEO of their company.
“Probably around 500k,” the man answered, and continued to drone on about logistics.
Calvin tuned out rather quickly after that as the discussion would inevitably shift to topics he found even more boring. He drifted away from the group before they could add him to the conversation and found himself at a bar of drinks, staring at glasses of various concoctions he didn’t know to pick from.
Wearing a suit always made him feel like he was in a sauna. Wearing one in a formal setting such as this event was on another level, though.
Just then, a clink of a cup roused everyone’s attention. At the head of the massive ballroom, a man in an expensive suit stood. Surrounding him were a few of his colleagues, most of whom he wouldn’t have cared about until he spotted one.
A woman… a blonde woman, dressed in an elegant blue dress that shimmered with the light. Curvaceous bodies were the norm in a world built entirely on the success of the Fertility Pill, but this woman went just a bit beyond the bounds of normal.
Her breasts must have been nearly the size of her head each, and while her waist was narrower than a wasp’s, her hips were easily one and a half times the width from her one shoulder to the other.
It had been three years since Calvin had ever looked at a woman and felt his primal instincts fire up this badly, demanding that he stop being the lazy bum he was becoming and do what his ancestors did best: Woo women for sex.
He chuckled at his own thoughts and returned to the bar of drinks, picking a sparkling glass of lemonade… or at least that’s what he thought it was.
“I’m proud to announce this successful partnership as our two companies come together…” the man began, already creating a drone of sleep in Calvin’s mind.
Most of those speeches were so well-rehearsed that the message travelled within the first ten seconds of the robotic language their bosses loved using.
“Allow me to introduce the colleagues I travelled with. They will be joining your teams to learn how you’ve been operating. A similar-sized team has already left your ranks to do the same at the place we call ‘home’,” the man continued.
The only real reason Calvin’s attention left the funky lemon-like drink he’d picked was the fact that during the introductions of the unfamiliar faces, the blonde woman that had made his sex hormones wake up at just a glance was introduced as none other than Ruby.
His body shivered.
The resemblance snapped into place.
He’d been staring at her breasts and hips so much he’d not studied her face long enough. His heart skipped a beat, and his brain began performing a system check. ‘Shit!’
He pulled out his phone and was about to text his best friend when he heard a voice behind him, “Is that you, Calvin?”
Calvin’s mind went on a two-second vacation to dust off the record labelled ‘Ruby’s voice’ in the archives of his mind, just to play against the voice that had just echoed his name. It was a match. A perfect match. Logic was melting.
He turned back to her with a tight-lipped smile, “Hi, Ruby.”
She stayed where she was, tilting her head curiously. “Am I intruding?”
“Not at all,” he managed, “I just… wasn’t expecting you. I’m still trying to recover from the… uh… shock.”
She smiled, “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too. You look…” he paused, thinking about all the inappropriate terms he could use before settling on, “…amazing.”
She raised her eyebrow at him, “That’s it? I spent a lot of time picking out what to wear.”
“What do you want me to say?” he found himself laughing defensively, “I can barely recognise you… especially considering how different you look from the last time I saw you.”
Ruby approached the table and picked up a drink from the table. It seemed to Calvin that she was trying to close the distance between them so she could speak on matters she didn’t want others to know. She smelt great. His heart skipped a beat, and for a second, he hated himself for actually getting flustered over the same woman who had broken his heart.
“Well, a lot can happen in three years… If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like to ask for your help. Could you show me around? There is just not a single familiar face in the entire company,” she tried.
“If it isn’t Miss Ruby,” Trent’s voice suddenly interrupted them.
There were several other co-workers with him, and for some reason, Calvin felt as though he was being told to buzz off from the pretty flower that was Ruby. Trent wore his emotions on his sleeve, and most of the time, those emotions were ‘Beat it, pipsqueak!’.
“Hi…” Ruby nearly squeaked before her voice gained an authoritative edge.
“You didn’t forget my name, did you?” the man suddenly spoke. “It’s Trent. We worked together two years ago before I quit and started working here.”
Calvin’s blood went cold, and for a second, he felt as though someone had just doused him with a bucket of cold water. ‘No familiar faces, huh…’
His eyes opened wide as he turned to Ruby. Her eyes quivered. She knew what was running through his mind. "My! What a surprise!"
Author's Note: Ouch! Not a good start for these two.
Bonus images here: