I'll Be Your Val-Enf-Tine

Bella McMasters tossed the remote control at the coffee table and threw herself back onto the couch, arms spread wide.

The comfortable, overly large blue t-shirt hid a body that had done enough miles at the gym to turn heads when she walked into the fitness studio. They also hid a pair of panties that by rights should have been ripped off by her lover by this late hour and yet had resolutely stayed on, unmolested and in a state of total security that normally required state-of-the-art sensors and regular patrols by armed guards to replicate.

She was bored, and she was bored on Valentine's Day.

Admittedly, that sort of thing wasn't entirely without precedent. There had been the occasional badly timed breakup right before a Valentine's Day that meant the day itself had been a love affair with a tub of break-up ice cream. It was, however, pretty tough to reconcile tonight's boredom with the fact that she'd been in a steady relationship for the past two years with someone who was, frankly, wonderful, and who rightly shared the opinion that Bella was wonderful, too.

Yet Alex, her partner in that steady relationship, was at work and the messages flowing back didn't bode well for an early return. Alex had been hauled in on a Friday night to slave away on a design project to meet a deadline for an overseas client.

Admittedly, if Bella was being fair and even-minded, the fact that last Valentine's Day it had been her sales rep job that had taken her away to an entirely different city, would suggest she should have taken tonight's abandonment on the couch with good grace. After flicking through three different streaming services and finding nothing binge-worthy enough to rival the ice cream tubs of yesteryear, Bella's philosophy on "fair and even-minded" was that she was a proponent of other people practising it.

As for her, she was bored, she was lonely, she wasn't single, and that wasn't right. She was also a red-blooded blonde-haired twenty-six-year-old who looked after herself - ignoring the occasional and entirely justifiable aforementioned ice cream tub raid of which no more needs to be said - and sitting on the couch two blocks from her lover was not something a just world should countenance.

She glanced out the window to the Wellington cityscape beyond. The steady, unending lights of the capital city streamed in, an unplanned mass of random apartment buildings and corporate office spaces shedding light onto the streets below as some people spent the night curled up on their couches, some people worked late, and others slinked off but wanted to give the impression of the one of the former.

It was around ten in the evening, and Alex was barely a seven-minute walk away, if that. It hadn't been the warmest New Zealand summer on record, but tonight was quite pleasant, all said and told. The city's trademark wind was even only a zephyr tonight.

Bella at least had the good grace to be in a completely different city last year, so there had been no hope of a sudden romantic liaison to cling to. Instead, this year, she'd spent the last ninety minutes pining for Alex to come home and join her on the couch, and Bella had reached the point where either it was time to take matters into her own hands and check the batteries on the vibrator, or woman up and head out and do something, anything, to relieve the boredom.

Bella tapped her fingers on the edge of the couch for a full minute. It was not a soul-enriching activity.

She stared at the card that Alex had left of the table in front of the TV. It was a "Be My Valentine" card, with the requisite large, red, playful font that competed with a teddy bear and a heart for real estate on the front. Inside, Bella could recite the message Alex had left. "So sorry, sweetheart, missing you so much, and I'll make this up to you! Love you to the moon and back, Alex." There had been four hand-drawn, perfectly coloured-in hearts under Alex's name, each of which had only succeeded in pissing Bella off more because it made her miss Alex twice as much.

The problem was that Bella didn't fancy in her current state of mind facing her wardrobe and having to decide what to wear, just to go out to a nightclub surrounded by singles while unable to do anything with those singles beyond drink, dance and miss Alex.

Neither option held much merit, but Bella finally hauled herself off the couch, sighed, brushed her long blonde hair out of her eyes, straightened the large blue t-shirt slightly, and moped off to the bedroom to find the vibrator.

It was stashed in the underwear drawer on her side of an unmade queen-sized bed, and she was rummaging through a pile of thongs, panties, bikini bottoms and the occasional misplaced sock when she heard her phone beep back in the lounge. She sniffed, made one last grab, grunted with partial satisfaction when her fingers encountered the tip of the device, yanked it out without looking, and stalked back to the lounge to see what the latest message said.

