Sitting at her desk, frustrated, Kate Argent snapped a pencil in two. It had been a frustrating day, the end of a frustrating week, and the bickering she was involved in would ensure that she was heading for an equally frustrating weekend.
At the desk opposite her, Carrie Grant looked up and glared at her. There was tension in the air, and the row which had been simmering all week came one step closer to erupting. Which was totally out of character, because the two women were close friends, lovers, and business partners who owned and ran a thriving little employment agency for hotel and catering staff in the Midlands. They had been hard at work all week, finding and placing staff in hotels and restaurants which were gearing up for the summer holiday season, and late that Friday afternoon was the first time that both had been off their phones at the same time.
Physically, the two women, both on the cusp of their forties, were very different.
Kate was tall and slim, with dark curly hair flowing loose around her head, full lips, and dark brown eyes with long eyelashes which hid behind large, heavy-framed glasses. Regular sessions at the local fitness centre had endowed her with a flat abdomen, finely muscled limbs, and a delightfully tight rump. At work, she like to dress in a tailored trouser suit with a white shirt and polished low-heeled black pumps. She wore very little make-up, and her fingernails were short and neatly trimmed.
Carrie was a good four inches shorter, a neatly coiffed blonde with electric blue eyes, finely drawn lips, and a peaches-and-cream complexion. She was not overweight, but her skeleton was more generously fleshed than Kate's, and she attended yoga and Taiichi classes to stay in shape. Her office wear was more feminine: she chose skirt-and-blouse combinations with a cashmere cardigan, and she wore stilettos to give her more height. She liked a touch of lipstick and eyeliner and indulged in a regular mani-pedi.
However, they were totally compatible: physically, mentally, professionally.
Their compatibility had come at a price. Both had grown up unhappy, Kate in a house with a drunk stepfather who beat her mother, Carrie in a hyper-religious home where the Church could do wrong, and where her complaints about being abused by a church warden were dismissed by her parents as wicked lies. They had survived their childhoods, and had discovered their sexuality at university, where they had also found each other.
The campus was predominantly male, and overtly heterosexual, and twenty years ago, their sexual preferences had been viewed with suspicion, if not open hostility. This served to strengthen their commitment to each other, and to look for ways to support female empowerment. They had both got jobs in hotel management after graduating, and had put up with male dominance and blatant sexual harassment for ten years before leaving to set up their employment agency.
Because most of the decision-makers in the industry were middle-aged males, they continued to struggle with the undertones of male chauvinism, but in their personal lives they avoided heterosexual males wherever possible. All their service providers -- hairdresser, plumber, electrician, painter and decorator, builder -- were women, and apart from a few gay men, their social circle consisted of women, nearly all of whom were single, divorced or in a lesbian relationship.
They were quite happy to share the heavy workload of running a demanding business in a volatile service industry, and to then go home and make passionate love after eating a freshly cooked meal and drinking a bottle of wine, but their pet hate was housework. Like husbands in the dark ages, they both wanted a tidy, well-organised home, but did not want to do the work to achieve that.
They had tried to get around the problem by employing a succession of au pairs, but it had not gone well. Some of the girls had been embarrassed about living in a house with two women who slept together, and one or two had tried to take advantage of what they perceived to be the women's vulnerability. The activities of the latest au pair had come to crisis point the previous week.
"Fine. Okay. Granted, I may have gone a bit too far last week," Kate burst out, continuing a quarrel which had lapsed while they dealt with a succession of phone calls. "But let's face it, she had it coming. She has been a total waste of space ever since she got here, and..."
"A bit too far?" Carrie retorted. "Yanking the girl across your knee, pulling down her panties, and smacking her bare bottom with the back of a clothes brush, was a lot more than a bit too far. We're lucky she didn't go straight to the police. As it was, I had to pay her till the end of the month and put her in an uber to the airport on our account. And now we're in a mess..."
"Well, she deserved it. And god did I enjoy doing it! There's nothing like smacking a naughty bottom to get the juices flowing."
"I know, and I enjoyed watching you do it. And I'd have joined in myself, but one of us had to be sensible. We could have got into a lot of trouble..."
"She'd been drinking our vodka for weeks and topping up the bottle with water. And she's been using our body lotion and shampoo. And she never hoovered under the furniture. And she used to pinch money from the shopping. And..."
"Yes, yes, she was a bitch, but that doesn't help, does it? The house is a mess, there's no shopping done, she was supposed to do the laundry today, and now we'll have to do it. And god knows where we'll find another girl. They're all so bloody useless..."
Kate held up a placatory hand. "I know my love, and I'll do my share. We won't go to Alli's do tonight. It's a pity that girl didn't just accept the smacked bottom and buck her ideas up. We could both have helped her be a much better au pair and had some fun doing it!"
Carrie calmed down and laughed. "Yeah, bottom smacking as an educational technique for domestic science! Wouldn't that be a laugh!"
They were calming themselves into a state of resignation, when a third voice piped up.
"I'd be happy to come and work for you."
The interruption took both women by surprise. They had thought that they were alone in their office, but they weren't. Their office accommodation was modest: a shop window opening onto the High Street, with a small waiting area in front. At the back, behind a few artistically arranged potted palms, Kate and Carrie each had a desk with a visitor's chair between them. Seated at their desks, they could not see who was sitting in the waiting area on the other side of the palms, and they had quite forgotten the young man who had come in an hour earlier, to enquire about a position as a hotel domestic.
"Oh gosh, sorry," Kate exclaimed, looking at his record on her computer screen, "Mr Oliver! How rude of us to be talking about our personal stuff in front of you. I'm afraid no one's shown any interest in your CV today, but if you would give us a call on Monday?"
Tobias Oliver -- to give him his full name -- stood up reluctantly. He walked around the potted plants so that he was standing between the two ladies' desks.
"I meant what I said, Miss Argent," he said politely. "I'd be happy to come and work for you."
"Oh, that's very kind," interrupted Carrie with a smile. She hit a couple of keys on her computer, and found the details that Kate was looking at. "You've got a good record working in hotels in the North and the Midlands, and I'm sure we'll find you a position next week. I don't think we could afford to pay you the sort of wages you earn there."
"I wouldn't want to be paid hotel rates," Tobias Oliver protested earnestly.
