Cube Farm

This one came to me as I was stuck in rush hour traffic. Needless to say, the drive went a lot faster with these characters to keep me company.

*****

I was stuck in one of those protracted managerial pissing contests that caused lower ranking non-combatants like myself to feel acutely uncomfortable. When my BlackBerry vibrated, I was grateful for the distraction.

I had an instant message. I read: I suppressed a smile and the surge of desire that the sender aroused in me. Vivienne.

The next message came: After the passion / Your come is like cinnamon / on a thirsty tongue

I almost gasped and looked around the table, worried that someone might have seen the message. No one was paying any attention to me.

Another message. I wrote it under my desk.

I replied: Tell me you didn't.

The reply came a moment later: In permanent marker. There was a wink icon.

I didn't think for a moment that she hadn't done so. She'd already surprised me. I didn't know whether I should be alarmed or excited.

It'll be our little secret, she IM'ed back.

Not a secret if company is monitoring this chat.

She sent me a kiss icon and my nether regions tingled at the memory of yesterday.

I was a team lead for a group of technical writers in a small software company. This meant that I was responsible for them and the quality of their work but had no real power. I had earned the position by having outlasted everyone else who, by dint of greater ambition, had gone elsewhere. I now supervised a department that consisted of a middle-aged harpy who was waiting to be packaged out, a guy by the name of George whose sexual orientation had been a topic of idle speculation, and a young Asian woman who, until yesterday, had seemed so impossibly demure and proper that I couldn't imagine her applying graffiti to the underside of her desk, let alone becoming acquainted with the tang of my discharge.

Vivienne had stopped at my cubicle as she did several times a day. There was nothing in this visit that suggested anything unusual.

"Did you get my email?" Vivienne leaned against the wall of my cubicle, backlit by the late afternoon sun that shone over the canyons of the cube farm and into my space. I squinted against the brightness. Normally, the harpy would have closed the blinds against the glare, but she was taking a mental health day, as a result of which the team was short-staffed on the eve of a release. I noticed, not for the first time, Vivienne's gentle curves -- shoulders, waist, hips, and long, lean legs that ended in lovely black pumps. She was, in a word, willowy. She was also, I reminded myself, a direct report and probably out of my league anyway. She had a hand on her hip and despite the dazzling brightness of the sun, I could make out the delicate, pale fingers against the black leather skirt that I thought was perhaps a bit too racy for the office, but for which I was nonetheless grateful.

I scanned my inbox and there, buried amid the other emails I was ignoring, was Vivienne's.

"It's a procedure," she said helpfully.

I opened the attachment and read the following:

1. From the File Menu, choose New.

2. Unless your system access is restricted, the New dialog appears.

3. Click OK.

4. Key in the desired values.

5. Modify the default values as required.

6. Exit the dialog when done.

"What do you think?" asked Vivienne, who had approached my desk and now leaned over it.

I smelled her perfume, little more than a hint of fragrance. There were rules against perfume in the workplace, but to my nose, perfume was infinitely better than the more offensive, end-of-day funk it was designed to mask. "As a procedure, it's weak. Step 2 isn't even a step."

Vivienne shrugged. "Anything else?"

"I don't see what this has to do with our product."

"It doesn't."

"Then why send it to me?"

"You'll figure it out."

I moved the document to my secondary screen and forgot it, burying it under a growing pile of electronic refuse.

It was dark when I decided that I'd had enough for the day. George had vanished, claiming some pressing engagement.

"It's probably an illicit assignation," suggested Vivienne wistfully.

The cleaners had come and gone and in the unnatural silence of the office I could hear Vivienne's fingers dancing over her keyboard. I cursed her dedication. I had this rule that I'd never leave the office before any member of my team. Successful leaders -- so went the corporate truism -- had to demonstrate that they had less of a life than their direct reports.

In anticipation of my departure, I started deleting the electronic refuse on my secondary screen until only two documents remained. A report and beneath that, partially visible, Vivienne's procedure. What I saw was this.

1. F

2. U

3. C

4. K

5. M

6. E

I stared at it for a moment, hardly recognizing what I saw. Could this be a coincidence? A typographical quirk? A Freudian procedure? I couldn't believe it that it was an accident. Vivienne was too diligent. What was it then? I rolled the two words around in my head. Was it, for example, an exclamation? A frustrated utterance of a fellow cubicle-dweller. Could it be a request?

Without context, it was difficult to tell. That was the trouble of the written word and why one had to be so careful. Two words gave me little to go on. Context was impossible.

Getting context would require me to visit Vivienne's cubicle. I could ignore it and spare myself the potential embarrassment. After all, how did one broach the subject of such a provocatively structured procedure? Then again, if the procedure was a plea, how could I not respond?

My heart beat rapidly in my chest. It was almost palpitating, tripping over itself. Accident or design? Exclamation or request?

