Soma

The first person in that morning, aside from Lauren herself, was Kevin Tolman. Kevin may or may not have been gay -- no one had ever been able to pin that down. He didn't have a girlfriend, never expressed an interest in having a girlfriend, and hardly ever talked about his person life. He was a forty-five year old paralegal who sat with the others down the hall from Lauren's office, keeping mostly to himself but working hard on every assignment that crossed his desk. Lauren sometimes felt a bit uncomfortable ordering him around, given the fifteen years that he had on her. But then, despite the title she held, Lauren was younger than most everyone else on the twenty-sixth floor, aside from a few members of the administrative staff, two of the legal counsels, and the student interns.

Tolman first loped past her office that morning without much reaction. Apparently catching himself a few steps beyond, he doubled back to check out what he thought he'd seen. Sitting at her desk, every visible body out in the open, was Lauren Laframboise. Her door was closed, but Tolman was able to see her through the glass, and she was able to see him. Awkwardly, he raised a hand and waved, and got an uncomfortable wave in response. But, the acknowledgement of Tolman's presence seemed enough to satisfy him, and the paralegal moved on immediately afterwards.

Yvonne Egremont was next, another forty-something, but one who had climbed a rung higher at Evelyn Apparel than Lauren currently stood. They both reported to Dick Bramley, was Yvonne was a pay grade more senior, a gap that would be closed by Monday, if Lauren was successful in getting everything involving Cortland completely wrapped up. As she passed Lauren's office, the blonde girl held her breath. But Yvonne didn't even so much as glance in Lauren's direction, walking by without noticing the naked body.

Dana Newton, another paralegal from down the hall, arrived a few minutes later. A total space cadet, Dana smiled when she saw Lauren already sitting at her desk. She opened the blonde girl's office door without knocking, wished her good morning, complimented her hair, and then moved on. Dana made no mention of Lauren's nudity, leaving the blonde girl whether the paralegal had just been polite, or if she'd even noticed something was different about the way she'd dressed for work that morning.

Lorraine Dorsett, upon her arrival, certainly noticed Lauren's shameful display, her disapproval apparent in the scowl she shot the girl as she walked by. To be fair, Lorraine always seemed to be in a bad mood, a perpetual malcontent who disapproved of most anything that anyone did. But she returned a few minutes later, scowl still firmly entrenched, to fetch the naked blonde girl.

"I got your email," Lorraine explained. "So did Dick. He's in the parking garage now, and should be up in a few minutes, if you want to come down and wait for him."

Lauren nodded, and followed the older woman down the hall. She'd put her heels back on, and decked herself out in the jewelry available to her. Instead of the small, conservative earrings she'd worn the day before, Lauren had fished the large, ostentatious silver hoops from her desk. Her silver bracelet from yesterday had become an anklet at the base of her right ankle, and the large, faux pearl bracelet she'd forgotten had existed was now adorning her right wrist. In addition, she was wearing her watch and silver choker, and upon her fingers three different silver and platinum rings. During her years at Vermont State, she'd had a belly-button piercing, and as she had looked herself up and down that morning, Lauren wished she hadn't removed it -- it would have added to her sex appeal.

Lauren didn't mind waiting for Bramley in his office, if only because his office was at the end of the hall, and she could avoid the awkward morning hello's as people noticed her naked body. She brought with her a few pages of the contract she'd been working on since first thing that morning, and fully intending on using every second of her time to her advantage.

"Would you like something to sit on?" Lorraine asked.

"Excuse me?"

Obviously, Bramley's secretary was concerned about Lauren's naked ass on her boss's furniture. Instead of prosecuting the issue further, however, Lorraine mumbled a "never mind," and left the blonde alone in Dick Bramley's office. Lauren sat down on one of the two business chairs placed in front of his desk, and lost herself in the contract as she waited.

Bramley was, as promised, only a few minutes behind. Stepping into his office, he did a double take when he saw the naked blonde waiting for him. And though he'd been in the process of shutting the door to talk to Lauren in private, her state of dress unnerved him enough that he opened it all the way back up again.

"Well, make yourself comfortable," Bramley joked. The girl half rose to greet him, but Bramley b-lined for the far side of his desk, eager to put the large piece of furniture between himself and his naked employee.

