Staff meetings were never my strong point. Staff meetings on Monday mornings drove me to distraction. A staff meeting on a Monday morning, watching the woman I fucked on Friday night pretend to ignore me while she flashed her thighs at me under the boardroom table was a special form of torture.
It was going to be a long week.
I was not in very good nick to begin with. I had spent the weekend in a state of complete distraction. Images of my night at the Republic of Desire loomed up in front of me: the leather-harnessed girls, the ritual auction, Lucy’s passion, Selma’s cryptic remarks… and Lucy’s husky, suddenly vulnerable voice bidding me Till Monday in the street.
I could not concentrate on anything. Ages ago, one of my first girlfriends had told me that when a couple had sex, pheromones were exchanged between them, keying them in to one another’s chemistry, binding them to one another. It was the chemical basis for falling in love, she said, and it accounted for that disorienting, disarming stage after a first sexual encounter when your mind is constantly filled with images and memories of the other person. It sounded a bit simplistic to me. But chemical or not, Lucy had managed to get past my defences.
Nothing could hold my attention. My weekend rituals – shopping and cleaning on Saturday morning, a slow breakfast, a walk and music on Sunday – were in pieces. Mr Thelonious (that’s my cat, an aging, portly and very dignified chocolate brown Burmese) had been entirely displeased. Instead of sitting on the couch listening to music or watching old movies like I was supposed to, I had wandered aimlessly around the apartment, adjusting objects here and there, pacing the carpet, stopping suddenly to gaze out at the river, picking up the telephone and putting it down. I had even forgotten to brush him – an unpardonable offence. That same girlfriend had always said that cats don’t have owners, they have staff. Mr Thelonious was a case in point, and he was deeply disappointed in me. He had sat sulkily on the windowsill that Monday morning, barely suffering his ears to be tickled and evidently feeling that I was lucky he was not implementing major retrenchments.
Some of my feelings were of elation, and revelling in the fact that this strange and bewitching woman apparently wanted me. Some were of embarrassment and self consciousness – here I was, a man just into my forties, carrying on like a seventeen-year old in love with a pretty girl in her twenties. And some was confusion and fear. What was going to happen now? It was not as if this affair, or whatever it was, could fit into life at work. Things between Legal and Research were pretty strained already. I could only imagine the incendiary effect on office politics of dalliance between the middle-aged and rather controversial Director of Research and Charles Gaunt’s newest PA. Incendiary! Dalliance! Those were just the words Charles would use. I could already hear him sounding forth.
And then there was the matter of the other woman. Office rumours to the contrary, I could now conclusively say Lucy was not lesbian. But she could still be bisexual – and what was her relationship to the pretty Asian girl whose picture sat on her desk, and who dropped her off with a kiss outside the office every weekday morning? Liu Mi, I recalled her name had been. Were they an item? And if they were, what was I? Just a game? An experiment? A betrayal?
To make matters worse, the intensity of pressure at work seemed about to redouble. The Soft Information Co had managed to get its hooks into one of the biggest and most important contracts in its existence, and we were going to have to pull out all the stops to bring it off. Monday morning was really a council of war. The whole office was excited, and more than a bit uptight. Everyone had ants in their pants. I hid it well, but I was the worst off. Before the meeting, Lucy was nowhere to be seen. I had not been able to concentrate on my preparations. Every time someone walked past the copy room I had spun around expectantly. What was it going to be? The cold shoulder? More of the elaborate pretence of nonchalance? Or what?
The meeting had just started when the answer became clear. It was - Or What.
Lucy made her entrance five minutes late. People had just settled in, mugs of coffee positioned, piles of papers shuffled. Dear old Charles was in mid-pontification when she walked in. Everyone stopped listening. I have not seen many women make all the heads in a room, male and female, swivel simultaneously, but she did it.
She looked stunning.
Now , she was not dressed particularly seductively. As sexy-smart office wear goes, this was nothing out of the ordinary. Just an elegantly cut - even slightly severe – charcoal mini-dress and jacket assembly, ending just a tad above the knee. I have seen many young secretaries and temps show more flesh and not raise an eyebrow.
But you see, they had not been Lucy. And that made all the difference.
