Forbidden Afterglow

I was already looking at him.

His face was doing exactly what I expected. The color rising, the jaw slightly tight, the eyes trying to find somewhere safe to land. There was nowhere safe to land. I was looking right at him.

"Did you enjoy the view down there?" I asked.

I watched him decide to pretend.

"Yeah," he said. "The view of the surge protector was riveting."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "No. Did you like the view up my dress?" I let that sit for a second. "I saw you looking."

The color in his face deepened. He opened his mouth, and what came out was "Sorry," and then something about just turning around and it being there. I almost felt bad for him.

"You know," I said, "fair is fair." I let my eyes stay on his. "You've seen mine. You should show me yours."

I watched that land.

He stood there in the quiet office, red-faced and cornered, and I felt something shift in me that I hadn't felt all day. This was different from the AC moment in the meeting. Different from the man at the restaurant. This was just me and Tom, and the entire weight of the day behind me, and a man who had just seen something he was never supposed to see and couldn't do anything about it.

I was enjoying this.

He wasn't moving. He looked like a man who wanted to walk through a wall.

"Fair is fair," I said.

He just stood there, the color in his face deepening by the second.

I tilted my head. "Fair is fair, Tom."

He swallowed hard. "I'm a grower, not a shower."

I looked at him for a moment. He was serious. More than serious. There was something behind his eyes that went past embarrassment, and I didn't know what it was yet.

Something came out of my mouth before I could stop it.

"How small could it be?"

"They're all small when they're soft," I said. "I've seen a lot of them."

I've seen a lot of them. The words hung there, a confession that had slipped out the way true things do, Knowledge so familiar I'd forgotten it wasn't supposed to be public.

I continued to hold his gaze.

The silence that followed was very loud.

____________________________________________________________________________________

He looked at me for a long moment. Then his shoulders dropped.

"Okay," he said. "But you have to promise not to laugh."

I felt something flicker in my chest. Not guilt. Something adjacent to it. He was serious. He was genuinely asking me.

"I promise I won't laugh," I said. And I meant it when I said it.

He took a step back. I watched him reach for his belt. The click of the buckle was very loud in the empty office. Then the latch. Then the zipper, slow and deliberate, the sound of a man doing something he did not want to do but had run out of reasons not to.

I had seen enough of them to know that soft didn't mean much. They came in two varieties. The first was just average. Soft and unremarkable, the kind of thing you register and move on from, no different from a hundred others. I had seen that version many times.

The second was the one that made you pay attention even when it wasn't trying. Long and loose, topped with something that made it interesting even at rest.

I was quietly hoping for the second one.

He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his underwear.

He pushed his underwear down.

I looked.

My brain stopped.

It wasn't what I had prepared for. Not version one. Not version two. Not anything in the range of what I had built a frame of reference for over the years. My husband, even soft, even first thing in the morning, was never this. The others I had seen, the ones I had filed away as unremarkable, as average, as just men being men in various states of readiness, none of them had looked like this. This was a category I did not have a name for. A small, soft nub, almost swallowed entirely by his own body.
I genuinely tried to hold it.

The laugh came out of me like something I had no control over. Loud and sudden and completely unrestrained, the kind of laugh that starts in your stomach and takes your whole body with it. I heard it coming out of me and could not stop it. I pressed my hand over my mouth, but that did nothing. My shoulders were shaking. My eyes were watering.

He pulled his pants up fast.

"You promised you wouldn't laugh," his face a color I have never seen. "I told you I was a grower."

I was still laughing. I knew I was hurting him, and I still could not stop. A tear ran down my cheek. An actual tear. From laughing at a man who had trusted me not to.

He turned and walked to his desk without another word.

The laugh finally ran out of fuel on its own. I sat there with wet cheeks and the quiet of the empty office.

I had promised him, and then I had done that anyway.

I got up and walked to his desk. He was sitting with his hands flat on the surface, staring at nothing. The look on his face was something I recognized and didn't like recognizing. I had put that there.

I put my hand on his shoulder.

"Tom. I'm sorry. I mean it. I promised, and I broke it, and I'm sorry."

He didn't say anything.

My mouth kept moving before my brain could properly supervise it.

"Have you ever actually had sex?"

He stood up.

The look on his face was something different now. Not humiliation. Something harder than that. He reached for his jacket on the back of the chair.

