by Wright,Lulu
“How’s your week going?” He shoots me his signature toothy, dimply grin. That goofy smile usually makes me feel immediately calm, but today that feeling is harder to reach.
I shrug my shoulders. I haven’t told him about Connor yet because I don’t want to talk about it. And I’m certainly not going to tell him about getting spanked in the stockroom. “Awesome.”
He glances around. “The department looks incredible.”
“Thanks.” It had been a sweaty week, but I finally had everything organized by line, style, size and color. I still have to get visuals in place to make the department stand out, but at least I’m off to a good start.
“Ready for a break?”
“Yeah, I’m starving.” Unrequited horniness makes me hungry.
Jack spots us leaving from his stance near the register and taps his watch. “Be back in an hour,” he calls. “Or else.”
“I’ll be back when I feel like it.” I stomp out of the department with a confused Ricky following me.
“What was that about?” I can tell from Ricky’s tone of voice he’s in a gossipy mood, so I have to be careful not to give him any. “Jack Hammer giving you problems already?”
“Jack Hammer?” I raise an eyebrow.
Ricky throws back his head and laughs. “Everyone in the store calls him Jack Hammer.”
“Do I want to know why?” I sigh.
Ricky’s eyes light up with pure joy. “Well, he started at Hamilton’s two years ago in the Kids Department.” Ricky smirks.
I giggle at this because kids is the worst gig in retail sales. Hard to imagine the unsmiling Jack Stewart dealing with harried moms and unruly kids. Picking up dirty diapers left on fixtures. Hanging tiny onesies. Sorting rattles on a display.
“I know, right? So, right after he starts, all the ladies and all the gays swan around him trying to get a piece of that. The girls won cos that’s a straight boy. And from what I hear, he caught a lot of V. Ha ha. And when he got promoted to women’s shoes, oh girl, forget it. The customers went nuts. Bitches in Philly be buying shoes like they had a thousand pair of feet each. I think he banged every woman in Philly with toes. I swear.”
I don’t bother to hide my disgust.
When we hit the fourth escalator, Ricky’s face lights up. “But the best—literally the best thing that happened—is more recent.”
I don’t want to know and I open my mouth to tell him, but Ricky is a runaway freight train packed with scandal. His eyes are glazed and he is beaming. “The cat fight in ladies accessories was honestly the most marvelous thing I have seen in my life. This girl from Juniors and this older woman from Plus Size went at it. Girl, nails were out and weaves were flying …”
We hit the 5th escalator and Ricky’s in full rapture. “Cops came and everything and still they didn’t stop. You can Google their mug shots.” He spreads his fingers across his throat to clutch pearls that aren’t there. “‘You stay away from my man!’ ‘He’s mine, whore!’”
I laugh because Ricky expects me to, but it bothers me Jack is a himbo. It shouldn’t matter, but for some reason my stomach aches a little at hearing it.
We get to the final escalator and Ricky is shaking his head. “They got fired, he got promoted to management. Lucky for him, he wasn’t even in the store that day. After that he kept it in his pants. Though I guess it helps that that girlfriend of his works here now. God, I hate her so much …”
Bile bubbles in my stomach at hearing that. We need a change of subject ASAP. “How’s the online dating thing going?” The only topic Ricky enjoys discussing more than other people are his sexual conquests.
Sure enough, he swallows the bait hook, line and sinker. “Did I tell you about the Daddy Bear with the truck yet?”
I feed him a wide eyed “no” and Ricky tells me all about a hairy guy named Joe and his 12-inch cock until we reach our destination.
The employee breakroom looks the same as every department store’s employee breakroom in America. Beat up couch in front of an old TV. Vending machines. Formica tables and plastic chairs. And a clock on the wall ticking away the seconds of your break.
Ricky and I sit down at an empty table. He’s moved on from Daddy Joe and is showing me phone pics of the next guy on his hit list, a Temple grad student named Jasper. He scrolls through pics of the guy in various states of undress and then lands on a face shot. Ricky zooms in. “Don’t you think he looks like he could be Jack’s younger brother?”
