by Amy Brent
“I’ll do the CEO floors!” I said, almost too quickly, leaving Davie blinking at me in surprise.
“Are you sure? I know you’re new, but that’s the hardest floor on our list. You’ve cleaned it every night for the past week. And you’ve only been working here two weeks.”
I shrugged. I had been made aware from day one that the floor that all of the janitorial dreaded was the uppermost in the building. Between its marble-like floors that required a specific type of cleaner to not leave streaks, to the specifics in each office, they had the longest to-do list. But I didn’t mind, for reasons that were purely my own.
“Alright then. Alicia, how about you take the floor below and I’ll take the bottom ones?”
Alicia shrugged as well. As long as she got home in time to feed her approximately billion and one animals, she was more than happy. Not that she actually had that many animals. But since she ran an informal sort of rescue, she had an ever-changing roster of children that I couldn’t quite keep up with.
“Very good. Goodnight, my friends, I will see you at wrap up.” Davie stood, his short legs bringing him to just about my height when I was sitting. He gave an adorable bow and shuffled off to find his old cart.
I liked Davie. He rarely asked questions that I had to dodge answering and generally just rolled with the flow. As long as I continued to work as best I could, he liked me plenty and that was all I really needed.
We all broke our separate ways, and I grabbed my cleaning cart. After two weeks on the team, I had managed to build up enough callouses on my hands that the mop handle no longer hurt me, and I could hold onto the floor-polisher without feeling like I was going to die. Who would have thought, with how vain I was about moisturize my skin, that I would ever allow such a phenomenon?
I certainly never would of, but that was often how my life went. Too many surprises going every which way to ever feel comfortable. But that didn’t matter, because the elevator doors were opening, and I was stepping into my one way to wind down.
I had never expected to find a way to relieve the intense anxiety within me at work, but that’s exactly how it had worked out. Pushing my cart to the middle of the room, I pulled my MP3 player from my pocket and placed my headphones on my crop of fiery-red hair. Turning my music all the way up, I got ready to jam.
As the base started, I swung my hips around, careful not to knock over anything as I grooved. If there was one thing I learned from having wide hips and thick thighs, it was that I could do a whole lot of damage if my movement went unchecked.
Grabbing the polish/cleaner from my cart, I danced all around the office, sprinkling the powder across the floor in the specific pattern I had perfected in my week of tackling the top floor. It was amazing how fun it made the job, and it also was a good work out too. Especially considering that I couldn’t afford my own gym membership.
It took two songs before I finished powdering everything, and then it was on to the mop, so it could all be wetted down and spread across the floor.
Heart pounding, breath rasping, body writhing, I poured all of the twisted emotions in me out of my limbs. I was grateful that I had remembered to wear two sports bras instead of one, as all the bouncing made my ample chest ache more often than not.
It was in these moments, where I danced wildly across the floor while cleaning, flaunting my curves without fear of repercussions, that I was finally free. For a moment, I was out of the cage that had been created when I was too young to recognize the bars being set in place, and everything was alright with the world.
If only it could stay this way forever.
Chapter Three
~Raphael~
I let out another string of curses as I stored in the front doors of work, but somehow it never seemed like enough. I was so steamed that I couldn’t hold it in, so I compensated by taking the executive elevator and forcing myself to breathe deeply and slowly.
My son, Dominic, had a hard time waking up that morning. He was still recovering from a bit of a cold and I wanted nothing more than to let him sleep in, but it was his mother’s turn to have custody of him. And if I cancelled on her, the courts would immediately hear about it and then her and my lawyers would have to have another face off about who he spent time with which was really just a thinly veiled grab at more money.
So, against my better judgement, I had gotten him up, fed and ready just in time for his pick-up window.
Except his mother didn’t come. I waited a full half-hour for her before calling, and of course she sent me straight to voicemail. I was so irritated that I let Dominic go take a nap, but what I didn’t expect was for his mother to take four hours to actually get her ass to my place and pick him up. She breezed into the lobby without so much as a sorry, dressed in designer from head to toe and shoes I recognized from a fashion show I had gone to with a prospective client. She didn’t even remove her sunglasses, just offered her hand to Dominic and walked right out.
But not before giving me a poisonous smirk on the way out of course.
It took all of my control not to pick up a piece of furniture and bash it into the ground until it didn’t exist anymore. It killed me that she had any custody at all, as she clearly only cared about our son as a way to get more money. I couldn’t believe that I had once allowed myself to be married to such a snake in the grass.
Actually, that was an insult to snakes everywhere.
Finally, after what seemed like a literal eon, I was up on my floor. Of course I could come in late whenever I wanted, there was no one forcing me to hold a nine to five, but I was in the middle of several intense projects involving new directions I wanted the company to go in, and being four hours late meant four hours less of making my company as competitive as it could be.
