The Long Resignation Pt. 01

"Where from?...if you don't mind my asking?"

"Uh..." Nicole debated lying. She could plainly see that the elfish woman was garbed head to toe with designer clothes. "Thrift store on Westwood," she revealed, somewhat defeatedly.

"Oooh" the woman sighed, unphased. "Did they have any more there or?..."

"Last pair," Nicole answered, unsure if this rich woman was about to offer to buy the shoes off her feet.

She didn't, but simply said sincerely "you have a great eye," and Nicole beamed a little.

"Do you know how long the meeting will be?" the elfish woman asked. "I left my assistant in the lobby."

"No idea," she replied. "Hopefully short."

"No worries," the elfish woman smiled. "It's good to keep a man waiting now and again."

Last through the door was Sandra Canning, the company's hawk-faced 53 year old Chief Financial Officer, escorted in by Nicole's least favorite human being, her own boss, Garret Shimizu who sat down directly beside her without a word.

And from there, the presentation began. Began, but seemingly never ended. The entire meeting was run by Sandra, who welcomed everyone, identified the elfish woman next to Nicole as Heather McAllister, representing a hedge fund that was checking in on an investment opportunity with the company. Then there was a slideshow. It had charts and graphs and colours and so, so many numbers. Enough numbers to make one regret the invention of math, the invention of slideshows, perhaps even the invention of numbers.

Nicole scrambled to take notes. Scrambled to concentrate on the mind-assailing content of the meeting and not on the sharp inner seam of her husband's stolen boxer shorts massaging her colon, or the angelic man-bun accountant sitting across the room from her in the dark. "It totally wouldn't even count if I tapped that," she concluded.

She was the only unimportant, unwealthy person in the meeting, a serf within a court of kings and queens. "When do I get to be the queen," she typed, absent-mindedly into the word processor, before deleting it quickly so she could keep up with the revenue projections Sandra was lying about so convincingly.

CFO notes that third quarter earnings will increase dramatically this year.

CFO notes that growth is the direct product of aggressive market expansion.

CFO notes that further expansion is feasible in current trading climate.

Nicole was losing her mind. It was two hours into the meeting. It was two hours into the longest, hardest, morning of her life and she was sure that the whirr of the overhead projector was literally sucking the youthful vitality out of her pores.

CFO is kind of a douche who likes the sound of her own voice.

Nicole laughed a little bit to herself. This was as close as she might get to rebellion, and it was only the briefest moment. Her finger drifted up to the backspace key to bring her back to reality. Before she could hit the key, however, she saw in the reflection of the laptop screen, Garret Shimizu's face staring directly at it.

"Oh shit," she thought. "Can he see that? Am I about to be fired...or possibly murdered? Murder-fired? Just be cool. Act like nothing hap..."

"Nicole" he whispered through gnashing teeth. "When this meeting is over, you and I are going to..."

But Nicole interrupted him...not with spoken words, as was his usual tactic, but with the soft clatter of typing.

******

It was then that Virginia from legal unbuttoned her blouse to reveal a soft glimpse of the pale skin atop her breasts.

******

Garret Shimizu, for just about the first time in his adult life, had no idea what to say.

Chapter 3 – Running With Fingers

Nicole typed with the drive of desperation, urging her fingers along at the speed she thought necessary to avoid breaking the spell, cursing the entire time at the slow speed of the written word and the effort it took to build images out of it.

*****

In the expansive darkness of the room, the pale light of the laptop shone across Virginia's chest like a spotlight as she slowly undid a second button on her blouse, spreading the opening between buttons to a size that was, in polite society, close to scandalous. There's a thing that happens in long, slow meetings, a defense mechanism on the part of the brain that kind of tunes everything out so that the world itself seems to go away, and people become more like potatoes, just sort of sitting there, inattentive to the world around them. Nobody had even noticed the Virginia's blouse was coming off slowly, button by button.

*****

Nicole was in her own world at this point. Writing had always had that effect on her, though writing to a live audience was a new experience. She kept waiting for Garret to say something – to tell her to stop, or "you're fired," or "what the fuck is wrong with you," but she felt that if she kept typing she might somehow stave off that inevitable humiliation. She found herself running with her words instead of her legs.