I stood up and stretched casually. I glanced outside, noticing that it was dark and that only a few cars remained in the parking lot.

I took a deep breath and approached Vivienne's cubicle.

"Cute," I said.

She looked up at me, confusion on her face. Then it seemed to dawn on her. "Oh, the procedure."

I nodded.

"Cute? That's it?"

"What do you want me to say?"

"Yes."

"Yes?"

"Yes. That you will."

I hesitated. Was she suggesting what I thought she was suggesting? "Pardon?"

"Do I need to spell it out?"

I wanted her to. Desperately. For me to say the words would be to cross a line. Those two words were fraught with danger, personally and professionally. She looked at me expectantly, all innocent and pretty.

"You realize what those letters spell out, don't you?" I asked nervously.

Vivienne smiled broadly. "Of course I do. I wrote them. I knew you'd get it."

"Really? That's what you meant? There was no context...." I was stammering in my consternation, yammering as I never did in my writing, which I've been told was very economical (which is a good thing) and unambiguous.

Vivienne stood up and approached me. We'd been only a couple of feet apart -- cubicles are small -- but my agitation lent her approach a dramatic distance. I noted the seductive sway of her hips as she placed one foot in front of the other. I noticed the slender calves. And then she was right in front of me. She held my face between her hands and stood on her toes and whispered into my ear.

"I'm stressed, Stephen. I can't think anymore. I need release. Unless I'm mistaken, you're the one to give it to me. If you don't fuck me, I'm going to scream. I want you to fuck me right here, right now. I want you to go fast and hard. I want you to fuck me mercilessly and I want to come. I want you to spray my insides. I want to feel you throb within me."

"Besides," she continued after taking a breath, no longer whispering. "It's the best way I know of to relieve stress. Don't you agree?"

I was speechless. My head throbbed. I was more than a little distracted by the imagery that she'd left in my brain. "Um. Of course."

"Not to mention that it's the most sublime expression of our humanity to give and receive pleasure so intimately."

"Right." I was getting aroused by her logic.

She let go of my face, took a step back, and smiled. "Okay?"

I might have nodded. "Okay."

She turned and swept aside her keyboard and mouse and paperweights that marketing continued to churn out despite the fact that wind had largely been eradicated from offices, save perhaps from the boardroom.

She looked at me earnestly as she lifted her skirt and perched her butt on the desk. "You will fuck me," she said, as though there were any risk that I'd misunderstood her before.

This was unreal. This didn't happen to team leads. Usually it was the other way around, unbidden and unpleasant. I noticed a tiger tattoo on her upper thigh, coiled around that lovely silken expanse of well-toned flesh. I was surprised by the tattoo. Vivienne didn't seem the type. Then again, she didn't seem like the type to be doing what she was doing now. She perched one foot on the back of her chair and hooked the heel of the other in the handle of a filing cabinet. She shimmied her hips forward and moved the thin fabric of a red thong aside, revealing the thin slit of a hairless pussy.

My mouth was suddenly dry.

"Why are you hesitating?"

"I've never heard it expressed that way before -- sex as the simple giving and receiving of pleasure."

"Expressing it any other way just complicates things. Life is already complicated enough without complicating one of life's greatest pleasures."

"But I'm your lead."

"See, you're trying to complicate it," she retorted impatiently.

She spread the lips of her pussy with her fingers, revealing a glistening shade of pink that I'd never seen before. Perhaps it was the fluorescent light.

"Tell me that you don't want me."

"I can't. "

I approached and tilted her chin up. I kissed her tentatively, unsure of the etiquette of screwing a direct report in the office.

"Such a gentleman," she said as her fingers deftly undid my belt.

I traced the contour of her jaw with my fingertips and then brushed them down her throat and finally across her breasts. I felt the hardness of her nipples beneath the fabric. She hummed in what I interpreted to be pleasure. Encouraged, I undid the buttons of her blouse as she unfastened my pants. I reached around and undid the clasp with one hand on the first attempt, as though I did that kind of thing every day. She shrugged out of her blouse and bra and leaned back on the desk. She was a vision, lean and toned and inexplicably available to me. She had small breasts, each crowned by a small, delicate jewel of a nipple.

My pants fell to the floor and pooled around my feet. I kicked them out of the way. She pulled me into the apex of her legs and I felt the moist warmth of her through my underwear. She ground her pelvis against me, seeming to savor the promise of me while my erection strained painfully against the fabric.

I helped her with my underwear and a soon found myself in that nightmare scenario of being at work with nothing on beneath the waist. But this was no nightmare and I didn't mind.

She cupped my testicles in one hand and squeezed gently while the fine, porcelain fingers of the other wrapped around my thickly veined circumference. She squeezed and my knees almost buckled.

