What We Imagined on the Fourteenth Floor
Elena got out of her black car and crossed the parking lot with her chin held high, as if the concrete floor owed her an apology for existing. She walked on fine heels, putting one foot almost in front of the other, and every step echoed beneath the garage roof. She wore a gray suit jacket, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows, several wide bracelets clinking on her wrist. Hanging from her forearm was a leather bag that cost more than my rent. Huge sunglasses, bangs falling over them, her hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. She was in her late forties, had two children and a husband who appeared in industry magazines. And she walked with such an air of smug self-assurance that my mouth went dry.
I got off the bus in a three-euro T-shirt and wrinkled linen pants. Thirty years old, no children, a girlfriend who didn’t talk about weddings either. I kept my hands in my pockets and wore a five o’clock shadow that, according to my desk mate, was the only decent thing about me. The backpack on my back lifted the fabric of my T-shirt as I walked, and I suppose it showed more than I realized.
We shared a floor in the office tower, the fourteenth, the one where the air conditioning was always two degrees too cold. We barely knew each other’s names. A “good morning” in the elevator, a “see you tomorrow” by the photocopier. Nothing else. And yet that “nothing else” took up an indecent amount of space in my head.
***
Elena had no idea what was happening in my body when I saw her crossing the hallway. I watched her between the monitors, lost in the drape of her satin blouse, in the sway of her dress pants, while mine grew more and more uncomfortable under the desk. There were days when I would only look for her to find her talking to someone, her weight resting on one hip, and then I would start tracing her: the buttons at her neckline, the broad, womanly curve filling out her trousers. I had never been with a woman like that, mature, with the confidence of someone who no longer asked anyone for permission, and I wondered what she tasted like.
What I didn’t suspect was that she was doing exactly the same thing. That her eyes, usually loaded with irony, stuck to me when I walked away down the hallway with my hands in my pockets. She told me much later, laughing, that she imagined digging her nails into me, leaving red marks on my skin, checking with her teeth whether I was as solid as I looked. That when I turned the corner she would look at her immaculate manicure and think about what she could use it for.
***
Meanwhile, I lost my composure just from seeing her argue over a report. She had the face of an old-movie villain, haughty, capable of poisoning apples and sleeping soundly afterward. And I was getting hot under the collar thinking about what that woman could do to me if she wanted. I would have let her step on my back in those heels. I would have given up half my life for that statuesque woman to brand me with her elegant contempt.
For her part, she studied the angles of my face, the short beard, the dimples when I smiled. She shifted in her chair when she saw me laughing with someone. She wondered — she confessed to me — where that knot in her stomach went when she got home and saw her husband on the sofa. What a young, taut body would smell like. How my beard would feel against the inside of her thighs, those thighs she treated with oils every night without quite knowing for whom. She said that with no other man, ever, had she thought things like that. That her expensive-school upbringing wouldn’t allow it. And that with me, however, she imagined herself dragged, hair mussed, makeup smudged, begging for more.
***
We ran into each other on a Tuesday in the photocopy room. Two machines in five square meters. There was no way not to brush against each other.
“Sorry,” I said, stepping aside.
“Don’t apologize,” she replied, and didn’t move.
I smelled her expensive perfume, saw up close the texture of her makeup, the exact contour of her mouth. Something in me broke. I grabbed the wide belt she’d put on that morning and pulled her toward me. Our stomachs pressed together. I buried my nose behind her ear, over her blouse, and breathed deeply, as if I wanted to keep her whole inside me.
She let me do it. The only thing she managed was to grab me with both hands from behind, one hand on each side, like a believer finally touching the relic. I kissed her neck, went down to her neckline, breathed in again. And with a tiny movement of my fingers I undid her bra clasp beneath the fabric. I felt her release, her whole body loosening.
“Not here,” she whispered, without conviction.
“Here,” I said.
Just by squeezing her shoulder, she understood. She crouched in front of me and there wasn’t a trace left of the hauteur she wore in the hallway. She stayed there, waiting, docile, suddenly turned into something else. The executive who scared half the floor, on her knees on the carpet, looking up at me.
I held her chin with one hand, stroked her cheekbone with my thumb. She parted her lips on her own, tipped her head back. And then, for an instant, I gave her control back: I let her set the pace, recover the upper hand, let the demanding mother be in charge again even while she was kneeling.
