Part 9
Samy's POV
Next day I walked into the office expecting Sid to be already in, he usually came in by 7 AM.
Having Sid's cube close to my office increased the time of my morning routine by few minutes as I had to make sure to look good. I blamed Sid for it as I had to wake up much earlier to be in office on time.
"Oh yeah! Blame him for everything ..", my inner voice shouted.
"Ofcourse I will", I countered, "if not for his stupid actions, we would have been married and I would have been kissing him good morning. Stupid!" I shouted back to myself walking by his cube and slammed my office door, hoping the idiot would understand my pain.
I sat in my chair and looked at him through the glass panel. If I was burning earlier, after looking at him, I was literally on fire - look at him, laughing and smiling, talking on phone with someone.
He was enjoying life and I was stuck on him. I felt like barging into his cube, yank the phone from his hands and bash him with it, till he begged for my forgiveness.
Just then I saw our PR manager Mr Manik come towards my office. When it comes to PR, one would expect a young person, usually a female, represent the company, specially for a young industry like Information Technology, but in our case it was Mr Manik, almost 65 years old, baldy with a bad case of hearing. However he was very dedicated and effective in his job.
Once every three months, Manik attended technical conferences and usually requested someone from my team to accompany him. As time went on, it became clear to everyone that it was virtually torture to spend a day with him and I had to literally force people to volunteer.
I decided to take out my anger on Sid by sending him out with Manik. As Manik approached my office, I stepped out and introduced him to Sid.
"Sid, I am volunteering your services for the day to Manik. Please represent our team." I tried to keep my voice as casual as possible, suppressing the laughter inside, as my best buddy Uma approached us from the other side.
"Sure, no problem." Sid replied, leaving with Manik.
"Samy .. poor guy .. why do you hate him so much ... hmm .. poor sacrificial lamb." Uma lectured me watching Sid leave with Manik.
"What! .. If you want to save him by volunteering .. be my guest. " I countered, glaring at her insinuations.
"Hmm .. better him than me. Lucky you - you have a bunch of new employees to sacrifice." She patted my shoulder walking away.
"Keep an eye on him when he returns back. I am leaving early today." I told her going back into my office. With Sid not around for rest of the day, I had a distraction free work day ahead of me.
Later in the evening Uma called me at home.
"Samy .. lucky you went home early. Sid came back in the evening and rushed into your office. Seeing you already left, he slammed the door and rushed out. He looked very frustated and angry. Better be careful tomorrow."
"Thanks for the heads up Uma." I thanked her and disconnected.
Next day Sid tried to talk to me a few times, but each time he knocked on the door, I acted as if I was busy and sent him away. I needed him to cool down.
After two days, he looked more calm, seemed to get over the incident and stopped bothering me the next few days.
It was Friday again and I had a series of meetings with clients lined up. I was so caught up in the meetings that I missed my regular ten o'clock coffee break. I was finishing a status email for a client, when I heard a knock on the office door.
"Come in" I shouted without looking at the door.
"Coffee for you" Sid placed the Starbucks Coffee in front of me.
"What is this?" I asked him even though it was apparent to me that he brought me coffee. It was what I could think of to ignore the butterflies in my stomach.
"Oh! I saw you have been very busy since morning and even missed your coffee break, so I brought you one. Me and some guys went to Starbucks."
"Aww ..so sweet", I thought, as my heart did somersaults realizing he was keeping track of me and cared about me.
"Mr Sid, I don't like to be patronized. You don't have to bring me coffee. I wasn't planning on drinking coffee today, so skipped my break." I replied, trying to sound serious, shutting down the urge to jump and hug him.
"Oh sorry! I was just trying to be helpful." He bent forward to take back the coffee cup.
"How dare he?", I thought and slapped his hand away. "Its okay, I don't want to waste your effort."
"Okay then", he had a big smile on his face. Not sure because I touched him or agreed to have the coffee.
"Sid .." I called as he turned to leave. "Please don't take this personally, I want everyone to behave professionally all the time and not give others a chance to point fingers at us. Please don't ever buy me coffee unless I ask for it. Thank you."
The moment he left the room, I kicked back my chair, picked up the coffee and started savoring it. It was my favorite - he remembered. I felt bad for shouting at him, as I was enjoying the coffee, drowning in warm and fuzzy feeling it was generating.
Later in the afternoon, I was in a meeting with a vendor, discussing their new monitoring tools and benefits of deploying the same across our client base.
After technical discussions, they wanted to show us a demo of the product, for which I invited rest of team into the conference room.
As there was limited seating, many of the team members had to stand and the soon the room was full. In spite of the crowd, from a corner of my vision, my eyes registered Sid's entry as the doors of the conference room closed. He moved towards corner of room, behind me, as the introductory speeches started.
