In which it turns out that all is not quite what it seems

Today was a beautiful day, and with the bank holiday weekend almost upon us, my team decided to treat ourselves to lunch in the sunshine. Wandering back to the office with two of my colleagues, the conversation turned to the colleague who (unbeknown to them) recently asked me out, and the fact that he is dating my schoolfriend.

"Really?" questioned my brunette colleague. "He's seeing someone?"

"Mmm," I responded with forced nonchalance. "It's early days, but he seems to like her. I think he cooked her dinner the other night."

Brunette raised her eyebrows and replied, slightly frostily, that she supposed that it was a good thing he was looking outside of the office for once.

Obviously, my interest was piqued, so I questioned this. "Ooh, no-one you know," replied Brunette, who has worked at The PR Agency for a lot longer than me. "I think he had a thing with someone who left last year, and, well... we did exchange a couple of emails."

I glanced at her but she was staring pointedly ahead. "Um..." I ventured. "I exchanged a couple of emails with him too." Now Brunette looked round, so I continued with a wry smile, "He asked me out."

"He asked me out!" said Brunette, looking surprised.

Now I wondered what I'd gotten into, so I quickly explained that he'd cancelled on me. "He's cancelled on me five times!" said Brunette, now starting to laugh. Just as we thought it could get worse, our companion chimed in, "He hit on me too."

Brunette and I both turned to stare at Blonde, who is married! "We went for lunch," she continued, "and afterwards he emailed saying he knew it was inappropriate, but he thinks I'm really great."

By this point we were all in stitches. "He sent me that same email!" I squealed. "But without the bit about it being inappropriate!"

"He's probably got a template set up in Outlook!" laughed Brunette, and we all dissolved into fits of giggles.

Further investigation suggests that he's been 'involved' with Brunette the longest, with Blonde coming in a couple of months ago and me most recently. We haven't checked the dates exactly, but it seems there may have been some cross-over between Brunette and I - it's not impossible that he was emailing us on the same days. We've decided to put out a few feelers and see if anyone else has been in any way involved - it seems likely, don't you think?! You have to have a grudging respect for him really. He's been putting a lot of trust in the idea that we won't talk to each other about it... either that or, as Forces Wife suggested, he's completely shameless!

The gentleman in question is leaving work in a couple of months, so we have plenty of time to plot our revenge. We'd like to bring to his attention the fact that he's been caught out... and preferably in a fairly public way! As he's dating someone, we don't want to go down the obvious route of asking him out and then all turning up, in a John Tucker Must Die type scenario, but we've got plenty of time to think of an alternative... and if you have any ideas, I would love to hear from you!