"Tom." I stepped closer. "I'm sorry. That was an awful thing to ask. I didn't mean it the way it came out."

He stopped, but he didn't sit back down.

I stood there looking at him. The curiosity that had started when he was walking back to his desk had not gone anywhere. It had just gotten louder. He had said he was a grower. I had seen a lot of things in my life, but I had never seen that turn into something. I wanted to know if it was true. I needed to know if it was true.

I reached for him.

I looked up at him. "I really need to see it grow."

I squeezed gently. He didn't move. Didn't step back. I knew then that he wasn't going anywhere.

I sank to my knees.

His hands were at his sides. I reached up and pulled his waistband down. It was different from the first time. More recognizable. Still soft but no longer invisible, no longer swallowed by his own body. I could see what he had been trying to tell me.

I looked up at him.

"Is that all of it?"

He didn't answer me with words. Instead, I felt his hand settle on the top of my head. It wasn't tentative. A firm, grounding weight that didn't just suggest; it guided.

As I leaned forward, the smell of him was the first thing that hit me -- clean, soapy. When I finally took him into my mouth, the initial taste was familiar. Salt and heat.

He was still the soft, yielding presence that rested easily on my tongue. But as I began to move, as the heat of my mouth and the friction of my tongue took hold, I felt the transformation.

I felt his fingers tighten in my hair; he was thickening, filling out with a density that seemed impossible given where we had started. He was growing. Not just in length, but in a heavy, throbbing girth.

The "grower" wasn't a myth. It was happening right in my mouth.

The man who had been a "soft mountain" at a desk five minutes ago was gone. In his place was something undeniable, something that tasted of a raw power I hadn't expected.

I thought about my husband.

Then I stopped thinking about my husband.

I tried to hold my rhythm, but my body found the limit before my mind did. My eyes stung. A sound came out of me in that quiet office that I hadn't planned on, raw and unguarded, and once it was out, there was no taking it back.

My hand found the hem of my dress. The tension that had been building since the AC kicked on at 2:47 had been looking for somewhere to go all day. It found it.

Tom noticed immediately.

His hand came down over my breast, heavy and certain. He found me through the fabric, and he wasn't asking. After a day of men stealing glances and looking away the moment I caught them, Tom stopped looking away. He pressed in, and I felt it everywhere.

Another sound escaped me. Also unplanned.

I had started this evening in complete control of everything. I had kicked the surge protector with intention. I had smoothed my dress, sent him under my desk, spread my knees, and watched him see exactly what I wanted him to see.

That version of the night felt like a long time ago.

I stopped.

Not because I wanted to. Because I needed more than this, and I needed it now. Two months of waiting had made me impatient in a way I hadn't fully understood until this moment.

I stood up and turned my back to him.

"Unzip me."

I felt his hands before I felt the zipper. Shaking, a slight hesitation, his fingers finding the top of my dress. The zipper came down slowly, carefully, like he was afraid of making a mistake. When it reached the bottom, the dress fell away on its own and pooled around my feet.

I turned around and let him look.

He looked.

I pulled him down to me by the back of his neck.

The kiss was not gentle. Two months and a very long day have a way of expressing themselves.

His hands moved over me, his mouth found me before I had time to think about it.

I pressed his head in and stopped thinking about much of anything.

His mouth broke, and he sat, rolling his chair, settling in front of me, and his hands began to wander with confidence I hadn't expected from him. One hand found my lower back. The other began to move between my legs with a deliberateness that caught me off guard.

I grabbed the back of his head and held on.

When the first sound came out of me, I was glad the office was empty. When the second came, I stopped caring either way. He found something that made my knees go weak and stayed there. I felt it building before I could do anything to slow it down.

I hadn't expected that.

Not from Tom.

Not tonight.

When it hit me, my legs had stopped being reliable. My whole body shook with it, sudden and complete, and I heard myself making sounds in that quiet office that I would think about later with equal parts satisfaction and disbelief.

Tom had done that.

His soaking hand was evidence of exactly how long it had been.

I looked down at him and revised everything.

He didn't ask.

One moment, I was looking down at him, and the next, his hands were at my waist. Then I was on the desk.

Things fell. A monitor tilted and slid back against the cubicle wall with a sound that was too loud for eleven o'clock in an empty office. Something else went with it. My back was being poked by a monitor, and I could feel the rough fabric of the cubicle.

