"Morning, Carol," I said over my computer as Dr. Carol Wilson passed my desk. "I had a very nice time on Friday, and Ashley is so cute."
"Thanks," she murmured continuing a couple steps on.
I heard her stop outside her cubicle which was next to mine. She took a step back, so she was barely visible at the wall between our workspaces.
"I'm sorry," she said, her head hung low.
I just looked at her, not being able to fathom what she might be apologizing for.
"Art said that I should apologize to you, that I probably made you sick by letting you see my flat chest when I was feeding Ashley," she said just above a whisper, and then disappeared into her space.
I should have just shut up, kept my thoughts to myself. I was the only male in the office, and I heard a lot of things from the all-female staff as they talked about family and friends. In today's litigious society, it paid really high dividends to say nothing, especially anything that might be construed as a sexual inuendo or worse.
There were six cubicles on the second floor of our office. We are a medical practice owned and operated by my sister-in-law, Rita. Dr. Rita Wang, sister of my late wife. Due the growth of the practice, we now had four other physicians, all females, in addition to Dr. Rita, and had built out the space on the second floor for offices in anticipation of future staff additions. Of course, things had hit a lull right after we'd spent the money for the addition, so only Dr. Carol and I occupied workspaces on the second floor. In building out additional exam rooms on the first floor, my office was taken over and several spaces changed function, and we had completely forgotten that any new physicians would need their own spaces in addition to exam rooms. I was up here alone for six months before Carol had started with us two years ago.
I sat stunned at my desk for a couple seconds, then spoke out loud, not even turning to the wall that separated us.
"I think you have the most alluring, magnificent breasts I have seen in my entire life. It was so touching to watch the bond between you and Ashley. Thank you, and I am sorry if I stared, but I found your breasts intoxicatingly beautiful."
I turned back to my computer, saved the document I had been working on, and began to write out a resignation letter, sure that Carol would be reporting me to Rita. There would be no trouble, I'd definitely stepped over a line and I did not want to cause Rita or the practice any issues.
Five minutes passed without a sound, then Carol walked quietly past my entranceway without a word and headed downstairs to begin seeing her patients.
At about ten thirty, Carol came upstairs to pump. She'd had six weeks off with her first child, Ashley, and pumped three times a day since returning to work three weeks ago. She walked past my office, head down, and entered her cubicle, drawing the curtain that had been put up over the entrance. I heard the whir of the pump a couple minutes later, and tried to focus on the report that I had been working on but my mind could still see Carol's breasts as they had been last Friday night.
Dr. Rita was a planner, and had decided to get the principals together to discuss problems we were having with our electronic medical records and the implementation of a new schedule. This really affected the doctors and staff more than me, but I had been asked to attend as well as I was CFO. To keep it informal and have everyone relaxed, Rita had invited everyone to dinner at her place on Friday night, spouses and kids were welcome. After dinner the staff had stayed around the dining table, while Paul, Rita's husband, and those spouses in attendance and several kids decamped to the family room to watch a movie. It was only about twenty minutes before Art came up and, handing Ashley to Carol, announced that "She needs you."
Carol had smiled shyly and responded that there were bottles in the bag, but Art wasn't having that and responded that she should "just feed her." He handed the baby to Carol and took a seat at the kitchen counter.
It was obvious that Art wasn't a care-giver type. All the women at the table were mothers and said it was fine, but it also became immediately obvious that Carol had not intended to be breast-feeding. I lowered my head and pretended to be absorbed in some papers Rita had handed out as Carol undid the buttons on her blouse and unhooked the front closure of her plain white bra, and raised Ashley to feed her. There were six of us around the table, the five doctors and myself, who was seated to Carol's right and separated from her by one of the other docs.
"Okay then," Rita began, returning the conversation to the topic we had been discussing, and I felt it was okay to raise me head. As Carol had Ashley on her right breast, there was nothing really to see, as her undone blouse covered her left side. The conversation resumed and after a few minutes I was not even distracted by the child suckling in our midst. It actually began to feel 'normal.'
At some point, I can't even recall how long it was, Carol unlatched Ashley from her right breast and moved to cradle her to take the left. She nonchalantly uncovered her left breast, unlatched Ashley from the right, and moved the child to take the left, leaving her right breast completely uncovered.
