I run up the stairs to the second floor duplex and jiggle the key in the loose lock. When I shove the door open, glad to hear the sound of the TV, I know my roomie’s home already.

“Pop the cork, quick, it’s starting in five minutes,” I shout at Tai, who I’ve been living with since I landed in San Francisco a year ago.

Our sacred ‘TGIF on Thursday night’ lounge-in is about to begin. We always save Thursday for each other mostly so the pre-weekend night is left free for any possible hook-ups. I’m happy the long-standing routine is still intact because with Tai you never know when anything will be upended. That was Tai’s idea because he always has a date for the weekend and it usually lasts the full thirty six hours. Me? Not so much.

“No need to shout,” he says, with the sound of a cork easing smoothly from its shaft with a relaxed suction. “I’m right here in the kitchen, in our splendid five hundred square foot loft living space.”

By loft he means cramped studio meant for one.

“Sorry. Man, there’s no better sound than the wine being opened on Thursday night,” I say, dropping my purse on the tiny stand meant for a single pot plant and crossing the three steps from the sofa to the beeping microwave. I open the door and tug the ballooned bag out.

“Oww, that’s hot,” I squeak when I pop the paper and the steam blasts out in a scorching exhalation.

“That’s the idea behind heating popcorn,” Tai laughs.

“Hot butter and steam though.”

“Don’t. You’re turning me on. I may not make it to my date with Mr MacHottest tomorrow.”

“Come on, it’s starting,” I urge, “final season, what will we do on Thursday?”

“We’ll find something else.”

“But it won’t be the she-wolf Olivia.”

“She’s screaming more than smoldering these days. And she’s developed a serious case of megalomania,” he tsks.

“Power corrupts,” I inform him, like I know the inside scoop on that. If only women could be like that irl, without being labeled a bitch.”

“Are you still having a rough time at LoxTek?” Tai asks, carrying two glasses to the coffee table then shimmying back to the counter to grab the bottle.

“Yeah,” I groan. I haven’t even filled Tai in on all of the nasties that happen to me at my heavily male-dominated geek office.

“You don’t know how lucky you have it. I’d kill to work in an all-man office.”

“I don’t think many of my colleagues play on your team.”

“Impossible to tell these days. The wardrobe of drag queen gear isn’t a given, you know?”

“I know, I didn’t mean it like that. They’re just so macho, but not in an alpha sense, just in their pointed disdain for ‘females’,” I complain.

“Come on it can’t really be that bad.”

I haven’t told Tai, because its just too embarrassing to be universally unattractive to an office full of young, presumably virile men. Some of them are even pretty hot, in a bearded nerdy kind of way.

“Can’t it?” I moan. I reach behind for my purse on the plant stand and pull out the package, still loosely gift-wrapped in the cheapest holly-covered paper. “We had our Secret Santa today.”

“Ooh, what did you get, show me? Is it a tiara?”

He fingers the odd-shaped gift then shakes off the paper and lets out a squeal.

“Why is it so small? Is that girly size?”

“Isn’t it the weirdest looking cock shape you’ve ever seen?” I laugh at how constantly obsessed with size he is. But Tai would know, having had so many more sexual partners than I have. The lurid pink thing is small but has a bulge halfway down. And a pair of fingers under the curve.

“That’s to give you a better filling, girl,” He says like a professor know-all. “After initial penetration. Ooh look, it lights up – I’d say regift me, but you probably already took it for a test drive in the washroom amirite?”

“Ewww,” I squeak, trying not to laugh and splutter my mouthful of butter flavor popcorn all over his lap. “I don’t masturbate at work, do you?”

“Er, yeh-esss. Like every other healthy member of the corporate race. What is wrong with you, Aura?”

“I wish I knew. My co-workers gave me that, all of them en masse. Cutter Dale was meant to be my secret Santa, but he came up to me after lunch and said they’d all chipped in to get me something they knew I needed.”

“A vibe?” Tai laughs. “Even your colleagues are letting you know you need to get laid.”

“Keep it at the office. For stress reduction,” Cutter said “You know when Mr Locksley is out. Or in and giving you a hard time.”

They all snickered at that. And my humiliation was totally because I thought they’d finally come around after months of smirking and innuendo. Me being the only girl in the office, they just made assumptions because there was definitely no reason behind them.

“So they still think you’re doing the boss?” Tai demands. “Is there something you aren’t telling me Aura?”

“No, eww, You know I hate that arrogant bastard. I could never, not if I were stranded on a desert island with him for ten years. Never , ever, ever.”

Tai examines my face like he’s a human lie-detector.

“All I can say is you must need your head examined,” he says, letting me off the surveillance. “Because your boss could examine me any day of the week, and I would pay to be stranded with him. Have you seen that rack?’

I laugh out loud at the way Tai creams over my boss. It used to be men talking about a woman’s rack around the office, so it feels somehow fair that the tables have been turned by women, and gay men.

“Shhh, it’s starting.”

We settle down for our ritual, leaning into each other on the small loveseat to watch our favorite shows over a bucket of popcorn and a bottle of cheap shiraz.

At least the fake butter flavor eradicates the iron tang of cheap wine. While Tai is engrossed in the show, drooling over a young gay man, playing the stay-at-home to an older president’s chief of staff, my mind won’t stop wandering to my personal chief. I didn’t get the chance to tell Tai about the ultimate culmination of my secret Santa humiliation today. Maybe I will during the commercial break, or maybe I’ll let that slide.

I’d sat at my desk staring at the lurid vibrator, too embarrassed to notice that my co-workers suddenly scattered. Instead of the leering faces surrounding me, I felt the vacancy as they suddenly retreated to their desks. Then pressure filled the room, squashing out the air as though a charismatic force had suddenly stalked in.

I looked up to see the rugged face of my boss, Milo Locksley looking down at me, or rather, at the candy pink rubber prick lying across my palm.

“Oh,” I squeaked. “I wasn’t expecting you to come,” A round of guffaws circled the open plan office – no cubicles at LoxTek.

Shit.

“Come back, I mean,” I stuttered on, digging myself a deeper chasm while my boss stared down at me. Was he trying to repress a grin? Or was it a scowl? Emotion could be hard to read on Milo’s gorgeous face.

Women must be genetically programmed to get wet for stunningly handsome men – the way girl peacocks are for the male when he fans his attractive colors for them. My boss sure knows how to open his plumage for a female. And it always makes me feel like a bumbling idiot on the inside. My mouth refuses to operate, becoming either an accelerator pedal gone soft, or else running away with itself. I can’t seem to focus on anything when Milo’s light fills the space around me.

“Is that an essential piece of equipment for your current project, Miss Johanssen?” He inquired sternly.

He had to do it. He couldn’t just ignore the embarrassing cock in my hand, still flashing purple, green and orange. I couldn’t find the way to make the thing shut off. The more I fooled around with it, looking for where the manufacturer had concealed the off switch, the more manly giggles flew around the room.

“This? Oh no, just a, a, gag gift, from my secret Santa. See?” I reached for the nasty giftwrap but it wasn’t there. I searched under the papers on my desk and under it in case it had fallen to the floor, but the evidence must have been snatched away.

“You’re getting the party started early?” Milo said.

“Me? No. I don’t think I can make it anyway. My, um my roommate has a thing. I said I’d go with him.”

Milo’s face collapsed into a glower at that.

“Attendance is mandatory,” he’d informed me. “This is your first, but you need to know, my office Christmas party is a vital bonding experience.”

Just like that he turned his back and walked into his loft-size office, kicking the door shut with his heel.