"Sorry babe, probably another thirty minutes."

So an hour then, at least, Bella thought. Well, fuck.

She looked at the vibrator in her hand and experimented with the on switch. It buzzed half-heartedly in her grip for a few seconds and then appeared to come to the same view on tonight's promise as Bella had already reached and simply gave up.

The vibrator clattered onto the coffee table next to the remote, knocking the latter off, and Bella flung herself back onto the couch.

Fuck. Fuckity fuck fuck, fuck. She was going to have to choose an outfit from the wardrobe.

Having a lot of clothes in her wardrobe may have led the casual observer to the impression Bella liked choosing what to wear. This would be an unfortunate misunderstanding. Bella loved choosing what items to buy. She despised to the very core of her being choosing any one of up to sixty different options for nightclubbing, all of which she would somehow conclude halfway through the evening was the third-worst outfit she could have possibly chosen on that given night.

Arggh!!

Bella looked up to the ceiling for inspiration. The ceiling stared back at her, bare, bereft of anything but plain, unadorned nothingness with two single lights blazing away.

Bella blinked.

Bare. Bereft of anything. Nothing.

For the first time all night, a smile flickered on Bella's face. An idea had formed. A crazy, stupid idea. A very Bella idea. The kind of idea Alex would look back on in the years to come and think, "Bella, what a wonderful partner she is, capable of pulling off the most romantic surprises imaginable! I'm so lucky she chose me!"

Bella beamed.

Okay, so obviously, Alex wouldn't probably think that tonight, specifically. Tonight, Alex would most likely alternate between opening and closing that amazing mouth Alex had - Bella so wanted to kiss it right now! - words wanting to come out but incapable of doing so, with wild, flailing hand gestures doing the job of asking Bella what the sweet fuck Bella had thought she was doing.

Still, Bella reasoned, if Alex was going to leave her unattended in their apartment, then Alex, frankly, was responsible for whatever hare-brained ideas Bella came up with.

Having successfully convinced herself that all credit - if this worked - would sit with Bella, while all blame - should it go wrong - would rain down on Alex, Bella made up her mind, squared her shoulders and gave their apartment door a determined, steely stare.

If Alex could, or would not come to Bella, then Bella must go to Alex. And for once, Bella had just the right outfit in mind...

****

There had been a surprising amount of preparation and planning that had needed to be done between the steely, determined stare at the door and the subsequent standing with the door half open. The somewhat easy part had been that the t-shirt and panties had now joined the vibrator on the increasingly abused coffee table.

Bella stood naked at the entranceway to the third-floor hallway, from which their apartment opened out. She had not yet stepped beyond the door frame. She had to admit, her body was trembling slightly with excitement.

This wasn't the first time she'd streaked. There had been an incident on a golf course at three in the morning, under a bright moonlit night sky on Bella and Alex's fourth date, where - fueled by the usual alcoholic lubricants - inhibitions and clothes had been shed in equal measure. Alex had broken down in fits of laughter as Bella had sprinted from one bunker to the next, theatrically taking cover and then popping her head up, scanning the empty golf course and scampering across the fairway, crouched, covering her womanhood, as if she had been running through a major golf championship during the climactic final round.

She'd also streaked through a hotel at two in the morning, again unseen, while out of the city for work, which had left her breathless, giddy and extremely aroused, resulting in not much sleep and a buzz during a morning sales presentation that had, ironically, won her plaudits from her audience for being "engaging and capturing the audience's attention."

There were, Bella admitted, several orders of magnitude difference between that and streaking two blocks from their apartment to Alex's office before midnight. Two blocks wasn't a lot when clothed. It would be a marathon while nude. Their part of the city wouldn't be over-endowed with foot traffic at this time of night, as while they told all of their friends they lived in the centre of the city, they were still a moderate distance away from the main entertainment district.