As it turned out, Bramley was fairly well-informed about Lauren's affliction, at least up to a point. He had been checking in with Ginger periodically throughout the afternoon and evening the day before, trying to make sure that Lauren was okay. She was a good girl, an ambitious employee, and a trusted lieutenant within Commercial Transactions. Bramley had planned on joining Lauren, Ginger, Danny, and Rachel in the hospital, but Ginger had insisted that he stay away, explaining to him the nature of Lauren's problem and the predicament it presented in terms of her state of dress. But while he understood that she'd been allergic to her clothes, he hadn't been aware of the underlying cause of the reaction, the psychosomatic effect of her overwhelming stress about work.

"You need to go home," the deputy counsel growled. Gesturing to her naked body, he continued, "You can't stay here like this."

"No, I'm okay with this," the girl replied. Catching herself, she amended her statement, "Or, at least, I can deal with this."

Bramley shook his head. "Lauren, it's nothing against you, personally, but I can't have a naked woman in my offices."

"But, Dick, listen," she begged. "I need this work. I know it's the work that's doing this to me, but unless I'm able to put the work to bed, I might no be able to get over this. I'm going to stress about the acquisition whether I'm here working on it, or at home worrying about it."

"You can work from home," he offered.

"I can't," she whined. "I spent seven hours in the hospital yesterday, and accomplished maybe two hours worth of what I might have accomplished, had I been here in the office. I need access to the Share drive, access to the hard copies of the contracts and proposals Corporate Development put together, access to the people here who are pulling all the different pieces together, and access to law library we have here in the building. There's just no way I can telecommute and get this done."

Bramley shook his head again, but Lauren knew his resistance was wearing down.

"I'll stay in my office, with the door closed, ninety-nine percent of the time. There are more women in the suite than men, anyways. And even if it were the other way around, we're all adults here. This isn't going to devolve into some Internet erotica author's sexual fantasy -- we're all grown-ups. You're married, Danny's married, Dmitri's married, Steve Ellison's married, Mike Haralson's engaged, and George has been married enough times over the course of his life to account for everyone else, so nothing's going to happen."

She pleaded, "I need this. I need to get better. I need this so I can be normal again. I need this so I can put on a t-shirt without breaking into hives." She took a deep breath, and pulled out the trump card. "But more importantly, you need me."

Their eyes met. Bramley was well aware of this last fact, and seemed resigned to giving Lauren what she wanted in order to make sure the acquisition went smoothly. Her failure would reflect upon him, and his failure was sure to damage the reputation of his own boss, Jim Grieve. And all of that was nothing compared to the monetary amounts that might be lost if the deadline were shifted from the end of the Third Quarter to a few weeks into the Fourth -- Evelyn Apparel could potentially lose millions.

"You're going to need to sign a hell of a lot of waivers," Bramley conceded.

Lauren had butterflies in her stomach. She had gotten what she'd wanted, but when what she wanted included three solid days of nudity, it was difficult to consider it much of a victory.

The man picked up his pen, and on the back of unimportant sheet of paper, he wrote, "I promise not to sue." Rotating the makeshift contract around, he extended the pen to the blonde girl. "I'll have Charlie Peasgood come up with something a bit more concrete by later this morning, but for now, you're going to have to sign this for me to let you go back to your office."

Lauren accepted the pen, and then accepted the terms. The last person she wanted to deal with that morning was Charlie Peasgood. For whatever reason, he was the lawyer Bramley most trusted in the Employment Law division on the eighteenth floor, but he gave Lauren -- and most other women, for that matter -- the creeps. Peasgood had the habit of addressing her chest when they spoke, and she had caught him plainly staring at his female colleagues on more than one occasion. Lauren hated the idea that he'd be aware of her present state, and she doubted it would be long before he'd come up with an excuse to invite himself down to Suite 2600 to see for himself. At least he wouldn't have to undress her with his eyes today, she thought.

"Okay, one other thing," Bramley said, taking the makeshift contract back from the blonde. "This whole thing has 'corporate scandal' written all over it. So, from here on, you're not allowed alone with any of the men behind closed doors. Not without another woman with you."

"What exactly do you think is going to happen?"

"Probably nothing. Hopefully nothing. But I'm not taking the risk. If you want to pull Ginger into a meeting, or you want to use the intern, what's her name..."

