“…and I told him how you’d spent last night here, and were probably going to spend tonight here, as well. And he said he did the same thing, a few months ago, during that SAP implementation.”
Lauren raised an eyebrow.
“Well, he did the ‘sleeping here’ part, anyways. And he figured out a way to take a shower.”
Lauren did perk up a bit at this, but the reality of the situation quickly reared its head. “I’m not going to go traipsing through the building like this for a shower.” No, she could continue to bathe in the sink in the women’s bathroom. It was annoying, and nowhere near a real shower, but it didn’t require her to take the elevator down to the IT floors to bathe.
“No, you don’t need to. He…well, he’s right here.” Ginger gestured with her head down the hall. “I can have him explain.”
The blonde rubbed her eyes. On top of everything else, she didn’t want to deal with someone else from outside their suite at that moment. But she’d put up with Charlie Peasgood; how bad could Brian Pinova be?
“Fine,” Lauren agreed.
Brian was clearly taken aback as he answered Ginger’s summons. He swallowed hard, though, and after regaining his composure and making an unfunny joke about the dress code, got down to business. He did his best to avoid looking at Lauren in any way, instead glancing from the computer screen to Ginger and back to the computer screen, trying to pick up social cues from either the administrative assistant or the desktop hardware.
As it turned out, Brian and a few of his friends had hacked into the building’s fire control system, and after putting together a relatively simple interface program that Brian installed onto Lauren’s computer, they’d used the used the sprinklers to take showers down on the fourth floor. There had been a few kinks in the beginning, like when Brian had activated the wrong spigot and soaked a conference room three floors up from where he’d intended. Or the time that the fire alarms had gone off when they’d activated their makeshift shower, and the entire building had to be evacuated. But, as Brian clicked through the few commands that Lauren would need to operate the system, he explained that there wasn’t anything to worry about anymore, aside from the water itself.
Lauren looked up at Ginger, who nodded.
If Lauren were to hack into the building’s sprinkler system, illegally turn the spigots on, and shower beneath what she assumed would be ice-cold water, it only made sense that she’d do so in the girlish pink women’s bathroom. On the other hand, the men’s bathroom was already flooded. Taking advantage of a fortunate, pre-existing problem that had already compromised the men’s room, Lauren’s bathwater would simply sit among the rest of the water that already covered the floor. It wasn’t as if she were going to shower when anyone was on the floor anyways, so what difference did it really make if she were in the women’s room versus the men’s?
Lauren allowed Brian to show her the commands that identified the sprinklers in the men’s room on the twenty-sixth floor. She jotted on a post-it the prompts she’d need to follow in order to turn the water on and off again. And, while the idea of taking a cold shower in the men’s room might have appalled her twenty-four hours earlier, a lot of things had changed in that time. The prospect of an actual shower excited her, and given what had just gone down in Bramley’s office, perhaps a cold shower was best.
Only after Brian and Ginger had gone did Lauren notice her gray cotton panties still sitting on the surface of her desk. She blushed, at first kicking herself for leaving her underthings out where anyone could see them. But taking stock of how she was currently dressed, the blonde couldn’t help but laugh to herself. Brian Pinova seeing her unoccupied panties was the least of her humiliations.
Ginger, Brian, and the system hack still open on Lauren’s desktop had allowed Lauren a few moments respite from the shock and horror of her climax in Dick Bramley’s office. Alone in her office once more, the girl tried to shake the memory, busying herself by jotting down a few notes she recalled Paul McIntosh launching into that might have an effect on her work. She was unsuccessful, however, and after just a few minutes of hand-scratched notes in her legal pad, Lauren was swept back up into fretting over and recalling her orgasm.
It was the best she’d had recently, that much was for sure. Lauren had been working herself to the bone the past few weeks, and she mostly just collapsed onto her bed each night after work. She was up and on her way back to Midtown each morning, leaving little time for anything else. Lauren couldn’t honestly say that she hadn’t thought about masturbating every now and then, but so consumed by the Cortland acquisition she was that such thoughts never had any time to ferment at the forefront of her consciousness.
