"Anna, ready for our meeting?"
"Yes, Daniel."
He walked towards the meeting room he had booked without so much as looking her way. She held back a sigh, not wanting anyone to think it was unusual. Truth was, they probably knew something was up. Anna had a proud reputation for being a ball breaker. Sexy, but in a bookish kind of way, her pleasant looks betrayed a level of bluntness and assertiveness that said: you don't want to mess with me. She got shit done and was respected for it; was typically liked once you got to know her, but she was an anomaly.
On the rare occasions she dressed up for work events or parties, she turned heads. With naturally straight brown hair, glasses, pointed cheekbones and dimples, she was striking. Add the tongue piercing, the deep intimidating blue eyes when she wasn't wearing glasses and her being 5'8 out of heels, she owned an aura of confidence. She had been subtly hit on by enough of the new men and women that had joined the team across the prior twelve years for her to know she was someone desired. The woman nobody there could get. They wouldn't even know what they'd be getting. Did she like men? For she never declared anyone handsome. Did she like women? Because she'd never been seen checking out any ass that looked as good as hers in a dress.
She stood up and used the movement to mask the sigh she couldn't stop, as she was forced to imagine she was a child walking towards a telling off. Before him, she was an animal walking towards its next scent of food.
Nobody looked up, everyone tapping away at their keyboards or on calls. Most people knew there'd be a sharp "
yes?"
if they did anyway.
The dynamic since Daniel had been parachuted in a year earlier had rocked her in more ways than she wanted to admit. Things had gone down shit street under their previous boss, eventually leading to her dismissal. Anna was so grateful to see her old boss gone, she let her guard down in relief that Daniel seemed immediately more competent, despite being younger than her 38 years and a good 15 years younger than the woman he was replacing. He steadied the ship and directed them all - they followed his steer and life steadied again.
For Anna though, it never really did.
The working relationship was now one where she basically did as she was told, though he gave her direction collaboratively, as though they had come to his decision together. She was the head of the customer insight team, him the now-permanent director after a very successful six months, by all accounts.
In group meetings, around her team, he looked to her for advice, pointedly so. She was one of three Heads who reported to him, and he gave them all the space to lead. All three of them were women, all there before his arrival. Still, she couldn't help but think he treated Emma and Raquel differently to her. Subtly different, but different, nonetheless.
She made her way into the room and zeroed her eyes onto the chair, striding towards it. Her long dress, the kind she always wore, brushed the new carpet the company had put down when Daniel had complained about working conditions.
He was in a suit, never wearing a tie, with the top button open and a fair amount of chest hair visible. She didn't need to look up at him to know that, and she had discreetly checked the colour of his shirt earlier on, building on a hunch that she had that might be paranoia but might also be reality.
"How goes it, Anna? Everything okay?"
She looked up at him, surprised. He was very structured, even more so than her. She quite liked that about him. He typically waited for her to settle and then he outlined the things he wanted to talk about and then he asked how she was. That was always the way. He was very clinical in his interactions with her.
"Yeah, why?" Her tone was accusatory, and she was used to a slight recoil from men who sat opposite her when she used that tone. He didn't move. She sometimes wondered if he didn't understand tone. But she had heard him when he was assertive and knew that couldn't be true.
"We'll try that again," Daniel replied, still unmoving. "Only this time you'll either decide to tell me what's on your mind or you'll say you're fine and you have no idea what I'm talking about."
"I'm fine, I have no idea what you're talking about," she replied in a very hammed-up robotic voice.
He laughed. "I watched Doctor Who as a kid, you do a good Dalek."
"Thanks," she smiled. "But I'm fine. Why do you ask?"
This time he did lean back and he surveyed her. She'd never worked with anyone who behaved as he did. Everything was always considered, even if it felt reactive and off-the-cuff. He held eye contact as he spoke, which itself was quite rare for her. Most men looked away or couldn't help looking down at her tits.
"You've booked a random Thursday off this week but you're back in on Friday. You missed the deadline I set you for the segmentation report yesterday, which is most unlike you," he outlined, watching her face fill with colour and her mouth hang open in horror, "you never miss a deadline. If you're interviewing for another job, at least give me the opportunity to counter-offer before you get swayed elsewhere."
"How do you know I'd even get the job?" No point denying she was in an interview process at that point. If he knew her, she knew him well too.
He nodded slightly, coming to terms with being right. "Because Anna, unless you come apart at interviews, which feels unlikely given the way you carry yourself, they'll quite quickly see you're relentless, technically excellent and the most capable person I've ever had the responsibility of managing."
"Thanks," her voice caught, "that's kind of you."