The streets wouldn't be empty, though, and there was the small matter that Bella and Alex knew a reasonable number of people around here. Bella would have been lying if she tried to claim that didn't make what she was about to attempt just that little bit more exciting, but the tiny, oft-ignored part of Bella's brain that thought about consequences had been frantically waving for attention, specifically to point out that Bella shouldn't attract attention.

Bella had considered taking a backpack with some clothes for the journey back. Bella was fairly confident Alex wouldn't have any spare clothes in the office, so if she didn't take clothes with her, she might be committing to a return leg in the same clothes-deficient outfit. A backpack would also allow her to take the apartment door key with her.

She'd half-packed the backpack before the let's-think-about-the-consequences part of Bella had unwisely turned its back on the I'm-so-fucking-horny-right-now part of Bella, and consequences-Bella had suddenly blacked out from being smacked over the head with a metaphorical vibrator.

Bella now planned to simply lock the door from inside, step out, and close the door. Once the door swung shut, once that lock clicked, she'd be naked and with no escape route except to find Alex, guardian of the only other key. And Alex was in a different building on a different street.

With a nod to the memory of the now-comatose consequences-Bella, horny-Bella had at least mentally mapped out a route to Alex's office that didn't entirely require streaking along two blocks completely in the open.

There was an alleyway just around the entrance to their apartment building that led to a quieter side street that would then get her part of the way. She could then duck through a small open car park, which, she felt fairly confident, would only involve some nimble scaling of a low wire fence, and that would lead to another alleyway between two apartment buildings, which in turn would get her to about fifty meters from Alex's office building.

Bella and Alex owned a car, parked in the basement of their apartment building. Alex walked to work, it only being two blocks away, so the car was technically available. There was also a carpark in the basement of Alex's office, so in theory, she could streak to the car, drive there, park, and only really have to handle sneaking through two buildings.

However, as grand gestures of her love for Alex went, Bella felt that using the car was the budget economy version. No, Alex would be so much more impressed by Bella getting there on foot, so much so that any thoughts of staying on to work more would surely be discarded forthwith to the rubbish bin of stupid ideas.

Even horny-Bella had realised that developers of building security software probably took the view that naked women trying to gain entrance to an office block was a sufficiently rare occurrence that the software only had to check for prosaic, boring things like swipe cards and not for things like "Are there two amazing c-cup breasts on full display at the front door? Yes? Well, come on in!"

So, the discovery of Alex's spare security card on the bedside table had elicited a triumphant yell from Bella only minutes earlier. Nobody was going to mistake Bella for Alex if there was a manual check of the person-holding-the-swipe-card to the person-in-the-photo-on-the-swipe-card if for no other reason than Alex's work did not yet have sufficiently talented HR or legal personnel to successfully get away with asking their employees to pose nude for profile images.

That was no problem, though, Bella was confident security would be automated at this time of night.

She'd slink out of their apartment building, duck down an alley, race along a side street, practice her old gymnastic skills in an open-air car park, dash between two buildings, appear for a final sprint along a main road to Alex's office, and then sneak into Alex's open-plan office, which should in theory only have one occupant right now, and surprise her lover with a Valentine's Day present for the ages.

Easy.

So why was she shaking so much, and why was she still standing in the doorway to the corridor rather than out there confidently making her way to Alex?

There were four other apartments she'd have to get past to reach the lifts, and she was debating whether to take the lifts or the stairs. The stairs were surely safer. She was trying to talk herself out of using the lift, in which she'd be trapped if someone else wanted to use it, and finding it surprisingly hard to do so.

Don't get caught, she chided herself. Enjoy the streak, shock Alex, but don't get caught!

Alex would certainly be surprised to find Bella naked at their work desk. Bella felt like Bella would be surprised to find Bella naked at Alex's work desk, and Bella was the one with a reasonable amount of forewarning of what was about to happen.

She also had a single small padlock in her hand, along with a crude Valentine's Day card crafted from a piece of paper she'd ripped out of a workbook and a red marker pen. That was all she'd carry with her. The purpose of the card was self-evident; the purpose of the padlock was something she hadn't really figured out herself yet, and she had seized it on a whim that she didn't yet know how to follow through on.

