The Burp on the Call (Chapter 2) (Patreon)

I got the job the following Monday. I knew in the back of my head that I got the job but I didn’t want to jinx it by gloating, especially by thinking too much about Courtney. I actually jumped up and down in my living room after the official phone call. You can do shit like that when you live alone in a dingy third-floor apartment and not be judged. Courtney was the sole thing on my mind. Sure, I got to find the joy in working remotely, having good health benefits, dental, eye care, and a 401K; but I got to work with a mysterious woman whose voice sounded like a voluptuous, flirtatious goddess.

I have to admit it: I stalked her online. Just a little bit. After the interview, I looked everywhere on Facebook and Instagram for a certain “Courtney Esposito”. I came up with nothing. A dozen Courtneys later and none of them posted anything about cats or xxxHolic or Star Wars. I could not find a single confirmed image of her anywhere.

The mystery persisted.

The company had so many SOPs and guidelines for me to read. My first few weeks were pretty dull as I kept having to do these online “learning modules” about said SOPs and guidelines.  I wasn’t expected to ever go on-site but the data they collected from testing drugs was very, very, very confidential. I would have access to virtually everything, so I had to basically write my soul away promising that I would take the strictest security measures when accessing this data. Whenever someone had trouble logging in or moving things within the network or needed to delete something that they did not have permission to - I was there. I granted people access to programs they needed when they gave us “tickets”. And, if things went well in the future, I could move up into cybersecurity and test their security measures.

Once every Thursday I would have a meeting with Courtney, my boss Derrick, and the cyber security specialist Tim. Once a month we had a bigger meeting with virtually everyone in I.T.,  just updating each other on what was going on with the company in general. It was very lowkey and the meetings were brief. I caught onto the fact that Courtney was typically the first to arrive. I made it a habit to log on earlier so that there was a greater chance we could chat more before the meeting officially started.

Remote meetings are a thousand times more awkward than in-person.

People say bye suddenly and log off. Derrick sometimes asked questions and nobody said anything. Without faces to see (hardly anyone cared to show their face), it was difficult to tell how people were reacting.

I really wanted to talk more to Courtney when it was just the two of us. She would often leave herself idle until the meeting officially started, so there would be this painful awkward silence that dragged on. I wouldn’t be sure if she could hear me or not.

I tapped my legs thinking, C’mon Pat. Say something! You get to have a good ten minutes with a gorgeous female voice. A gorgeous female voice who can burp!

“You doing good?” I asked.

A pause. Then she went from idle to active.  “Yeah. Can’t complain.” Another pause. Then, “The best part of working from home of course is having one of my many cats sitting on my lap.”

“Oh, yeah. Heh. Which one is with you right now?”

“Poe.” She began talking to her cat in a cutesy voice. “Who’s the cutest black kitty? Whoooo’s the cutest black kitty? You are!”

“How long did you say you had them for?’

“Five years. I got them all from when they were babies. I went to my local animal shelter and they were having a ‘2 fur 1 deal’. Get it?”

“Yeah. That’s cute.”

“They all came from the same litter. So they are all siblings. They were all huddled together in one bin. I couldn’t just separate one from the other. They all had to come with me, clearly.”

“That’s so cute.” Goddamnit Pat, stop saying it’s cute. Can’t you think of anything else to say?

Too late. Derrick and Tim logged onto the call. I slumped back in my seat feeling defeated. We went straight to work talking about moving data from Somerville’s legacy drives to the new drives. Apparently a year before the pandemic, the Somerville site had a cyber attack from (presumably) China. The second it was detected, Derick literally ran from room to room yelling at everybody to disconnect their computers immediately. They contained the spread of the virus but there was still some compromised data that - to this day - they were carefully picking at slowly.

“Yeah,” Courtney said half-laughing, “that was a fun time. I still worked on-site then and I remember you running from room to room screaming ‘DISCONNECT RIGHT NOW! UNPLUG EVERYTHING!”

“And this was from China?” I asked.

“Oh yeah,” Derrick said. “Stuff like that is always around the corner. We think somebody just pressed a bad link in an email.”

