Sunday 16 February 2014

Of Human Bondage



Every day in the office, Suzanne and I would email each other.

Stupid nonsense, mostly - songs or interesting articles or funny videos. Just another way of surviving another day of our lives wasted in the thankless world of advertising.

Today, on Monday morning - both of us still not quite recovered from the searing, knock-out punch of our hangovers from the house party on Saturday night - she emailed me something different.

I still can’t get over what you told me on Saturday night.

I responded with something witty, like,

Oh?

She typed back quickly, expressionless from across the desk.

I don’t think I’ll ever look at you the same way.

I dropped it. I was a little embarrassed, but I trusted her enough to believe that she wasn’t going to spread it around the office.

The day moved on. I wrote more copy. More superlative lies about crappy outlets, crappy services, and crappy products. Or, as I’d have the people of the UK believe, achingly trendy hair salons, fabulous deluxe facials, and top-notch LED dog collars.

And then she pushed me again. I could sense her glancing at me from across the desk.

I can’t believe you like to tie girls up.

I tilted my head slightly and stared at the words. This girl was mischievous, no doubt about it. She liked winding me up. Fuck, she liked winding everyone up. If we didn’t have a history - the most insignificant and chaste of histories, but still - I probably wouldn’t have taken the bait.

Why? I asked. Is that something you’re interested in as well?

She did a double-take. I saw her frown. And then she began to type again, more furiously.

I don’t know what I’m interested in, she said. I don’t know if I’d enjoy it. I mean, I've never really thought about it until now, but Tom, when you said that to me, my eyes widened. And the time we kissed, you were saying all of these things about me - that you liked me, that you thought I was really pretty - and they were great. But they didn’t make my eyes fucking widen.

I think my own eyes would have widened just a bit myself, if I hadn’t spent the past depressing decade of my life quietly and with self-loathing concealing my reactions to the things that really turned me on.

So I wrote,

Do you think you’d like to find out if you enjoy it?

She looked nervous now. She was staring fixedly into her screen. She wrote back,

What do you mean?

Her coyness was genuinely beginning to annoy me. I typed it out without thinking. Never mind that it was a bad idea. Never mind that she was in a relationship, and my colleague, and we’d already done far more than we should have.

Would you be interested in doing these things. With me.

A long pause. She stared at her screen for a few moments longer. She breathed heavily outwards. I could see the excitement - and the fear - glinting in her eyes.

She typed,

I can’t breathe.

And then she began to fucking hyperventilate.



I don’t think I’d ever had a comparably compulsive effect on a woman before. Truth be told, I’m not sure I’d had any compulsive effect on a woman before, aside from possibly compulsive pity.

The sight of it was quite incredibly sexy, aside from the fact that she had now placed her hands palm-down on the desk and was breathing so loud and fast that our colleagues were putting their hands on her back and asking her frantically what was wrong.

She shook her head vigorously, told them she’d eaten a bad sandwich, and we agreed to meet for a drink after work.

1 comment:

  1. What would we day dream about if our lives were nothing but fantasy?

    ReplyDelete