The text came at two-fifteen on a Thursday.
*I'm outside.*
I was mid-ticket on a calendar sync issue on the second floor. I looked at the message. Then at the calendar sync issue. Then at the message again.
Amber did not exist outside the building where I worked. She had never expressed any interest in the building where I worked.
I texted back: *Which door.*
*The glass one.* A pause. *They all look like glass doors.*
*Main entrance. 6th Street side. I'll come down.*
I put the calendar sync ticket on hold, which wasn't standard procedure but was going to have to be good enough, and went to the elevator.
She was in the lobby.
The Hartwell lobby at two-twenty on a Thursday afternoon had the lobby's usual texture. Pale gray porcelain tile, the reception desk a long curve of bleached wood with the company name in brushed-metal letters on the wall behind it, two low gray couches nobody ever sat on except the rare visitor who arrived early, and the wall-sized abstract painting in beiges and grays the building had inherited from whoever had occupied the floor before us. The afternoon light came in flat through the floor-to-ceiling glass of the south wall and made the porcelain shine. Two visitors at the reception desk. A delivery guy with a dolly waiting for the freight elevator at the far end. The security guard on the morning chair watching the entrance with his usual half-attention.
I saw her before she saw me. The security guard had stopped doing his half-attention. A man in a visitor badge near the elevators had his phone out and had forgotten what he was looking at. That was what she did to rooms.
Dark slacks tight on her legs, tight on her ass. A dark blazer, buttoned once. Hair pulled back into a low knot. Low heels in a leather color a shade darker than her tan. Her tits filled the blazer in a way that made the single button work hard, the fabric pulling slightly toward the seam between them. No visible makeup, which meant either none or exactly enough.
She looked up when I came through the lobby doors. Flat expression. Something had happened and she considered it entirely normal.
"You came to my office," I said.
"I was in the neighborhood." She looked around the lobby. "Is it always like this?"
"Like what?"
She gestured toward the security desk, where the guard had decided he needed to re-read something on his monitor. "Never mind."
I signed her in. I got her a visitor badge. The woman at reception said "Hi!" with about forty percent more warmth than she used when I came through alone.
We went upstairs.
I gave her the fifteen-cent tour because I wanted to see what she made of it.
The sixth floor at this hour had its mid-afternoon rhythm. Finance on the south side with the better light, sales in the middle bullpen, IT in our corner near the printer. Frosted glass on the partition walls, the same standard-issue grey carpet tile in every direction, fluorescent panels overhead that nobody had ever complained about loudly enough to get replaced. The coffee bar nobody maintains was at the kitchen end with three half-full pots of three different things. The standard office sound at three on a Thursday: the steady low murmur of conversation, the click of keys, the printer somewhere doing its current thing, the AC vent over the bullpen running because somebody had set the thermostat at sixty-eight again. She looked at the open plan the way she looked at things she was learning. The glass partitions. The way the finance side had a different feel from the IT area. She didn't comment.
Three people in the first eight feet stopped conversations mid-sentence and pretended they hadn't. A guy from logistics who'd worked fifteen feet from my desk for seven months and said maybe thirty words to me looked up from his monitor, looked back down, then looked up again.
Marcus was at his desk and saw us coming from twenty feet out. He stood up, a thing he did not always do, and pushed his chair back with his calf, and his hand went briefly to his tie to check it was still where he'd put it that morning.
"Owen," he said. He was looking at Amber.
"Marcus. This is Amber."
She looked at him. "You're the friend from the bar."
"He told you about me."
"He doesn't talk about much. He mentioned you."
Marcus's mouth did something warm and quick. He offered his hand. She took it. He looked at me over her shoulder. Several thoughts. All kept to himself.
"Good to meet you," he said.
"Likewise." She looked around his part of the floor. "He said you're in finance."
"Corporate. Yeah." He was watching her with the alertness he used when he was deciding whether to say something. "He mention how long we've worked here together?"
"Seven months."
Marcus looked at me. I looked at Marcus.
"I'll let you finish the tour," he said.
The IT area was less interesting to her than the printer, which she found in the small room off the kitchen and examined the way she'd examined my stove.
"This is the printer," I said.
"It's the one you mentioned."
"The very same."
She looked at the amber indicator light that had been on since Wednesday and had not resolved. She crouched and read the panel message. She stood back up.
"Have you escalated the parts request?"
"Twice. With full documentation."
She looked at the printer, then back at me.
"It's IT support," I said.
"I know. You've told me."
We left the printer.
On the way back through the open plan, a woman from the floor above had found a reason to be at the kitchen counter near the exit. Late twenties, auburn hair, nice tits in a blouse that knew it. She and I had exchanged one sentence per week for seven months: good morning, and then the elevator.
"Owen," she said, with warmth she had developed in the last seven minutes.
"Hey."
Her eyes went to Amber. Two seconds. Then she did the thing I'd started noticing, running the math on what it meant that Amber had chosen me.
"I didn't know you had a girlfriend."
"Yeah."
"That's so nice." She looked at Amber. "Are you in the building?"