She checked the reflection in the screen again, and he was definitely still there, still reading over her shoulder. She regretted immediately that, in her panic, she had chosen such a present sexual theme, but her mind had been going there already.

"Fucking David," she thought to herself: "he probably secretes pheromones into the air from his man-bun or something."

It was more than that, though. She remembered a rational thought just before her panic: what do men like? What distracts them? She'd tried to imagine the world from Caleb's perspective, and from Caleb's perspective, the world was a place with breasts in it. She blamed him for her situation as well. Not knowing what else to do, however, she just kept on typing.

*****

Virginia reached behind her back and unclasped the bra through her blouse, hoping that would appease the surge of desire she was experiencing. Her heart sank when it didn't, when it only wet her appetite, and she found herself cupping and caressing her large breasts, subtly at first, but then flagrantly, obviously. The itch continued unimpeded and she tore the blouse open, the buttons popping loudly across the boardroom table, suddenly drawing the attention of every human being in the room.

She should have been humiliated, she should have snapped back to reality, but she didn't. She didn't at all. She'd done the absurd and still it wasn't enough. With their horrified, aroused, and attentive glares now upon her she slid the bra off of her shoulders completely before clutching madly at her own nipples to provoke still further the torrent of arousal that enveloped her...

*****

Garret was still watching her screen, Nicole observed in the reflection. Garret had still not spoken, had still not fired her. She had still not said a word to him, still not looked in his direction – eyes ever on the screen, at the flurry of lustful words running left-to-right as fast as her fingers and her imagination could herd them, until she suddenly hit a wall.

"Why is she ripping her boobs out?" Nicole wondered. She was unsure how to advance the story without some sort of reason for it. Striving to avoid looking at Garret's reflection, she ran through all the possible reasons why a woman in a board meeting might suddenly rip her boobs out.

The first thing that came to mind was neurosyphilis, but that was neither a sexy concept nor something Nicole was willing to subject Virginia from legal to, even in a fictional format. "Maybe she just hadn't had sex in a long time?" That didn't really line up. "Maybe she was just super-duper thirsty for mahogany?"

The clicking of the keys had stalled. Nicole stared at the blinking of the cursor, counting the blinks, trying to urge it to move onward by the sheer force of her will, but nothing was coming to her.

"Nicole," she heard the voice behind her. "I'm not sure what this is, but it's not helping your situa..."

"Shhhhhhh" she whispered indignantly without turning to him. Locking her fingers intertwined, she turned them outward and pushed hard until all the knuckles cracked at once.

"OK," she told herself. "Something else" She pressed CTRL-A, then delete. "Something with a reason."

Chapter 4 – The Ill-Timed Dose

Nicole stared at the screen, churning through ideas whilst counting down in her mind the length of the silence. Possibilities came to her – threads of narratives that could lead somewhere or could fail spectacularly. Garrett was watching, but only for so long. She had to decide.

Miraculously, her fingers started moving.

*****

Alyssa stepped out of the portable plastic shower, meekly trying to decide whether she wanted to use her hands to cover her breasts or to cover her vagina, wondering if there was a magical configuration by which she could do both. With a sigh of acknowledgement, she decided that if she were a small-breasted woman, maybe.

Her family descended from Austria and all the women in her family had inherited two particularly abnormal traits: they were very tall and they had very large breasts. Middle-school had been a nightmare of training bras and height differentials. Alyssa was quite familiar with having unwanted attention, and she had never ceased to despise it.

As it was, she chose to cup her large breasts with two hands, preferring the comfort of having her arms crossed in front of her. Her vagina, she left to the wind, striving very very hard to not think about how exposed she was.

"Can we not even have towels?" she pleaded. "I'm freezing."

"We're working on that," said Gary through his plastic yellow hazmat mask. "Still looking for the missing crate. We've got the heaters on full blast – should be fine in a couple minutes. Maybe just try to jump around a bit – shake the water off."

"You'd fucking love that, wouldn't you?" Alyssa asked with a death glare to back it.

"Sorry," he responded, as it occurred to him that he had just asked a naked woman to bounce around in front of him. "I didn't mean..."

"Yeah," she replied, dismissively.

