Glare: Coming to Submit
"Stand," he said, "right there. By the window."
He gestured, a finger pointing at a blank square of window. I hesitated, making a face.
He pealed his jacket off and hung it over his naked self pics chair. A cup came up to his mouth as he sat.
He looked at me with the Well? expression of an irritated father.
I ran a comb of fingers through my hair and waited for the softness of an apology. Or a please. I was an intern, not a servant, and I didn’t appreciate his tone.
I wiped the inside of my cheek with my tongue and made a disgusted sound.
"You can walk there," he said, carefully pointing at the window, "or you can walk out," he said, indicating the tan rectangle of the office door.
He sat there in calm detachment. The sharp angles of his rough face flowed around sips of coffee, but didn’t soften.
"Fine," I said. Turned.
"Fine Sir," he shot back.
I whirled and gave him a look. He stared, blank and waiting.
"Whatever," I whispered. I walked to the window and stood, glaring. He turned back to his computer.
His shoulders had the bunched look of a walking cat, the quiet grace of unimaginable power. I pictured him rolling in the sun as it lifted over the skyline.
He drank coffee and words scrolled up the screen. Behind him, I made angry faces and sharp little adjustments to my skirt and shifted in my heavy black jacket.
It might have been a test, his attitude. Some kind of hazing thing—first day, with the ink still wet on my diploma. I’d left a boyfriend and a bigger check just to be in his office, though. The opportunity to learn was too valuable. So if he wanted to keep the small talk to himself, I amature wife was okay with that. I shuffled in my heels and tried not to read over his shoulder.
The dim glow of a tepid dawn spilled over the tops of buildings and cut the room into thirds, sunlight flowing over my back and splashing onto either side of his desk while he sat in my shadow.
I fought with a smile. A rich man in my shadow. Exactly the kind of life I came here to have. I couldn’t wait for clients of my own. For an office like this one. For a taste of the top. I let myself grin. I would teach him to respect me.
Time passed. The sun moved.
"Step to your left," he said, without turning around.
I rolled my eyes, and moved. My shadow swung back to the middle of his desk. The words on his screen jumped, then resumed the slow trickle of upward movement. He cracked his neck and sighed.
I realized, in a sickening moment, what my job was.
He was using my body to block the glare on his screen. No wonder the salary wasn’t competitive.
Four years of college, all that work. My boyfriend, my hometown.
"I’m a curtain," I said.
"Don’t talk," he said, simply.
"I’m a fucking window shade!" I screamed.
His shoulders dipped. He sighed. Turned. His face was a study of tired annoyance. Like many rich people, he was the product of a powerful man and a gorgeous woman, like his father and grandfather before him, so his face was unnaturally beautiful—in a cold, cruel way.
It was the face of angel, the kind of angel that razed villages and slaughtered newborn sons. Ordinary people never see a face like his. I wondered how many ordinary people ever saw the face of a king.
And how many saw him angry. I shivered.
His thick, beautiful lips curled in a snarl.
"You’d rather be an automated chute down in my mail room?" he asked. "How about an answering machine at the desk outside?" He stood. I am a tall girl, but he looked down at me from a head above mine. His neck was long and defined, like the braids of a cord. It was so precisely shaped it almost looked hydraulic.
I forced down the corrosive edge of my fury and took a step toward him. The big jacket and heavy skirt helped me feel a little less tiny with a palmable wisp of stomach loose under my blouse, the twig-like curl of my twenty-two year old body hidden under the professional skin of my clothes.
"I didn’t come here to be a thing," I said. "I came to work. To learn. I’m an intern, not a… a shutter."
I backed away as he stepped forward, but up against the huge window, that just meant sliding to the side. The sun cut through my dark hair and made shapes on his face. His blond hair was the same color as the light, sharp against his head as if edged like a knife.
He sighed again, rubbed his temples. His fingers were long and heavy, knuckles bent like the legs of a spider. He reached out and planted his arm on the glass next to my head. His palm was as wide as a paperback book. His face moved toward mine, and I bit my lip to keep it still.
"Every job," he said, closing in until I could smell the coffee on his breath, "Every job makes someone into a thing. You want to learn? Learn this: there are women in the basement who have worked in this building since my father was in college, and all they do is sort mail into separate boxes. There is nothing they do that couldn’t be done by a machine the size of this desk."
