For most of the morning, though, Lauren lost herself in her work. She shared a few, quick emails with Dick Bramley and Paul McIntosh, and gave marching orders to a handful of her team members, but the blonde was primarily focused on the contract itself. She read and re-read each line of each paragraph, initialing the pages as she progressed. There was a note, here or there, in reference to punctuation or more careful wording, but for the most part, much of the contract looked to be in fairly decent shape. Gone were thoughts of posing naked, of orgasming the men’s room, of Lauren’s continued lack of clothing, replaced in totality by legal clauses and sub-clauses.
Lauren heard none of the men on the floor complain about the unusual amount of water splashed across the men’s bathroom. But then, she’d spent most of the morning with her door closed and her head down. Still, Ginger confirmed that no one she’d heard had said a thing, especially given that more and more of the male members of the staff were going to the twenty-fifth floor even just to pee. Apparently, no one liked standing sole-deep in puddles in the rest room.
And so, when Lauren took a break from her work that morning to relieve herself, it was with a certain amount of confidence that she did so in the men’s room, relatively comfortable with the fact that her chances of being caught were slim. She splish-splashed across the tile floor, into the handicapped stall, and shut the partition door behind her. She squatted over the drain and pissed, telling herself that no matter how vulgar this might be, it beat having to walk all the way to the other side of the elevator bank, past the Auditing office, and down the long hall to use the women’s room. Lauren was in and out before anyone could catch her, though she did leave — unbeknownst to her – a fairly distinctive high-heeled, wet footprint in the blue carpeting behind her.
“Hello?”
Lauren looked up from her work to see Dave Adams at her office door, letting himself in without too much fanfare. Lauren grimaced. A part of her was relieved to have him there, as over the phone he had sounded like he had another idea. But another part of her had found a relative peace in her work, blocking out anything and everything to do with her nudity and the incident that morning.
“Hi,” the blonde replied. “Come in. Sit down.”
Adams had his leather messenger bag with him, as he had had the day before. He also had a nondescript brown paper bag tucked under one arm, and he bore a rather uncomfortable smile on his face.
“Thanks,” he replied, sitting himself across from her. They’d talked about that morning over the phone, as they’d spoken about the incident in Bramley’s office the afternoon before. There wasn’t any need to go over it again, and so Adams launched right into it. “Okay, so, I have an idea.”
“Okay…?”
“Wait,” he said, placing the paper bag on the floor and reaching for a pen out of his briefcase. “Do you have a sheet of paper?”
Lauren ripped a page from her legal pad and slid it across the desk.
“I…will…not…sue,” Adams spoke aloud, as he wrote.
“No, that’s fine,” Lauren interrupted him. “The one from yesterday, it’s fine.”
“This is for you,” the psychiatrist explained, rotating the sheet and indicating that Lauren should sign by the X that Adams had drawn.
A bit unnerved, but ultimately undeterred, Lauren did as she was instructed. Was Adams going to get naked, too? Gay or not, the blonde had to admit that he had an incredible body, and she wouldn’t mind taking a peek beneath the shirt and tie.
She swallowed hard, nipping the thought in the bud as soon as it entered her head. Even if Adams was there to try to help her get to the root of the problem, the girl was uneager to burst into throes of ecstasy in his presence.
“Do one thing for me first,” he instructed. “Just do me a favor, and try the panties again.” Lauren had repeatedly slipped in and out of her gray, cotton underwear during the previous day’s session, and again after cumming in Bramley’s office. It was a test, to see if her rash returned.
Lauren reached for her duffel bag, beneath her desk, but found Julie Lambourne’s cardboard box first. Without really thinking about it, and with a hint of mischief somewhere inside her, Lauren slid the box from its position and slipped off the cover. Rustling around until she’d laid her hands on a pair of deep red nylon/spandex hiphuggers, Lauren extracted the underwear and placed it on the desk.
“Leftovers,” Lauren smirked. “A gift.”
“I’m sure,” Adams smirked back. “Came with the garter over there, I’m assuming?”
The black and white garter dangled precariously on one of Lauren’s computer speakers.
Lauren nodded.
“Try that first,” the psychiatrist ordered, jutting his chin in the direction of the garter.
Lauren nodded again, and reached for the garter. She crossed her legs, her right over her left, and slipped the black ribbon and white lace over her ankle, up her calf, and past her knee. She adjusted it around her thigh, stood, and took a step towards the far wall, testing to make sure it stayed up. Like Adams’s belt or her own shoes and jewelry, though, the garter seemed to have no effect — it hadn’t set off whatever alarms Lauren’s body had put into place.
Of course, it was at that very moment that Dmitri stopped in front of Lauren’s office. He looked ready to knock, in order to ask some question, but after peering in at the naked blonde (or naked, save the black and white French maid’s garter), he thought better of it, backed away, and disappeared down the hall.
Lauren blushed all over, but turned her attention back to the psychiatrist.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing,” Lauren affirmed.
“And the panties?”
The blonde picked up the lace-trimmed panties, and still standing, bent at the waist to slip them on. As they had the evening before, and the afternoon before that, they stung as they went up Lauren’s calves and thighs, as if they were sewn entirely out of thistles and thorns. But, snapping them into place around her waist, Lauren recalled the events of the hospital on Tuesday night, remembering how she’d wanted to cut the waistband in order to get them off more quickly, how they’d seared her flesh. Today, more than a day and a half later, wearing them still caused quite a bit of discomfort and pain, but the hurt was nowhere near as agonizing. Whereas she had felt like she would die if she didn’t get them off back in the hospital, her present state of suffering was more comparable to scratching a bad sunburn. As she slid the panties off, Lauren noticed that the rash had returned. By her estimation, though, it didn’t look as vicious or as pink.
She relayed the sensations and observations to Adams, who seemed to share her general diagnosis.
“Which brings me to this,” Adams announced, placing the brown paper bag on the desk in front of Lauren. “Whatever the disease, I think we may have inadvertently stumbled upon a treatment.”
Lauren looked at the psychiatrist, and then reached into the bag. Packaged in firm, see-through plastic, the blonde found a seven-inch phallus. It was long, slim, and shaped more like an elongated bullet to some fantastical gun than it was like an actual penis. There was a small knob at the bottom; speed-control, Lauren guessed. The entire shaft, which looked like it was made from some sort of high-grade plastic, had been done up in a tiger-stripe motif. And, deep in the paper bag, there was a pair of Duracell AA batteries.
“What is this?” Lauren asked in disbelief.
Adams glanced at the girl, smiled, and offered, “You’re more repressed than I thought.”
“No, no, no,” the girl replied, shaking her head. “No, you’re supposed to help me stop with the orgasms.”
“I can’t, Lauren. Your body’s doing everything in its power to relax you. We could try acupuncture, or a mud bath, or a day at the spa, but my guess was that you wouldn’t be amenable to any of those things if you had to leave work. And, though less desirable on your part, your body found away to relieve some tension without you.”
“So…this…is…?”
“We can’t stop what’s happening to you. But we – well, you – can control it. Exert a little more structure over what’s happening.”