The Long Resignation Pt. 01

Chapter 1 – The Surface

The dream had always repeated itself with a surprising specificity. Nicole was at the bottom of a pool – the kind with those miniature tiles, mostly white with the occasional blue tile in the mix for the sake of contrast. She was never quite sitting on the bottom, just drifting, fluid like the water all around her, inches from the tiles, naked as always. She didn't know what the dream meant or why it recurred for her so often, but at some point over the years, the dream had become familiar enough to be comfortable, maybe even comforting after a long day of stress and anxiety.

It had started when she was 18, and not knowing what to make of it, she'd even attempted to stage the dream in reality. As a lifeguard at the community pool, she'd been given the keys to the building. She snuck in one night and undressed at the side of the pool, diving in. She sank like a stone, unable to replicate the elegant drifting she'd always had in the dream itself. When she finally surfaced in defeat, Michael Coslow had stolen her clothes and run into the night with them, presumably to use as evidence when he bragged to his friends. Nicole walked home naked that night in the dark, having learned a valuable lesson about both the distinction between dreams and reality, and about the general shitty-ness of certain members of the male of the species.

On the cusp of the morning of the incident, Nicole drifted in her dream pool, completely and totally at peace in a world without shape or severity, until again the familiar pull of consciousness reached into the water, it seemed, and pulled her upward, back to the trappings of the world above. Oddly, however, it was her right breast this time leading the way, as if possessed by a will of its own, and with the relentless vigor of a horse pulling a chariot. Boob-first, she surfaced.

Nicole opened her eyes.

Where her right breast was supposed to be she could only see the familiar dark shaggy hair of her husband's head, delicately twitching as he sucked and lapped at her erect nipple, before he finally finished and parted his lips to let the flesh of her areola sink back from his mouth to her breast with a loud suction popping noise to punctuate the exchange. He lifted his head to look up at her.

"Time to wake up," he said.

Nicole's immediate reaction was embarrassment at how swollen her nipple had become. Reflexively, she covered it with her hand.

"Wha're you doin?" she mumbled, finding that her jaw and tongue were still half-submerged in the sleeping place she'd been pulled from.

"I'm your alarm clock," Caleb smiled, stroking her long brownish-blonde hair with the tips of his fingers. "But, like a sexy alarm clock 'cause of the boob action."

Caleb was 27 years old (1 year older than Nicole), an actor in his mind, but a warehouse worker on his census report. His job kept him physically fit and tightly muscled for his small frame, while his ambition kept him sweet, and sensitive, and always entertaining, "if a little strange at times," Nicole reminded herself as she rubbed her cheek into the soft embrace of her pillow and closed her large green eyes again.

She could feel now that his whole weight was upon her, warm and heavy and familiar. It confused her richly curved body, which suddenly had absolutely no idea what it wanted. She longed, as she always did in the morning, to just sink back into sleep, but the physical sensation of him upon her was triggering other longings as well. She was cold, because she slept naked and he had broken the duvet cocoon that kept her warm. She also felt hot, though, in response to his choice of alarm, and her rounded chest and soft thighs were tingling with something other than sleepiness.

"Sleep would be warm," she told herself, "but sex would be hot."

"What time is it?" She asked, adjusting her hips as if she was stretching, but really trying to subtly manoeuvre the bulge in his boxer shorts into just the right spot.

"Yup," she told herself. "There it is." She had to concentrate in order to avoid showing her pleasure when it reached her, pressing down fully with the weight of her husband's entire body across her labia.

"7:40" he said with a knowing smile. If Nicole had been uncertain about the sex-sleep debate in her own mind, Caleb was never less than assured, and he paused a moment to reflect on his impeccable seduction.

The blood left her warm spots instantaneously and the full sobriety of consciousness struck her like a mallet. Her eyes opened again, wide this time, and she pushed up so hard that Caleb fell clean off the bed, landing on the cheap faux-laminate floor beside it, his fall broken just slightly by the layer of unlaundered clothes strewn around the room, and a full pup tent still striving against the stitching of the zombie bunny rabbit-themed boxers he was wearing.

"Shit, sorry!" she exclaimed in horror. "Are you OK?"

"I think I'm..." he began, trying to stand back up before Nicole's foot pushed him square in the chest, knocking him back down again.

