I Imagined It So Hard I Could Almost Feel It

We work together. I arrived at the company to be his second-in-command and, by a twist of fate, we ended up getting along. Too well. We share the same acid wit, that kind of joke only two people in an entire room understand, and he doesn’t treat me with kid gloves just because I’m a woman like the others do.

He expects me to perform just as well as he does, except when something has to be reached from the top shelf, of course. He teaches me while making fun of me, and by now we communicate with looks. An arched eyebrow, the tiniest gesture, and the two of us know exactly what the other thinks of the meeting we’ve just had to survive.

We spend more hours together than with anyone else in our lives. We eat at the same table, fight over the last decent coffee from the machine, cover each other’s backs when one of us is late. There’s a strange intimacy in that, one that doesn’t feel like romance but isn’t entirely innocent either. It’s the kind of closeness that slips through the cracks when you let your guard down.

The only flaw, the unforgivable one, is that he’s married.

And I would never mix work with my personal life. I may be many things, but professionally suicidal isn’t one of them. Besides, if I get picky, he isn’t even my type. Though I’d have to be blind not to notice he’s attractive: tall, quite a bit taller than me, with fair skin that flushes pink when he laughs hard, honey-colored eyes, and long hands he moves far too much when he explains something.

He has that little Friday-beer belly men swear nobody notices, and his hair is cut so short he looks like he’s about to enlist in the navy. Sometimes I think the universe put him right in front of my desk just to laugh at me. Maybe my fate is to be happy at work and a disaster in love. Anyway.

I’m not going to pretend the chemistry hasn’t led me to fantasize.

Especially on ovulation days, when my brain turns into a teenager with hormones through the roof. Like today. After a slow day, too many chats in the coffee hallway, and a walk together to the parking lot, I get back to my apartment with my body buzzing.

I fling my heels through the air, pull down the dress pants that have been squeezing my waist since nine, and collapse onto the sofa. I close my eyes. My hands start massaging my breasts over my blouse, slowly, while I let the movie begin on its own in my head.

It’s not something I decide. The fantasy is simply there, waiting, like a record that starts spinning the moment I lower the needle. And the worst part, or the best, is that it gets more detailed every time. Today I even know what shirt he’s wearing: the blue checkered one he rolled up his sleeves in this afternoon while he explained a table of numbers I wasn’t listening to.

***

For some reason that doesn’t matter, we’re in a bar. Whether we came alone or lagged behind the others doesn’t matter either. We talk, we laugh, and that’s when the usual brushing starts: his elbow against mine, his knee searching for my leg under the bar. Until his hand settles on my hip and stays there, no attempt to hide it.

I look him in the eyes and he answers without saying anything, with that half-smile I know by heart. Let’s find a room, his eyes say. I put on my terrified-virgin face, because that’s how the game works, but he bites his lip with all the shamelessness in the world.

“I know you want to,” he murmurs.

On the sofa, my hand has already gone down on its own. I press over the fabric of my panties, wetter than I’d like to admit, while with the other hand I pinch a nipple through my blouse. In the fantasy, he has me trapped between his body and a wall of cold bricks.

“We shouldn’t,” I whisper, just to stretch the tension a little longer.

“Would you rather keep wanting?” His mouth is so close to mine I can feel his breath.

“And after?” I ask, already completely given in but still pretending to be the good girl.

“Nothing after,” he says. “It’s a one-night craving. Tomorrow we go back to pretending it never happened.”

His fingers climb my hip like someone climbing a staircase, step by step, unhurried, enjoying making me wait. He lifts one of my legs and devours my mouth with an impatient tongue, and suddenly he’s seating me on a dresser that conveniently appears in the middle of the scene, because in fantasies the furniture never fails.

He barely unbuttons my blouse. Of course, in this version of me I’m not wearing a bra. His mouth wraps around my nipple while he holds my gaze from below, and that image, his honey eyes fixed on mine, is what pulls the first real moan out of me.

I open my eyes for a second. I’m alone, hair messed up on my own sofa, with my hand inside my panties. I laugh at myself, but I don’t stop. I suck on my own fingers so I don’t lose the thread of the illusion and close my eyes again.

I imagine him touching me there, with those long fingers he moves so much when he talks, and I bite my lip until it hurts. I can’t stand the sofa anymore. I get up, stumble to the bedroom half tripping over my own clothes, and open the drawer of the nightstand.

The vibrator comes on with an almost heroic buzz.

***

Now I’m on my knees in front of him. He gives me a slap on the cheek, neither hard nor soft, just enough to make my heart jump.

“I knew you liked it rough,” he says with a bad-boy smile he’d never allow himself in the office.

He grabs my hair, twists it around his fist, and forces me to look at him while he strokes himself slowly. I imagine his cock: good, without going grotesque, with a slight curve that makes it more interesting than it should be. I bring two fingers to my mouth and play with them as if they were something else.

I stick out my tongue and, with the sweetest look I can manage, I wordlessly ask him to let me please him all the way. And he, obedient for once, does, while my throat holds out like in the stories I invent, the ones where no real throat would hold out for anything.

On the bed, I’m so wet the vibrator slides in on its own, without asking permission or waiting for an invitation. I let out a moan against the pillow and arch my back.

I change position almost without thinking, as if my body knows the script better than I do. Face down now, one arm bent behind my back, him stretched over me, thrusting with that desperation that only exists when something is forbidden and time is running out. I feel his heavy breathing on my shoulder, his free hand pressing my face into the mattress while I lift my hips as high as I can so he won’t stop.

“I want to feel you fill me,” I tell him, voice broken.

“You’re so mine tonight,” he जवाबs, and gives me a slap on the ass that echoes all over the imaginary room.

I writhe. The sheet scrapes my nipples every time I move, and that stupid friction, that detail no story would plan, is exactly what pushes me over the edge. The vibrator’s buzz, my own hand, his invented voice in my ear. It all comes together.

I come with an anthology-worthy orgasm, the kind that leaves you sprawled out and trembling, just as I imagine he finishes too. In my head he ends on my stomach, panting, and I bring a finger to my mouth with a gesture of absolute triumph, as if I’ve won something.

***

Then comes the silence, the usual one. The vibrator buzzing out, my breathing finding its place again, the white ceiling staring down at me.

I always feel the same at this point: a mix of satisfaction and something like shame, even though there’s no one here to judge me. I imagine what he’d think if he knew he stars in my nights like this, and the thought alone pulls another smile from me. He’d probably make a joke. I’d probably laugh myself to death rather than die of something else.

The truth is, the fantasy is perfect precisely because it’s never going to leave my head. In there he isn’t married, there are no ten o’clock meetings or unanswered emails, there’s no risk of ruining everything. In there I can have him whole, surrendered, mine, and give him back to the real world the next morning without a single piece missing.

I lie there on the bed for a few minutes, smiling like an idiot, getting my breath back. For something that’s only a one-night craving that’s never going to happen, it tastes like heaven.

Tomorrow I’ll get to the office, pour myself a coffee way too strong, and he’ll make some sharp comment about the ten o’clock meeting. I’ll laugh, lift an eyebrow, and we’ll communicate with looks like we always do.

And no one will ever know that tonight he was completely mine.