Soma

"No, I completely understand." Lauren gritted her teeth. She knew what she had to do, unpleasant though it may have seemed. If it really was the Cortland contract that was causing her body to react the way it had, she needed to be done with it.

"Lauren?" It was Ginger. The girl slipped through the curtains, and as her boss had done just a few minutes earlier, the secretary ran her eyes up and down Dr. Adams's divine body.

"A coach," Lauren explained. "Can you call me one of the executive coaches?"

"Sure," Ginger shrugged. "Where are we going?"

"Home," Adams answered. "She needs to get away from work for a while."

"Absolutely not," Lauren snapped. Facing Ginger, she ordered, "Back to the office."

The administrative assistant was confused, and looked to the psychiatrist first for an explanation. But it was Lauren who paid Ginger's bills, and she wasn't about to question her boss, not with the resolve evident in the blonde's voice. "No problem," she answered, and slipped back through the curtain.

"You can't go back to work," Adams insisted. "Look at you. You're a bundle of nerves. That's why your body's reacting this way."

"I've got three days to go," the blonde reasoned. "Five o'clock on Friday. It's the last day of the Third Quarter. It's not even seventy-two hours."

"Miss Laframboise, your body is trying to tell you it can't take any more. Rather, your mind is trying to tell you it can't take more, and it's using your body to deliver that message. You need to go home. You need to take a warm bath. Have a stiff drink. Watch a movie. Unwind. You need to let someone else pick up the slack."

"No, no, no!" Lauren exclaimed. "It's like you said -- I need to remove the source of my stress. I'm going to stress about that contract if I go home. I'm going to stress about the entire acquisition for months to come if it doesn't go through before the Fourth Quarter begins on Monday. And my career? I've staked my future with the company on this acquisition. If I get this done? Big promotion. Bigger office. Bigger salary. Bigger opportunities. If I don't? Well, I don't know. But, it would seem to me, the past way to get past this newfound hang-up is to simply take it by the horns. I complete the Cortland acquisition, I've beaten the allergy."

"There's a chance it could get worse," the psychiatrist pleaded. "The pressure's only going to build as you get closer to the deadline, isn't it?"

Lauren rolled her eyes. "Really? How is it going to get worse? In addition to being allergic to all my clothes, am I going to develop allergies for my shoes and your belt? Because, Dr. Adams, I'm not sure that's really that much worse."

"You have no idea how your body is going to react if you push it further. This is a bizarre enough form of subconscious expression, but there's no telling what could be next."

"I'll take that risk."

They stood, arguing, for a few minutes longer, until Ginger returned to tell Lauren that the coach was around the corner, and would be arriving in just a few minutes. Lauren thanked the girl, asked her to fetch her when it had arrived, and turned back to Adams. Adams, for one, was thankful for the brief respite in the argument, and seemed much more collected when he spoke again.

"Forgetting, for a moment, the psychological and physical health risks that you hazard by going back to work," Adams began calmly, "You're still allergic to clothes, of any sort. You can't honestly expect that your boss and your coworkers are going to be okay with you walking up and down the halls in the nude."

Lauren took a deep breath, and steeled herself for the days ahead. Certainly, she wasn't looking forward to the prospect of sitting around on the 26th Floor stark naked, and she definitely wasn't looking forward to having to explain herself to Dick Bramley. But, she had reasoned with herself, putting into concrete terms what lay ahead. "Seventeen thousand dollars. That's the difference between the salary of an Associate General Counsel and an Assistant General Counsel. So I'm naked? Over three days, that's about two hundred thirty-five dollars an hour."

Adams looked stunned, shocked that the girl had converted her health and dignity into dollars.

"But we're really only talking, like, thirty-five hours in which there will be other people around. I've been the first one in and the last one out that past few weeks, so that's fourteen hours a day, over Wednesday and Thursday. Plus Friday, but there's a natural cut-off at five, which means it'd really only be ten hours. So, if I'm calling it "naked in front of other people" money, it works out to be about four hundred fifty dollars an hour."

"Before taxes," Adams cracked.

"Right, but that doesn't include the bonus, the profit sharing, or the extra days of vacation."

"You can't be serious."

"Five o'clock, Friday," Lauren assured the psychiatrist. "It'll all be over. I'll be able to put on my clothes and go home."

