It was no small wonder that Wendy tried assiduously to feel nothing at all. Just get it over with, Janet, and tell me you want to fuzzy handcuff someone else. Or Janet could bend her over that desk, giving Wendy a once-in-a-lifetime enjoyment of a sex act involving hardwood. That was a good possibility. Wendy could get high on that possibility. It was a possibility so good, she almost wanted to wait on it happening so she could keep anticipating it. If only she could rule out the possibility of Janet doing the other thing, the thing with no sex!
Wendy entered Janet’s office clutching her purse like she was doing a drug deal. “Is it true bread helps with hangovers?”
“Does bread help with…” Janet paused. “Are you on lunch break?”
“I think I’ve been on lunch break since I drank the worm.” Wendy limped over to Janet’s desk, helped herself to a chair, and slumped down in it. “Why?”
“I just don’t like to be conducting personal business on company time.”
Wendy smiled. This definitely didn’t seem to be going in a ‘let’s not have sex’ direction. “So we’re having lunch together?”
“I suppose, technically—”
“You order pizza? I think I could stomach some pizza.”
Brow furrowed, Janet reached down to open a drawer. “I have some power bars. And a bottle of water.”
“That’ll do,” Wendy said. “I suppose I should pack a lunch. Then I can just bring it in here and we can do lunch that way.”
“Or we could eat out,” Janet said.
There was a slight pause.
“Should I wink?” Wendy asked.
“I think you should’ve winked.”
“Sorry, I might still be a little drunk.”
Janet handed her a water bottle and two power bars.
Wendy took the bottle, uncapped it, gulped down water, then paused to say, “So, get any good e-mails lately?” Then drank more.
“I did,” Janet announced evenly. She turned to her laptop. “‘Dear Boss MILF, have you ever seen the movie Ella Enchanted? In it, Ella, played by Anne Hathaway, is under a spell where she has to do whatever anyone tells her to do, no matter how embarrassed it makes her. I think it’d be kinda hot if I dressed up as Ella and you told me to do stuff and maybe I cried a little and then we did sex.’” Janet paused a moment. “And this next line is either a typo or a saying in Swahili.”
Wendy pursed her lips. “Probably a typo.”
“Yes. Moving on. ‘P.S. no butt stuff.’” Janet resolutely tapped on her keyboard to close the e-mail, then just stared at Wendy, as unimpressed as a Downton Abbey character would be with the poor.
“I was drunk,” Wendy said. “We can negotiate on the butt stuff. Wait, who would be doing the butt stuff and who would be receiving?”
“Is this you making fun of me?”
Wendy held her hands up. “No, Ella Enchanted is actually a pretty good movie. I mean, it’s no Princess Bride, what is? But it’s a pretty good-faith effort. It has Hugh Dancy from Hannibal, which gives the whole thing an added layer of hilarity if you’re a Hannibal fan, which you should be, and they also got Eric Idle, and Anne Hathaway is great in it, I really don’t understand the backlash, she’s talented, she’s charming—”
“Wendy!”
“—willing to do nude scenes.” Wendy stopped and held her head. “I promise, I’m not making fun of you.”
“What does MILF mean?”
“Mother I’d Like to…Friend.”
Janet nodded, as if that made sense. “I thought we were going to have an…an intimacy. I told you what I wanted you to do and you seemed fine with it.”
“I was! I am! But Janet, look at this thing.” Wendy plonked her purse down on Janet’s desk and wrestled the supposed vibrator out of it. “I mean, come on! If I ran an auto shop, I wouldn’t have enough lube for that! Who do you think I’ve been dating, the Expendables?”
“It has a very high user rating on Amazon!” Janet objected, trying hard to look Wendy in the eye as Wendy waved the thing in front of her face.
“Well, then the company had to have paid for good reviews, because there is no way that many women have a fantasy of being fucked by Ultron.”
Elizabeth chose then to poke her head in the door. “Jan, Mr. Marlowe needs an answer on the conference, ASAP.” She didn’t actually raise an eyebrow at the sight of a vibrator being waved in her boss’s face, but managed to convey one entirely through voice. “Didn’t Indiana Jones find that in his last movie?”