To be honest, the orgasm she’d just had was better than just about any she could remember. Certainly better than her night with fumbling Scott Tydeman, and perhaps more intense than she’d ever felt in her short relationship with Jon Derby prior to that. She hated to admit it, but Lauren’s climaxes were usually better when she was alone, and even those lacked the residual inner warmth and satisfaction that Lauren felt now, more than a half hour since she’d stormed out of Bramley’s office.
Her legs had gone weak, her spine had tingled, the very hairs on her head had stood on edge. Deep inside her, further than any finger or penis had ever penetrated, Lauren’s pussy had exploded in carnal bliss. Wave after wave of delight had washed over her, even as she clenched her teeth, stifled a moan, and did her best to pretend that nothing was happening.
The blonde glanced at the glass across from her desk, and satisfied that no one was watching, just at that moment, touched the top of her slit. It wasn’t sexual in nature, exactly, even if Lauren felt a few vaginal tremors that served as aftershocks to the orgasm that had rocked the Richter scale earlier. She was still wet – and not just damp, but sopping, soaking wet. Her whole pussy was drenched, lubricated all the way through. Maybe she should get herself off again. Maybe Adams was right, that she needed a release.
Horrified at herself, Lauren pulled her hand from her lap. Fingers still moist, the girl flipped back through her notes from the call two days earlier, eager to get her mind back on her work.
Rachel stopped by a bit later to check on the blonde, and though she, like Ginger, knew that Lauren was holding something back, she accepted her friend’s explanation of a sudden sensation of embarrassment without pressing further. Danny stopped in to announce he had to meet his wife for a parent-teacher conference downtown, but that he’d comb back through Sections 11, 12, and 13 afterwards, at home, to make sure that everything looked copasetic. Dick Bramley wished the girl a good night on his way home, making sure that she knew to call him if she needed anything. Kevin Tolman, Stephanie Kidd, Yvonne, and others all trickled by, saying their goodnights and using the opportunity to stare at Lauren one last time for the day.
For the most part, though, Lauren kept her head down and her nose buried in the contract before her. Five thirty became six, and six became seven, and before the blonde realized just how much time had passed, Ginger was standing at her door with a menu for the Indian place around the corner. Lauren stood, placed an order for chicken tikka masala, stretched, and excused herself to the bathroom.
About half of Suite 2600 had already emptied out, judging from the orders Ginger had collected from up and down the hall. While Lauren was certainly annoyed, given how much work was still to be accomplished between now and five o’clock on Friday, she was also greatly relieved. She’d made it through the day, as naked as she was, with only a few minor hiccups. Okay, maybe one major hiccup. But the day was done. Tomorrow, her humiliation would be old news, no longer quite the novelty it had been today.
Lauren stepped out the rear door of her suite and into the long, darkened hallway that ran to the elevators. As she passed the men’s room, a sudden curiosity struck the blonde, and she stopped. She’d never been inside, and could honestly say that, before that week, she’d never once thought about going inside. Earlier in the week, sure, she’d been tempted to poke a head in, to catch a glimpse of the flood driving her male colleagues to the twenty-fifth and twenty-seventh floors. But that evening, owing to the plan devised by Lauren, Ginger, and Brian Pinova, she had a sudden interest about what lay beyond the door.
She knocked first, pushed the door open a crack when no one answered, and hollered, “Hello?” Hesitating a moment longer, Lauren added, “This is the janitor!”
When no response came a second time, the girl decided the coast was clear. She glanced towards the front door of Suite 2600, and then the rear, and stepped into the darkened bathroom.
Lauren had to flick the light switch as she entered, the safety of which she wondered about, given that her heels splashed in a shallow puddle the moment she stepped into the bathroom. The tiles and paint were blue, complementing the pink of the women’s room. Even as adults, Lauren observed to herself, girls were pink and boys were blue.