"So your solution to having too much stress at work is --"

"To stay at work until I get it done," the blonde finished. She had a mischievous sparkle in her eye. "You don't expect me to commute, dressed like this?"

As if on cue, Ginger returned to announce the arrival of Lauren's car. Taking a deep breath, and straightening her back, Lauren stepped through the curtain of her hospital bay to the world beyond.

***

A statue of Eve stood in the lobby of the Lane-Russet Building, as naked as God had first intended. Carved of marble, and standing seven or eight times larger than life, the colossal nude had been the guardian of Evelyn Apparel since the company had relocated to their current corporate headquarters. She held an apple in one hand, a single bite extracted from the fruit. She hadn't yet shared the apple with her partner in Eden, but the alluring curves of her body and the seductive gaze of the woman's eyes suggested that Adam stood little chance of resisting. The Serpent was wrapped about her right leg, slithering further and further up her naked thigh.

It had been suggested by many that there was more than a passing resemblance between Evelyn Lane-Russet and the statue that stood at the entrance of her office building. It may have been the overactive imaginations of her employees, or a subtle allusion entirely of the artist's own doing, but the rumor that the company's founder and chief executive officer had posed for the sculpture hadn't died. Though she may have been close to sixty in real life, the naked form of the statue lived on, and was entirely complimentary to how Evelyn had once looked. If it was, in fact, Evelyn.

It was not a classical depiction of Eve, full and plump as a Renaissance artist may have created her. No, this Eve had an entirely modern figure, a nude form worthy of adult entertainment, with its curvaceous hips, thin waist, and ample bust. It captured perfectly the sex appeal seized upon by Eve Intimates in their current commercial campaign.

Still, Lauren thought it odd that a business built upon women's clothes would choose as its mascot a woman entirely devoid of them.

Tonight, though, Eve did not stand stark naked alone. Lauren had entered the lobby of the office building dressed herself for a sojourn into Eden. She was naked from head to toe, save for a few pieces of jewelry. Her shoes were tucked away, in Ginger's purse, as the dark-haired secretary stepped a few feet ahead of Lauren, serving as vanguard to the nude girl.

Leaving the hospital had been grueling. She'd spent the previous seven hours naked in the emergency room, but she'd been shielded behind the closed curtains, available for inspection only to a handful of doctors and her friends from the office. As she walked through the open room, she felt dozens of eyes on her body, patients and staff staring wide-eyed at the tantalizingly gorgeous naked woman in their midst. She couldn't be sure of it, but Lauren was fairly positive she'd heard a wolf whistle as she left the bruised and bloodied behind.

The walk through the waiting area was no picnic, either. Nor was the prospect of stepping out into the cool September evening. The driver was waiting for her, as promised, and only Ginger's angry finger-snap kept the pudgy chauffeur from staring at his passenger.

The car was black, inside and out, an elegant Lincoln Town Car. Lauren slid naked into the back seat, the fine leather caressing her soft, unclothed skin. Normally, the coaches were reserved for Senior Vice Presidents and high-ranking corporate officers, but Lauren felt as if this were a special situation, and she'd be able to justify the use of one of the corporate cars to Bramley. Ginger followed behind the exposed blonde, and Lauren couldn't help but feel grateful for her assistant's presence.

Nothing much seemed to phase Ginger Gold, not even a Midtown drive with her bare-skinned boss. She was a tough, good-looking Brooklyn Jew, a city girl who possessed an innate confidence lacking in those born outside the five boroughs. She was a party-girl, and kept Lauren, on any number of occasions, entertained by recounting her adventures with men and alcohol. Lauren and her assistant, whom she shared with Rachel Wilks, were approximately the same age, Lauren a few months older. But their lives were on different tracks, their interests in different things. Still, Ginger had become a good friend and an ally within Evelyn Apparel, and the fact that she had stayed by Lauren's side throughout this harrowing afternoon had made the day that much more manageable. Ginger repeatedly caught the driving sneaking peaks at Lauren's body in his rearview mirror, and each time, Ginger scolded him and warned him to keep his eyes on the road.

After disembarking in the basement garage and bidding their driver adieu, the two girls ascended to the lobby in the elevator. As Lauren's own attention drifted to feelings of empathy for the eternally naked statue before her, Ginger's eyes were straight ahead, ready to meet the next hurdle standing in their way.