Wendy stuffed it back in her purse. Naturally, it didn’t quite fit.
Janet leaned to one side of her. “Tell Marlowe I’m reviewing the options right now.”
Elizabeth closed the door behind her.
Wendy successfully got her purse to do a sword-swallowing act. “I mean, I get that that part is to stimulate my clit, but what are all these for? How many clits do you think I have?” She looked up to see Janet jotting out a quick e-mail. “Seriously?”
Janet stopped, slapping her hands down on the keyboard with a crunch of keys. Then she took her hands away and backspaced through all the gibberish she’d just made. “This was a mistake.”
“It’s okay, you can just press Ctrl-Z.”
“No, this.” Janet slammed the laptop shut. “I gave you a simple instruction to gauge your willingness to enter into an arrangement, and the next day, all you’re interested in is immature jokes and excuses.”
“Willingness?” Wendy asked, not giving an inch. “I think I proved how willing I was when I came into your office and let you fuck me.”
“I didn’t lay a finger—”
“I didn’t say you touched me, I said you fucked me.” Wendy’s lips curled around the word, relishing the slight emphasis she put into it, the quiver she saw go through Janet. Not much—the radio mast on a skyscraper in a high wind—but she saw it. “You asked me into your office and you. Fucked. Me.”
Janet stood up slowly, like a rattlesnake uncoiling its head, and Wendy thought maybe this hadn’t been exactly the best tack to take. “You should leave this office right now.”
“Or what?” Wendy asked, marshaling her willpower. It didn’t hurt that Janet with her arms steepled on her desk, glaring at Wendy with all kinds of power, inspiring the kind of awe most people only got from religion, was actually kinda hot. “You’ll spank me?”
“I ought to,” Janet snapped. “I should bend you over this desk and paddle your ass until you’re begging me to stop.” The very tip of the left side of Janet’s lip hooked upward. “Or to keep going. As long as you beg.”
God, she could be a smug bitch. “Is that supposed to scare me? Do it. You have my permission or safe word or whatever. Get on with it. Punish me already.”
And as Janet stared at her, her lips looking as dry as Wendy’s felt, her gaze raking over Wendy’s body like fingernails down her back, like warm water over her skin, Wendy realized something.
Janet was into her. She was attracted to her. Janet Lace had a big fucking girl-crush—scratch that, regular crush, sexy crush—on her. Wendy Cedar. After all, Janet had seen her go-sign and she’d taken it. What was that? Target of opportunity? No, Janet Lace could have any woman she wanted. It was just that she wanted Wendy. Nothing else to it. After all, it wasn’t like this was Jane Austen and she was trying to marry into a well-to-do family… Well, Wendy was from a well-to-do family, but it still wasn’t Jane Austen!
And then, just like that, Janet snapped shut. Wendy saw a flicker of doubt in her eyes, some inner decision-making tilting to one side, and then the mask was back up. Janet regarded Wendy like something on the side of the road. She rose to her full height, her fingers tapering off the desk.
“I believe I asked you to leave,” Janet said. “Please return to your office and resume your work.”
Wendy bit the inside of her cheek, weighting her options, whether to press Janet, whether it was unthinkably insane to try to press Janet, then realizing that her best bet was to sweat Janet a little
and she’d already done that enough, insouciantly lingering in her presence. “All right,” she said. “And I won’t even make you promise not to watch my ass as I go.”
And as she went—feeling like she had more sway than her iPod—Wendy wondered if she’d actually been cool for a moment there.
Janet thought of starting up the Kee Bird like playing a symphony, note by note, every key struck lingering in the air as pregnant as a thunderhead. There’d be the quadruplets of the control panel, one for each of the Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone engines: Polly, Ida, Norma, and Pat.
She’d start with Norma; her first cat had been named Norman. The battery switch would set voltage meters flickering, the needles moving like the twitching finger in a zombie movie. Then the rest would follow in satisfying sequence, each a little crescendo: the auxiliary power unit and the mixture levels and the throttle and the booster pumps; the circuit breakers and booster coil; the start and prime switches.