After the speeches, the lights were shutoff for the presentation. A few seconds after the lights went out, the alarm bells in my heart went off as my senses picked up a familiar scent, the one which makes my heart race and turns my insides to jelly.
"He was in a corner - how did he end up behind my back?", I questioned myself.
"Ahh! The things people do for love." My inner voice answered, always making fun of me.
"Shutup! Concentrate on the presentation." I chided my inner voice. I knew he was standing right behind my chair, with his hand resting on the top of the chair, close to my neck.
I had to use all my self control to stop me from pushing my head back and hitting him. Though I was facing the presentation screen in front of me, every cell in my body turned in the opposite direction, itching to touch him.
I lost track of the presentation as I felt his hand move lightly towards me and graze my neck, sending electric shocks through my body. In fact I wasn't even sure, if he actually touched me or I imagined it as my senses got corrupted and the line between reality and imagination got blurred.
I was a total mess, when the lights came on suddenly after the presentation ended. Everyone turned towards me as I was supposed to give the closing remarks.
Luckily I was prepared for it and had it written down. I managed to mumble the words and bolted towards the rest room.
It was 4 PM, I turned my head just in time and saw Sid pick his backpack and leave. I was angry at him and annoyed with my body for making me so uncomfortable at the presentation. Also I wasn't happy with him leaving at 4 PM daily, when rest of the team hung around till six pm. I already discussed the issue with his team lead and let my displeasure known.
Around five pm that day, all hell broke loose. We had a major issue with one of the production systems at a major client. It was a severity one issue and I ordered all hands on deck to resolve the issue and bring back the systems online. I stayed back to make sure we had the required resources working on the issue.
Around nine pm, I had a technical review meeting with the tech leads to discuss the problem as the systems were still down.
"Samy, we have done everything we could and would continue the effort into night, but I think we need Sid's help to get to the bottom of this issue." Kishore, the team lead for the project requested.
I looked at Arvind, who was the team lead for Sid. Though it was not their project having the issue, I wanted all senior resources to work on the issue in case of Severity one issues.
"I have been trying to contact him, but he is not answering his phone." He replied.
"Ok, keep working on the issue and I will try to get Sid. I am leaving now, but keep sending the updates to me." I took my bag and walked to the car park.
I knew, I still had his number in my phone. In fact it was etched in my memory. I dialed his number and as Anil said, it went to his voice mail.
After that I kept on trying every five minutes and each time, it made me more angry and frustated. I couldn't understand where he was and what he was doing. It was Friday night and all i could imagine was negative thoughts about his whereabouts. On the other hand we were loosing time.
Finally around 11 pm, he picked up of the phone.
"Samy! Are you ok? Sorry, I was away from my phone." He sounded worried.
"Sid, we have an emergency at office and I need you to work on it." I replied controlling my anger.
"I will take a look at it tomorrow morning."
"No Sid, I want you to work on it now."
"Samy, I am tired right now. I don't think I can work on the issue."
"Sid, I don't care. It is one of our biggest client and I need you to work on this."
"Samy, I had a long day. I am drunk and tired. Don't you have other people who can look into it? Please hold it till morning and I promise I will look into it."
"No Sid, you have to work on it else there will be consequences. I know it is not your project, but we need your help and no matter what, you need to look into the issue."
After a long moment of silence, he said "ok" and disconnected.
I called Kishore and told him Sid will be joining the troubleshooting efforts soon.
I couldn't sleep and kept on watching the status emails. Finally around eleven thirty pm, Kishore sent email stating Sid reached office and started looking into the issue.
I kept on waking every half hour and checked my emails regarding progress on the issue. Around five in the morning, Sid fixed the issue and at five fifteen an all clear message was sent out.
At five thirty the operations group at the client site confirmed the fix and all systems were green.
I called Kishore to thank him and Sid, but Sid already left the site. Kishore informed me that Sid worked all through the night and fixed the code and if not for him, they would still be struggling.
I felt proud about my man and decided to do something special to make up for my earlier outburst. I closed my eyes and drifted to sleep, giving the dreamboy free rein over my body.
I woke up late, finished lunch and went back to sleep again. I heard the phone ringing a few times, it was unknown number. So I ignored it and went back to sleep.
I woke up again at four pm and went downstairs.
"Drink it hot honey, you will feel better." my mom handed me coffee.
I checked my phone and had few missed calls from unknown number. I called the number.
"Hi my name is Samantha .. I have missed calls from this number"
"Oh hi .. do you know anyone called Siddharth?"
"Yes, may I know what this is about?"
"I am calling from Apollo hospital. He got into an accident today early morning. His phone broke and is showing only this number, the last call it got."
I dropped the coffee and stood up.
"How is he?" I managed to speak, holding my chest. The pain was unbearable.
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