Trinh nearly snapped a heel sprinting up the escalator from the subway station, but she didn't let it stop her. She limped and stumbled past the turnstile and out into the warm spring air, then began to run the three blocks to her apartment as fast as her unsteady feet would carry her. Her feet almost skidded out from under her again as she rounded the first corner, causing her handbag to swing in a wide, potentially lethal arc, but thankfully foot traffic was beginning to thin out and she didn't wind up making anyone an inadvertent casualty of her uncoordinated stagger.
Normally she would have stopped and changed shoes on her way out of the office, but the meeting at the remote location overran by twenty minutes and Trinh had to take the calculated risk that it would take her less time to run three blocks in modest heels than it would to stop back at her office building, go up twenty floors in an elevator that she privately suspected hadn't been serviced since the Truman administration, change into her sneakers, and head back down and catch the next train. Her ankles protested that she'd made the wrong choice, but when she burst into the lobby of her apartment building and checked her watch, she saw that it was still seven minutes to seven. Plenty of time.
Or at least enough. Trinh unlocked her door and yeeted her shoes halfway across the living room with two swift kicks, then stepped through and closed it behind her with a sigh of released frustration. She quickly turned the deadbolt and slid the chain home, then shimmied off her skirt with a single angry yank that took her panties with it. Of course the meetings had to run long today. Today of all fucking days. She darted to the bathroom and grabbed a towel, then headed into the bedroom.
Not that she couldn't have joined the call a little late. Nobody would have minded-hell, probably nobody would have even noticed, depending on how late Trinh actually was in signing into the group voice chat. But that wasn't the point. Trinh looked forward to her Thursday nights the way normal people looked forward to Fridays, and the last three hours had been an absolute agony of impatience for her. She couldn't pay attention to anything her co-workers said. She couldn't sit still. All she could do was fidget and roll her eyes and glance back and forth between her watch and the clock on the wall, waiting for this moment to arrive. Trinh spread the towel on her computer chair and sat down, her tawny brown thighs vividly contrasting with the bright yellow terry cloth.
She slid open her desk drawer and pulled out a pair of wireless headphones, fumbling with one to get them over her ears while her other hand brought up the chat program and signed in. She just managed to get logged on with the window maximized in time to hear Suzie say to the others, "-got a good one this week. Like, hang on to your IQ, Elena, because this shit is going to leave you fucking drooling in your chair, okay?" Trinh's eyes closed as the sensation of familiarity washed over her, and her lips spread in an involuntary and unnoticed smile.
She opened them a few moments later when the chorus of, "Hey Trinh!", "Hi Trinh!", "Good to see you, Trinh!" and other comments flooded through her headphones. Reflexively, she checked to make sure her webcam wasn't on-she always left her blouse buttoned up until she was sure that she wasn't about to flash the entire room, not that she'd learned that the hard way or anything. (She hadn't. That was Missy.) Once she was sure that she was in the clear, Trinh let her fingers drift up and begin to slowly undo her buttons one by one, exposing the clasp of her bra. She barely remembered to mute herself before letting out a reflexive groan of relief as she finally unhooked it and tossed it aside.
"Okay," Suzie said, breaking into the muddle of random chatter, "It's seven o'clock here, so let's go ahead and get going before Brogan falls asleep in her chair. This week was my turn, and I made a file that runs about twenty minutes. It uses binaural sounds and a lot of rapid motion, but I stayed away from stroboscopic effects this time. It's kind of deceptively smooth, I think. Y'all are going to go down in no time." With that, the monitor suddenly went dark... then brighter than ever, as swirl after swirl of bright pink ribbon began to unspool toward the center of the screen.
Trinh tapped a key to unmute herself, marveling at how quiet and calm her voice already sounded as she muttered, "Nice flutter effect," into her microphone. The ostensible purpose of the group was to polish their computer graphics skills after all, and even if they had... drifted... just a little away from that goal, Trinh always tried to give feedback for as long as she could before-oh. Oh wow. A purple ribbon spun into view just behind the pink one, chasing it around and around in a rapidly unfurling spiral that captured Trinh's gaze and drew it deeper and deeper to the center of the screen.
"That looks so... wow..." Trinh heard someone else, probably Elena, murmur as a yellow ribbon unrolled into the gap between pink and purple. Her voice sounded loose and muzzy, almost drugged with fascination in Trinh's ears, and Trinh felt her mind float just that little bit faster into the spinning, swirling spirals of color and light at the sound of it. It always started like that. One of them would begin to drift off a little into rapt, mazy enchantment, and everyone else just sort of took it as permission to let go. To relax. To stop thinking and simply watch.
The ribbons unwound deeper and deeper into the darkness at the center of the screen, tugging Trinh's gaze deeper and deeper along with them. She heard a few scattered "ohhhh" sounds, but already the women in the room were beginning to settle into slow, measured breathing in time to the throbbing pulses of bass rhythm that came in through the headphones around the voices in chat. Trinh had a moment of quiet envy-she was still just beginning to experiment with sound editing, and most of her visuals were silent. Then the spooling threads of light began to give way to darkness again, and Trinh's envy vanished into mesmerized fascination once more.