Soma Ch. 03

"What do you want me to say?" Lauren asked. "I can say it's not weird, but..."

"But what?"

"But I'm not gay. That makes it a little weird."

"I'm not gay, either, Lauren," Rachel replied. "But you've got to admit that last night was better than masturbating."

"I'm not saying it wasn't..."

"So then, fine. You wanted to get off. I wanted to get off. We both got off."

Lauren paused. "I guess you're right."

"Lauren, seriously," Rachel begged. "I'm your friend. We've been intimate before, you know, emotionally speaking. I've told you things that I've never told any guy. I think we know each other pretty well, especially given my confession about this whole situation turning me on, and you wanting me to talk dirty to you..."

Lauren blushed.

"So I think we can be intimate with each other, that once, without confusing things too much."

The blonde nodded. She hadn't been fair to Rachel that morning. And Rachel was right, wasn't she? They were friends, friends that helped each other out, friends that were there for one another. They'd seen each other naked, they'd confessed secret things to one another, and Rachel had seen or heard Lauren cum how many times over the past twenty-four hours? She wasn't a lesbian, she wasn't gay – she just wanted to get off.

Lauren smiled at her friend. "I'm sorry."

Rachel seemed relieved. "Okay."

They looked at each other, their eyes meeting, and everything seemed to be right again with the world. They were closer now, especially given the intimacy of the previous night on the third floor, than they ever had been, and Lauren knew she'd have a friend for a long, long time.

"Now," the redhead said, "we can move onto more pressing items. Like, have you seen my yellow panties?"

The blonde laughed. "What? What do you mean?"

"My panties," Rachel explained. "I took them off in here last night..."

"I remember."

"...but I don't know where they went."

Lauren looked at her friend, and jutted her chin towards Rachel's brown pants. "So, what are you...?"

Rachel shrugged, unsnapped the fastener at her waist, and unzipped her fly. Instead of the first pair of panties that Lauren had watched her shed last night, Rachel was wearing the second – the zebra-print thong she'd wore for a few hours in the conference room. The blonde giggled again, and Rachel laughed along with her.

"They're not in my office, with the rest of my clothes. And they don't seem to be on your file cabinet, where I could have sworn I left them."

"Have you checked the big box? Maybe you put them in there when you got those ones?"

Rachel zipped her fly back up, and plugged in her friend's hairdryer. "I looked. Granted, not very hard. No, but you're probably right."

"You want me to check?"

Rachel shrugged again. "Eh. You're right, they're probably in the box. I'll get them later."

Lauren wasn't sure that sorting through Julie Lambourne's box of lingerie was going to take all that much time, but Rachel was fairly nonchalant about her missing underwear.

"Wait, what's this?" Lauren asked, just noticing a pile of black lace on her chair.

"Try it on," Rachel suggested.

Lauren looked quizzically at her friend. "Are you forgetting something?"

"No, are you?" the redhead shot back. She flipped the hairdryer on, and over the whir, continued, "You've been doing nothing but 'relieving tension' since last night, right?"

"Yeah...I guess..."

"Before dinner yesterday. In the kitchen after dinner. This morning. With me downstairs last night."

"Yeah..."

"Have you tried putting something on?"

Lauren looked at the black lace underwear, a little bit scared about the possibilities they embodied. But again, Rachel was right. Given that she'd actually had sex last night, even if it was with a woman, maybe her body's tension had been diminished enough to do away with her affliction.

Slowly, and with great caution, the blonde, reached for the black floral-lace panties, noticing that Rachel had fished her out a matching bra, as well. As she had with Adams the day before with the red hip-huggers, Lauren slipped into the panties, sliding them up her legs, and snapping them into place at her hips. She remembered the burning, the aching, the excruciating pain from Tuesday night, but none of it haunted her at that moment. In fact, sneaking a peak below the fabric, Lauren saw that the rash hadn't even returned.

Her heart was in her throat. There was hope.

She grabbed at the black lace bra, slid her arms beneath the straps, and reached around behind her back to snap it on.

Nothing. No burning. No itching. No aches. No pains. No constricted breath.

Just a blonde girl, standing in her office in her bra and panties.