She tossed it lightly in the air and caught it a few times before her shaking hands fumbled the catch, and the padlock dropped to the floor. It hardly made a noise on the carpet, yet to Bella it sounded like it had been a boulder clattering down the high walls of a huge cavern, echoing for all to hear.

She dropped to her haunches and quickly picked up the padlock, still trembling slightly, but fighting to get her nerves under control.

"You can do this, Bella," she chanted under her breath, holding on to the words like a mantra.

The woman standing naked at the door had the kind of body that well-meaning admirers would say was a "natural beauty". Bella usually smiled politely at the attempted compliment, even as the claim of "natural" seemed to erase the countless hours she'd spent in the gym and the fact that she'd expended pretty much her entire supply of self-discipline on ensuring she ate at least a half-sane balanced diet and didn't over indulge in the snack department.

She was attractive, in the way that any athletic woman is attractive, and she was smart enough to look after her skin and make use of her long blonde hair to present a face that was very, very pleasant to look at. Admittedly, right now, any passers-by interested in the female form would probably struggle to identify key features like the number of eyes or the presence or lack thereof of a nose. They would, however, be able to paint a picture born from memory seared into their skulls of a treasure-laden chest and a tiny yet fertile field further south of short, neatly trimmed blonde hair that would merit display in any discerning art gallery.

Bella's eyes, both of them, were a piercing blue, for the record. Her nose was both present and pert.

A light tan was returning to her skin now that summer had unenthusiastically arrived in Wellington, although there were a few more weekends needed out at Scorching Bay in a skimpy bikini before Bella would be satisfied that the appropriate browning had occurred. That did have the benefit at least that her tan lights were barely noticeable, just a slightly paler complexion to the area immediately around two light pink nipples, and a couple of strap lines that someone would have been peering at intently to notice.

Although given Bella's firm, toned stomach, well-formed perky c-cup breasts and athletically muscular arms and legs, a close inspection would both be merited and its own reward. Bella was the kind of person whose membership at the neighbourhood gym wasn't just a donation to support a local small business.

Bella took a few more deep breaths, building courage with each inhale, edged forward and felt the hall carpet under the toes. All was quiet in the building. Bella didn't move and just stood like a statute, naked, in the doorway.

This was one of those "fork in the road" moments in Bella's life. Step back, close the door, find some batteries and wait for Alex to return. Or, step forward, let the door close behind her, and then just let fate take its course.

Bella took her step.

The door swung shut slowly behind her.

Bella could feel the air move as the door closed, her senses amped up to beyond maximum. There was the click. A piece of metal sliding across into a groove. The door lock did its duty.

Bella was trapped outside, naked, with a paper Valentine's Day card, a security access card for an entirely different building, and a simple padlock, her only tools for the journey ahead.

Shaking, Bella took another step forward, wondering if at any moment another apartment's door might open and a neighbour would appear, incredulous at the sight of Bella baring it all.

Then, as she forced herself to focus on the task at hand and not on the multitude of what-ifs that her imagination was churning out, Bella started to run towards the open space where the lifts and the stairwell were.

The stairs were the safest option, so logically, she would take the stairs. Take the lift, and she'd be at the absolute mercy of anyone waiting for it on the floors below.

She was still reminding herself of how much safer the stairs would be to take as she stepped into the lift and nervously watched the doors slide shut behind her.

If she took the lift in their apartment building, she'd feel okay taking the stairs at Alex's work. Yes, Bella reassured herself, that's a sensible compromise.

She draped one arm over her breasts, and the other hand hovered in front of her pussy, as she felt the lift begin to descend.

And this, she reflected as the floor indicator slowly dropped one by one, was the easy part.

****

There was a light ting as the lift signalled its arrival at the ground floor, and there was a two-second pause between the sensation of movement stopping and the shush of the doors sliding open.

Bella was like a coiled spring and shot out of the lift as soon as the doors were wide enough for her to squeeze through. There would either be people in the atrium or there wouldn't be, and Bella cowering in the back of the lift wasn't going to affect that.