Lauren was naked from head to toe, save for a few pieces of jewelry and her pumps. In the aftermath of a sudden, psychosomatic reaction to clothing of any kind, the twenty-nine-year-old lawyer had opted to go back into the office completely naked. Evelyn Apparel had an acquisition on the line, and the successful purchase of Cortland Menswear before the end of the Third Quarter would mean millions for the company. For Lauren, the reward was more personal, as she’d been appointed lead by her boss, and knew she had a promotion and a seventeen thousand dollar raise on the line. She’d been willing to humiliate herself for the good of her employer, willing to sell her shame and her dignity for a new title and a bump in pay grade. Her body, though, apparently believed she hadn’t sacrificed quite enough, as she was still shaking the lingering effects of a spontaneous orgasm she’d achieved in the middle of a meeting in her boss’s office.
The blonde had bolted from the room the moment Paul McIntosh’s end of the line went dead, the Corporate Development officer satisfied with sweat, tears, and man hours Evelyn Apparel’s Commercial Transactions group had dedicated to the contract that day. She’d shared a smile of accomplishment with her boss, Dick Bramley, and a head nod with her colleague Danny Baldwin, but she’d entirely ignored Rachel Wilks, her closest friend in the office. In fact, only Amy Melrose had left before her, and Lauren passed even her as she charged down the hall back to her office.
Her chest still heaving, Lauren lunged for the phone on her desk. “Two-one-two,” she spoke aloud as she dialed the numbers from Dave Adams’s business card. “Six-nine-six…”
It took a few moments for Lauren to get past the past the psychiatrist’s assistant, but the panic in the girl’s voice told the assistant all she needed to know — she patched Lauren right through.
“What the hell just happened to me?!!”
“Hello?” Adams asked.
“It’s Lauren Laframboise,” the girl explained. “I need to know what the hell is going on!”
“Lauren,” Adams repeated her name. There was no doubt he knew exactly who she was, but he needed a moment to collect himself. “I think we established what we thought –”
“I just had an orgasm. In the middle of a conference call. In a room full of people.”
“Wait…what? An orgasm? Really?”
“Yes, really!” Lauren ran her shaking hands through her blonde hair. Aside from the rash that enveloped her body the previous afternoon, Lauren had, up to that point, demonstrated no outward signs of stress. Suddenly, she felt herself perspiring heavily, breathing shallowly, and trembling in her chair. Nudity was one thing, and sure, it was humiliating. But with her high heels and jewelry, and a feigned sense of confidence, Lauren was able to convince herself she was in control. Cumming in the middle of a crowded room was not “in control.”
“This is exactly what I saying earlier today,” Adams offered. “Your body is trying to tell you that it needs a break. It simply can’t handle the stress that you’re under at work. You need to go home and relax.”
“‘I told you so’? Is that your advice?” the blonde shrieked.
“You’re not listening,” Adams explained.
“I am listening,” Lauren replied. “I’m listening, I’m listening!”
“Not to me,” the psychiatrist continued. “You need to listen to your body. The rash was a first attempt at communication. But it’s twenty-four and some odd hours later, and you haven’t heeded that call. You’re still at work, still putting yourself through all that stress. And, ultimately, I don’t think that being nude in front of all your coworkers is exactly helping to diminish that anxiety. So, my guess is — and I’ve never encountered anything exactly like this before — but my guess is that your body upped the volume a bit, brought things to the next level.”
Lauren rubbed her eyes. Outside her office, a gentle rapping on the glass alerted her to Rachel’s presence. The redhead was standing at the door with a concerned look on her face. The blonde gestured to the phone; she didn’t want to deal with her friend just then. She just wanted the psychiatrist to solve her problem.
“So now I’m going to break out in a rash if I don’t keep climaxing?”
There was an uncomfortable silence on the far end of the phone. Lauren was frightened that Adams even seemed to be thinking the question over, frightened that the answer might be in the positive.
Instead, he asked, “How long since your last orgasm?”
“About five minutes ago,” she answered.
“No, before this one.”
“What? Why?”
“How long, Lauren?”
The girl massaged her temples. “I don’t know. A few weeks, I guess?”
“Were you alone?”
“Was I alone? What? Where are you going with this?”
Adams sighed. “Did you reach orgasm through self-stimulation or with a partner?”
The girl hesitated, but eventually squeaked out, “The first one.”
“Masturbation,” the psychiatrist said aloud, more to himself than to his patient. “And how long since your last partner?”
“I don’t know,” Lauren answered, honestly. It had been a while. “A few months, maybe?”
“How many is a few?”