Exuberant, Lauren grabbed at one of the cocktail dresses hanging on the back of her office door. Certainly she wasn't going to wear one of the revealing party dresses around work that day, was she? But Lauren was off the mind that if she were capable of wearing a slutty Halloween costume, she might just do it – anything was better than another day in the nude. And so, the blonde stepped into one of the little black dresses and began sliding it up her body.

Only to discover that the fabric burned against her skin as she did so.

"No such luck," Lauren whined as she slipped out of the dress. The mysterious pink rash had returned, but faded quickly.

Rachel pouted. She had hoped to be Lauren's cure. "You can still wear the underwear, though, right?"

"Yeah," Lauren replied, looking at her reflection in the window. "I guess."

"You guess?"

"Well, it's kind of weird to be in my underwear, isn't it?

"As opposed to being naked?"

Lauren frowned. "No, you're right. You're right." She hesitated. "But if I'm wearing this, doesn't that just open me up to a new barrage of questions? Like, why I'm in my underwear, and not everything else?"

Rachel didn't quite follow. "So you'd rather be naked...?"

"I don't WANT to be naked," the blonde answered. "I don't WANT to sit around in slutty Eve Intimates lingerie, though either."

"So then what?"

"It's only a couple of more hours," Lauren decided, and unsnapped her bra. "Me in underwear is big news. Me naked is old news. I'll just keep my head down, get the contract done, and be done with this whole fucking thing."

She shed the bra, and then the panties, and stuffed both into the top drawer of her desk. Was she insane? She'd rather go naked than have the cover of at least her underwear? She was buoyed by hope, however. She could wear some clothes, at least. And, in a few more hours, once the Cortland contract was on Dick Bramley's desk, she'd be able to put everything back on.

In the mean time, she put her jewelry back on – the large, ostentatious silver hoop earrings, the faux pearl bracelet, the two silver and one platinum rings, the thin silver bracelet she was wearing as an anklet, and her watch. She slipped her feet back into the same pumps she'd been wearing since Tuesday. And she did her hair, once Rachel was done with the hairdryer.

Ginger had curled up into a ball under her own desk. Rachel was doing the same thing in her office, while Amy and Jessica had decided to go grab bagels and muffins and bring them back to the office for breakfast. Lauren, meanwhile, had the peace and quiet of an early Friday morning to concentrate on the task at hand – proofing the final version of the Cortland Menswear acquisition contract.

As usual, she said hello to her colleagues as they arrived. To sexually ambiguous Kevin Tolman. To the scornful Lorraine Dorsett. To heavyset Mitch Oldenburg. To diminutive Ken Fuji. To Dana Newton, to Julie Lambourne, to Stephanie Kidd. To Jenny Smith. Lauren could hardly claim the morning greetings, in her present state, had become routine. But it was nowhere near as nerve-wracking as it had been on Wednesday morning, when her lack of clothes had shocked one individual after another. It helped, she supposed, that she could see the light at the end of the tunnel. No chit-chat. No long conversations. Just a morning "hello," and returning to the task at hand.

She was shaken from her concentration briefly by the arrival of Ben Davis, of course. He greeted her with a nervous hello, his perfect smile not at all diminished by his awkwardness with Lauren. As relationship-building as the previous night had been, Lauren in no small way wished that she'd shared the mock dorm with the law student instead of Rachel.

Terms and conditions. Options and management buy-out offers. Paragraphs and clauses. Lauren's eyes traced one item after another. Yvonne, Danny, Dmitri, and Rachel had already been over most of the material, but this was Lauren's project, and it necessitated one final set of eyes. Everything seemed to be checking out that morning – not a single correction, not a single misspelling.

Dmitri had popped in earlier that morning, said hello, and gone back to his office. But he returned around mid-morning, hunting for Lauren's notes on a title they'd filed a few months earlier, unrelated to Cortland altogether. Lauren, apparently, was the last person in the office still working on the acquisition.

"It's in my file cabinet," the naked blonde answered, waving across her office. She didn't even bother to look up from her work.

"Er, Lauren?" Dmitri asked.

What now? Annoyed, Lauren initialed the page in front of her, and turned to the other Assistant Legal Counsel. In his hands was a pair of canary yellow panties, fished from the interior of the file cabinet.

"Jesus," Lauren swallowed. She shook her head. "Those aren't mine."

This caused Dmitri's right eyebrow to arch.

Lauren cursed herself. Wasn't it worse if the woman's panties in her office weren't her own? Did that make things even more complicated?