That would do it: there’d be a metal scream from the starter, the propeller jerking like a body hit by a bullet, the slow spin that followed, and then the magneto, like a flick of a horse’s reins sending it into motion once it’d been saddled. The deeply held breath of the exhaust would finally exhale, hacking up flame wrapped in smoke, and the prop would twirl faster, faster, oil pressure rising, oil temperature rising, reaching for the green…
Janet imagined that the smoke didn’t stop with the engine clearing its throat, but continued: a never-ending purge of oily black that surrounded the cockpit in a sheath of night. The rattle of the engines growing jarring, hard, unfriendly; shaking the ship that held them like a hound with its prey. The smoke seeping into the cabin, the gauges malfunctioning. The fire now: heat pushing into the cockpit, flame following, pushed by the smoke or pulling it along, some terrible symbiosis devouring the plane between the two of them. The metal groaning as it was rent. As it blistered, bubbling, the entire plane the surface of a skillet, the air filled with the hazy distortion of the heat, stinging the eyes even before the smoke hit, the fire struck. If you were lucky, maybe there was enough fuel left to explode and rip you out of the plane the only way that you could get loose…
“Mrs. Lace?” Mary Borchardt called.
Janet snapped to attention to see that the room’s gaze had turned to her. She was in the middle of a meeting—a meeting scheduled for two hours, which meant it was now at three and a half hours. And she had spaced out. She never spaced out.
She stood, adjusting her jacket for a beat as she reoriented herself, noticing a sheen of schadenfreude as those present enjoyed her being caught in an unprofessionalism. Very well. Let them have their fun. They wouldn’t get another laugh at her expense.
She moved to the head of the table to begin her presentation.
The sun set, the lights switched off, and Janet’s workday ended about an hour after Elizabeth had left. She decided she needed a better time management system. There was no reason she should be working these late hours. In the morning, she would ask Elizabeth to find her some decent applicants. With any luck, a few of them would work out, and she’d be able to delegate better.
Maybe Roberta was right. She couldn’t do everything herself. She had to let others do some of it before she became a holy terror of micro-managing. Napoleon on Elba.
As she left her office, pulling on her gloves, Janet looked across the floor to the front partition of Wendy’s office and was relieved to find no light pushing through the opaquely pebbled windows or under the door. Then she was amused, if darkly, at her own relief. What did she have to fear from Wendy Cedar?
Why did she still have a flutter in her stomach after she’d decided it was inadvisable?
She walked through the darkened offices, exchanging greetings with the cleaning crew as they filtered in, and then she entered the elevator.
Wendy Cedar was inside.
She wore the same respectable suit she’d had on when she’d entered Janet’s office—a dark knee-length skirt, a white blouse with subtle polka dots, the sleeves rolled nearly to her shoulders. Her jacket was in her hands, folded over her purse, and Janet could see the power of her musculature, trickling down her arms in tension and tautness.
Janet faced her evenly as she stepped beside her, then looked straight ahead. “What floor?”
“Whatever’s good.”
“Were you waiting for me?”
“I thought you might have something to say to me.”
Janet pressed the button for the lobby. She pulled her hand back, seeing her and Wendy’s reflections in the glossy metal that surrounded the white buttons. Even blurred and stretched by the impromptu mirror, Wendy drew her gaze.
Wendy’s finger went back. It pressed the Stop button. With a shrill jangle of an alarm, the elevator stopped. Without the hum of its movement, the silence begged for something to be said.
Janet turned her head slightly toward Wendy, barely enough to see her out of the corner of her eye. “If I had fucked you, you’d know it.”
“That’s what I said,” Wendy insisted. “The way you talked to me, the way you looked at me—”
Janet turned her attention fully to Wendy. Looked her in the eye. Nothing more than a vexing issue. An itch. A tingle that had to be addressed.
She could deal with that. “You’d know it,” she reiterated. “And right now, you don’t.”
“Okay,” Wendy said. “I don’t. But you got to at least third base with me.”