"WHAT THE FUCK?!" she exclaimed. "Why did you let me sleep so late?"

Caleb fell back to the floor, his pup tent collapsing by the second.

"I...I thought...you know...sexy alarm clock. What's the big deal?"

"Today is the board meeting!" she shouted. "I was supposed to be up an hour ago to get ready. I can't be late."

Caleb's expressive face (an essential tool of his trade, along with his perfect teeth and strong jawline) seemed suddenly expressionless, as if the flesh itself were at a loss for which direction it ought to go.

"I thought that was next week. You always get up at 7:40. I turned the alarm off when I got up for my run so I could..."

"So you could ruin my life?" she asked. As he stood to his feet she punctuated her point by flicking the head of his penis through his shorts, causing him lurch over in pain.

"What the fuck!?" he whined.

She was already on her feet and scrambling toward the heaps of clothing on the floor of their one-bedroom apartment.

"Where's my white blouse?"

Frantically, Nicole dropped to all fours, naked as she was, hurling clothes to all sides of the room in her search. As she did so, her large breasts swung and swayed beneath her from side to side while her round buttocks flexed and released with each desperate crawl to a new pile of clothes. She stood to her feet and turned back to Caleb, brushing her hair out of her eyes.

"Did you hear me?" she asked. "Where's my white..."

Caleb's resurrected erection was staring her in the face, mocking her sense of urgency.

"Are you fucking kidding me!?"

The blood seeped from his face as he sensed her anger, the head of his penis still searing from her vicious attack the moment before.

"You were all naked and wiggly," he protested.

She flicked it again, harder this time, enough that he had to roll back onto the bed in pain. He retreated under the blanket to insulate and protect his throbbing manhood. She resumed her search, pulling a knee-length black skirt up over her bare ass.

"That job is beneath you. You have a Masters degree." Caleb had always been her biggest fan. It was sweet, of course, but also made him a difficult partner to have in her life. Sometimes she wished he'd just accept the compromises that the world had dealt her. It would make it easier for her to accept them as well.

"In English," she replied. "I have a Masters degree in English."

"So?"

"So this job is about as good as it gets for people like me. Most of my cohort are baristas or salespeople working part-time with no benefits."

She snagged a sheer navy blue bra that was hanging from the drawer-knob of her dresser and fitted it around her breasts.

"You don't belong in corporate," Caleb stated. "You need something more creative."

He reached back to the headboard and pulled a white blouse that was dangling from the headboard post there, extending it, cautiously, toward her.

She paused and stared at him a moment, enjoying his fear of her more than was fair to. Then her expression warmed sympathetically.

"This is just how it has to be, right now," she apologized. "I'd love to be a professional screenwriter or novelist, but I checked the want ads yesterday, and that position isn't exactly hiring right now."

"Your boss is a dick," he shot back in blind frustration.

With infinite grace, Nicole smiled at him. "Thank you for looking out for me. It means a lot, but sometimes it's better to just accept the things that have to be."

He flinched in terror as she reached her hand under the blankets and gently patted his flaccid penis. She kissed him on the forehead, buttoned her blouse, and hurried out of the bedroom.

"Underwear!" he shouted after her.

"Shit!" he heard from the hallway before she ran back in and stood in front of him, staring him down with her large green eyes, not saying a word.

"What?" he asked at last.

"We're way past laundry-day is what," she replied. "Gimme your boxers."

Chapter 2 – Fuck My Entire Life

Alone in the elevator, ascending toward the 37th floor of 68 Bloor St W, Nicole quickly discovered that boxer shorts and tight skirts were fundamentally incompatible. In endless frustration, she tugged at the perplexing fabric combinations of skirt and shorts in the naïve hope of reduce the wedgie that had developed over the course of her subway ride. The crowds of the morning commute and even the walk through the downtown made it impossible for to adjust the wedgie away. She'd thought it a miracle when she found that she had the elevator to herself. A quick reach up her skirt from behind solved the problem, but immediately resulted in an even more unfortunate front wedgie.

"Shit," she thought.

The sense of urgency started to weigh on Nicole, as if the cascading number lights and intermittent dings of each floor passing by were a sort of grim countdown to another public embarrassment. She did not want to be fidgeting at her skirt all meeting, and she was not sure she could tolerate the present discomfort for another minute more. In desperation, a solution presented itself to her.

