Since nobody would be seeing the bra she would have been willing to put up with some discomfort until she could find a better time and place to deal with it, but several of those devilish plastic cords were holding the back straps together. “No way on earth am I going to get into this thing with those cords tying the backup,” she muttered as she picked up the tool and went to work.
“You have reached your destination,” the driver’s phone announced, startling Katie. She still needed to cut a few more plastic ties off the back of the bra to make it wearable. The car had come to a stop, this time not because of traffic; her car was one of several parked at the curb near an employee entrance of the Rayburn office building. Her driver’s bright blue Focus stood out in the lineup of black limos and giant SUVs, drawing the attention of several well-dressed aides and lobbyists standing on the sidewalk.
It didn’t take long for a few of the pedestrians to notice the shapely topless blonde in the back seat of the out-of-place little blue car. They had no idea what she was doing with the bra in her hands, her hands not being where their attention was focused. The handful of voyeurs clustered near the car, groaning in only slightly exaggerated disappointment when she finally detached the last bit of plastic and swiftly put the bra on. Thinking it might make the cluster of men lose interest, Katie put her blouse on before removing the one tie it had hanging from its right sleeve, but her audience seemed to be rooted right where they stood.
Katie resigned herself to the likelihood that she would need to push past them to get to her Congressman’s office, but wasn’t sure what she would do if they followed her; she was sure that besides being the end of her career in politics, it wouldn’t be at all good for her boss if anyone were to connect him to the topless mystery woman. She had her hand on the door handle, ready as she’d ever be to try to force her way past the men outside when they all suddenly dashed off to join a larger group focused on a new arrival getting out of a limo three cars ahead.
She cut off the one tie on her blouse, tipped the driver, returned his multi-tool and seized the unexpected opportunity to get into the office building without anyone following her. She hustled in and sent her bag through the metal detector; after she cleared the security checkpoint she looked back one last time, breathing a sigh of relief when she saw no one had followed her. “I have no idea what was so interesting about whoever was in that limo, but whoever it was saved my butt,” she laughed as she hurried to her Congressman’s office.
Katie walked into the office at 8:57 and immediately sought out the Congressman’s chief of staff, apologizing for being late, “I know I was supposed to be here before 8:30, but my travel has been an absolute disaster.”
Looking frazzled, the chief of staff told her, “As it happens, we’ve had to push the boss’s announcement back two hours. We were all set to have him get out of his limo and walk a hundred feet to make his announcement speech at a scenic spot with the Capitol dome in the background; instead, now we’re scrambling to get Emancipation Hall in the basement of the visitor center set up for the event.”
Katie asked, “Why the change?”
“At the last minute we got word that some kind of protest was being planned. Apparently topless women, or maybe naked ones were going to pop out of cars near the site of his announcement and heckle him. Would’ve been a total shit-show. The press corps would’ve loved it, but the Congressman would’ve been a laughingstock. You just got here, did you see anything like that going on out there?”
“No, but I saw a lot of people clustered around one of the limos parked outside the building entrance.”
“No matter, my deputy was out there waiting for Congressman Randall and called to warn me that he saw one of these women pull up in a small blue car, already topless! He thinks she chickened out at the last minute,”