And I would have set my alarm and driven to Kenmore Square to pick any one of these boys up after a concert, at 2 a.m. on any Wednesday he liked. But then, I suppose, he would have been even more shortchanged on sleep.
For the ones who wanted me as much as I wanted them, I tried to project what they desired in me. Self-assurance. Stability. Poise. Savoir faire. I tried to give them the complete grown-up woman – a soft, fleshy rock of adulthood, sculpted into a svelte hourglass.
It’s odd to recall that Ned did not seem especially pretty to me that first morning, when he showed up for work at my art-book publishing house. He’d been hired by my editor as one of the three all-purpose proofreaders/rights researchers/caption writers he always kept on hand – our version of an entry-level position. I was comfortable letting Bill do his own hiring, so I never met his assistants until they were already on the payroll.
Shaggy was great, but Ned’s straw-blond hair verged on unkempt. And since his eyes refused to meet mine while I was doling out his paperwork, and his head refused to orient itself away from the sight line to his shoes after I’d collected the completed forms, the hair was practically all I got – that, and a thin cute ass in nondescript jeans, as observed when I followed him out of my office.
The first thing Ned did when he’d been assigned a cubicle was put a cartoon up on the wall. I winced – tape marks! – but when I read it over his shoulder and he volunteered that he’d created it himself, I got a squishy sensation in my belly. The cartoon showed a woman declining, as I inferred from the bubbles, champagne (served in what Ned presumably didn’t realize was the wrong kind of glass), and saying to her male companion, “Yes, Frank, I know that was a good year. It’s just that I’m not ready to relive it yet.” Frank. If I’d encountered this in the New Yorker, I might not even have lingered to bemoan their sagging standards. But standing almost on top of the boy who’d taken the trouble to draw this slim idea – smelling the youthful, citrussy essence of this kid who’d risked ruining a cubicle wall his first day on the job in order to display his work – all I could feel was admiration. Admiration, and a warm tingling between my legs. Suddenly, I was very interested in Ned.
“Sorry about the breasts,” he said nervously, stepping to the side so he could face me. I took a peek at the cartoon lady’s cleavage, which I hadn’t noticed before. “I didn’t mean to draw them so large. I don’t want people to decide I’m one of those guys who thinks a woman amounts to a set of breasts.”
I felt a flush in my own, relatively generous, chest. “It’s OK, Ned. Hey, women have breasts. And breasts are nice, right?” I laughed, more self-consciously than I was used to in my workplace. In my time, a parade of seasoned men, my peers, had tried to flirt and banter and grope me into losing my cool at the office – had tried to make the always-in-control goddess blush or stammer or run off to change her panties. They had all failed. But poor Ned was nearly succeeding, without even intending to. The sincere way he both cared and didn’t care about the size of his cartoon character’s bust seemed to tug at my nipples and tickle my clit.
“Some of us have larger ones than others,” I continued, masking my flutteriness with a reassuring, didactically matriarchal tone, and trusting that my injection of self-referential language wouldn’t completely give away my agenda – yet. “You happened to draw one such woman.”
He gave me a sensitive, tentative-looking smile, and that’s when I understood that his face was capable of more complexity than silently framing the question, “What time is lunch?” I was about to ask him – I don’t know – about his life, what he’d liked best in college, about his family . . . but he spoke again before the words formed.
“What time is lunch?”
In fact, it was my policy to take a new hire out to lunch on his or her first day – just the two of us. These kids worked closely with Bill day in and day out, with a healthy share of collegial staff lunches sprinkled over their tenure; but I wasn’t involved in any of that. I welcomed them in and had little directly to do with them thereafter – unless I chose to offer extracurricular attention, and they chose to accept it.
Spending an hour alone in a quasi-social situation with a publishing-world rookie could be anything from a cougar’s wet dream to a nightmare of stifling silences. But whether it proved, from case to case, to be drudgery or delight, it was a non-negotiable duty that I’d long ago assigned myself.