Courtney stifled a laugh. “I still think it was Rob. He was never very tech-savvy. Poor guy. Old guy. Very sweet. But not very tech savvy.”

That made sense with all the annoying training modules I had to sit through for literally hours. There was a lot about reminding you to look out for phishing and social engineering from suspicious co-workers who might be working for other companies under the table. That’s the curse of an I.T. worker - having to deal with entire generations who do not know how to be cautious when reading a suspicious email. They always say there’s no such thing as a stupid question but by God we are asked many stupid questions. My last boss once asked me, “How do I download the YouTube program?”

“Somerville recently installed a new system to index their studies,” Derrick said. “So far only Courtney knows how to work it so she’s been bombarded with emails from people asking about why they can’t log in or what’s wrong with such-and-such feature. For this month, Pat, I’m gonna have you work with her so you know their system too. That way the load can be taken off her a bit and she can work on helping to inspect those corrupted drives from the cyberattack.”

My heart thumped. We were finally going to be working together.

“Sounds good,” I said. “When do we start?”

Courtney said, “I have time after we end this call. If that’s okay with you.”

I gulped. “S-sure! Yeah.”

I ran a hand through my hair. It was an instinctive quirk of mine whenever I knew I was going to see a girl. Funny I still did that despite the fact that we would be working remotely and not in-person.

We went through a number of other miscellaneous items before logging off. Courtney made a new voice chat room for the two of us. I sweated bullets as if I were physically in a room alone with her. It was a bad time to reflect on the fact that I hadn’t dated in a while and my game was off.

“Can you give me like ten minutes?” she said. “I gotta prepare my lunch.”

“Sure thing.”

Lunchtime: what a coincidence! I had lost track of time during the meeting. I whipped myself a burger in the meantime while having the laptop out in the kitchen. Strange thing - working from home. I flipped my burger as she was telling me in real-time how to use the Somerville site’s new index system.

The sound of oil crackling filled the kitchen.

“That sounds good whatever you’re making,” she said.

“Oh, just a burger.” I hesitated before asking, “What…are you having?”

I heard a bag crinkle. “Pork rinds.”

“Oh.”

She snorted. “Gross, right? I don’t know anyone who eats these within a thousand mile radius of me.”

“Is that your lunch though? I thought you were–”

“Oh, no, no. I made myself tacos. I just meant at the moment I’m having pork rinds.”

The bag crinkled loudly as she shot her hand inside and munched on a handful of them. After one loud gulp she continued my training. I soon finished cooking and sat at my living room table. I wasn’t paying attention to a word she was saying because I was fixated on the phrase “made myself tacos”. I wondered if she lived alone or with a roommate or with a significant other. Technically, cats could qualify as the latter two.

GgrrrRrrrGGGgrrrr.

A throat gurgle! Right before a burp was about to escape!

Courtney let out a deep, rumbling closed-mouth burp. Even though I couldn’t see her, I just knew what kind of burp it was. I could see her trying to hold it back and holding her mouth with her hand. A long urrrrrrraaaaap escaped her. Very deep, very rumbly.

“Whoo! Excuse me. Sorry. Anyway. So you click here to check if the study is finished or not.”

She went on as if it weren’t embarrassing at all. She maintained her professionalism and kept training me, moving through the awkward moment.

When she wanted to see if I understood by navigating the site, she hiccuped and held in another burp.

Say something, say something, Pat.

“You okay over there?” I said, half-chuckling.

“Yes, sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have meetings when I’m eating, haha.”

Okay…we’re getting somewhere. Don’t lose it. Don’t lose it, Pat!

“That’s alright. At least it’s just the two of us.”

No! That sounded weird. Why did you say that?!

Her prolonged silence as she watched me navigate the site through the screen share didn’t make me feel good at all. She sounded like she was tying up the bag of pork rinds when she said, “I gotta say, the quarantine has its pros and cons. On one hand I love spending more time with my cats and saving money from commuting. On the other hand, literally all I do now is sit and eat.”