Timing her move with the pace of the elevator to be safe while she worked, she quickly pulled down both shorts and skirt in the elevator. The fear of the door suddenly opening to a crowd of people was palpable, but her plan worked perfectly as she delicately layered skirt and zombie-bunny boxers back on, perfectly aligned at their respective waistbands, and composed herself for business, just before the elevator dinged one last time and the doors pulled open like a curtain opening up on a stage to reveal the star performer at last.

"Perfect," she thought proudly.

Then it occurred to her that the elevator almost certainly had a video surveillance camera in it.

"Shit," she thought before stepping out. "Here's hoping my vag doesn't make it to YouTube."

The movement of that first step off the elevator was enough to reconfigure her lower-attire all over again, and the boxers quickly found their way right back up her butt crack.

"Shit, shit, shit," she thought, turning over her phone to check the time.

To her astonishment, she was on time. She was unshowered, unfed, and generally unravelled in terms of her nerves, but she was on time, almost to the minute.

"Your late," her boss said, the second she walked up to him.

Garret Shimizu was a 43 year old senior executive at GenXsys, a leading biotechnology consulting firm with a roster of brilliant scientists, lucrative grants, and seemingly inexhaustible revenue streams from patent-litigation suits. Unlike many of the higher-ups at the company, Garret was a self-made millionaire. Where his peers all inherited fortunes, Garret inherited nothing but debt, high cheek bones, and a fierce will to make something of himself. He worked out every day, consumed nothing but protein smoothies, and his eyebrows were maintained with diligence and perfectionism beyond most people's treatment of their own newborn infants.

Nicole and some co-workers had once charted their impression of his activities on a spreadsheet for fun, and confirmed that his accomplishments required a sleep schedule of negative 3 hours per night.

"I'm right on..." she began.

"This is a big meeting, Nicole. If you're not early, you're late. I shouldn't have to tell you that."

"Sorry," she sputtered, "I was just..."

"Let's go," he interrupted, turning from her to speed-walk toward the conference room. "I need you to take notes today. You know Robert's rules?"

"Yes," she lied as they walked passed the labyrinth of cubicles spilling over with ambitious youth – interns and recent graduates willing to work for cheap or less in a high stakes environment, all with dreams of climbing to the top of the hill that Garrett was standing on. To Nicole, the bullpen (as the cubicles were called) always reeked of false hope and energy drinks. She'd only recently been promoted out of it, and the thought of ever going back was enough to leave her short of breath. She could feel the eyes following her as she walked by, all her former comrades in suffering watching, wondering what made her special. Nicole wondered if it was possible to experience survivor's guilt from a small promotion.

"Good. No mistakes on this. I don't want a repeat of your quarterly report issues."

"That wasn't actually m..."

"Excellent," he interrupted. "In we go."

Nicole paused for a moment, briefly considering if her life would be better if she were still in the elevator with her husband's zombie-bunny boxer shorts around her knees while, she presumed, some overpaid security guard watching a video monitor nudged his equally immobile co-worker with an elbow and, through bites of a bologna sandwich, shouted "jackpot!"

The idea passed, and she followed her boss into the board room, a luxuriously open space with thick crimson-painted concrete walls for a rugged aesthetic on all sides and a large, rectangular, mahogany table in the middle with twenty high-backed leather office chairs surrounding it. The carpet was soft, but also crimson. Even the ceiling of the room was painted crimson for some reason. Nicole strongly suspected the décor was all the product of some ill-conceived interior-design power posture devised by her boss. It suited him to perfection, but it only ever reminded Nicole of Jane Eyre.

They were the first and only ones in the room. Garret pulled a laptop bag from off the table and slid it toward her. She stared at it apprehensively.

"Hey assistant," he suggested sarcastically. "Assist."

She opened the bag and extracted the laptop, presumably for her to record notes on. She then turned her attention to the floor, seeking a plugin just in case the meeting ran long.

"Do you know where the..." she began.

"Figure it out," he snipped, stepping out of the room with the same speed by which he'd entered it.

