The holiday party at our office is a sad little event. Rented room on the fourth floor, one bartender who looks like he’s doing community service, a cheese platter that has been sweating since five, and a white-elephant gift exchange where somebody always steals the good candle and somebody always cries about it.
I went because Simone said she was going.
That’s the embarrassing truth. Not out loud, obviously. What I said out loud, to the whole row of cubicles, was that attendance was “kind of expected,” and I put on the good shirt, the dark green one that fits across the shoulders, and told myself it was about the team.
Simone sits two desks down from me. Accounts. She has the loudest laugh on the floor and a way of sitting sideways in her chair with one leg tucked up that makes it hard to remember what I’m doing. For about a year we’d been doing this thing. A joke here, a pointed look across the break room, her stealing my pen and returning it with the cap chewed. Nothing ever happened. We’d both gone home to our own apartments every night, as God intended, and I’d lie there and think about her laugh.
She showed up to the party in a black dress with sleeves that stopped at the elbow and a neckline that made me look at a framed motivational poster for a really long time.
“Don’t,” she said, appearing beside me with two plastic cups of something pink. “Don’t say it.”
“Say what?”
“That I look different. Everyone’s been saying it. Gary from legal said I ‘cleaned up nice.’ I wanted to put his face in the cheese.”
“You look the same,” I said. “You look exactly like yourself.”
She stopped. Took a sip. “That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said all night.”
“It’s a low bar. Gary’s the competition.”
“Gary is the floor.” She handed me a cup. “Here. It’s punch. It’s mostly sadness and ginger ale.”
We drank the punch. We watched the white-elephant, a woman from HR stealing a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST BOSS and a guy from the loading dock getting a candle and being so happy about it that the whole room applauded. Simone leaned in to say something in my ear and her hair brushed my jaw and I forgot the entire sentence. She smelled like pears. I have never recovered from pears.
By nine the party had thinned. The bartender had started stacking chairs with a sort of grim dignity. People were calling rideshares and hugging in the elevator lobby, doing that overlong office hug where you don’t know where to put your hands. I stood by the coat rack looking for mine, and Simone was suddenly next to me with her coat over her arm, not putting it on.
“I left something at my desk,” she said.
“What did you leave?”
“I don’t know yet.” She looked at me. “I’ll have to go look.”
I have never been so aware of my own pulse.
“I’ll walk you,” I said.
“That would be chivalrous.”
“I’m known for it.”
We took the stairs, not the elevator, because the elevator lobby was full of people from sales, and because the stairwell was the kind of place where you could talk. It echoed. Our footsteps went down a flight and across a landing and up a hall to the third floor, and the door at the end swung open to the bullpen, all dark, hundreds of monitors black, the emergency lights making everything look underwater. The HVAC hummed. Somewhere a printer made a tiny sad noise.
Simone walked through the cubicle maze like she owned it. I followed. She reached her desk, put her coat down on the chair, and turned around, leaning against the edge with her hands flat behind her.
“So,” she said. “I didn’t leave anything.”
“I figured.”
“I wanted to see if you’d come.”
“I would have come to the roof.”
Her mouth twitched. “I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.”
“Define a long time.”
“The offsite. The thing in March where we got stuck in the van.”
“That was March.”
“I know. I counted.”
I laughed, but it wasn’t really a laugh. It was the sound of a man losing his composure in a poorly lit room. I crossed the distance between our desks in about four steps, and I stopped right in front of her, close enough to smell the pears, and said, “Simone.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I kiss you?”
“God,” she said. “Yes. Please. I’ve been waiting for you to ask.”
I put my hand on her jaw and kissed her.
It wasn’t graceful. We’d both had punch and nerves, and our noses bumped, and she laughed into my mouth and then stopped laughing because I kissed her again and she kissed me back like she was starving. Her hands went into my hair. My hand went down her back and found the zipper of her dress and stopped there.
“Is this okay?” I whispered.
“It’s more than okay. If you stop I’ll throw a stapler at you.”
“Understood.”
I pulled the zipper down. Slowly, an inch at a time, and she shivered with every inch, and under it was bare skin and the strap of a plain black bra and the line of her spine, and I put my mouth on her shoulder and she dropped her head back. The dress slid off her arms and pooled on the carpet. She stepped out of it in her heels, in her underwear, in the glow of a dead monitor and the red EXIT sign down the hall.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Now you.”
“I’m in a lot of clothing.”
“I’m aware. It’s an injustice.”
She went for my shirt, the good green one, and had it unbuttoned in about a minute and a half, with a competence that told me she’d thought about doing this. Her palms flattened on my chest. I was already hard, pressing against my slacks, and she felt it when she leaned in and bit her lip. “Wow,” she said. “Okay. Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Is that for me?”
“It’s been for you since March.”
She undid my belt. I lifted her onto the edge of her desk, which was clear except for a stress ball and a stapler (the stapler, I noted, had been moved nearer to her hand), and she wrapped her legs around me and pulled me in, and we kissed there for a while, grinding, panting, my hands on her thighs, her heels digging into the backs of my legs.
“I need to tell you what I want,” she said, between kisses.
“Please.”
“I want your mouth first. Then I want you inside me. And I want it fast, because I don’t trust the building.”
“The building?”
“Security does a walk-through at ten.”
“What time is it?”
“Nine forty.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“So we have time. We have a plan. Get on your knees, Gabe.”
I got on my knees on the thin office carpet. It smelled like dust and old coffee, and I didn’t care, because she hooked one leg over my shoulder and I hooked a finger in her underwear and dragged it aside. She was already wet. I could see it, glistening in the red glow of the EXIT sign, and I put my mouth on her pussy and she gasped, one hand slapping flat on the desk and the stapler skittering off to the floor. She tasted clean and a little sweet. I didn’t stop. I licked her slow and then less slow, listening to her breath, learning, because she was giving me everything to learn from: her thighs tightening when I used my tongue flat, a harsh little “there, there” when I found the spot just left of her clit, her fingers twisting in my hair.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered. “Don’t, don’t — oh, my God, you’re good at this.”
