Not Your Fairy Godmother

0 - Dinner for Three

In a cozy corner of Hatter Street was a nice quaint little restaurant where a tall, affable looking man sat at a table. He was nervous. This was a second date with a woman he sort of liked and he wanted to make a good impression.

Noah Raleigh working in the graphics department of a software firm where Matilda Merryweather was a Business Analyst. Her job involved a lot of research, a lot of client side interviewing and a lot of arguments with the development team about how the features in their software product were to be made.

She was a scary woman, especially to someone as sensitive natured as Noah. She was curt and cutthroat and known for her sharp tongue and even sharper suits. Her suits were the subject of much debate, she wore them all the time like a uniform. It had propagated an assumption that she may not prefer men.

But the more dominant assumption was that she preferred no one at all. Seeing as she never was seen in any romantic entanglements.

There were also another rumor; that she was having an affair with her good friend, the incredibly handsome and popular Sebastian Spencer. This Noah knew to be false since Sebastian had been seen dating another woman from the office and his conversations with Matilda had more "Bro!" and "Dude!" than a fraternity reunion.

She was also rumored to be a vampire since she worked late into the night and came in very early to "avoid the sun, obviously," as one colleague had put it. There was also the issue with her birthday. HR had informed the nosy Kelly that they would not be giving out her birth date since she had requested it be kept confidential. What made it weirder that even Sebastian didn't appear to know what the date was.

"Yeah she's weird about her birthday." Sebastian had said, "I dunno, maybe it's a weird date or whatever. Me and the gang usually just celebrate it on a Friday the 13th. She likes that."

"It's to hide that she's a hundred years old!" someone in the office had reasoned at a later discussion, "She's definitely a vampire. She even dresses like one."

Many had agreed with that assessment, but Jeff the Janitor insisted they were all wrong. "She's a witch, not a vampire," the man had said claiming he had seen her levitating some heavy boxes to her desk but then again, Jeff also insinuated that he was a medieval Knight who was reborn as a janitor for abandoning his knightly duties so his word could not be taken seriously.

Still, Noah had found he liked Matilda despite her tough behavior. He respected her dedication to her work, seeing how she spent hours on her computer without a break, punching her back that ached from all of that sitting.

He had also seen how helpful she was to people who weren't even in her department. Like the time the snobbish Savannah in marketing had broken down crying when her rich father had cut off her credit card because she needed to learn how to fend for herself.

"How am I supposed to go to Milan now?" the woman had wailed. Everyone else had snickered. Matilda had put her arm around Savannah and empathetically told her she could simply discuss her problems with her father and that it wasn't the end of the world.

"He's your dad. He won't actually abandon you. He just wants you to act more maturely." She had said.

Noah reasoned that she was secretly a very gentle person who only had a spiky exterior. But that may just have been wishful thinking. A thinking he had accidentally blurted out to his work friends who had inevitably howled at his assumptions and challenged his manhood, saying that he did not have the guts to even ask her out for a drink.

Noah wasn't one to worry about his manhood, he knew that kind of thinking was useless. But all of the girls from the office were also watching and he didn't want them to think him a coward. So he had walked up to the scary looking suited woman as she frowned to her computer screen and typed away furiously.