Scott Tydeman. A guy she’d met at the gym. They’d gone to dinner, and had ended up back at Lauren’s apartment. She never put out on a first date, but that night had been different. It had been a few months since Lauren had broken up with her previous boyfriend, and she’d been horny. Scott didn’t call after that. But Lauren hadn’t called him, either.
“Seven,” she answered. “Maybe eight.”
God, had it really been that long? And Scott had been a one-night-stand, a brief oasis in a desert of self-imposed celibacy. She was nearing the one-year anniversary of her split from Jon Derby — November of the previous year.
Getting no immediate response from the psychiatrist, Lauren sarcastically offered, “So that’s your prescription, I’m assuming?”
“No, no,” Adams half-chuckled.
I’m glad he’s finding this amusing, Lauren thought to herself.
“So I’m rethinking what I said earlier,” Adams offered. “Maybe the orgasm wasn’t another warning. Maybe you’ve been getting warnings all along — tense shoulders, blurry eyes, so on and so forth. Maybe the rash was the last warning. Maybe it was your body’s last ditch effort in trying to get your attention.”
“And so the orgasm is…?”
“Your body taking the matter into its own hands, in a way.”
Lauren was puzzled.
“Let’s try something,” the psychiatrist suggested. “The gray pair of underwear from this afternoon.”
The blonde eyed the duffel bag in the corner of her office.
“Let’s try again.”
Lauren had calmed a bit since walking into her office. Maybe it was Adams’s voice. Maybe it was talking about it. Maybe it was just that a few more minutes had passed, that she’d put a bit more time between herself and the incident itself. Whatever the case, the blonde reached for her bag, and extracted the cotton panties from within. Knowing full well the itchiness and burning that awaited, she took a deep breath, bent at the waist, and slipped her ankles through the holes in the fabric.
The sting was instantaneous, the sensation like running barbed wire along her naked thigh. Yet – and perhaps it was just her imagination — the pain didn’t seem quite as intense as it had that afternoon. Wishful thinking, she told herself. She was probably just learning to bear it better. A few seconds longer of gritting her teeth, Lauren slipped back out of the panties and placed them on the desk. She related the perceived amelioration to the psychiatrist.
“You were warned,” Adams explained. “Your body tried to tell you to relax, to ease off the pace you’ve been keeping over the past few weeks. And since you blissfully ignored its pleas, it opted to seek release in the only way it knew how.”
“So, I’m just going to keep orgasming until I’m cured? Until the rash goes away?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Maybe.”
Lauren groaned. “I can’t keep doing it in public.”
“Then go home!”
The girl shook her head, mostly for her own benefit. “No,” she said, for Adams’s. The equation had changed a bit, to be sure, but the solution had remained the same. The underlying stress was being caused by the acquisition of Cortland Menswear. If she were to go home, the stress wouldn’t just magically dissipate. She’d be just as anxious, but without the outlet of work. Moreover, the burden that she’d failed at her task might crush that lingering fraction of her consciousness that wasn’t apparently bat-shit insane.
There was a knock at Lauren’s door. She looked up and saw Ginger, the dark-haired girl gently tapping the glass window with her knuckles.
“I need to go,” Lauren announced.
“You need to go home,” Adams corrected her. Sensing it was a lost cause, though, the psychiatrist concluded, “I’ll be by tomorrow afternoon.”
“No need,” the blonde replied.
“It’s no bother,” Adams insisted. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” With a click, he was gone.
Lauren took a deep breath, and gestured Ginger into her office.
“How was the status call?”
“Fine,” the blonde answered. “Nothing of note.”
Ginger knew her boss well enough that she correctly surmised this wasn’t entirely true. And Lauren knew her assistant well enough that she knew the dark-haired girl saw right through her. But it wasn’t important just now, as Ginger had something else to offer.
“Alright, so I know that we’re trying to keep your situation under wraps…”
Uh-oh. Lauren didn’t like where this was headed.
“…but I was talking to Brian this afternoon…”
Brian Pinova worked in IT. He was a bit of an odd duck, though, not at all as geekish or socially inept at the usual computer support staff. Tattoos peeked from beneath his shirt collar, and he tended to wear more jewelry on average than even Lauren was wearing at that very moment — earrings, nose ring, eyebrow piercing. He looked more like Hollywood’s ideal punk-turned-computer hacker than the usual overweight, bespectacled nerd that populated the real world. Lauren wouldn’t have been surprised if Brian had picked up his computer skills in rehab or through some sort of prison correspondence course. All of which, of course, explained why Ginger was constantly flirting with him.