Office after 7 pm

She was resting, her feet on her desk. The door lock clicked, and she hurriedly put her feet down, when her officemate, Aya, came in. She said something in Japanese to her, but she didn't understand. She only caught the ending sound, "ka", and knew it was a question. So she said, "uh huh," not caring to understand what was asked. It was some phatic phrase anyway. Aya was with her boyfriend, an American graduate student in mechanical engineering. She had caught some glimpses of him before, but had very little idea what he looked like, for he never came in. She only knew that he was almost twice as tall as Aya. She heard that from someone else. That, however, didn't seem extraordinary to her. Rather, she would often wonder how people met and became lovers. Mechanical engineering and Japanese linguistics. They must have met at some party, or student club. For graduate students and teaching assistants, parties are clubs were luxuries.