I don't know if I breathed or not, trying frantically to look without looking, mesmerized by the scene before me. Carol's exposed right breast, teet distended by the suckling of her daughter, was so beautiful. Certainly not large, it was a small swell of tissue - not more than an "a" cup - with the areola just a shade darker than the surrounding alabaster flesh and not much larger than the base of her swollen teet. That nipple, about the size of the end of my little finger, stood out seductively, and Carol made no move to cover herself with her blouse as she went about feeding her daughter. The conversation continued, and I made sure to move my eyes to each of the doctors as they asked questions or gave answers. I swear that I caught a little grin on my sister-in-law's face at one point as she, I'm sure, was enjoying my awkward predicament.
The discussion continued with no one else seeming to be distracted. Again, it somehow became 'normal.' Or so I lied to myself, hoping I wasn't acting like an adolescent, and hoping too that no one noticed what I prayed were surreptitious glances at Carol.
"Hmm, someone's full," Toni (Dr. Antoinette Devino) said, smiling and nodding toward Carol. We all looked to see Ashley had sated herself and had fallen asleep. She was cradled in Carol's arms. It was an genuinely moving sight, mother and child in a classic pose of love. It was, for me, also a deeply erotic sight as I took in the splendor of Carol's breasts both exposed; small, perfect, capped with adorable protruding nipples.
Dr. Carol was a bit awkward socially. Or at least around me she was. We'd sat on opposite sides of the same cubicle wall for the past eighteen months, and in that time she'd never said 'excuse me' or 'can I ask...", and had never called me by name. If she had a thought or question, she just asked it out loud from her desk. A disembodied voice seeking information or offering an opinion. I always answered the voice, wondering if she thought of me as the computer on Star Trek, a voice that answered questions and not a real person. She broke my thought, my daydream recollection of the previous Friday night.
"What you said earlier," she began.
"Dr. Wilson, I apologize. It was completely inappropriate of me. I'll understand if you feel the need to report my behavior to Dr. Wang," I answered. Rita might understand, but she wouldn't tolerate anything that hurt her practice. She worked too hard and I had been wrong to voice my feelings.
"Did you mean it?" the voice on the other side of the wall asked softly.
I am so getting fired, I thought. There won't be a resignation, Rita will just call me and tell me to pack up my things. Tell me that she's so disappointed in me, ask how I could be so stupid? Carol is probably recording right now, I thought, and waiting to sue the hell out of the practice.
But there was something in that voice...
"Karen, my late wife, was a small-breasted woman as well. I always thought her breasts were fantastic. She loved...well, she enjoyed my attention," I smiled at the recollection.
"Your breasts are even more lovely, very sensual and wonderfully shaped. Carol, you should never think about apologizing for letting anyone see them, they are beautiful and it's a gift that I got see you feeding Ashley.." I trailed off. There were so many things I could say, but none of them would make up for that fact that I had been unprofessional.
"She wasn't like Rita? I just thought..." the voice said.
I smiled. "They were very alike, but not in the chest department. Rita is gorgeous and voluptuous. They had the same hips, but up top they were Yin and Yang."
The silence was crushing. I stared at the wall, waiting for the voice. I could not even hear her breathing, nothing. The clock on my wall seemed to stop.
Finally, I heard the sound of the curtain being pulled back, and Carol walked past me without a word, not even a glance in my direction. What's going on? I wondered.
She was a little late coming up for lunch, which she always ate at her desk since she began working here.. Now, of course, she ate, and then I would hear the sound of the breast pump afterwords. I generally worked through lunch myself, but today I just wanted to be on the other side of the wall in case the voice spoke. It didn't. The pump whirred for a time, then more silence.
Just before I knew she would be going down for her afternoon patients, her phone rang. I tried not to listen but it was in reality not possible with our shared wall and an otherwise empty second floor. There were no camouflaging noises. I worked to focus on my screen, but it was a tense conversation and though she tried to keep her end quiet, I caught snippets.
"Ass!" she said, hanging up the phone roughly.
"Everything okay?"