"Um...I'm sorry!" the security guard called out, his voice echoing across the empty room. "You can't come in here like that!"

"And why is that?" Ginger shouted back. "Are there kids around?"

The security guard swallowed hard. He was an older man, dressed in the same faux police officer uniform that academy dropouts and underachievers wore the whole city over. "It's indecent exposure. She can't just walk into this place without any clothes on."

"It's nine o'clock," Ginger replied, checking her watch. "Who's here?"

Lauren's eyes met those of the security guard, but it was Ginger who did all the talking.

"She's got her clothes upstairs," the secretary lied. "Twenty-sixth floor. Suite 2600. Just let us by, she'll put them on, and this whole crisis will be averted."

The guard was clearly bewildered, the low brain capacity required for his job put to the ultimate test. Finally, he decided he could look the other way on the blonde's nudity -- at least, metaphorically speaking. "Can I see your ID badges?"

"Honest to God," Ginger cursed, rummaging through her purse. In order to get to her wallet, and the identification card within, she was forced to extract Lauren's high-heeled shoes. Turning to hand them to her boss, she noticed the blanched look on Lauren's face, and realized what the girl was panicking about next.

"Shit!" the dark-haired girl cursed again. Addressing the security guard once more, Ginger said, "I'm going to have to sign her in. Her ID badge is upstairs."

"With her clothes?"

"Yes, with her clothes," she answered, growing increasingly more frustrated. "Her purse is sitting up in her office. We left in a hurry this afternoon."

"Without her clothes?"

Lauren stood silent behind Ginger, uncomfortable about the attention she was receiving. The security guard seemed significantly more concerned about the integrity of his post than about scoping out the naked blonde, but even the occasional look seemed to be more an assessment of Lauren's physical attributes from the neck down than any sort of understanding about the person from the neck up.

The evening was dark outside, and the lobby well lit. Strangely, but fortunately, there seemed to be few pedestrians on sidewalks beyond the large, floor-to-ceiling glass windows that walled the lobby. Cars rushed by, but Lauren guessed that the drivers and passengers weren't going to be treated to much more than a high-speed peep. It was cold inside the lobby, the marble frigid beneath Lauren's naked feet. As she took her shoes from Ginger, she decided she'd slip them on, rather than pad barefoot to the elevator banks -- if the security guard would allow them to get that far.

"Jesus Christ," Ginger exclaimed. "I've got my ID card. I'm willing to sign her in. We've had a really difficult day, if that's not exactly self-evident by our current situation. Could you cut us some slack?"

"I'm just doing my job," he answered.

Ginger leaned across the desk and snatched the Visitor's Book from the guard. "Do you know who this is?" she asked. "This is Lauren Laframboise. She's a vice president and assistant general counsel within legal. She's one of the company's top lawyers. And if she says one word about this tomorrow to your supervisor, you'll be looking for a job by noon."

The threat seemed to do the trick, the guard finally capable of seeing Lauren as something more than a piece of tits and ass. Ginger was allowed to vouch for the girl's presence in office building by signing her in, and the two were allowed to pass by the front desk to the elevator banks beyond.

"Thank you," Lauren said politely as the elevator doors shut.

"Fucking moron," Ginger huffed.

Lauren nodded, but added, "Probably might have been better off not telling him my real name, though."

"Oh," Ginger gasped. "I'm sorry."

The elevator bell pinged their arrival on 26, and the two girls stepped into the elevator lobby for the floor. To the left was Suite 2650, home to a substantial portion of the company's Audit Department. To the right was Suite 2600, home to a small collection of the Legal Department - twelve lawyers in total, as well as their administrative support staff. Danny, Rachel, Lauren, and their colleagues represented a portion of the Corporate & Finance Legal division, including Compliance, Governance, Litigation, and, the role that Lauren had represented since her promotion from Senior Legal Counsel, Transactions.

The elevator lobby was carpeted in an uninspiring blue and gray, a motif that stopped at the glass doors of either suite, but which did continue back around the corner to either suite's back doors. The ladies' room for the floor was down one hallway, the men's down the other. Unfortunately for Lauren, her gender's bathroom was down the far hall, across the elevator lobby, past the glass doors of the Audit Department, and around the corner.

