I Spied on My Boss with the New Girl and Couldn’t Move

My name is Marina, I’m thirty-seven years old, and I’ve been married for eleven. The office where I work is one of those trendy open-plan spaces: islands of four desks, gray upholstered chairs, windows looking out onto the avenue. Only four places break up that flatness: Damián’s office, my boss’s, which is five years older than me; the conference room; the bathrooms; and a cramped little break room with a microwave, a fridge, and a sink where barely two people can fit without brushing against each other.

On Tuesday the new girl showed up. A recent university graduate, still carrying that furious confidence of someone who believes the world belongs to her. She was wearing black Lycra pants clinging to her legs, a white blouse with just the right amount of cleavage, and chestnut hair falling in waves to mid-back. She walked on thin heels, and I couldn’t help staring at the way her ass rose and fell with each step until she disappeared into the office.

Ten minutes later she came out smiling, escorted by Damián.

—This is Camila. A brilliant girl, eager to eat the world alive —he said, looking at her longer than he should have—. She’ll be working in your department, Marina. Under your supervision.

I held out my hand. She squeezed it firmly, keeping my gaze a second longer than necessary.

—I’m going to learn a lot from you —she said, with a smile that was far too rehearsed.

I nodded in silence. Something in my stomach had already lit up.

***

What could I say about Camila after a week? That she was smart, yes. That she was hungry, too. But behind that magazine-cover smile lived a cold schemer who measured every word, every favor, every absence in other people. Every piece of advice I gave her, every shortcut I showed her, every template I shared with her, she tucked away in some mental drawer to pull out at the exact moment she could use it to hurt me.

The moment came soon enough. The mistake had been hers, a stupid oversight with a client, but I knew the situation would splash back on me as soon as I saw her leaving Damián’s office with that little smile I’d only ever seen on cats before they pounced on a bird.

—Marina, can you come here for a second? —he said from the doorway.

I stood up, trying not to let my legs shake. The knot in my stomach tightened so much that for a moment I could barely breathe. I crossed the office counting my steps so I wouldn’t think.

Damián reproached me for not supervising the new girl. Camila, apparently, had put on a lamb-at-the-slaughter act and told him a version in which I came across as an absent boss, evasive and stingy with my time. I listened without interrupting. When he finished, I looked him in the eye.

—You’re naive —I said, without thinking.

—What did you say? —Damián lifted his eyebrows.

—I said that men’s brains turn to mush when a young girl smiles at them. I’m sure she looked at you with those orphaned eyes of hers and fed you some story. But the facts are the facts, so let me tell them to you, one by one.

After that outburst, I laid out what had happened calmly, with data, with dates. I showed no mercy. Camila didn’t deserve any. When I left the office, Damián had his brow furrowed and his gaze fixed on a closed folder.

Later, after seeing a client and making a couple of calls, I saw him come out and plant himself in front of Camila’s desk.

—Want to grab a coffee? —he said.

—I’d rather have chamomile tea —she replied, blinking slowly.

—Whatever —he answered, curtly—. To the kitchen.

I couldn’t help smiling as I watched them disappear into the little break room. I took it as a victory. A small one, but a victory.

***

The next day, Camila was serious. She didn’t speak to me all morning, and I let myself enjoy the idea that she’d gotten a proper dressing-down. Until, in the middle of the afternoon, I caught her looking at me from her desk with a strange smile, a smile that wasn’t defeat but the smile of someone who knows something you don’t. Something shifted in my stomach again, but this time it wasn’t fear. It was something murkier.

At seven-thirty, before heading home, I went to the bathroom. I lingered longer than necessary fixing my hair, touching up my lips, smoothing the gray skirt I wore every Thursday. When I came out, the office was dark. The automatic lights had gone off and only the glow of the streetlamps seeped through the windows.

Only one strip of yellow light came from somewhere: the door to Damián’s office, half open.

I approached, trying not to make a sound. The soles of my flats barely made a noise on the carpet. Halfway there, I stopped, not really sure what I was doing or why. I thought about turning around and leaving. I thought about a lot of things during those steps. In the end, none of them stopped me.

—You know what’s next —I heard Damián say, in a low voice.

Then I heard the unmistakable sound of a zipper coming down. And then a muffled moan.

I peeked in, just with one eye, judging the crack in the door so I could see without being seen.

Camila was crouched on the office carpet, topless and braless. Her back was straight and pale, and her hair was tied up in a quick bun that left her neck exposed. Damián was standing in front of her, his trousers and boxer briefs around his ankles, his hands hanging there not quite knowing what to do. His eyes were closed.

Camila was sucking him without hurry. She moved her head up and down with a slow, almost bored rhythm, like someone doing a chore. And even so he was biting his lip and his thighs were trembling.