They stared at each other, and Anna felt the familiar confusion start to grow inside her as he looked at her and she looked at him. She was sure she was asexual or
at best
demisexual, which amounted to the same as she never let anyone get close enough for her to form an emotional connection.
"Do you want to make your offer?" She broke the spell because it seemed he wasn't going to.
"Yes," he smiled, seemingly back into his stride. "I've got nothing I need to talk about for the next hour that can't wait. Why don't you take the time back to get the report done and we can talk again on Thursday evening over some alcohol? You can tell me how the interview went as your colleague and dare I say friend, so we can help you organise your thoughts before you negotiate me into submission on Friday."
Anna nodded in agreement, rising from her chair a second after Daniel did, and then walking back into the open plan office through the door he was holding open and past the arm he was using to gesture her back towards her desk.
It was perhaps the best example yet of her doing as she was told, as though they'd come up with the plan together. Her head spun as he walked off and spoke to someone in her data team, and she was glad for the way her features naturally looked quite severe so that nobody would ask why she was out in 5 minutes.
_
When Thursday morning came around, Anna spent a disproportionate amount of time picking what to wear. She hadn't had an interview in over a decade, if you excluded internal promotions that were box-ticking exercises.
Realistically though, as she looked at herself in the long mirror of her bedroom, she was only ever going to wear one of the many long dresses she owned for work, when jeans and a jumper was too casual.
Not many people at work knew why she wore maxi dresses that went down to her ankles and stopped at her forearms. But then, not many people in the world had seen her naked. If people found her striking in looks, they'd need to find a stronger word for her body.
To her, it was her canvas. Her private place to create her own work of art. To decorate her body with the things that mattered or felt good.
She estimated that at least half of her body from the thighs upward and the elbows inward was covered in tattoos.
Flowers - a rose, a peony and a cherry blossom, adorned the back of her body from her thighs up to her shoulders. The rose ran up the length of her spine stopping at her neck. The peony covered her round ass, the cherry blossom encircled her lower back. Around that were tattoos of a lioness, a compass and the earth. Each meant different things at that point in her life. Intended to convey different things for different moments and remind her of who she was.
She had had her sternum tattooed before it became fashionable, stretched under her large breasts and pressed tight to the top of her defined abs. At the line of her groin, over her mound and below her belly button was a sprawling tattoo of the oak tree that her family dog was buried under and then the ashes of both her grandparents and her mum were scattered under, with light from the sun just threatening to break from the shadows.
When she was in her early twenties, sexual partners wouldn't believe that her breasts could be that big & full and not be fake. That her ass couldn't be that round against such a flat stomach without some kind of enhancements. She had quite liked the shock and awe at first, enjoyed the lust of it.
But it wore off and she spent the rest of her twenties covered up in long dresses that didn't show off her figure, to save the repetitive exchange.
Over time barely anybody saw her figure and her body became her own thing to enjoy. So the tattoos started and then piercings followed - on both her nipples, her sternum, her belly button and then onto her pussy itself until she stopped herself getting any more except her tongue, which she'd wanted from the start. She rowed back from wearing loose dresses, but they were loose enough to hide just how curvaceous she was and to stop her nipple piercings showing.
She had a total disinterest in sex, only occasionally sleeping with her tattoo artist when he'd done a particularly good job, and fucking her piercing artist when she had got her so aroused from the feel of the needle. She could have kept going for hours after the feel of the needle piercing her clit.
Whichever way she looked at it, she was a lot. The only people she had been intimate with had been the ones who had taken her body to another level.
So, that morning, a disproportionate amount of time was spent deciding what to wear and a further disproportionate amount of
that
time was spent thinking about whether Daniel would like it.
_
They'd offered her the job before she'd even got to the bar Daniel had picked, away from the area of work, later that evening.
Taking it was a no-brainer. It was a bigger company, more pay, better prospects (she was only getting promoted when Daniel left, let's face it) and an easy commute.
Despite that, her response had instead been a very appreciative "I'll think it over and get back to you as soon as possible."
She wanted to hear what Daniel would say and most of all, she wanted to be smug about it.
"I'm delighted for you," was the first thing he said after bringing over two pints of beer and finding out who it was that had offered her a job. Anna sipped her pint instead of replying, so she could buy some time. He carried on anyway. "I think I'm going to struggle to offer you anything that can beat that, but I'd be very interested to find out what it would be."
Surprising herself, she chose a most unusual response: "Well, buy me a few more of these and I'll be drunk enough to tell you."
Did she just invite him to get her drunk?
Daniel took it in his stride, seemingly unfazed and as though he hadn't interpreted her words in that way. She could think of about 30 other guys who wouldn't have been so respectful towards her.
They chatted about the interview in more depth, the role, the people on the panel. One beer became two which became another, with some fries.