“I’ve had a year to think about it.”
“You’re so good —”
I sucked her clit between my lips and flicked it with the tip of my tongue, and she rolled her hips against my face, grinding, soaking my chin. I slid two fingers inside her, curling them, and her pussy gripped them, slick and hot. I fucked her with my fingers while I licked, in and out, in time with her breathing, and she came apart in a few more strokes, a quick, startled climb and a hard shudder, her hand clamped over her own mouth to keep the sound down in an empty office. I felt her pulse around my fingers, felt the wet run down to my palm. I kept licking until she tapped my shoulder, panting, and said “okay, okay, stop, too much.”
I stopped. I sat back on my heels and wiped my mouth. She was flushed to the collarbone, her hair a disaster, the bra slipped, a little bead of sweat in the dip of her throat. She looked at me like she was seeing me for the first time.
“Come up here,” she said. “I’m not done. I’m barely started.”
I stood. She slid her hand into my open pants and pulled my cock out, and stroked me, once, twice, from base to tip with her palm, her thumb rubbing the pre-cum around the head, and my knees nearly went. “You have a condom?” she asked.
“In my wallet. I’m — it’s been there since a long time ago. Probably expired.”
“Check.”
I checked. It had not expired, which felt like a small miracle. She slid off the desk, and before I could say a word she dropped to her knees on the same carpet, looked up at me, and licked the length of my cock. “Thirty seconds,” she said. “For luck.” She sucked the head into her mouth, hollowed her cheeks, took me halfway down her throat, and I grabbed the edge of the desk to stay upright, swearing in a whisper. She pulled off with a wet sound, a string of spit on her lips, and grinned. Then she rolled the condom on me herself, her fingers quick and sure, stood, turned around, and bent over her own desk.
“Like this,” she said, looking back at me over her shoulder, her ass in the air, her dress in a puddle at her feet. “From behind. I want to see the monitor go dark while you fuck me.”
I pushed her underwear down her thighs, held her hips, and slid inside.
She made a sound like a held breath finally let out. I went slow, her pussy stretching around my cock, the heat of her tight and slick, until I was buried to the balls, and then she said “all of it” and I gave her all of it. We stayed like that for a second, shaking. It was the most real thing that had happened to me in months.
Then I moved. The desk creaked. The stress ball rolled off and bounced silently on the carpet. I pulled almost all the way out and thrust back in, and her heels scraped the floor, and she dug her nails into the blotter. “Harder,” she said, “I want to feel it tomorrow,” and I fucked her harder, deep and steady, my hips slapping against her ass, the monitor wobbling in front of her, her breath coming in short hot bursts. I reached around, found her clit with two fingers, and rubbed tight little circles.
“Gabe. Gabe. Gabe.”
“I’ve got you.”
“I know. I know you do.”
I fucked her faster, watching my cock slide in and out of her, glossy with her wetness, and her ass shook with every thrust. She turned her face and I kissed her, sloppy, and she gasped into my mouth and said “turn me around, I want to see you.” I pulled out and she hopped back up on the desk, spread her thighs, and I pushed back in, her legs locked around my waist, my forehead on hers. I looked down at the place where we joined, and then up at her face, her eyes half closed, her mouth open, her chin tipped back, and I knew I wasn’t going to last. I told her. She said “good, come, I want to feel you,” and she slid a hand between us to touch herself, and in a few strokes she tightened around my cock again, a long clench, her cunt pulsing, her whole body going taut, and she bit down on my shoulder through the good green shirt to stifle her cry.
That did it. I thrust deep and came with a groan I tried to swallow, my face in her neck, cock jerking inside her, load after load into the condom, hips stuttering, hanging on to the edge of the desk like it was a ship’s rail. She held me. She kept her legs around me until the last shiver had passed, until I was just breathing, big breaths, in the dark.
We stayed like that. Maybe a minute. Somewhere far off, an elevator pinged.
“Was that security?” I whispered.
“That was the elevator.”
“Is security coming?”
“Probably.” She pulled back to look at me, grinning, lipstick smeared, and started to laugh. “Oh my God. Your shirt.”
“What about it?”
“I bit it. There’s — it’s wet. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll wear it as a trophy.”
We dressed in a hurry, in the half-dark, giggling. I couldn’t find one of her earrings. She found my belt on the carpet under her chair. She zipped up the dress herself and then turned and made me do the hook at the top, my fingers shaking, and I kissed the back of her neck, right at the hairline, and felt her smile.
At the elevator lobby, which was empty now, she pressed the down button and leaned against the wall and said, casually, “I’m hungry.”
“For what?”
“Anything. There’s a diner on Delancey that stays open. They do eggs all night.”
“Are you asking me to breakfast at ten o’clock?”
“I’m asking you to a late dinner, Gabe. Try to keep up.”
The doors opened. The elevator was bright and mirrored, and we stepped in and stood side by side, looking at the two of us. Hair a mess. Her lipstick gone. My shirt buttoned one hole wrong. We both started laughing at the exact same time.
“We look like we got caught in a hedge,” she said.
“We look like we had a very nice holiday party.”
She took my hand. Her fingers laced into mine, simple, warm, and she leaned her head on my shoulder as the numbers counted down.
“You can steal my pen again on Monday,” I said.
“Oh, I plan to.”
“I’ll let you.”
“You’ve always let me,” Simone said, and the doors opened on the lobby, and the night guard looked up from his crossword, saw our faces, and very kindly decided not to see anything at all.
