The way it worked in that beautiful, implacably impractical old building, was that the filing room that her shitty company rented was down in the second sub-basement. When her boss handed her another fat sheaf of documents for filing Laney had to cross the whole fifth floor to get to the tiny, battered old service elevator and wait in the claustrophobic little box as the faint sound of grinding metal described her descent into the bowels of the earth.
The air-con in the small open-plan office worked fitfully, and the office air was stale and hot. The air in the elevator was musty, well-aged and hot. Once the door had finally opened on sub-basement two, the air down there sweated with the exertions of some old generator that was roaring and chugging away even at the height of summer. It was very, very hot. She could feel the condensation clinging to her skin. All of their files were damp, something her boss was well aware of and seemed to care very little about. No-one seemed to care much about anything that happened at her little company, least of all Laney.
So she would file the files amongst their clammy brethren, get back into the vintage heat of the age-worn elevator and this time punch the top floor, waiting as the elevator groaned and moaned its way back up its narrow, filthy shaft.
On the seventh floor she'd slip out onto the fire escape, skip up the clanging metal steps and onto the roof where she would squat in the shade of an old service shack and smoke a much-needed cigarette. The air outside, in summertime, was very, very hot and very, very dry.
Laney thought about stripping naked every day. She dreamed of the cold shower that she'd jump into as soon as she got home, and she smoked her cigarettes and endured the heat and headed back to her desk praying that someone had finally gotten the air-con working the way it should. Back at her desk she could still smell the tobacco; still smell the stale old air of the elevator and the muggy, ripe air of the basement. The scents stuck with her all day long.
The back of her blouse was plastered to her by the middle of the morning. She felt trickles of perspiration running down the small of her back to hit the waistband of her skirt, and below that she felt more little drops making their way over the curve of her backside, slipping down between her cheeks and making her squirm.
Laney hated summer.
- - -
"Run these downstairs will you, Elaine."
Laney looked down at the stack of files, up at the retreating, sweat-stained back of her boss and then down at herself, and the worn old jacket she was having dry-cleaned every week. It wasn't like she worked with a bunch of lecherous old perverts, but her top was almost constantly damp and clingy at work. If she took the jacket off then that would be sharing more details of her bra and perspiration situation than she was comfortable with. She tried to keep the jacket on most of the time despite the discomfort, but when she really felt that things were getting desperate she slipped it off to go down to the basement.
Things were getting desperate. She glanced around, slipped it neatly onto the back of her chair, grabbed the files and her cigarettes and trotted quickly out into the hot, dead air of the corridor. There was nothing too scandalous, she noted. Yes, you could tell she was wearing a bra, but then, that was hardly news. People could deal with that.
Laney had always thought that old, old buildings with thick, stone walls should be cool havens from hellish summers. That had been her experience at college, and it had held true until she'd started working here. Some combination of window placement and lack of proper ventilation turned the gracefully crumbling property into a kind of rudimentary kiln. The employees of the half-a-dozen or so small companies that rented space there were all slowly dehydrating into terracotta mannequins.
There was no-one else around, so she used the walk to the elevator to pluck clumsily at her damp blouse, pulling it out from under her arms, away from her back, trying to get it to outline her underwear just a little less. There was another problem, in that her panties were resembling a hot, damp second skin by now, clinging and riding up in a really annoying way. But even in the deserted corridor she didn't feel like she could slip and hand up her skirt and sort them out right there.
The elevator's chime of arrival seemed to choke in the heat. The door opened and in she stepped, back in the elevator that was big enough for two and a half people - as long as they had no concept of personal space.
It was a beige 1970s number - no window and, in an interestingly hellish design choice, everything but the ceiling was beige linoleum. It smelled like an abandoned tax office. The buttons were plastic and anonymous, and the cover had long since vanished from the recessed emergency phone.
She pressed B2 and started her descent.