But only for an instant. Because I realized that there, in that corner without windows, I was the one in charge. Her knees were going red against the carpet for a reason. I lifted her by one arm. She protested with a gesture; she wanted more. She’d have to wait.
***
I turned her toward the photocopier. Her ass pushed back, rounding beneath the fabric of her pants. I yanked down her waistband, moved aside what needed moving aside, and bent down. I wanted that whole night of her body over my face. I grabbed her by the hips and shoved her against me, eating that pussy slowly, feeling her legs give way as she leaned over the machine, which buzzed absurdly beside us.
When my face was soaked, when I had completely undone her, I thought only one thing: I’m going to fuck this woman who scares the whole building like nobody’s ever fucked her before.
I pulled her upright by the hair, gently, gripping the outside of her neck, that same throat that a minute earlier had filled my mouth with her gasps.
“Where’s your boss face now?” I whispered in her ear.
And I took her. Without warning, without mercy, again and again, our bodies sounding in dull, wet thuds, slick with sweat. I lost my head. I looked up at the ceiling, clenched my teeth, drove harder until a tremor ran through me from top to bottom. I thought I’d last only a little — the way seeing her walk down the hallway got me so worked up had had me on the edge for months — but that wasn’t how it went. When I finally let go inside her, it took me a while to empty myself, several more thrusts, holding on to her hips like someone who doesn’t want it to end. She was still folded over the machine, exhausted, shining, completely given over.
***
That was what I imagined, a thousand times, between one report and the next.
What she imagined was different. And one Friday, in the coffee room, she decided to tell me in her own way.
She was leaning against the counter. She took my hand, pulled me toward her, and started kissing me. Against her husband’s soft belly, she said, my taut stomach was paradise, not a gym body but firm, with the obliques showing when I moved. She had studied my body from behind, but not until that afternoon had she really noticed my shoulders, the broad back she ran her palms over while she put her tongue in my mouth. She was, she said, like a child with new shoes.
She took off my T-shirt. Her fingers followed the line of my shoulders, the hard contour of my back. She dug in her nails, scratched me, pressed me against her, as if she needed to check that I was real and not one of the things she invented alone in her office.
“Where’s your air of indifference now?” she asked me, unknowingly repeating what I had said to her in my head.
She stripped me completely and made me parade for her like a doll. She wanted to scold me, she said, like a teacher.
“You’re never going to get anywhere like that,” she murmured, biting her lip.
She traced me all over with that salon manicure. My torso, my stomach, my back. She tested the hardness of my body with her teeth, left a round red mark on my skin, and stared at it with satisfaction, like a geologist who has just identified a mineral. When she got to the rest, she wrapped me in her slender, well-brought-up fingers and felt me grow in her hand. She was behind me, pressed to my back, and laughing softly at her own surprise.
“I’m going to drain you dry,” she said. “I’m going to teach you what a woman is.”
But for a second, sanity came back to her. It had been a long time since she’d made love, she confessed, and when she did, she almost never came anymore. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to handle it, afraid of breaking. Then desire returned and the fear vanished from her face.
She made me sit in one of the chairs. She lifted her skirt, swung one leg over with an agility I wouldn’t have expected from her, pushed aside her soaked underwear, and lowered herself onto me slowly, all the way. She let out a moan, almost lost her balance. She grabbed my short hair like someone clutching a life raft and started moving, hips, ass, fine heels dug into the carpet, riding me with a fury no one on that floor knew she possessed. Her back arched, the groove of her spine gleamed with sweat, she looked at the ceiling and screamed. She had proved who was in charge. What a real woman was. She had made me hers in a way, according to her, she hadn’t been with anyone in a long time.
***
None of this happened. Neither the photocopy room, nor the coffee room, nor a single extra word in the elevator. We kept crossing each other in the hallway with our “good morning” and our “see you tomorrow,” outwardly strangers, burning on the inside. I didn’t know what she imagined. She didn’t know what I imagined.
And sometimes I think that was precisely the best part: that the fantasy lived on intact, without reality ruining it. That each of us had the other whole, to our own measure, on the fourteenth floor of our own head. Someday, maybe, I thought when I watched her walk away. And I’m almost sure she, looking at my back, thought exactly the same thing.