"They're Rachel's," the blonde offered. She kicked herself again. How was that better?

"Rachel's?"

"No, no, no. I mean, Julie's. They're Julie's."

Eyebrow arch again.

Shit, Lauren thought to herself. Still not better. Just because she'd engaged in lesbian sex last night with Rachel, and had fantasized about being fucked by Dmitri's wife Natalia that morning, didn't mean that she had to give Dmitri the impression she was undressing with other women in her office. She groaned, and directed Dmitri's attention to the large cardboard box under her desk.

After doing her best to explain the box full of lingerie, why Julie had had it in the first place, and what it was now doing in Lauren's possession, the blonde sighed, desperate for this conversation to end.

"So it's all Eve Intimates? And she just gave it to you?"

Lauren nodded.

Dmitri cleared his throat, working up the courage to ask, "Would you mind if I just take a peak inside?"

Now it was Lauren's turn to jump to conclusions, and Dmitri's to back pedal and explain himself. What exactly did Dmitri want to rifle through a box of women's underwear for? Underwear that now, technically, belonged to Lauren?

"Natalia," Dmitri offered in defense. "Natalia, Natalia. She's always nagging me about getting free samples or whatever. And I've told her, about a million times, that we don't really have access to that sort of thing." He cleared his throat again nervously. "If you don't mind, and you have something in there that I could steal for her..."

Gross, Lauren thought to herself. She didn't want to sit here as Dmitri picked out sex clothes for his wife. Then again, she'd utilized both Dmitri and Natalia in her own sexual fantasies that morning – she supposed she owed him some sort of royalty payment. Moreover, the image of Natalia Antonovka, naked save for the red hiphuggers Lauren herself had tried on yesterday, wasn't an unappealing one. From a completely aesthetic standpoint, of course.

"Sure," Lauren offered, kicking the box in Dmitri's direction.

The blonde tried to refocus on her work, but couldn't help but watch as the Russian-American sifted through mesh and lace, trying to find the exact right thing for his wife. He seemed alternately excited and confused, and at one point looked up at Lauren's chest, and stared at it for just a moment too long.

"Can I help you?" Lauren asked.

"Oh! Oh, god!" Dmitri exclaimed. "I just...I was looking at this..." He held up a purple demi-cup bra. "...I was just trying to figure out what size she...I was just..."

Lauren had never seen him so nervous and embarrassed. He had been looking at Lauren's breasts to figure out what size his wife was. And he'd been caught.

Despite her better judgment, she leaned over to help him, only to have him back away. "You know what?" he asked, flustered. Holding up the pair of yellow panties he'd found in Lauren's file cabinet, he said, "If it's okay, maybe I'll just take these."

The naked blonde strategized exactly how she was going to talk Dmitri out of taking Rachel's panties how to his wife. Even leaving aside the fact that they already belonged to the redhead, Lauren was a bit worried by the fact that Rachel had worn them all day on Thursday. In the end, however, mischief got the best of her, and she granted her colleague permission to take them. It served Rachel right, for leaving her panties in Lauren's file cabinet. It served Dmitri right, for skulking around and asking for freebies. And, more than anything, it cleared him out of Lauren's office, allowing her to get back to her work.

The morning began to slip away, and Lauren hardly moved from her desk. There was a single trip to the men's room – extra cautious this time, given that she'd been caught by Danny the night before – but otherwise the blonde's full attention was given to the pile of legal papers in front of her. Noon came, and though Lauren knew that she should probably get herself off at some point soon to stave off the potential of a spontaneous orgasm, she could bring herself to pull away from her work. She'd been mostly left alone all morning, so if an orgasm came, she'd just have to roll with it. Rachel bought her lunch, but left her alone to eat it, as the blonde was in the final stretch at that point.

At two o'clock, with the contract checked, double-checked, and checked again, Lauren dropped eight binders worth of legal papers onto Dick Bramley's desk. "The final revisions are all in the electronic version on the share drive," she announced, beaming.

Bramley smiled from ear to ear, congratulated the girl, and picked up the phone to Paul McIntosh's office. Though he offered the girl a seat on the far side of his desk, so that she'd be able to listen in, Lauren politely declined. She'd conquered her demon, but her reward was back in her office, hanging on the back of her door.