This morning, I was so eager for “lunch” that I couldn’t focus on the contracts I was supposed to be reviewing. Fifteen minutes before I was due to meet Ned in the foyer, I finally stopped trying to concentrate. I gave myself a booster shot of perfume in front of the mirror in my private bathroom, and I went to bother Bill with inter-office chitchat, merely as a diversion.
It had long been my philosophy that if I was going to come on to an employee, I should do it at the outset. Things are less complicated when your young man hasn’t yet breathed much of the company air – when you’re still more an intriguing older woman than a familiar edifice looming on the skyline, engraved with the grey legend BOSS.
I knew how to broach the matter, having done it many times, sometimes in this very restaurant. Step One – ascertaining that he was single in the real-world sense, and not only in the IRS-form sense, had been taken even before the server brought our water.
I let the conversation wander naturally as we awaited, then began, our meals, and then I proceeded.
“I’m so glad to have a chance to get to know you a little, Ned, before you get immersed in the hectic routine with Bill and the gang.”
“Uh,” said Ned, nodding graciously.
“I’m usually in a whirlwind of my own. You’ll be happy to learn that you won’t see a lot of me after today.”
I gave him my seductive stage-chuckle. Then I gave him my standard three-beat pause, before continuing.
“Unless we get together outside the office, of course.”
No pause this time – momentum was key here. “This has nothing to do with your job, and there’s no wrong answer . . . but I was wondering if you might like to join me at my place for dinner some night soon. I’ve been in the mood to cook lately.” I winked. Subtlety was not the way to go with these boys. It was important to be unambiguously bold, and to refuse to be daunted by the possibility of a brush-off.
He stared at me as if sizing me up for the first time. “Ms Bruxelle, you’re my employer,” he said slowly. I’d certainly heard that before, at this stage of the proceedings – though it wasn’t articulated as often as you might think. One had a tendency to catch on that at Bruxelle Art Books, we didn’t stand on ceremony.
“So what?” I said, calling into service my most laissez-faire body language – the devil-may-care cock of the head, the flirtatious, mock-dismissive wave of the hand. “I’ve frequently – mm, socialized – with my employees.”
He ate a bit of his omelette. “I don’t know whether that should make me more or less concerned.”
He wasn’t attempting to be witty – he meant it. Damn, I adored men who didn’t always know what to think right away. They let you breathe.
It was part of my ethos to be assertive, but never aggressive. “Anyway – for what it’s worth – I’m not really your boss. Bill is really your boss.” I tossed this dubious technicality his way as a peripheral remark, then changed the subject temporarily to take the pressure off. “How’s your omelette?” Fuck, I was wet. The kid wasn’t doing anything; but that in itself was doing everything to my insides.
It was funny to think that in Ned’s eyes, I probably appeared cool as a cucumber – as I intended to. He probably assumed I could do this in my sleep. After all, why would it ever occur to him that a self-actualized, experienced woman at the top of her erotic game got butterflies – that she sometimes had an impulse to run to her room and hide her head beneath pillows, crying with embarrassment even while furiously masturbating off her screaming sexual tension? I never ran, but that didn’t mean I never thought about it.
/>
Ned kept eating. He began to speak – then hesitated – wiping his mouth with the napkin an extra, unnecessary, time before breaking the silence. “I don’t know, Ms Bruxelle.” It was obvious he wasn’t addressing the “how are your eggs?” issue.
“Claudia.” That part wasn’t seduction – nobody called me Ms Bruxelle, except people trying to sell us advertising.
“I guess it’s not the boss thing.” He looked at me with uncompromising innocence, his gaze steady and clear. “But . . . seriously? You want me to . . . y’know, come over to your house?”
“I wouldn’t have invited you if I didn’t.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. “Can I think it over?”
Of course he could. And that night, while Ned presumably thought it over, “Ms Bruxelle” gave herself seven fantastic orgasms, riding a vibrator and visualizing the face of this man who was too casual to have recited the “it’s not that I don’t find you attractive” speech.