He moved in front of me, and I understood what was happening. I put my hand on the back of his head and pulled him in.

I had not expected this from Tom.

The second one built slower than the first. I felt it coming from a long way off and couldn't do anything about it, and stopped trying. My grip tightened on the back of his head.

The empty office heard things that night that I will never discuss with anyone who works on the tenth floor.

When it was over, my ass on the edge of my desk, monitors askew, my dress somewhere on the floor, chest heaving, looking down at Tom.

He stood.

I had a fraction of a second to understand what was coming, and then he was there. Whatever I thought I knew about Tom from six years of polite coffee-pot small talk was gone. He didn't just move toward me; he claimed the space, his broad frame casting a shadow that made me feel suddenly very small.

He wasn't gentle.

I hadn't expected gentle, not after the look on his face when I'd laughed, but I hadn't expected this either. When he entered me, the desk shifted. My monitor tilted, the screen glowing a dull, useless gray against the cubicle wall. This was a man with something to settle, and he was settling it with a heavy, rhythmic authority. I grabbed the edge with both hands, my knuckles white, and held on as something poked into the small of my back.

Two months of waiting. The horn at the light, Sarah's text, the man at the restaurant, 2:47, the text from hubby. A decision made with a toe on a surge protector. All of it hit me at once; part of my brain finally short-circuited.

He was looking at me the way he had when he first stood up from his chair -- intense, certain, and completely unlike the man I had filed away as unremarkable. I laughed at him. I had asked him if he'd ever actually had sex. He remembered every word. I could feel the answer in the raw, bruising strength of his hands on my hips, guiding the pace, making sure I felt every inch of what I had been so skeptical of.

I was already sensitive from everything that had come before, and what he was doing to me now was a sensory overload.

Rhythmic friction filled the office, the sound wet and steady. My gasps bounced off the fabric of the partitions. I stopped caring. I was just a woman being reminded of what I'd been missing.

I felt his hands tighten, his fingers digging into my skin, and then he was pulling out. It was deliberate. He didn't turn away; he stayed right there, looming over me while I was still shaking.

The first thick cord of him landed in my eye, a burning shock. It wasn't the polite, hidden end I was used to with my husband. This was Tom reclaiming the night. More of him followed, splashing across my breasts, and a final, warm drop landed on my firm stomach.

He stood there for a long moment, his chest heaving, looking down at the mess he'd made of me. His face in that last moment was something I had never seen in six years, a mix of satisfaction and a new power.

With one eye closed, I looked down at the white streaks on my body and then back up at him. I don't think I will ever forget the look on his face. And I don't think I'll ever look at him the same again.

____________________________________________________________________________________

I slid off the desk and found my feet.

My shoes were where I had left them. I put them on because bare feet on the office carpet at eleven o'clock was a line I wasn't willing to cross.

I was aware as I walked that I was leaving a trail on the tenth-floor corporate carpet. Small drops. Evidence. I did not look down. I walked quickly and kept my eye forward. The motion sensors clicked on ahead of me, one by one, fluorescent lights waking up to illuminate a woman in nothing but heels moving through an empty office, owning it.

The break room was empty.

I cleaned up under the fluorescent lights with rough paper towels and soap that smelled like every office bathroom I had ever been in. When I was done I stood at the sink and looked at myself in the mirror for a moment.

I had looked in a different mirror that morning.

That version of me grabbed her keys and told herself it would be fine.

I walked back down the hall, lights clicking off behind me. My dress was on the floor of the cubicle. I stepped into the dress and zipped it up myself.

Tom was at his desk, jacket on, keys in hand.

We looked at each other across the quiet office, the way two people look at each other when they have run out of the words that usually fill the space between them.

He nodded. I nodded.

He walked to the elevator, and I listened to the doors open and close.

I turned off the lights and followed a few minutes later.

The summer night was still warm when I walked out of the building. Two blocks to my car, the same two blocks I had walked that morning with my heart rate slightly elevated and a secret I was just beginning to understand. The streets were quiet. My heels were loud on the pavement.

I got into my car and sat for a moment before starting it.

I thought about his face.

Not the humiliation, not the pink at the back of his neck, and not the man who had asked me to promise not to laugh. The face from later. The one I had never seen in any meeting on any floor of that building in all the years I had known him.

I worked with Tom for six years.

I started the car and pulled out into the empty street and drove home through the warm July night with all the windows down and nothing on the radio.