She placed the crown of my cock between her silken labia and dug a lazy furrow from the base of her wet pussy up to its apex. She released my balls and moved her fingers to her pubic mound, teasing the pearl of her clitoris out from the flesh that enveloped it. She placed my cock there and rubbed lightly. I wanted nothing more than to plunge into her but resisted the impulse. She ran the tip of my cock against the spot, stroking me through her slippery folds. Wet sounds accompanied her as she strummed her clitoris with my cock, languorously at first and then with increased speed. She spread her legs wider. Her fingers and my cock blurred as they swept back and forth across the crown of her sex.

Vivienne closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall of the cubicle, surrounded by Dilbert comics. Somehow, that made her even sexier. Her lips were parted and the corners turned up in what might have been a smile. Her breath came in gasps and her chest swelled. I played my fingers lightly across her nipples and occasionally pinched and rolled them.

"Oh, fuck," she panted.

The sounds of her arousal, the gasps and whimpers and muted moans, sounded impossibly loud in the confines of the cube farm. I realized that we hadn't confirmed our privacy. The squeal that accompanied her climax sounded like a scream.

"Fuck!"

The syllable cracked like a gunshot. I prayed that there was no one in the office.

Vivienne let loose a flurry of full-throated moans as she punished my cock against her mons and shrieked when I pinched her nipples perhaps a little too hard in my own excitement.

"That's it. Mmmm."

My cock tingled with the abuse inflicted on it.

"Yes!"

Gradually, her hand slowed and her breathing returned to normal. She grinned at me as she rubbed her juices lazily over my shaft.

"Just what the doctor ordered," she said. "Thank you."

Vivienne closed her eyes and her fingers played my cock through the folds of her glistening pussy. She was driving me crazy and I pressed a little.

"Patience," she whispered.

The crown of my cock was purple with engorgement and slick with her juices. Just when I thought I could take no more, she positioned me at her opening. I could feel her heat and wetness. Silken lips parted and embraced the tip of my cock. Hands on my hips pulled slightly and I entered by the smallest of fractions, head almost vanishing within her.

"Slowly," she said. "I like to watch."

I entered her a little more. She was a revelation -- tight, warm, and blessedly inviting.

She tilted her head forward and observed my advance within her, seemingly fascinated by our union. "Mmm. You feel good," she whispered.

She pulled a little more and swallowed the head of my turgid shaft. I too was mesmerized by the sight. The parted lips that spread to encircle me, the swollen shaft that she managed to accommodate. The feeling of her embrace as it drew me in.

With a final pull at my hips, she swallowed me completely. Unseen muscled clenched me, tightening around me in the most intimate of embraces. We were joined and remained so for a long moment, both of us lost in the sense of filling and of being filled. At length she tilted her hips and pulled at me, grinding her pelvis against mine.

She loosened her grip and I withdrew slowly, watching my juice-slick length emerge.

Vivienne then leaned back and raised her legs, forming a wide vee.

"Fuck me now," she said.

I plunged into her and she squealed. Forgotten was the danger of discovery. I doubt I would have stopped had an audience suddenly materialized.

She held her ankles and spread her legs, tilting her hips so that I could plunge into her more deeply. Her breasts quivered slightly with each thrust.

I grasped her waist, pinioning her between my hands and my thrusting cock.

"Harder," she cried.

Something on the other side of the partition fell and the desk creaked. I didn't care.

My breath was coming in gasps and my thrusts grew erratic, announcing my imminent release. My world contracted into that part of Vivienne that I occupied. I attempted to withdraw but her hands wound around me, keeping me in place. I could feel the tingling and the increased pressure that presaged climax, even as she shuddered and gasped in her own. Her back arched and she shuddered a moan, pulling me to her with more force than I would have expected.

I closed my eyes and jetted my seed within her, spurt after spurt of moltenness.

After a few minutes, she said, "You look sexy when you come."

Her words brought me back with a jolt. I was still standing between her legs, buried within her. She studied me intently.

I laughed. "I somehow doubt that."

I moved to withdraw.

"Stay a little longer," she said.

What to talk about at a moment like this, I wondered. I stroked her breasts and lean torso to cover my discomfort at the situation, the dawning realization of what had been done now that the hormones had returned to their slumber. I looked at her again and saw that she'd closed her eyes, content in the contact of my fingers and cock. Perhaps words would have been unnecessary.

I continued to explore her, committing her remarkable body and this miraculous moment to memory. As I grew smaller within her, our juices trickled out of her and onto the desk. Vivienne opened her eyes and ran her index finger through her folds, anointing it with our fluids. With a wink, she lifted it to her mouth and played it on her tongue. She closed her lips around it and withdrew it with a pop.

"Yum. You taste like cinnamon," she said.

That moment had now been captured in a haiku under her desk. I shook my head. I'd have to crawl under there to check it out. I hoped that she'd be there when I did.

***

Thanks for reading. Comments are always appreciated. Let me know if you'd like me to revisit these characters.