“This is a lesbian relationship, Ms. Cedar. Third base is as many bases as there are, to my knowledge.”
“Okay, second base. There are a lot of things that count as second base, and that was one of them.”
Now Janet turned slightly. Canting her hip as she placed one heel closer to Wendy. “Is that what you’ve waited all this time to tell me?”
“I wasn’t waiting to tell you anything,” Wendy said. She dropped her purse and jacket between them. And, her cheeks flushing, her eyes demurely glancing away, she reached to the hem of her skirt and pulled it up her thighs.
Janet watched. She watched idly wondering if she should, could, look away, even when she could think of no reason to. It itched that she couldn’t look away—that she didn’t want to.
Wendy’s thighs were firm and flat, not rippling with muscle, but potently taut with it. They gleamed with a little gold sheen, and if Janet could’ve thought, she would’ve registered envy. But Wendy’s side was facing her, and she was turning slightly as she raised her skirt, so that her ass was facing Janet. Her panties. There was no crass logo on the back, no forced slogan, just the simple fact of white fabric stretched to translucence by her pert buttocks, the simple heft and lift of them revelatory, taking everything of Janet’s away but lust.
It didn’t make her lust for Wendy. It just stripped away everything in Janet until she was aware of the sheer want that was in her.
Then, with her skirt raised high above her ass, Wendy let go of it with one hand and brought that hand down on her cheek with a sudden, resonant smack. Air shot into Wendy’s mouth as she inhaled sharply, sounding discordantly loud; the flesh jumped with a jiggle beneath Wendy’s panties as red flooded in under the gauzy fabric. She’d struck with real force, even mewled a little with pain, and long after the bounce had settled, Janet found herself staring at the skin. The little bit of suffering it was imbued with, that fading, replaced with the creamy hue of Wendy’s girlish health.
Her eyes flicked up to Wendy’s expression and her heart skipped a beat. Something about Wendy’s look was even better than her little display. There was something of pain—that grisly pride some took in being injured that always struck Janet as tomboyish. But there was also an eagerness to please, a keen curiosity as to whether she had pleased, even an affection, all of which Janet found utterly irresistible.
Wendy exhaled, a breath that was dragged out of her, flowing softly out from between parted lips.
Janet inclined her head to Wendy, putting her hand around the fingers
of Wendy’s left hand and pulling it back from her skirt to let the thing fall back down. With her other hand, she smoothed it out, plying it back down Wendy’s legs to fix her appearance.
“Does it hurt?” she asked, feeling unnecessarily solicitous, but wanting to know.
“Not anymore. It was just one slap.” Wendy smiled at her, looking pleased with herself.
As pleased as Janet was.
“You think I’ve never had my ass slapped before?” Wendy asked.
Janet saw her and raised her. “If it doesn’t still hurt? Not really.”
Wendy bit her lip, giving Janet a look that was mostly curious, and all Janet could think was that most of the time when you were trying to fix a plane, even if it broke down again, you could always fix it up some more.
The elevator’s phone rang. Wendy jumped nearly out of her skin while Janet instinctively reached for it, tightening a vise-grip around everything she’d just felt.
It was building security. They wanted to know if everything was all right.
Wendy didn’t push after that. She seemed satisfied, even if Janet wasn’t. And if she wasn’t, then she at least understood there was only so fast Janet could go. A pace she set that she wouldn’t be rushed through.
Still, Janet lingered in the elevator after Wendy had gone. On her phone, looking up where Wendy lived.
CHAPTER 7
“Jesus Christ, what are you doing here?” Wendy demanded the moment she came through her door.
She had a small apartment and with the way Regan was bustling around, finding new spots in Wendy’s cupboards to stow non-perishables from grocery bags, then finding stuff to be thrown out to go into garbage bags (also from the grocery bags), she seemed to take up all of it. “Keith bought groceries at the same time I did. I’m letting you have them. Do you know how few fresh vegetables you had in your refrigerator? And where’s your bottle opener?” She set a bottle of Pinot on the counter. Not that Wendy had much of a counter left with Regan’s bags on it.
Scissor Link Page 12