Jasper looks like Jack in the same way that I look like Michelle Obama. “Uh, they are both white guys with blondish hair …”
Ricky pouts and shoves the phone closer to my face. “I mean the attitude. Look.”
Jasper has a smirk on his face and he’s looking down his nose at the camera; quite a feat in a selfie. If there was word bubble it would read “Yeah, I’m hot and I rule the world.”
“I see what you mean.” I say. “Jack is so arrogant.”
Ricky drops his phone in his breast pocket. “Yeah.” He sighs. “He’s thinks he’s God’s gift. But you have to admit, he kind of is.”
I think of Jack’s bare chest and muscular arms, his handsome face and those sexy hazel-green eyes. “He’s ok.” I shrug, but I feel myself blushing.
“Girl, please.” Ricky opens a bag of chips and offers me first pick. “Don’t tell lies to Ricky.”
I stuff a handful of chips in my mouth so I can’t talk. When Ricky goes third person, shit’s about to get real.
Thankfully, a chair rattles at our table and interrupts his interrogation.
Unthankfully, Crystal sits down. “Can I sit here?” she asks. Like she hasn’t already. In the harsh fluorescent light of the break room, her makeup looks more clownish than it did downstairs.
I’m half expecting her to make balloon animals for us.
Ricky jerks his head back and pokes my leg under the table. “Uh, sure. Crystal, this
is …”
“We met,” Crystal replies coolly. I know she’s sporting a fake smile, so I flash her one of my own. Ricky reads this and shifts in his seat with anticipation. I can tell he wants to explode in gay drama. I kick his leg hard to remind him to behave.
Crystal takes her things out of her bag, a painful process to watch. Her fake nails are long, so she moves her fingers with care. One by one, Crystal’s possessions fill the table. Her salad. Her bottled water. Her makeup bag. The last thing she pulls out of her comically large purse is a bridal magazine. She smooths the front cover with her hand, and I hear the scratch of acrylic on the glossy page.
Ricky, of course, is all over that. “Ooh, making plans?” he gushes.
Now I know I don’t care. Why should I care if Jack is going to marry his harpie cosmetic bitch?
But I recognize this for what it is—she wants to play Bitch Chess and it’s my move. I do a quick scan of her fingers and see no sparkly ring.
“He proposed?” I am sugary. I am grinning.
Check mate.
“He will soon.” There is no smile as she squirms in her seat. She flips to a page she has marked off with a pink post it note. She turns the magazine to us, more to me than Ricky. “What do you think of this dress? Too much?” The white gown is a girly explosion of lace and satin and pearls, but the navel-grazing neckline would make a stripper blush. Ricky gasps like she just showed him a picture of a corpse.
“I think you can go bigger,” I reply dryly. “Why hold back?”
She smiles. “Oh, I’ll go all out. Jack will love that.”
Yeah. Sure he would. Dude makes a Jonas brother look edgy. My turn again. “You should get a dress that lights up.”
Crystal sneers at me and flips a page of her magazine.
Ricky needs popcorn right now. We are his personal reality show. “Yes. Little LED lights in the skirt. I hear you can time them to flicker when you say I do.”
Crystal ignores him and rests her chin on her hand, blinking her mascara crusted eyelashes at me. “So, how’s the stock
work going down there in underwear?”
I bristle. “Getting things reorganized is part of my job. It’s looking great.”
She smiles and taps her plastic claws on the table. “My Jack runs a tight ship. You better keep in line.”
I can’t help it, I burst out laughing. “Yeah, or he might spank me.”
Ricky chimes in. “I wish! I would gladly take twenty years off my life for that.”
Crystal snorts like a bull and sucks in her cheeks. Ricky and I are on the receiving end of some pissed off duckface. She closes the magazine and puts it in her bag. “I have to go,” she snaps. “We have a shipment that just hit. New cologne. Men and women’s. Gotta get my stock people to set that up.”
She storms out, leaving Ricky to gape at me. “What the actual fuck, girl? Why is that bitch hating on you?”