I bit my lip. Ohhhhh shit. Here we go. We’re in! We’re officially in!

“Yeah, I feel you,” I said. I made up some shit. “I think I gained like…three pounds?”

Courtney sighed. “All my jeans are literally so tight now. Soon I’m going to be wearing just sweatpants all the time.”

What the hell do I say to that though? “Me too”? I feel weird saying that. I don’t like to acknowledge when I myself am bloated or gassy.

“Where do you live?” I blurted. “Are you able to walk around a bit?”

I cringed. I didn’t want to come off as “that guy” who always suggested his girl try to lose weight. I just wanted to prolong the conversation as much as I could around this topic without giving off a scent that I was into any of it. She read manga; she probably had some notion of the seedy underbelly of crazy and wild kinks. Or maybe she didn’t. I couldn’t tell.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “There’s a park across from my apartment here. I try to walk every now and then. But there’s actually been a smog warning lately and it was really bad yesterday. I have asthma and I was coughing like crazy after walking. Can’t stay indoors because you’ll get fat and lazy but can’t go outdoors now either because it’s deadly to your skin and lungs. The world is fucked, isn’t it?”

Oooo, nice, first curse word. What’s it been now, like almost a month?

“Sure is. Like the world is ending.” A good question popped into my head. “If it were to end right now, what would you do?”

“Oh God,” she said. “I’d end this call right away. No offense, haha!”

“None taken. I’d do the same. And promptly quit.”

“Same, same. Maybe I shouldn’t say that too much. Never know if they’re listening.”

“Oh God, do they do that?”

She laughed. “Nah. Be right back though.”

“Sure thing.”

I heard Courtney walk around her wooden floorboards. One of her cats meowed as a response and her distant voice said, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll be right back.”

I stood idly in my kitchen.

Even though I was alone, I looked left and right and started touching myself.

I had placed Scotch tape on my work laptop’s webcam - just in case any higher-ups ever decided to really check in and see that I was there.

I often wondered how many people secretly masturbated during these remote meetings. Probably a lot more than we would like to think. I would think that many would even fiercely deny it. Come on. They give you so much free reign that how could you NOT be curious and touch yourself at least once during a remote meeting?

I stopped when I heard Courtney move around her floorboards. She cooed at her cats and fed them. I heard the faint sound of dry food being poured. She walked around some more, and then - very audibly - she let out a belch from another room that nearly vibrated my headset. I gasped but clutched my mouth.

Holy shit. That was no mere burp. That wasn’t an “Oops! I burped!” kind of burp; that was the sound of a woman who held nothing back, the sound of a woman who was probably known in her friend circle as the best belcher. She even sighed aloud after letting it go.

My heart raced and I stood there frozen.

“Allllright, back!”

Silence.

“You still there?”

She clearly didn’t realize that she had not been muted…or maybe she didn’t think I could have heard her. Either way, I was speechless.

“Pat?”

“Yeah! Hey, sorry. I was watering my plants.”

“You’re a green thumb too? I have like a thousand plants in my apartment.”

“Not really. I just have a…little tomato plant dying on the windowsill. Don’t think it’ll last much longer. It was a brief stint at gardening I tried when I was unemployed.”

“You really do wear a lot of hats. You said you draw, right?”

“Errr. Yeah.”

“Cool. Do you have your art somewhere online? People do that now.”

I cringed; images of fart porn flashed through my memory. “Nah. I don’t have anything online. It’s more of a hobby.”

“Well, I’d be curious to see it one day.”

The way she said that sounded so sexy that I could have sworn she was hitting on me. With me rendered speechless again, she said, “Pat? You there?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“I think we’ve done enough for the day. It’s a pretty simple system to know. If you have any questions you can ask me.”

“Cool cool. Just on like Teams or something?”

“Yeah. I’m available all the time. Don’t worry. It’s just me and my cats here.”

“Cool. You and your cats.” I paused, thinking how to wrench out explicit information about her relationship status without sounding obvious. “They’re like your roommates then?”

“Oh definitely. Just me and my cats.”

She sounded single…

Right?