But something told me that it really wasn’t that he didn’t find me attractive – that despite the layers of surprise and wariness, Ned had been looking at me with a three-dimensional appetite idling portentously in the background. That steady gaze. It bore into me, in absentia, in my bedroom, as my cunt danced contractions over hot sheets and I banged my ankles together, whimpering my lust.
The company’s tenth-anniversary party happened to be scheduled for the weekend right after Ned started. And when I brought this up the day following our lunch, I was afraid he might inform me that he already had plans. But one of the things I treasured about my bohemians was that they almost never had firm plans for anything. As was typical of these boys, Ned had “a few” parties he was thinking of attending that Saturday, but nothing definite on his agenda.
“Well,” I assured him, successfully keeping the college-girl longing out of my voice, “you’re not obligated to attend. But I’ll be delighted if you can.” After throwing the singular pronoun his way – I rather than we – I allowed my eyes to flash him for an instant. Don’t forget: sex here, my bohemian boy – if you want it.
As I skated back into my office, I wondered if he had been as wakeful and autoerotically engaged as I had the night before. Had he dreamed cartoonishly of my breasts? In any event, I’d been with enough young artists to accept that “Maybe I’ll be there” was the closest I was going to get to an RSVP, and I forced myself to assume optimistically that Ned would be at my disposal on Saturday evening – and perhaps, if I was lucky, on Saturday night.
A party like this was a whopping expenditure. But in the circles I travelled, we understood that additional business would result from the friendly bookstore-chain buyers we plied with friendly drinks, as well as the difficult-to-court customers who couldn’t resist a free, classy affair . . . and who were bound to find things they liked once our catalogues were shoved under their noses.
As the charismatic, impassioned, but business-shrewd CEO, I was centre stage most of the evening. Ned had arrived soon after the affair had begun – looking even more rumpled in his “nice” clothes than his clumsy-vintage duds – but it was hours before I was able to break away from the latest round of schmoozing, grab a plate of food, and casually float him towards the back rooms in the “rent for your function” Victorian we’d taken over for our celebration. I was, ostensibly, giving him a tour.
We nearly walked in on Bill and his fiancée. I halted myself – and Ned – in the doorway of the sprawling back parlour, just in time to keep them from realizing they’d been interrupted.
Only they hadn’t, in fact, been interrupted – because, deep in the parlour and oblivious to our presence, they proceeded with their business. Good old Bill had Felicia’s long, elegant skirt up at the back, and he was lazily fondling her mauve panties, just massaging her ass in there . . . showing her how private he wished to be with her, how intimate, despite the call of the festivities. Felicia, serene and content, was holding her drink right below her lips, and mouthing involuntary kisses towards a mirror. And, involuntarily, I felt my lips yearning to imitate those quiet kisses, and my ass yearning for a roaming hand.
“Shouldn’t we go?” whispered Ned. His breath tickled my earlobe.
I turned to look at him, my breasts still pressing against the heavy Victorian doorjamb. I took hold of his arm – firmly and purposefully. “Yes,” I whispered back. “Yes, we should.”
He studied my face, and then he broke into a sly grin. He looked down to my hand, where it rested on his forearm, and he removed my fingers from his person. But instead of letting my fingers drop, he guided them to my chest, where he boldly squeezed my right breast, using my own grip as his proxy.
His face glowed with unrefined want.
Of course, I couldn’t take Ned home until the guests had finished depleting the canapés and Cabernet. Fortunately, the catering firm that had rented us the space and their services were responsible for clean-up, and Bill and I had no obligation to hang around washing dishes or vacuuming up crumbs. I said a quick goodnight to Bill and Felicia – getting a frisson as my mind leaped back to what I’d observed earlier – and I left the building with Ned.
“Did you take the ‘T’ to get here?” I asked him after we’d driven a few blocks. I was surmising that he didn’t have a car, and that the subway would have been the logical option.