Rachel was already in Lauren's office when she got back, the blonde practically skipping down the hall. They were joined moments later by Amy and Dmitri, the latter having apparently shaken himself of his earlier embarrassment. All three congratulated the girl heartily.

Success would mean a promotion to the level of Associate General Counsel, and a $17,000 raise along with it - $265 per hour that Lauren was naked, she'd calculated a few days earlier. But title and compensation were, for the moment, less of a reward than finally being able to get dressed once again.

"Should I go?" Dmitri asked as Lauren rifled through her top drawer, careful to use her body to shield everyone from the vibrator inside.

She pulled the bra and panties that Rachel had laid out for her earlier that morning. She shrugged at Dmitri, offering, "Whatever. It's not like you haven't seen me naked almost every day this week."

The man was obviously conflicted. He clearly wanted to stay and support Lauren, a colleague and a friend. But he was also clearly uncomfortable with the idea of staying here, with three other women, as one of them slipped on lacy underwear and a party dress. Lauren's permission to stay only muddled matters more, as Dmitri was now confused as to whether the naked blonde really wanted him to go or not. And so, he stayed, frozen in place.

Lauren bent over and stepped into the black panties. She slid them over her calves, past her knees, and up her bare, milky white thighs. Snapping them in place, she could hardly hide her smile. Next came the bra, her arms through the straps and her breasts in the cups, snapping it in the back. She gestured to Amy for the black dress on top of the others behind her door.

This was the moment of truth. Lauren had, after all, gotten this far this morning, her nerves having been soothed through a combination of her own fingers, her new toy, and her friend's tongue. But masturbation and cunnilingus had taken her only so far, and Lauren was banking on the completed contract's ability to take her the rest of the way. The dress was still unzipped from the morning's experiment, and so the blonde stepped into without much hassle.

It burned.

But maybe that was Lauren's imagination? Maybe it was the memory of the attempt that morning?

The fabric was like red-hot barbed wire against her skin, but Lauren refused to give into the sensation. She winced as she pulled the dress on, willing herself to get past the pain. And for a moment, as she blinked back tears of pain, the blonde was able to stand before her colleagues, clothed once more.

Lauren's agony, though, was readily apparent to everyone in the room. She stood proud for a few heartbeats, but even in that brief moment, Rachel was already rushing to her side.

As if the aching and burning wasn't enough, Lauren began to lose her breath. The material seemed to squeeze her chest, preventing her from inhaling. She panicked, and began to choke for air. She lost her balance, and it took a combination of Dmitri and Rachel to keep her from collapsing to the floor. Lauren began to cry.

The redhead fumbled at the zipper on the back of the dress, the zipper Lauren had somehow managed to operate through the blinding pain a few seconds earlier. Rachel, panicking herself, couldn't get a steady grip. Her own nerves were shot, and the blonde's jerking and thrashing didn't make the task any easier. She found the thin piece of metal once, dropped it, and found it again. But she was thwarted an inch into the zipper's descent, the teeth catching on piece of fabric. Her friend unable to breath, Rachel opted to sacrifice the cocktail dress. She grabbed the top and simply yanked the dress apart.

The black material fell to the floor, but its divestiture didn't bring with it any release. Lauren continued to wheeze, and Dmitri recoiled from the sight of the blonde's perfect, half-naked body covered in the ugly pink rash. She gasped for air, clutching at her bra as if it were slowly squeezing her lungs like some sort of boa constrictor. The fabric, a combination of nylon and spandex, was torturous, red hot and grating against her skin.

"Oh god!" Lauren managed to cough. There was more. She couldn't breath. Her skin was on fire. Her whole body ached. And, on top of everything else, her clitoris had begun to throb – she was going to cum again.

She grabbed at the left cup of her bra with her right hand and tugged. She might have reasoned that she had a box full of bras and lingerie beneath her desk, so this one was replaceable. She might have reasoned that the bra was barely hers anyways, a gift to Julie from some creepy guy on the third floor. But Lauren simply wanted the bra off, and didn't want to waste any time in reached around her back for the hooks. For the second time that week, the blonde just ripped her bra off, destroying the piece of lingerie in the process.

"Oh god! Oh god!" Lauren gasped, both out of need for air and because of the pressure building in her pussy. As she grappled with the waistband of her panties, her eyes met Rachel's, and the redhead knew instantly what was happening.