He backed me into the corner between banks of windows. I felt myself shrinking under his glare. His other hand hit the glass with a thunk, boxing me in.
His eyes were the blue of an Alaskan crab.
"The only reason I keep them around," he said, "is because they’re cheaper than the machine is." The snarl on his face was also his smile.
"You fucking liar," I said. I shoved him away from me with both hands. His body was mannequin hard but I felt him move back anyway. I felt a surge of power.
Time to start teaching him, I thought.
The young son of a powerful man made powerful by delusion. He had no idea what he was, so pretty and strong he’d never lead except through expectation.
Well. I was different.
"You don’t keep old women around because they’re cheaper. You keep them around because you like to use people." I held in a scream, pushed him again. This time he didn’t move. But the snarl melted a little in his smile.
"I can see an easel from here that you could use to block the light. Or, hey, you could just turn your fucking screen," I said, continuing to push on his immovable body, "or anything. But you hired someone just to be a thing for you."
He reached up in one smooth motion and took my hands off his chest, rolling me away and onto the edge of a conference table. He moved me without apparent effort, even though I’d struggled just to get him to step back.
I tried to ignore how big he seemed. How powerful I knew he was, delusion or not. A man like him could throw me out the window and get away with it.
What was I doing? I could have just quit.
"I don’t have to hire people to be things for me," he said. "And I didn’t have to hire you. You begged for this job."
"I didn-"
"You begged the recruiter, because if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t be here."
On the conference table, I tried to slide away but that meant spreading my legs. He stepped between them, planted his hands on the table at either side of my ass, and bent forward to snarl into my face.
"You folded your pretty little hands and begged my recruiter to give you a shot, because you had so much to offer." He snorted. "You even flirted with him. Hell, you’re flirting with me, now."
"What? I’ve worn this skirt to a funeral," I choked out. It was a lie, but it could have been true. Severe gray, wool, and just expensive enough to afford to be simple. It also made my ass look like a dark peach, which is why I’d worn it.
He smirked, backed off. A long finger pushed up the edge of my skirt until it was up around my stomach. I gasped and pushed it back down.
"Maybe," he said. "But I bet you didn’t wear a thong."
I kicked out at him but he caught my legs and spun me around so I was on my stomach. He held a foot in his huge, paperback hand.
"Or three-inch pumps," he said.
Before I could twist away, he grabbed my legs and tugged me toward him. My hands scrabbled at the table, but it was the slick wood of a polished piano key and I just slid where he pulled me. My ass pressed against his legs and something painfully hard along one of his legs made me jerk away.
"You want to be a different kind of thing?" he asked. The smile was actually evil, shape of his pretty face distorted by a delight in my fear.
"I want to be me," I said, shivering, unable to keep my lip from shaking the words into nonsense, as I looked up into his eyes.
There was a moment of softness in the look, but the amusement twisted into anger.
"And what are you?" he shouted.
"I’m no-"
"What is a girl with pushed up C-cups and pretty bare legs and a ‘Conservative Sexy’ Cosmo copycat combo-" he sniffed, actually growling like an angry dog- "who looked up and wore my ex-girlfriend’s perfume."
I stopped shaking. I was stunned. I’d expected him to notice the perfume—she was an actress and there’d been a piece in Variety—but the Cosmo thing…
He reached up and took my bottom lip between thump and middle finger. He pulled my mouth open just a little, rubbed at my foundation with his index finger.
"You’re a fucking parasite," he whispered. "With nothing to offer but a pretty face and a sense of entitlement you couldn’t scratch with a diamond."
"I have a degree from-"
He made his own disgusted sound. "You think you’re special because you went to a nice school?" he said. He stopped sounding angry and started sounding tired. Leaned on the table. Shook his head. "Your school churns out hundreds of diplomas a year-"
"I-"
"-every year for over a century! And there are thousands, thousands of colleges in this country alone."
He bent down to peer into my face again. I realized I hadn’t moved.
"The only thing special about you is that you were willing to beg for a job without a description, for less money than you could get waiting tables back where you belong."
I slid off the table. My heels clicked as they stabbed the floor.
I’d thrown my boyfriend’s ring in the garbage, then fished it out and sold it. I’d sacrificed years of social life just to maintain the last .01 of my four-point-oh, and when I’d finally opened my legs for a man, it wasn’t for my boyfriend.