"Fuck my entire life" she uttered to herself quietly, only after she was sure that everyone was out of earshot. She knew, as she'd always known, that this job was bad for her self-esteem, but again she resigned herself to enduring it for fear of what her alternatives might be. She had liked working in the general administrative pool for the past two years with the other lost souls (apart from the mandatory poverty that came with it) but being "promoted" to be Garret's personal assistant after he fired the previous one, who herself had been promoted out of the general pool after he fired the previous one, and on and on, made for a more stressful day-to-day. By the time the man died, he'd have run through 1000 of them. Nicole would be nothing more than one in a thousand and one. "A girl's gotta eat," she reminded herself, but she was tired of feeling so powerless...and then recalled that she had not, in fact, eaten this morning.

"Fuck."

The next person to walk through the door was David Eccles, a young up and coming representative from the accounting department. While his skill with numbers was up to, or beyond, all expectations, his appearance and personality were far from the idea of "accountant" that tends to dwell in most people's heads. David was conventionally handsome with long lustrous auburn brown hair that he usually kept up in a bun, or down in a ponytail. His face was dimpled and his eyes (he did not even wear glasses) sharply blue in colour. He was the subject of much gossip amongst the lower-level staff of the company and was known to be charming, flirtatious and considerate of others. Nicole was quite certain he didn't even know her name. Nonetheless, she smiled and stammered "good m-morning" at a volume that was about half of what she'd intended to use.

He smiled back at her with a practiced grace and said "there's a hidden console on the table."

Nicole found her mind running through possible interpretations by which that statement might make sense. She had no idea what it meant, whatsoever, but his smile made her wedgie hurt a little bit less, and she simply replied "huh?"

He walked up close to her, and she could have sworn that he smelled like walnut oil and puppy-breath. Subconsciously, her mind revised the earlier nightmare scenario of elevator surveillance she'd imagined. This time, the two imaginary slobs who were peeping on the video monitors in the security office were interrupted by a loud thump against the door. David burst in, his hair fully unbound and his shirt somehow absent. "Perverts!" he called them before beating them out of the room with his soft fists. Then he stared at the monitors himself, and as he did so Nicole, still in the elevator, heard music somehow and started to dance, her vagina swaying back and forth with the eloquence of a firefly in flight. Enraptured, David pulled his member out of his pants and...

"Right here."

The fantasy ruptured as David took the electrical cord gently from her hand, then pressed down on a small nested compartment on the surface of the board table that popped up to reveal an electrical outlet into which he plugged the chord with a movement that Nicole's smutty mind could not help but interpret as penetrative.

"Oh," she stated artlessly. "Thanks."

He was too cool to say "thank you," but the subtlest nod of his brow did the talking for him.

Nicole wondered if there was a tipping point of attractiveness by which one's spouse could accept infidelity. Like, if she brought home a picture of David to Caleb and asked if she were allowed to sleep with him, Caleb would have to say "you know what, yeah – I couldn't even call that cheating; look at that specimen."

Nicole slid into the chair and immediately noticed how much softer it was than literally any seat she'd occupied in her past two years with the company. She wiggled her bum back to fix her posture, but in doing so she only aroused the anger of the zombie-bunnies as the seam of the boxers slid sharply through her ass crack as though trying to floss it.

"Fuck fuck fuck."

Next through the door were the four senior partners. They had names, of course, but Nicole had not bothered to learn them since they all looked exactly the same (60ish white males with jowly necks and thinning hair) and since they never talked to her.

Today was no exception. They sauntered in while continuing some random conversation that they'd walked down the hall with, looked right at Nicole and David, and each of them stated some variation of "morning, David," without a single acknowledgement of Nicole's existence other than the occasional undignified and deeply uncomfortable scanning glance over her body. They were all of them fiery stereotypes of corporate fat-cats and Nicole couldn't wait for the inevitable collapse of their respective ventricles.

More people entered the room thereafter, most of them familiar to Nicole, save for an elfish-looking blonde woman with a pixie cut and possibly the tiniest nose Nicole had ever seen. She smiled at Nicole politely and sat down next to her, before noting "I love your shoes. Size 6?" Nicole also loved her shoes, a pair of navy blue pumps with an asymmetrical gold broach on the top of each. She felt a little disarmed by the kindness. "Thanks," she replied. "6 & a half."