Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms - Charles Austen [6]
“I have it right here,” Manschingloss said, holding out what looked more like a pair of comedy glasses than something an attractive woman might wear over her…em…
Gloop.
“I can put it on her now,” Manschingloss said. “If you, and your girlfriend there can just wait a moment.”
He began draping the bits of fabric over Ms. Nuckeby’s breasts, and I walked into a door.
“No. Necessary. Not. Later. What?” I said, and managed to get out on the third try.
After I had been gone a moment, I heard Manschingloss sniff. “Had I known all this time he could fill a ten-gallon bottle, I might have been nicer to him.”
And this brings us to ‘the line’.
My job description—as written by my grandfather, personally— contains just three words, though one is a contraction. ‘Don’t get sued.’
So you might be wondering why I didn’t simply exit the viewing room once the water bottle had made its interest in me known and put an end to the relationship quickly and cleanly with a minimum of water bottle sex. Any sane man would have. The answer to that is quite simple really: I am not sane. And besides that, more tellingly, I wanted to continue looking at Ms. Nuckeby.
Hence-o, Facto, Problemo.
I’d seen many a beautiful woman in my years with the family business; a high percentage had been erection-worthy. But there was something electric about Ms. Nuckeby that clearly revved up the old lust-engine where others had left it merely idling in park.
Even now, here in my office several minutes later as I stood shaking out the front of my trousers in an effort to—I don’t know, give the water molecules a ride—I was still fighting my way out of the ‘undergrowth’.
“Your grandfather’s going to be furious,” said Mrs. Abrososa, watching me pace in a failed attempt to hide my obvious and continuing attraction to Ms. Nuckeby.
What was in that water bottle, topical Viagra?
“Furious? Why?” I asked, stunned, and somewhat frightened. Being at Wopplesdown Struts and hearing the words ‘Grandfather’, and ‘furious’ conjoined was a lot like being lost in the jungle while wearing barbecue sauce and hearing ‘lion’, and ‘ravenous’ in the same sentence. It instilled the kind of reaction the makers of incontinence briefs live for. “Why furious?”
“You just did a pole dance with a water bottle in front of a naked girl. A naked girl employee.”
“It was an accident! I didn’t do it on purpose!” I studied her for a moment. “You were there. You don’t think I planned that, do you?”
“No, I don‘t think you planned that,” she said, irritated, as if she were a motherly sixty-year-old woman, and I was headstrong child, young enough to be her…
Suddenly our relationship made much more sense.
“But don’t you think,” she continued, “you should have called off the meeting—maybe unstuck little Corky there and not made her stand around and watch you do…whatever it was you were doing?”
I gasped. I steadied myself against the desk. I looked around the room for a clearly marked exit.
“Make her stand there?” I said. “I didn’t make her…” I paused. I studied my secretary-slash-mother-figure and slowly felt sadness and fear overwhelm me as I realized she was right.
“Well, I didn’t mean to.”
“What did you mean to do?”
“Nothing. I just…” I paused, unsure if I should admit it, then suddenly realized that in retrospect maybe it wasn’t all my fault. “She could have walked out.”
“Don’t be such a Wopplesdown!”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re being a sexist pig! She couldn’t have walked out! You’re her boss! Her employment hinges on staying and doing what you tell her to do—even if it makes her uncomfortable! Do you understand that this is why they call it harassment?”
Well, I did now.
“Oh, God. Really?”
Her expression said: ‘Yes, dumbass. Really.’ She could be brilliantly nonverbal, Mrs. Abrososa.
“Oh, God,” I repeated. “What have I done? This isn’t what I wanted, I just… ” I looked at her sheepishly and decided to just get it out there—as if it wasn’t already. “I’ve just