It was for a professor older than my father. And then my next boyfriend. Who wasn’t as nice as my first, but who knew people.
And the next. And the next.
I had given too much to too many to simply burn away in this powerful man’s fury. He thought I was some average girl, but I wasn’t.
I wasn’t waiting on destiny. I didn’t care what I was. I was willing to work to be what I wanted.
"I belong here," I said, quietly.
He held back a laugh. "I thought you didn’t want to be a window shade."
"No," I said. "I belong here." I pointed at his empty chair.
We both looked at his empty chair as though we could see my future self sitting on it.
"I’ll be a window shade," I said. "Or a mail chute," I said. "Or a vending machine, or a Roomba, or an autopilot, or a fucking microwave." I stepped into his personal space and shoved him back again. This time he stepped back, uncertain but faintly amused.
"I’ll be your secretary, your assistant, or your whore-" I straightened up as I said it so my breasts were clear little wedges through the scoop of my blouse. "I will be anything. *Do *anything. If at the end of it I get to sit in that chair-" I pointed "-and do what you do."
His eyebrows rose.
"I’m not a parasite," I said, powered by outrage. "I don’t want to feed off of you. I want to be you."
He laughed. Not hard. But he laughed. He sat on the edge of his table and with a stab of annoyance I realized his ass gripped it better than mine.
His hand wrapped around my arm and swung ex girlfriend nude me around to face him.
"Beg me," he said. He grinned.
"Please," I said, without hesitating.
"Hands," he said, looking at them and waiting.
I folded my hands. Got on my knees. College had taught me that men take a step back when you first get on your knees. The sudden change in perspective must feel weird for a moment. But he stood there, not even flexing his hips.
He was used to this.
"Please," I repeated.
"Please what?" he asked. His face was expressionless. The soft blush of his genetic perfection had a smoothing effect it took twenty minutes and two hundred dollars to achieve with makeup.
I knew what he wanted.
"Please use me," I begged him. Inside, I fought a sick feeling.
He was going to just throw me away.
He nodded, satisfied.
"Stand," he said, "right there. By the window." He pointed at a blank square of window.
I felt a surge of gratitude. Men were so ready to be used if you showed them the tiniest bit of submission.
I walked to the window and stood. He returned to his chair.
"Take the jacket off," he said absently, drinking coffee but wincing at it.
He pushed a button on his desk. A speaker lit up next to his computer. "New coffee," he said. A female voice said something and the speaker dimmed.
I tossed my jacket on the conference table.
"Now the shirt," he said.
I twisted my naked ex girlfriend head to look out the window, to look at the skyline with its hundreds of buildings and thousands of windows. How many people would see this?
I opened the buttons one by one. I tried to predict what he’d want.
"Don’t try to be sexy," he said. "Just do it."
I ripped the shirt off. The last few buttons pinged on the desk. He chuckled. Nodded.
"Bra," he said.
Strapless and tight, the hook was in the front. I pushed the sides together and let the bra fall to the floor. The room was cold, and my nipples stood out like pencil erasers, fat and thick over my bare breasts. My skin was pale, but the faint red of embarrassment painted me pink.
There was a knock at the door. I froze.
"Yeah," he said.
The door opened and a young woman with caramel skin and a tumble of blonde curls walked with a tray of coffee to his desk. She didn’t appear to see me. She set the tray down next to him, asked him how he took his coffee, something she must have known, and bustled with the pots and jars even though he’d asked for it black.
She refilled his cup and he took it from her.
Could she be so focused that she didn’t see a half-naked woman in front of the far window?
She started to walk away with the empty tray. The embarrassment drained out of me. I breathed.
"Leigh?" he asked.
"Yes?" she stopped a few feet from the door.
"There’s a jacket on the table, and a bra and shirt on the floor. Collect and dispose of them, will you?"
I took a sharp breath of surprise that she couldn’t have missed. She nodded at him.
"Of course, Sir."
She pulled my jacket off the table and folded it over her arm. Stooped to pick my blouse off the floor. Stepped to within inches of me to pick up the bra. As she stood we made brief eye contact.
The jealousy in her face hit me like a brick.
I had a sudden moment of terror as I realized how slim a chance this was. He might be using me, but at least he wasn’t using me for coffee.
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Lauren_R_Kimball
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