I cursed under my breath as I closed the door behind me, trying to center my mind so I could actually be productive. I decided a couple quick emails to one of my assistants to send any calls to voice mail as well as order my lunch and bring drinks to my door would be a good place to start. Sitting down at my large desk, I dove in to my to-do list for the day.
I didn’t get up for a while, letting my anger fuel me into getting as much output as I can. I drafted plans, set proposals, created presentations and reviewed reports while adding my own notes. I knew that plenty of my CEO brethren liked to take plenty of golf breaks and only show up for important work meetings, but I wasn’t interested in coasting on my wealth.
I remembered once that I had been called ruthlessly ambitious. Granted, that had been by another CEO that I had been outbidding for a contract, but I took it as a compliment nonetheless.
When my father came to this country, he had nothing. He had worked so hard to give me just the bare minimum, and I wasn’t about to let that go to waste. Although my father had passed when I was in my mid-twenties, I continued to push and push so my son could be proud of me too.
But eventually, even I needed a break, so I decided to grab myself some coffee from the mini-barista stand we had in the upper-floor café, only to be surprised when no one was in the office.
“What the hell?” I said, looking around at the abandoned space in front of my door. It was only after a quick glance that I realized it was pitch black. What time was it?!
Whatever, it didn’t matter. Dominic wouldn’t be home until Wednesday, so it wasn’t like I had anything to be home to. With a shrug, I headed to the café and helped myself.
It was strange being behind the counter, but it reminded me of my high school days when I worked three-part time jobs. I put on a pot to boil and perused the different selections they have, letting my brain rest for the first time in hours.
At first, I didn’t notice any other noises beyond the percolating of the coffee, but eventually I heard a strangle shuffling followed by banging. Confused, I stood up and listened intently, and realized I could hear heavy breathing as well, like someone was working out.
If my building was being robbed, someone had gone through a hell of a lot
of effort to get to the top floor. Curious, I headed out and looked towards the sound.
I don’t know what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t a woman in a maintenance outfit dancing her heart out in the middle of the office. I watched, puzzled and a bit amused, as she shook her head, flinging red hair every which way, and mouthed words into her mop-handle.
But then I began to notice other things and that amusement faded into… something else.
For being in a jumper, her curves were still more than evident. Every time she twirled her hips or bounced that delicious rear end, it felt like the world recalibrated herself. And then, when she turned to grab something from her couch, I saw that the first few buttons of her uniform were undone, revealing the tops of two pale globes as they jiggle around within her jumpsuit. She reminded me of that ever-so-famous painting of Aphrodite being birthed form the seas, all pale skin and ocean spray.
God, she was so attractive. The perfect hips for grabbing and holding onto, the softy womanliness to her body, from head to toe she had me spellbound, riveted in place like a gargoyle.
Coming to my senses for all of ten seconds, I looked around to make sure that I wasn’t on some sort of prank show, but as far as I could tell, no one was waiting in the wings to swoop in with a camera. But it had been several more minutes and she was still rocking it out while spreading some sort of powder with her mop and the water from her bucket.
It went on for hours, like a whole dance show courtesy of some maintenance goddess, with sweat beaded on her brow and her full lips opened as her breath rasped through them. God, she really was a vision. Her skin was paper white, which I usually wasn’t into, but it went well with the freckles that dotted her heart shaped face. Although I couldn’t see the color of her eyes from where I was, I could see that they had an interesting shape, almost reminding me of a cat.
I wanted to go out and introduce myself, to see those perfect lips curl into a smile. If I was anybody else, I might even ask her out for coffee and find out how her mouth felt on mine.
But she was an employee, so that would never happen. Not to mention the fact that I knew better anyways. Even the most attractive of women was most likely a gold digger who would see me as dollar signs instead of a human.
How disappointing.
She heaved a sigh, and her hands went to her headphones to take them off, so I stepped back into the café. The last thing I needed was to get caught leering at one of my employees for an hour or two.
I heard her shuffle towards the elevators, her breath slowly returning to normal. Once she was gone, I relaxed a little, but all the tension that her little show built up was definitely still there. Who was that woman? Obviously, an overnight janitor, but that didn’t answer who she was, just what position she was working. Had she been with my company long? Had she only ever worked overnights? I had no idea. I was going to have to go to HR and see what they could tell me about her in… I glanced to my watch and my eyes widened. It was two am. Just how lost in my work had I been?
Maybe this was the universe’s way of telling me I needed to go home and sleep. If I dallied much longer, I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep in time to get up at seven am and get to work at a more useful time. Not to mention that I was going to have a whole day’s worth of voicemails to go through after my assistants finished sorting through sales people and who I actually wanted to speak to.
Yeah, I definitely needed to go home. Crossing the freshly cleaned floor, I grabbed my keys and wallet then headed out, my thoughts full of a certain mysterious redhead with a good sense of rhythm.
