“Jurgita Valts,” Charlie Peasgood had insisted. “You look like Jurgita Valts. She’s a model. For Playboy.”
Despite the situation, and the utter humiliation resulting from it, any girl would have wanted to be wanted. Lauren had trimmed a good portion of her pubic hair, painted her nails, and shaved her legs for yesterday. She’d adorned herself with jewelry, and slipped into a pair of high heels to accentuate her ass better. If she were going to suffer through the various indignities she’d put up with, she wanted her colleagues to at least find her attractive, sexy, and desirable. And, as creepy as it may have come out, and as creepy as the compliment giver himself had been, Charlie Peasgood had, in his own way, been paying the girl a compliment.
Lauren typed the woman’s name, or her own best guess at the spelling, into Google and pressed return. She clicked on “images,” and was immediately treated to a good dozen photos of a thin, blonde model wearing clothes (a pink slip and a bra with the cups pulled down) in just one of the hits. No warning, no slow striptease, no swimsuits — nothing but flesh. It appeared that Lauren and Jurgita had that in common, at least.
That wasn’t all, however. Lauren clicked on a few images, opening them up. Even upon closer inspection, the lawyer had to concede the point to Charlie Peasgood. Lauren’s breasts and areolas were a bit bigger. Jurgita was marginally thinner. Lauren had at least a thin strip of blonde pubic hair above her pussy. And the eyes and lips were off. But there was certainly more than a passing inspection.
Thankfully, as the girl clicked through one photo after another, there didn’t appear to be any hardcore photos — no insertions, no blowjobs, no lesbian stuff. It was all straightforward, old-fashioned glamour shots. Her doppelganger appeared to be above such things, which meant that Lauren herself could breathe easier — no one was going to download anything too raunchy and claim it was her.
Lauren took one last glance at the image on her desktop. Jurgita stood stark naked, aside from an open, see-through pink shirt that she hadn’t quite managed to shed, hanging from her wrists and forearms. Her tits were hanging out, and her legs were slightly parted. But it was her eyes that Lauren couldn’t get over, the confidence and lust that they seemed to embody. It was as if the model was daring the viewer to stare even longer, to come closer for a better look.
Lauren shifted her attention to her own reflection in the dark glass of her office window. Similar, she thought to herself, but the eyes separated her from the nude model.
Then again, Jurgita had probably posed in the closed-off studio with a photographer, a make-up artist, and an agent, at most. Lauren, on the other hand, was in a midtown New York office building, surrounded by a good two dozen, mostly well-educated colleagues. She didn’t have a make-up artist. She didn’t have a photographer to pose her in the most flattering positions, or discard the less glamorous poses, or even airbrush away some of the blemishes.
She sighed, and gathered her things. She may not have been able to airbrush, but she could at least shower.
The command entered into Pinova’s interface, Lauren stepped from her office with her soaps and lotions in hand. She crossed the hall, slipping between empty cubicles, and let herself out the rear entrance of the suite, into the darkened halls of the Lane-Russet Building. Unlike Suite 2600, the fluorescents in the hall weren’t on motion sensor, and so the hall remained pitch black as Lauren padded towards the men’s room. Her sense of hearing led towards the door, the pitter-patter of falling water against bathroom tiles assuring her that she was headed in the right direction.
Lauren had been expecting torrential streams of ice-cold water issuing forth from the sprinklers, but was treated instead to a gentle, room-temperature spray from above. No corner of the room was left dry, so she was forced to abandon her yellow towel in the hall. Water fell on the sink counter, against the urinals to one side, down the partitions that sectioned off the malfunctioning toilets. Despite the sheen of water that had already covered the tiled floors before, someone was bound to notice the impossible places that the toilets had leaked.
The blonde placed her shampoo, conditioner, lotion, and body wash on the counter, capable of finding a suitable stream of water wherever she stood in the room. She had thought, earlier, that she would be showering in the partitioned-off handicap stall, behind a closed and latched door. But despite getting sidetracked in pursuit of her Internet counterpart, it was still before six in the morning, and Lauren was fairly certain she’d be the only one on the floor for a little while longer.
She ran her hands through her hair, and pulled the blonde locks back behind her. In the center of the room, after a nervous glance back towards the door, she crouched over the drain and relieved herself. She shook her head once more at just how lewd she’d become, but didn’t stop.
Lauren stood, and rinsed her body. The water wasn’t warm, exactly, but it was nowhere near as frigid as she’d expected. She was comfortable, and though it was certainly going to be a bigger mess, the experience was appreciably better than the bath she’d taken over the sink in the women’s room the night before.
Beads of water trickled down her exposed skin, rivulets of sprinkler water running down her bare back and naked torso. The last shower she’d taken had only been forty-eight hours earlier, but it felt as if she’d been trapped here at work for weeks, unable to get clean. Drops splashed onto her breasts, her nipples noticeably hard from some combination of exposure, tepid water, and residual memory of the pornography she’d just seen.
She reached for the soap, thinking back to the images she’d seen splayed across the computer monitor. Whereas before, there’d been noticeable, albeit minor, differences between the two women, Lauren was having difficulty now distinguishing herself from the model. It was Lauren, not Jurgita, slowly stripping out of polka-dotted lingerie. It was Lauren, not Jurgita, who was bent over a couch on some nondescript rooftop. It was Lauren, not Jurgita, who sat with her legs apart, her snatch readily accessible.
Lauren shut her eyes as she lathered herself with her body wash, thinking about what it had to have been like to be the focus of those shoots. She imagined the flashes of cameras against her naked skin. She imagined a photographer, behind his Canon, ordering her to spread her legs just a bit farther. She imagined a handful of lookers-on standing behind him, bearing witness to nude goddess making love to the lens.
“Touch yourself,” the photographer encouraged her.
“No,” Lauren replied, though not very convincingly. “I don’t do that.”
“Everyone does it,” came his response.
“Not for the camera,” the blonde answered. “I don’t do that in my pictures.” What she was thinking, and what she was saying, however, had very little effect on what she was doing. Her make-up girl, her agent, the photographer’s assistant, and a few others Lauren wasn’t able to identify watched as her hand dipped lower and lower, closer to her moistened pussy.
Lauren’s soapy fingers, back in the men’s room on the twenty-sixth floor of the Lane-Russet Building, lingered just a little too long on her breasts. The sensation as she squeezed her nipples set off a chain reaction, a cascade that she’d be incapable of stopping.
The studio disappeared, as did the characters that had stocked it. Lauren was in the men’s bathroom, showering beneath fire prevention devices in the pre-dawn. But the moistness in her pussy was very much real, as was the warm sensation enveloping her lower body. Her breath went heavy, her chest heaving as she gasped for air. Her knees went weak, her hands grappling at the top of the nearby urinal for balance. And her eyes nearly rolled back in her head, her body lost to orgasmic convulsions.
She came quickly and suddenly, with little warning or build up. Her body, it seemed, was through with foreplay. But while a lover might have been satiated with just one climax — or, given Lauren’s track record, with feigned proximity to one climax — her subconscious was not. Even as the first wave of her orgasm subsided, another was just beginning to crest. Covered in soap suds and drenched inside and out, the blonde lost her balance and collapsed to her hands and knees over the drain on the floor. Her vision was blurry, her field of sight consumed by pinks, purples, and deep reds. Just as she’d been aware only of her pain that Tuesday afternoon, she was lost to pleasure that Thursday morning.