For one thing, no-one (except me, that is) had seen Lucy in anything but the plainest of clothes. Not that she dressed boringly. She’d just had very quiet taste. No dresses. Black chinos and brown knitted sweater, nicely finished, clearly expensive, but definitely not eye-catching - that was her office style. Blend-into-the-background stuff.
This was surge-into-the-foreground stuff. This was hey-baby-look-at-me stuff.
And we did.
For, and this was the second thing, the secret was out. She was a stunner. She was a beauty. Not a babe - babes don’t come industrial strength. She was the real thing. She had the supermodel cool. The glamour. She was gorgeous. She was dangerous. She was a goddess. She was a witch. And she knew it.
Under the circs, I was one of the few who managed not to stare. Charles, who is never a good noticer at the best of times, continued talking for a sentence or two more before he ran out of gas. All the other directors goggled. The only ones besides me who did not appear nonplussed was Vanessa (who noticeably brightened), Peter, the big boss, who is never ruffled by anything and Andrew Sexton, our rather geekish head of Strategy and co-founder of the company, who only seemed pleased because the meeting could now finally start.
Lucy pretended not to notice and swept smoothly up to her place next to Charles, who was still gawking. For a second it crossed my mind that he had not recognised her. The same idea appeared to strike Lucy, for she smiled cheerily and extended her hand. “Pleased to meet you - Lucy Temple,” she said. In the resulting gust of laughter she sat down and opened the waiting notebook computer. Charles’ nose was noticeably out of joint but for once he was silent.
“Hi Lucy. Welcome. You look nice this morning.” This was Andrew.
“Sorry I’m late. Thank you.” She said briskly, starting to distribute neatly bound files from her smart little black briefcase. She paused and looked up, seeming to notice everyone’s admiring stares. “Well, this is the big time, isn’t it? No more kid stuff… We’re playing for real stakes now,” she said, looking directly in my eyes.
Indeed we were. It was the end of an era. No more safety for John Gray, I thought, feeling strangely calm and elated. All was on the hazard. The company, my career, and with my carefully won sense of stability. I had known for some time that the next few months at Soft Info was crucial. It was the test of my reputation and my position in the company. And now Lucy was in the works. A wild card if ever there was one. Who knew what would happen? I should have been scared, but what I felt at that moment was mostly a strange relief.
The staff meeting was one of those exhausting, nerve wracking battles where everything is happening at more than one level at the same time. On the surface, the appearance of consensus. Lots of talk of win-win, synergy, all that guff. Underneath, hostility, rage, positioning, sabotage. And the chief saboteur was Charles. His agenda was completely opposite to mine. What he wanted from this deal was safety. A relationship with a blue chip company. A long relationship. Respectability. Stock options. What I wanted – and I knew Andrew wanted it too – was edge. We are not a safe company. We deal in information. Market research of a very specialised kind, in very specialised niches. Not spying at all, though I do keep my ear on the ground. What had made us special was our independence. We had a reputation for giving controversial advice, making counterintuitive judgements, emphasising apparently irrelevant developments – and then turning out to be infuriatingly right. And Charles was often one of those who were infuriated. He hated controversy. He saw it has his mission to prevent us from being sued for defamation. He was terrified we would piss off someone important. When we started quietly advising people not to trust the integrity of a major global consultancy and auditing firm (no names needed, you know the one), Charles permanently went shade greyer – and when we turned out to be right, a shade more purple as well. He made it his business to object to everything I did, and squirted inky clouds of warnings and advisories around each of my projects. This meeting was no exception.
Lucy sat serene like a sphinx, tapping away at her notebook computer, her distracting long legs elegantly crossed at the ankle. Charles nattered away interminably, apparently unaware that the brief his assistant had handed out seemed to contradict several of his key points. I caught her eye. No response. Then her left hand crept under the table and she hiked that skirt up just one more centimetre. I tried not to focus on her creamy thighs. Pale, barely protected by the black fabric of her dress. I remembered the warmth of them against my ears, the sense of toned, living muscle beneath the skin, the delicate trembling of the tendons of her inner thighs, her beautiful, silky-hot cunt. I felt my loins stirring uncomfortably, and realised that there was no way I could adjust myself without everybody noticing. Except possibly Charles.