Chapter Four
~McKenna~
I yawned as the subway came to a stop and I shuffled off with the rest of the overnight people who were trying to get home and in bed before the sun rose. We were like a heard of apathetic zombies, shambling our way through the city with dark circles under our eyes and cold coffee in our hands. I had never seen so many scrubs and cleaning uniforms in one train car, and yet that was our story every night.
The first rays of sun were just beginning to poke over the horizon, turning the onyx sky into a myriad of purples while the stars faded back into obscurity just as I reached my apartment complex’ door.
I struggled with my keys for a moment, sleep really beginning to clutch at my brain, but managed to get in without giving up and slumping to the floor there. Once I was inside, I dropped my purse and keys by the door and shuffled straight towards my bathroom.
I turned the water up as hot as it could go in my standing shower and disrobed, throwing my cleaning uniform into my laundry basket to inevitably be worn again before I washed it.
I stepped in, and some of the stress slipped away, washed down the drain in a deluge. It wasn’t quite enough to forget everything that weighed so heavily on me, but it helped.
But the water grew too cold too fast and I had to step out before the warmth within me switched to shivers. But without the sound of water, my tiny studio was oppressively silent, and I was reminded that I had no one and it needed to stay that way.
I didn’t want to go to sleep on such a depressing thought, so I went about prepping my uniform and socks for the next day. I really was lucky that I had been able to find a full-time job that paid as well as mine did along with benefits while under a fake name. I had never thought I would get away with it, but it was my second week, and no one had said anything, so I was pretty sure I was in the clear.
But still, the two months I had spent searching had quickly bled through all of my savings. The biweekly pay was killing me, as my first chunk had just been completed and now I just had to wait for the check to come in the mail in a week.
I groaned headed to my mini-kitchenette. I had thought that kitchenette was as small as it could get, but my studio went a step down and only had a sink, a tiny fridge and a single counter piece that I crammed my microwave, blender, coffeemaker and toaster on.
Shuffling around in my fridge, I looked to all of the food I had left until I got paid. All ramen and old deli meat with stale bread. Fantastic.
Well, at least I had food. I had already dropped down a couple of pant sizes in a year and I didn’t want to lose any more weight so unhealthily. I forced myself to think of the positive side and went about making myself a sandwich and a side of cereal bar that was only… a month expired.
I somberly finished up my food and then shoved it back into the fridge in my battered lunchbox. It was so easy to get down on myself if I looked at all of the unpleasantness in my situation. Sure, I was lonely. Sure, there were water spots on the ceiling and my bed was a mattress on the floor of my living room. But it was better than where I had been before, and it would be improving very soon. I just had to wait for that first check and things would get a whole lot easier.
My sleepiness was really starting to get insistent, so I went about my nightly routine. Brushing my teeth with a toothbrush that needed replacing, washing what few plastic dishes or cutlery I had used to make my lunch, drinking water and refilling my filter-less pitcher, then brushing my wild, fiery mane with a brush that was missing a few too many bristles.
It was in these moments of silence, with only monotonous routine to fill my mind, that I wished I had someone I could trust. Someone who I could talk about my day with and tell them all the crazy things that happened at work. Not that anything crazy ever happened at work considering I interacted with a total of three people every day, but still. It would be nice. I missed knowing that I was loved, and that I had people who cared if I got up in the morning, or if I was healthy.
It was so tempting to just roll over and message some of the friends I left behind, but I couldn’t. That would open a door that I had worked so hard to close and I didn’t have the strength to shut again.
Although it didn’t feel like it, things were better this way. I just needed to remember how bad it could be before I was lured in by the greener grass on the other side of the fence. I was McKenna O’Grady, I was twenty-eight years old and a proud, inde
pendent woman. I could do this.
But as I laid in bed and sun started to trickle through the beige-stained venetian blinds, I couldn’t help but be lonely. Despite everything that I had gone through, I still missed someone beside me in bed. There was a certain warmth that I craved and, although dancing made me forget about it for a short while, it wasn’t enough to last through the night.
It didn’t help that it was the off-seasons on all of the shows that I liked to watch so I couldn’t even distract myself with television. I couldn’t read any new books considering how broke I was and signing up for a library card was a no-no, and I didn’t feel like rereading any of my well-worn adventures.
No, I was trapped in reality and it was a sucky one at that. I just had to hope that tomorrow would be better, and each day would be on the up and up. Just four to five more days until I got my check.
I just had to survive.
Chapter Five
~Raphael~
I looked to my watch again as I finished answering all the messages I wanted to answer and back-burnering all the ones I wasn’t sure on yet. It was just after ten and seemed like a good a time as ever to drop in on HR.
I hadn’t slept well the night previous. I had ended up at home at about three am, but my mind wouldn’t rest. It was full of images of the mysterious redhead as she danced across the floor so effortlessly. Her thighs as they moved past each other with no undue amount of friction -there was no gap on her- the inset of her waist as she twisted and turned. Her dance was like a movie on repeat in my own skull, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted to escape it.