I pressed myself back against the hallway wall. My heart was hammering against my sternum so hard I was sure it could be heard from inside.

“You know what’s next.” That phrase kept spinning in my head. This wasn’t the first time. Nor the second, surely. The idea assembled itself in my head on its own: yesterday, the two of them, in the narrow kitchen. That “want to grab a coffee.” That strange smile today. I imagined Damián with his hands under her blouse, pressing her breasts against the sink wall while she whispered in his ear how much it turned her on to be touched during office hours, with the door not fully closed.

I felt a tingle low in my belly that I hadn’t expected.

“Jealousy? Envy?” I had a husband. I loved him. We made love fairly regularly and I enjoyed it. But everything was predictable: the same bed, the same indirect light, the same turn-taking over who got on top. Then a long hug. Nice, yes. I needed it, yes. But nothing that made me clench my thighs in the middle of a meeting, nothing that left me wet in the office corridor the way Damián’s whisper was leaving me.

I hated myself a little. I hated Camila for being a bitch, for being an opportunist, for using her body as a shortcut. And at the same time I imagined her on top of the desk, on her knees on the carpet, and I imagined myself walking into that office and closing the door behind me and forcing her to stay quiet while I did what I’d wanted to do to her all week: bite her neck, bend her over, give her two slaps on that perfect ass, lick her back until she trembled.

“Enough,” I thought. “Go home.”

But I didn’t leave.

***

I looked again.

Camila was no longer on her knees. They had turned her around. She was bent over the desk, her skirt hiked up to her waist and her thong pulled aside. Damián, behind her, was slipping on a condom with clumsy fingers. The lamp light fell over his bangs and sharpened the line of his clenched jaw.

I waited, spellbound. That white, high ass, still marked by the seams of her pants. His hands resting on her hips. The line of her back arching, anticipating it.

Damián thrust in.

He did it carefully at first, then harder, and Camila’s thighs began to hit the edge of the desk in a dry rhythm that made the turned-off computer screen vibrate. Her face was turned toward my side, eyes closed, mouth slightly open. She didn’t moan loudly: she let out little short sounds, controlled, as if she knew the walls were thin and any excess could cost her the life she was building.

I backed away again.

Without thinking, without deciding, I’d slipped my hand under my skirt. My middle finger slid beneath the elastic of my panties and found everything soaked. I touched myself slowly, afraid the fabric would be heard, afraid to breathe too loudly. I braced myself against the wall. I closed my eyes.

I imagined I was the one on the desk. I imagined Camila holding my wrists down against the tabletop while Damián drove into me. I imagined my husband walking in at that very moment and standing in the doorway, staring, too afraid to speak.

I slipped in one finger. Then two. The wetness was so much that I was almost ashamed.

A moan escaped me louder than I wanted, and panic cut off my breath. I covered my mouth with the other hand, waited three endless seconds, listened. Inside the office, Damián kept panting and Camila had started letting out little whimpers. No one had heard me.

I couldn’t stay there. If they finished, they’d come out and find me in the hallway with my skirt wrinkled and my face red.

***

I walked to the women’s bathroom trying not to run. I locked the bolt with two turns, pulled my panties down to my knees, yanked my skirt up, and sat on the toilet with my legs open. The cold ceramic made me sigh.

I touched myself again. This time without restraint. One hand on my clit, two fingers of the other inside me. My head against the tiles. Eyes closed.

My husband wasn’t in my head. The bed wasn’t there. The kind Saturday-night ritual wasn’t there. It was the keyhole of the office door, Camila’s back, Camila’s ass, Damián’s open mouth. It was the new and horrible and delicious idea of walking into that office next time. Of being invited. Of being made room for. Of saying yes.

The orgasm came fast. Almost without warning. I clenched my teeth so I wouldn’t scream and a sharp sound escaped me, like a hiccup, bouncing off the bathroom ceiling. My legs shook for half a minute.

After that I peed. I dried myself slowly. I washed my hands twice. I looked at myself in the mirror: mascara intact, lipstick almost untouched, eyes shining in a way I didn’t recognize.

I came out of the bathroom with my bag over my shoulder. The office was still dark. Damián’s office door was now fully closed, and no light seeped out from underneath.

In the elevator I ran into the janitor, who greeted me with a nod. I nodded back without opening my mouth, afraid my voice would give me away.

In the car, before starting the engine, I sat there for a while staring at the steering wheel. Tomorrow I would be back. Camila would be in her place, with her cover-girl smile, and Damián would pretend nothing had happened. I would pretend too. But something inside me had already moved somewhere it wasn’t coming back from.

“You’re not going to look again,” I told myself.

And I knew, as I said it, that it was a lie.