“I dunno.” I don’t sound convincing, so I stuff more of Ricky’s chips in my mouth and look at the clock on the wall.
“Really. Jack’s harpie of a girlfriend is gunning for you and you have no idea why?”
I keep my eyes on the clock and each tick feels like a century. He’s trying to do that ‘tell Ricky all about it’ stare, but I won’t take my eyes off the second hand.
Throwing in the towel, Ricky leans back in his chair and sighs. “No way he’s going to marry that, anyway. Not in a thousand years.”
“Really? What makes you think that?” I know that sounded too anxious so I try to recover. “I mean, not that it wouldn’t suit him right to be stuck with her for eternity.” I don’t know if I am trying to convince myself or Ricky.
“He doesn’t seem that into her.” He voice is soft and reassuring and it makes me wince that he’s trying to comfort me. He totally sees right through me. “I hear he avoids her like skinny bitches dodge carbs. And have you seen the two of them together? He don’t look at her. He don’t touch her …”
I yank my turkey sandwich out of my lunch sack and peel back the baggie. “Whatever. Who cares?”
But I care and I hate me for doing it.
Back on the floor, I get to work refilling the fixtures between customers. I have to carry several hundred underwear boxes from the stockroom to the floor, which takes endless trips. Each time I pass the belts, I come up with a different scenario for what would have happened if Crystal wouldn’t have barged into the stockroom.
How far would that have gone? Would we have yelled at each other? Or would we have laughed it off? Would he have spanked me again?
Would I have gotten Jack Hammered on a desk in a stockroom?
No clue.
I don’t know what would have happened and that both scares and thrills me.
I knew I wanted more from my sex life. Connor was a big yawn, and before Connor, I was just satisfied with being sexually active like. Doing it in the back seat or banging in the dorm room felt scandalous enough.
But now an impossibly hot man has spanked me and I can’t stop thinking about it.
I want more.
Damn him.
Near the end of the day, not only have I racked up $1500 in sales, but I have also finished merchandising and filling all twenty of my Flash Fit displays. It’s taken over a week, but the results are worth the hard work. My floor is tight. I stand back from the department and admire my handiwork. Making the floor easier for customers to shop will increase sales by itself, of course, but the sexy images and displays I added are going to pump sales through the roof.
I can already taste the regional manager position.
I take out my camera to capture the moment for the ages. But as I tap the camera app, my nose twitches and I sneeze. My iPhone tumbles out of my hand, and I barely manage to catch it against my chest. Whew. Close call. I don’t want to try explaining to Brenda that another of my work phones broke. Especially when this one is brand new.
But something foul stains the air and it’s torturing my nose.
“What’s that smell?” I gag, to anyone in the vicinity. My eyes are clouding up and my sinuses are closing. “Jesus it’s awful.”
Naturally, it would have to be Jack standing beside me. Ugh. He hands me a handkerchief, an actual honest to goodness cloth one. “What smell?”
I dab my nose with the cloth. “It smells like lemon-scented bug spray.”
Jack lifts his nose in the air like a meerkat. “I don’t smell anything.”
I sniff around until my olfactory senses zero in on him. “It’s coming from you!”
Jack’s ears turn beet red and he tugs at his lapel. “It must be the new cologne from Blush.” He frowns. “My ex-girlfriend, Crystal, spritzed me with it. I asked her not to.” It sounds like he’s apologizing. His voice droops and he looks away. “It’s called Shame.”
Wait, did he say ex-girlfriend? Knowing Crystal is the source of the offending scent makes me hate it more. She’s skunked him to mark her territory. Well, it’s working, because I want to run away. “It stinks.” I wave my hand to circulate air. “Get away from me.”
He takes his jacket off, folds it inside out and drapes it over his arm. He nods at my underwear displays. “Take $250 before you leave.”
This again. Asshole. “I. Don’t. Work. For. You.”
“Yes, you do.” He writes something on his clipboard, tears a piece of paper off of it and hands it to me. I am surprised the paper doesn’t burst into flames from my red hot gaze. It’s a volume goal sheet, the same piece of paper he gives his associates. My name is at the top and he has charted out sales goals by the hour.