Ten minutes into the board meeting the alarm had gone off. At first, everyone thought it was a fire, but the intercom announcement told them otherwise. Hazardous substance found in the office. Everyone quarantined to the rooms they were in. Hazmat personnel on hand. They didn't mention that the "hazmat personnel" were actually just their co-workers who had earned an extra $2000 to their yearly salaries by spending two weekends a year attending hazmat training workshops to be first responders in the "highly unlikely" event that a suspicious substance were to be detected on site. Gary worked in the mailroom. Alyssa had, on two occasions, seen him throw up in a potted plant at office parties. He was not the kind of person that instilled confidence amongst others in an emergency.

The intercom had also neglected to mention that the hazmat response kit in storage (suits, plastic wrap, and what Gary informed them all was a very expensive portable shower unit) had been rummaged through some time in the past 6 weeks, that one of the crates was missing – the one with sterile clothes and blankets. Alyssa had assumed that Gary was joking when they wheeled in the portable shower, and told everyone to strip down to nothing. It was only the panic of the situation that had convinced her to do it in the first place. If she'd had time to consider her options rationally, she might have picked death by anthrax, or whatever it was, over the naked nightmare she was now enduring.

Gary ran a very expensive looking wand up and down her body, while Alyssa closed her eyes and fought the urge to cry. The wand made a series of uninterpretable clicking noises, before a number popped up on the display.

"Still testing positive. It's very low-level, but still not within the safety threshold."

"Shit," she thought. "When would this end?"

The worst was already over, though, to some degree. Watching the four board members standing around wet and naked, strutting about with a confidence that their physiques could not possibly support - the confidence of money - was a horrifying experience. They'd all tested negative and since been escorted out of the room, as had most of the other board meeting attendees. Only Alyssa, Kyle from HR and a woman named Priya who ran client retention were still left in the sheet plastic enclosure that had been put up inside the boardroom to contain them.

"I'll be back in an hour to retest," Gary told them. "Sit tight until then."

"Sit on what?" Priya asked aggressively. "You took out the chairs."

"Figure of speech," Gary said as he led the other two weekend hazmat warriors out of the room. "One hour," he called from the doorway.

Priya was in her early thirties, and had a reputation for tenacity. She was the kind of employee that other employees gave space to naturally. Alyssa had heard her described by one of the IT guys as a "bear" once. When Alyssa asked what that meant he'd explained that "she wouldn't go out of her way to hurt you, but you wouldn't want to stand between her and something that she wants, either." Alyssa had internalized that image and had always given Priya that space, though it was a little hard to see her this way now, the tiny naked woman in front of her with long dark hair and thin appendages.

Kyle, meanwhile, had his back turned and was facing the wall. It was an odd posture. Alyssa couldn't decide if he was suffering from shame or frustration? He had what Alyssa would describe as a diver's body – tightly muscled, but with a softness to the skin. He was well-liked within the office, but had a slight "fuck-boy" reputation.

And there Alyssa found herself, naked inside the boardroom, inside an enormous tent of transparent plastic sheeting, with a large, muscular bureaucrat talking to the wall, and some client services girl with a lot of attitude and breasts just small enough to be concealed by her right hand and forearm, while her left hand covered up her vagina. Alyssa sighed at this last accomplishment in envy, and hoped that her own pubic trimming technique was up to whatever the standard was these days. She hadn't expected an audience for that at work today.

*****

"Which ones are Alyssa, Kyle and Priya?" Garrett interjected, scanning around the boardroom.

Nicole ignored him. She'd decided that she wanted to work with fictional characters instead of actual coworkers this time, but had foolishly assumed that Garrett would recognize that the names she was using were unfamiliar. "In hindsight," she thought "I should have known better."

"This doesn't even make sense," Garret continued. "We don't even have a hazmat response protocol, and even if we did..."

Nicole was feeling a sense of momentum at this point, a sense of daring, so she turned to face him and instead of shushing audibly, she put her index finger up to her lips in the universal gesture of "shhhh." To her delight, he complied, and was content to look back at the screen.

*****

"Do you think we're going to be alright?" Priya asked. "Is that why they left, because we're done for and they don't have the heart to tell us?" The notion was alarmist, but there was genuine terror in her voice.

