A Lady in Waiting 1

She wore the glow proudly. Not boasting, which would be wholly unnecessary, but just the utter sense of peace and contentment that nothing else mattered. They knew. They had a thousand questions, but they all boiled down, “Why you? Why not one of us?”
Her answer boiled down to, “If I told you, you’d never understand.” She admired the silver band on her finger for the hundredth time that morning and walked into the gym for her morning workout. It all happened so fast. Had it been only a week ago?
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No one would mistake him for a movie star. He was handsome enough, but it was more a matter of how he carried himself. It was self-confidence on a different level. Without domineering or demanding, it seemed as if he could have commanded any whim crossing his mind and people would jump. It was the presence he projected when he walked into the room.
He was the new guy, officially an unimportant nobody, hired on a peripheral contract. He had no office, nor was their any requirement, so no one had to make room for him. For that matter, his office was in his backpack, an aging but durable laptop. Someone back in the States had hired him to conduct surveys and write the reports no one else had time to do, reports that would be read by some oversight committee at some regulatory agency. The few in the admin offices who knew about his contract spoke as if he was simply a friend of someone important carrying out a make work mission. But this was hardly a choice assignment.
He flashed his badge to the head-count at the doorway, signed the register, then strolled nonchalantly down the serving line, picking out some of this and that. The food was always decent, adequate, but nothing to write home about. The cafeteria was the largest single open room on the installation, almost geographically dead center. Perhaps you could have dug through the facility archives and found out what it was originally, but it probably wasn’t any kind of dining facility, more like an industrial assembly line. Current operations never seemed to justify budgeting for refurbishing the place, not even so much as painting the bare concrete floor. But the staff kept it clean, the kitchen always smelled okay, so no one felt the need to pick through their food looking for inedible debris.
The place was used as an ad hoc meeting room when someone’s cramped office wouldn’t hold the bodies for a conference, so there were always extra tables. As he passed, a few of the friendlier workers greeted and welcomed him. He declined offers to join any of the groups, but took up one of the empty tables off to one side.
Among the folks at lunch today were some of the more socially active women you could find in any bunch of paper pushers working for the various government agencies sponsoring facilities like this. We’ve all seen the type: some divorced, some never married and all hungry for fresh meat. Three in particular tried to flirt with him. His expression was mild, almost friendly, but he never quite smiled at them. He answered with precious few words when he deemed it appropriate, but was largely uncommunicative. What he said suggested he really needed to spend time getting things set up for his work.
So at the small table alone, his food was on one side and the laptop was placed on the other. He divided his time between eating, drinking and poking at the computer. His eyes seldom left the screen or his food tray.