“Yeah.”
“I guess you’d be at a party with your friends tonight, if you weren’t with me.”
He shrugged. “Some weekends I just stay home and draw.”
At my condo, my libido found a comfortable plateau. I’d figured out by this point that he wasn’t an animated talker. But I didn’t want to jump on him, first thing in the door – well, I did, but I knew it would be more civilized to pace myself. So I enjoyed simply sharing my space with him for a while, having a drink and taking him on his terms – letting him set the tone of what passed for a conversation. He complimented me on the wine I’d served him and catalogued his favourite dollar-fifty beer bars.
He was poking around my living room when I returned from the kitchen with our second round of drinks. I joined him in front of the bookshelf, where he had just stopped to admire a photo of me at about twenty-five, shaking my ass in a fringed miniskirt and go-go boots at a discotheque.
“You must have had some wild times in the Sixties,” he said – name-checking the legendary decade with the reverence my generation saved for the names of movie stars and European cities.
I smiled knowingly, and the comment that came out of my mouth surprised me. “Yes, that was a good era. But I’m not ready to relive it yet.”
It was as if my discovery of the lingering profundity in his one-panel rattled him, and all he could think to do was grab me by the waist and kiss me, hard. It was as good a trigger as any.
When his lips released me, I took a moment to set my drink down – feeling my juices flowing, my every atom ready. The next deep kiss would be served by the hostess, I decided.
But Ned had something more to say. “When I got to the party, I was thinking I was going to turn you down.”
“What?” This caught me unawares: I thought I could read a situation. And he’d picked a hell of a time to tell me this. Still, I was intrigued. “Why didn’t you?”
“Your face. When you saw Bill and what’s-her-name.”
“Felicia.” The word rushed out of my mouth.
“There was something in your expression that made me think I might regret it if I didn’t” – he scanned the room – “do this.”
“I see,” I said hoarsely.
“Yeah, you looked sort of naked, for a second. It was great.”
I would reflect on this later – how Ned had wanted me to be raw and churned up, not calm and in control. Other boys hadn’t felt that way. Or, if they had, they hadn’t told me.
But right now, I couldn’t take any more time to think. “This is what I look like when I’m naked.”
I’d dressed intelligently, and almost everything came off i
n one piece. My slip clung cooperatively to the inside of my floral dress – so that with one sibilant swoosh, I was left in only my bra and my jewellery. I had not worn panties.
As I unclasped the bra, Ned started laughing benignly.
I laughed with him. “What?”
“I was remembering that discussion we had about breasts. You know, the cartoon. And now you’re . . .” His laughter trickled off. “They’re so gorgeous, Claudia.”
He stood there worshipping me with his eyes – and with the hard-on that strained against his ill-fitting dressy trousers.
“I need you to touch me, Ned.”
The hand on my ass cheek was the warmest thing I could ever recall having in my living room. I hadn’t realized quite how hungry I’d been for contact with male flesh.
I luxuriated in his palm, feeling the honey seeping down towards the mouth of my pussy. It felt too good, too fast, for me to be surprised that he’d gone for my ass first, rather than my breasts. I only thought of that afterwards, conjecturing that Bill and Felicia had inspired him.
And, man, that boy knew how to caress a woman’s ass. The alternating circles, back and forth from cheek to cheek. The vigorous squeezes and delicate pinches. The thin finger dragging itself down the crack, like a languid exclamation point streaked onto a foggy car window. The no-sting slap of approval, gentle but lewd as hell.
I wondered if he was going to stay back there all night – and, frankly, I wouldn’t have cared if he had. But his hands finally travelled to my belly, grazing my bush, and his cock – still in his pants, but hard as fuck – nudged the pleasure-tingling bottom that his hands had just abandoned. I squirmed into him like the horny, in-her-prime sensualist I was, while my nipples buzzed like dried chili peppers. Then I turned around in his grasp. “You should get undressed.”
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