"Don't be ridiculous," Kyle responded "it's all just some minor reading that they're being way too cautious about for fear of some legal liability or insurance issue. We're fine. Hell, those assholes are probably just getting off on leaving us here like this."

"Seems unlikely," Alyssa stated.

"You think it's a coincidence they lost the clothes and blanket crate?" Kyle retorted without turning to face her.

Up until that moment, Alyssa had absolutely thought it was a coincidence, having had some experience with the amount of times things tended to go missing from storage in larger corporations, not to mention the genuine sense she held regarding Gary's utter incompetence. She considered Kyle's idea, however – it was a little paranoid, but not impossible. She clutched her naked breasts a little tighter and tried a little harder to push down her awareness of her exposed vagina, but her skin was still cold and the rising goosebumps were making her feel hyperconscious of her body.

"What makes you think it was on purpose?" Alyssa asked.

"I know what I'm talking about," Kyle replied without providing a shred of evidence that he knew what he was talking about. He was still facing the wall.

"Then why can't you look at us?" Priya asked.

"I'm being courteous," Kyle replied. "I'm a gentleman. I thought you'd both appreciate that."

"Not an hour ago you were texting me some very ungentlemanly things," Priya shot back.

Alyssa had not realized that Kyle and Priya knew each other; in hindsight, though, it explained a great deal about the way they'd been interacting during the crisis.

"Oh right, like you were just texting bible verses back at me." he snorted without facing her.

"Turn around if you want to get into it." Priya demanded. "I'm sick of speaking to your asshole."

"Bite me," Kyle replied. "It's called chivalry."

"Turn around," Priya threatened "or I'm going to shove my thumbnail straight up your chivalrous rectum."

Alyssa was not sure that Kyle would be convinced, but she herself definitely felt the sincerity of the small naked woman's threat.

"You're such a dick," Kyle whined.

He turned, his hands cupped over his genitals, but it was clear to both Alyssa and Priya right away that something wasn't right about HOW he cupped his genitals. His hands were up way too high, his testicles dangling low below the area that his hands were covering. His penis, which should have been dangling low as well, was instead poking out of the top of his hands, cresting, as it were, somewhere just above Kyle's bellybutton.

"What the actual fuck!?" Priya shrieked. "Are you turned on by this?"

Alyssa clasped so tightly at her own chest that she accidentally formed large round balls of cleavage. She awkwardly lifted her leg to try and cross it over the other – a difficult thing to do while standing – in order to hide her vagina.

Kyle had turned red. "It's not that."

"Then what the hell is it?" Priya asked.

"I took a pill."

"What kind of pill?" Priya pursued.

"You know. We were going to meet 'for lunch' like you said, and the pill takes a half hour to take effect, so I..."

"Wow," said Priya. "You were very confident in your chances weren't you?"

There was a long awkward silence as everyone in the room processed the events that must have unfolded to bring them all to this point. Nothing could be heard but the hum of the heaters and the rubbing of the plastic sheets against each other.

"When did it start?" Alyssa finally asked, easing up a little on the leg-lock she'd given herself.

"Why?" he asked her back.

"Well," said Alyssa, "was it before or after Gary was passing that machine over your body? I mean, did he..."

"Before," Kyle sighed, and Priya burst out laughing so hard that she put her hands to her mouth, exposing all the bits she'd been trying to keep hidden. She didn't bother to cover up again; she was past shame at this point, and no humiliation could compare to that of Kyle's raging erection being tested with highly expensive technical equipment by a co-worker.

"Did he say anything?" Alyssa asked, fighting hard the urge to laugh herself.

"He did not." Kyle replied solemnly.

"Maybe he didn't notice?" Alyssa offered.

"He did," Kyle stated matter-of-factly.

"Show me," Priya said.

"What?" Alyssa and Kyle stated in perfect dumbfounded unison.

"Let's have a look then."

"Ummm, no," he replied.

"Don't be a sissy – you can see all that we've got."

Alyssa did not bother to correct Priya on this score and maintained her firm grip on her own chest.

Kyle, already embarrassed beyond comprehension, dropped his hands, and to the credit of the American pharmaceutical industry, his penis did not drop with them. Instead, it held itself aloft by the unknown chemical cocktail coursing through the thick veins that ran up the shaft from base to circumcised head.