He gave me a kiss and it felt like a promise of something. “Come out and eat?”
“I’m going to take a shower. Wash all of you off of me,” I teased, and it came out right. Light and fun, void of the dark pit that had settled in my stomach at the thought of leaving our bedroom and facing Aaron, after everything I just envisioned. Embraced. Orgasmed to.
“See you in a bit.”
I nodded and laid back on the bed. “Save me some pizza.”
When he left, he was still hard and I was still wet, his words hanging thickly in my ear.
“Play with that beautiful pussy and pretend it’s his tongue.”
God. What had we begun?
17
I sat in the nosebleed section of the conference room, in one of the extra chairs wheeled in from offices and crammed along the wall. If I swiveled too far left or right, my knee hit either Tim Rowland or Charity Freeland, both novice agents with higher sales for the quarter than me. While our office’s hierarchy could be easily read by our positions in the room, the giant dry erase board, mounted at one end of the impressive space, also kept score: all sixty-three agents in the company listed and color-coded in order by volume. In green marker and at the top, the rich bitches that always dominated the standings and this conference room. Natalie Bestenbreur. Maria Bott. Jacks Williams. Lorna Pulley, the queen bee herself, currently held court at her standard spot on the northern-most end of the conference table, her gold-tipped Montblanc pen in hand.
“It needs to be trimmed. I don’t understand the issue. Get someone out there and do it!” She jabbed the expensive pen into the monogrammed page before her as if it was Neal Blanton’s chest.
Neal, our fearless broker who should have retired with his stroke four years ago, sighed. “It’s a historical tree. This is downtown, Lorna. You know how these things work. We can’t just hack away at it.”
I studied the agent list on the whiteboard, drifting down the list, where names went from green ink to black and then, near the bottom, red. I was two names above red, not that getting fired from Blanton & Rutledge would matter in the grand scheme of things. If life grew that dour, I would be submitting resumes for a salaried job anyway, and be out these gilded doors before they had a chance to clean out my desk.
“It’s unacceptable.” She sniffed, and the skin pulled tight along her ears, an unnatural fold of skin appearing. Her latest facelift had been impressive, but jumped into play at times. I drew a bubble heart in the margin of my agenda to keep from staring.
“You could park in one of the other spots, away from the tree.” This brilliant insight was offered by our newest marketing assistant, one of those snarky gays that could insult the last-season pants off you while still winning your affection. His suggestion was laughably ignorant, since the four shaded spots at the forefront of the parking lot were clearly marked.
Sales Person of the Year.
Sales Person of the Month.
Listing Agent of the Year.
Listing Agent of the Month.
It didn’t matter if those spots were straddling a landfill, there wasn’t an agent with that title who wouldn’t tread through fresh shit in order to park there. They’d earned that spot, and Lorna’s apple red Bentley was currently parked at an angle between two of them. It was also splattered with bird poo from the family of nine nesting in the branch above her vehicle, which is why we’d wasted the first fifteen minutes of the weekly sales meeting discussing tree trimming and not lead generation, our sales goals, or the broker’s open that was occurring in… I snuck a subtle glance at my watch. Four hours.
“If we could move on, Tyler has an excellent presentation on the new FAR-BAR contract that I think we’ll all benefit from.” Neal swept his good arm toward the thin attorney seated in the middle of the table. Tyler stood, and we all sank a little deeper into our chairs. As unexciting at Lorna’s bird shit debacle was, it was still better than a Tyler soliloquy. I carefully switched the cross of my legs and somehow managed to toe Tim in the calf. “Sorry,” I mouthed.
“Now, wait a minute.” Lorna held up a tan wrist draped in a vintage Cartier watch that, according to office gossip, once belonged to Elton John. “We haven’t solved my issue.”
“We’re going to table the tree trimming conversation until next month,” Neal announced with finality and I was disappointed to see Lorna settle back in her seat, her coral-colored lips pinning shut. Lorna and Neal, according to office lore, had a physical tussle in a weekly meeting two decades ago, an event that sadly occurred before the technology of cell phone cameras.