There were four elevators, in total, serving the First through the Twenty-First floors, and as Lauren stepped from her car, she caught her reflection in the silver doors of the car across from her. She was startled by just how naked she was, especially relative to the dark-haired secretary beside her. Her hair was a mess, her make-up not exactly what it had been that morning, and her eyes betraying just how tired she really was. Perhaps more unnerving, given her current situation, was the fact that her nipples will embarrassingly erect, her pubic hair a bit bushier than she cared for people to see, and her skin a pale shade of white, the last traces of her summer tan disappearing just a few weeks into September.

While Lauren was fairly sure that a few members of the Legal staff were still around, she was also sure that the auditors and accountants from across the hall had disappeared hours earlier. In her five years at Evelyn Apparel, she had never seen a single person from Suite 2650 stay after 5:30, at the absolute latest. So, as she excused herself from Ginger and slipped off to the ladies' room around the corner, Lauren was confident than no one from that office was going to catch her in the nude.

The bright pink walls and garish overhead lighting in the ladies' room only served to drive Lauren's earlier assessment about her body home. Regardless of the medical emergency she'd suffered that afternoon, Lauren hardly wanted people in her office to see her like this; if she was going to be naked, she wished that she could have at least looked her best. She peed, washed her hands, and checked herself out in the mirror, shaking her head at her current predicament.

"Confidence," she told herself. She had a job to do. She was going to do that job. If this was the hand she had been dealt, she was going to make do. The option to go home was not a real one -- she had to tackle her current affliction head-on, even if it meant sacrificing her dignity to do so.

Ginger was waiting for the girl when she stepped through the doors of Suite 2600, saying, "Almost everyone is gone. Rachel's still here. So is Dmitri."

Lauren nodded, and thanked the girl. "You should probably get home yourself."

They had all been working long days, and tomorrow was going to be no different.

"Is there anything else you need?" Ginger asked.

"No, I should be fine. Or, fine enough."

"Okay. Do you need me to bring you anything from home tomorrow?"

Lauren wracked her brain, but couldn't think of anything at the moment. "I'll give you a call if I think of something."

"Good night," the dark-haired girl said.

"Good night."

Suite 2600 was divided into uneven halves, the bulk of the office to the right of the reception desk. Lauren's own office, as well as those of Bramley, Yvonne Egremont, her fellow assistant general counsels, and two of the senior legal counsels, were in that direction. Up the hall from Lauren's office, in the direction of the reception desk, were four cubicles where Ginger, fellow assistant Lisa Cripps, and the office's two Fall interns sat. Further down the hall were six more cubicles, housing four paralegals, Bramley's assistant Lorraine Dorsett, and Yvonne's assistant Jenny Smith.

To the left, past the conference room and the kitchen, there were offices for the two remaining senior legal counsels, as well as for the two remaining associate general counsels, Danny first and then George Neal in the corner. Three assistants sat in cubicles there: Danny's Erin Carroll, George's Kim Gravenstein, and Beth Ashmead, who was shared by the four senior legal counsels.

If Ginger's scouting report was correct, and both Dmitri Antonovka and Rachel remained, Lauren would have to walk past both of their offices to get to her own. She was less concerned about Rachel, who besides being a woman and her friend, had already seen her naked that afternoon. Dmitri, though, was an issue. His parents were Russian immigrants, but Dmitri had been born and raised in New Jersey, educated at Princeton and Columbia, and was every bit the American male. Unlike Danny, who could be awkward around attractive women, Dmitri was as smooth as they came, and might still have been frequenting bars and clubs for one night stands had he not fallen for drop-dead gorgeous photographer named Natalia. They'd been married for a few years, and Natalia was expecting the couple's first child within the month. Still, if their office were high school, Dmitri surely would have been the "cool" kid in class, and Lauren was a bit wary about facing him in the nude.

The blonde girl advanced down the hall, observing that the light was indeed still on in Dmitri's office. In addition to the solid oak doors, each office had been fitted with a floor-to-ceiling length glass panel beside the door. It allowed little privacy, and Lauren, for one, hated the feeling of being an animal on display for everyone who walked up and down the hall. She had long ago surmised, however, that the glass windows had less to do with an overbearing boss making sure that all of his employees were hard at work and more to do with allowing the cubicle-dwellers who sat in the building's interior some access to natural light.