He smirks at me and heads off towards the stockroom.
He doesn’t see me rip the paper to confetti sized pieces.
“Wicking is a feature of non-natural fibers.” I shake a pair of Pump briefs out of a box and lay them on the wrap stand. Mona is the new part timer. It’s halfway through her first day and I am trying to school her on fabric before the floor fills up with the evening crowd.
“What’s wicking?” Mona is maybe 18 and giggles a lot. I’m only 25, but she makes me feel like an old woman.
“Pulling sweat away from the skin so it dries faster.”
“You should listen to her,” Jack interrupts as he passes by us. “She’s the Queen of Underwear.” He smirks at me. He’s trying to piss me off.
“A Queen!” Mona squeals. “That’s pretty cool.”
She’s so cute. “I just know the product well.” I shoot Jack a hot look.
Jack smirks again. He’s worse than a mosquito. Worse than a hangnail. The most annoying thing on the planet, ladies and gentlemen, Jack Stewart.
He picks the underwear up with his pen like he’s handling nuclear waste. He dangles it and swings it in the air. “All underwear brands are the same. But you should push customers on Flash Fit because it’s priced much higher than our other brands. That will help you reach your sales goal.”
My blood pressure swells to talk radio host levels and I snatch the underwear away from his pen.
I am super defensive of my brand because I really, truly believe Flash Fit is the best brand in the business. Jack degrading our awesomeness to something so basic as its price point offends me. I fist the waistband of the underwear in my hand and shake it at him. “Flash Fit delivers an architectural fit with a wise eye to style detail.”
I just quoted from our website like a cult’s most devoted member, but it’s a true statement. “Get a customer to try one pair on and I guarantee he will buy it again. It’s that good. Flash Fit makes the man.”
Jack’s expression drops back to its usual poker face. “Flash Fit will make no one a man. Underwear brands don’t matter. They’re all same.” I am about to throw a stapler at him, but then he winks at Mona before I can get my hands on it.
He’s fucking with me.
He’s a retail guy. Of course he’s all about the features and benefits of different brands. I feel stupid for letting him get to me.
Time to turn the tables.
“What do you wear?” I stare at his crotch blatantly. “Wh
at brand? What style?”
Mona laughs and covers her mouth with her hands like a schoolgirl.
Jack shoves his hand in his pocket. “Wouldn’t you love to know?”
I catch his eye. “What’s the matter, scared to admit it?”
Jack shakes his head. “I don’t even know. I don’t pay attention to brands.”
I put my hands on my hips and walk a circle around him. “A likely story.” I stroke my chin like I’m a philosopher solving one of life’s riddles, but I am also checking out his tight ass. Damn those are some fine buns. “I’m thinking trunks. And black. Always black.”
“Are you trying to convince me you have X-ray vision?” He’s drumming his fingers on his ever present clipboard. “Like I said, I don’t know.”
Mona is staring at us both now, but I don’t care.
I walk behind him. As he looks over his shoulder at me, I lift his jacket up and pull his dress shirt out of his pants. He doesn’t move. He’s barely even breathing. I can tell, because those hazel green eyes are fixated on me again. I love this feeling of power I have over him, it’s making me hot as hell. “So aggressive, Miss Brook.” His voice comes out almost a whisper.
“Hold still,” I murmur in response.
Mona’s eyes are so wide they might pop out and bounce off the register.
I twist the waistband of Jack’s pants and flip it back. With my other hand I pull up his underwear by the waistband. “Whoa,” I say gazing upon his underwear—and sneaking a peek beneath it at his sexy hiney. “Mercerized cotton. Seamless. Microfiber waistband.” I plunge my fingers down his pants, along the side of his legs until I feel where the underwear stops. I can’t believe I’m doing this.
Neither can he, judging by the way he’s staring at me.
“Definitely trunks.” I called it. I rule. I pull his underwear up higher and he’s on his tip toes because I kinda have him by the balls. “For a guy who claims brands don’t matter, you wear a very expensive European brand, you know. These retail at what, sixty-five bucks a pop?”