"No," Amber said. "Just visiting." She looked at the woman. Not unfriendly. Just complete.
The woman said something else. I responded. At some point we were at the elevator.
I pressed the button. The woman was still at the kitchen counter, doing something that did not look urgent.
"She's been here seven months," I said.
"I know." The elevator opened. "She noticed you were there the whole time."
"That's not what her behavior indicated."
"No. It wasn't."
We got in the elevator.
By four-thirty the open plan had shifted. Two more people stopped by the IT area with tickets that could have been submitted through the portal. The guy from logistics suddenly needed someone to look at a printer issue in person. The woman from accounting had opinions about cable management.
I handled the tickets. Amber was at my desk with her phone and a coffee, entirely comfortable being looked at.
By five the building had mostly emptied. Marcus stopped by on his way out.
He looked at Amber, then at me.
"Good to meet you," he said to Amber. "Make sure he eats something before six. He forgets."
Her eyes came up. "You forget."
"The queue was heavy today."
Marcus left. The elevator dinged. The floor was quiet.
She stood up from my desk.
"I want to see the stairwell."
"The stairwell."
"The one you take when the elevator is slow."
"It's a stairwell."
"I know what it is." She'd already decided. "Is anyone still on this floor?"
I looked around. Lights on in the far offices. Empty chairs behind the glass.
"Probably not."
Nine hundred years and she had opinions about stairwells.
I led her to the stairwell.
Third floor landing. Fire door. Exit signage.
She came in after me and let the door close.
I will say this: the stairwell was not a context I had previously considered. I have a reference library. It is fairly complete. The stairwell was in it. I had not expected to encounter the stairwell personally.
She looked at me like she'd read the complete file and found the entry.
"You had opinions."
"I had opinions."
She undid the single button on the blazer and opened it. Nothing underneath. Her tits: full, heavy, tanned skin against the dark fabric. She'd been walking around my office floor like this for two hours with nothing under the blazer. I stared. She watched me stare.
"I've been thinking about your cock since Tuesday," she said. The acoustics of the stairwell did something with her voice. "I couldn't wait until tonight."
She dropped to her knees on the concrete landing.
The fire safety signage was behind her left shoulder. Exit this floor at the fire door, or continue to the lobby, three flights down. You notice structural details when your back is against a stairwell wall and a woman is undoing your belt on the third-floor landing of the building where you work.
She had my cock out and in her mouth before I'd finished registering that this was happening at Hartwell. She took me to the base on the first pass. Her throat tight and hot around me, her nose against my skin, the wet sound of it echoing off the concrete walls. She pulled back and went down again, fast, aggressive, her hand gripping the base of my cock, her other hand flat on my thigh.
She sucked my cock on the third-floor landing of my office building. Her blazer open, her tits out, her knees on the concrete. The sound of her mouth on me bounced off the stairwell walls. She looked up at me with my cock buried in her throat and her eyes said she'd come to my office today for exactly this and wasn't sorry about any of it.
I had walked past this door for seven months. Seven months of very ordinary Tuesdays.
She pulled back, her lips wet, and stroked me with her fist. Fast. Her mouth open, her tongue out.
"Come on my face."
I came across her cheek and her jaw and her lower lip. She didn't flinch. She didn't close her eyes. She looked up at me with my cum on her face and the blazer open and her tits out in the Hartwell stairwell and she said: "I needed that."
She brought her fingers to her face. Cheek first, gathering everything there, licking her fingers clean between passes. Her jaw. The corner of her lip. She watched me watch her the whole time. Not embarrassed. Not performing anything. Just a woman cleaning her face in a stairwell, eating what was on it.
When she was done her face was clean.
She buttoned the blazer. One button. She stood up, straightened her hair with both hands, and looked at me the way she'd looked at my squat form that first Saturday.
"Your belt."
I did my belt.
We left at five-forty-eight.
She walked through the lobby ahead of me. The afternoon light was gone from the south windows now, replaced by the kind of dimmer interior lighting the lobby ran in the evenings. Track lights along the back wall behind the reception desk, the brushed-metal HARTWELL letters reflecting the track lights, the reception desk itself empty because Janet went home at five. The night security guard at the chair looked up from his phone. His eyes went to her face, held there about a second too long, and then very deliberately back to his phone. "Have a good one," he said, without looking at either of us again.
Koreatown early evening at six on a Thursday. Still warm at six, the sun behind the buildings on the west side of the block now and the sky doing the orange-and-pink thing it does when the smog is right. Foot traffic on 6th heavier than at lunch, the after-work drift. She walked with her arm through mine and said something about the printer that was correct in a way I was going to think about later.
"You came to my office," I said.
"Every day you work there."
"I know."
"I've never seen it." She looked at the street. "Now I've seen it."
Seven months in that building and largely unremarkable. Then Amber showed up.
"It was different today," I said.
She looked at me. "Was it."
The expression she had was not modest.
"You liked it," I said.
She didn't answer, which was an answer.
We walked to the Metro. The stairwell was behind us. The LDAP routing request would be there tomorrow.
The day had been significantly better than a regular Thursday.