- - -
The filing was a mindless, if sweaty, job and by the time she'd reached the roof it felt like every part of her body was trying to stick to every other part it happened to touch. The worst was her thighs, and the cheeks of her ass. Down in the basement she had allowed herself a little rearrangement, but even down there in that dank little hole she had felt too self-conscious to really hike up her skirt and sort things out.
Squatting, balanced on the balls of her feet in her short heels, careful not to let any part of her body emerge into the searing light of the sun, and careful not to rock back and lean against the hotplate surface of the shed, she smoked and considered more drastic options.
She could come to work without panties, right? She smiled at the thought, without seriously considering it. How about stark naked? Ugh, but sitting naked on the chairs in her office? Another bead of sweat slid between her shoulder blades and she sighed.
She imagined sitting in that ratty old office, rubbing her thighs together, the only keeper of a very private secret. She imagined having to think twice before she stooped to pick up a box of spilled paperclips. She let her mind keep turning over, and thought about the kind of guy she would love to be getting hot and sticky with in her office. None of the middle aged gents she was currently stuck whiling her time away with anyway.
Oh, a maintenance guy? Here to fix the copier (Laney kind of resented the copier since it was the source of all those goddamn files she had to take downstairs all the time)... and she said- Oh, I think it's jammed right down here at the bottom... bending at the waist her feet touching, bare legs perfect and straight as she leans down and the skirt comes up...
And him, his face, he was...
Goddamn it! It was too hot for her to even come up with a guy she wanted to fuck! Her brain was overheated and her cigarette was finished.
When she stood up she watched heat haze from the rooftop blurring the buildings that loomed up around her. She had to brace herself before she stepped back out of the shade.
- - -
Down the fire escape to the seventh floor and back into the hot box. Not that it was really any hotter than anywhere else in Laney's workday world. She pushed the button for the fifth floor, relieved to see that she wasn't leaving trails of sweat from her fingertips yet, and looked up as the box started to move. She stared at the neon, buzzing away behind its cheap plastic cover. That was probably adding to the heat too.
But almost immediately the elevator started to laboriously slow down. Someone on six had called it? Laney was stunned. She tried to recall if she had ever had to share this horrible little machine with anyone else, and couldn't remember a single occasion. At one of the building Christmas parties when people had been heading up to the roof to smoke together? No, most people had taken the stairs or the bigger elevator at the front of the building.
The elevator that annoyingly didn't go below ground level.
So, could she share? Should she just get out and walk down? She should, right? But then why should she give up the little automatic box? Whoever was waiting could keep waiting, or walk down themselves.
And in the middle of this flustered little private debate the elevator came to its familiar, juddering halt and the doors started to open.
She kind of wished she was still wearing her jacket.
The impression of movement, of a swinging momentum, hit her before she really processed anything else. Some guy was waiting, young-ish and tall-ish and he was swinging right into the elevator with her. Swinging?
"Oh, Jesus, sorry." Crutches! He was on crutches and he'd been wrestling with something - a wallet, she saw now - when the elevator had come. Without thinking and without looking he'd heaved himself forwards, and now he was clumsily trying to keep from falling into the elevator on top of her. "I didn't see that there was anyone else... Jesus, hold on I'm just..."
The door of the tiny compartment was still open and Laney knew she should hop out. He was on crutches, that was why he was calling the closest elevator, and she really should let him fit inside and jump out.
But with one rigidly supported leg and two extra spindly metal attachments, he was blocking her path. She couldn't squeeze past him, and he didn't seem to be adept enough at manoeuvring himself to let her out.
His momentum had landed his good foot just inside the metal lip of the chamber, one crutch further in, the other still pointing outside. He was gripping his wallet tight, which made moving the crutch (one of those standard looking modern things that gripped around his upper arm, and had a handle half way down for him to hold onto) more difficult, and while he did seem to be trying to get out of her way, it wasn't occurring to him to back up out of the elevator completely.