"...Jessica..."

"Jessica, right. If you want to use the intern, by all means. But, door closed, you need another woman present. Door open, no problem."

"Fine," Lauren agreed.

"Alright," Bramley huffed. "I'm going to send out an email to the staff of this suite, letting them all know what's going on, and warning them all to be on their best behavior. And then I'm going to call upstairs to see I we can work out some sort of documentation."

"Understood."

"In the mean time, why don't you go back to your office, and let's see if we can this thing done sooner rather that later. The more quickly you can pull the pieces together, the more quickly things can go back to normal around here."

Lauren needed no convincing on that end. Even without her current clothes-less predicament, she wanted the acquisition over with. She wanted to be rid of thinking about Cortland for some time.

On her way back to her office, Lauren passed first Yvonne, who seemed completely unnerved by the blonde's state of dress, and then Mike Haralson, who tried to croak out a "hi," but the sound was lost somewhere in his throat. Haralson, though, followed the girl to her office next door, knocked tentatively, and asked if she was okay. Lauren said, "yes," and though she did uncomfortably invite the lawyer into her office to detail her day the previous afternoon, she first warned, "But we need to leave the door open."

All morning, things seemed to flow the same way. He friends and colleagues stopped in to check up on her, and even those too nervous to come speak with made excuses to walk up and down the hall, hoping to sneak a peak without making it look as if they were sneaking a peak. It didn't help any that the copier room was directly across from Lauren's office, and any number of peeping toms could find a legitimate excuse for standing around outside her door. The warning that Bramley sent out, urging everyone in the office to behave like adults, only seemed to make things worse, as it served to advertise Lauren's state rather than discourage her audience.

But Lauren had given her suitemates a scare the day before, and there was a strong undercurrent of concern for her well-being among all the voyeurism. Ginger, for one, stopped in first thing that morning with a blanket and a pillow from home. While Lauren had gone the night before on the bare carpet of her office floor, she still had two nights ahead of her in the office.

"Weren't you cold?" the secretary asked.

"I cranked the heat up in my office to eighty-five," Lauren giggled. She didn't maintain a temperature of eighty-five degrees throughout the day, but Lauren's office was a good five or six degrees warmer than the temperature in the hall.

"I also brought you this," Ginger said, handing the naked girl a nondescript paper bag.

"Tequila?" Lauren asked. "Are you trying to get me drunk?"

"Hey, I know a good drink makes me feel more relaxed. And, you know, it's liquid courage."

"Thanks, but this may have to wait until Friday afternoon. I'm not sure Bramley would approve of me checking the wording of the contract while drunk."

The dark haired girl shrugged. She hadn't intended for her boss to have more than a few shots, but reasoned that, if stress were the underlying cause of Lauren's predicament, then maybe a drink would take some of the edge off.

Lauren was uneager to leave her office. Behind her desk, she was essentially shielded from the waist down. And with the door shut, no one in the office got more than a quick glimpse through the glass window as they strolled up and down the hall. But, she had to admit that after working in the conference room with Ginger, Jessica, and Rachel for the bulk of the previous week and half, she felt cramped in the small office, unable to spread her various documents out very far. Even more worrisome, though, was having to go to the bathroom.

It hadn't been an issue late in the evening when she'd returned from the hospital, or even later in the evening, when she'd "showered" over the sink. That morning, she'd used the ladies' room before anyone had arrived, but it was now mid-day, and both her suite and the suite across the hall were filled with Evelyn Apparel employees. Hours had past since she'd last used the facilities, and Lauren cursed herself for having had Ginger fetch her that second cup of coffee. She crossed and uncrossed and crossed her legs repeatedly, willing herself to ignore that fact that she had to pee.

If only the restrooms were on the opposite sides. The men's room was just outside Suite 2600's back door, as the ladies' was just outside Suite 2650's. If it had been reversed, Lauren could have avoided a long walk up the hall of Legal, past the reception desk, out past the elevator bank, around the corner past Audit's reception desk, and down the long back hall to the rest room. Instead, she could have slipped out past just Ginger, Lisa Cripps, and the interns, and right into the lavatory.

Lauren found herself toying with the idea of ignoring the gender barrier and just using the men's room. Really, would any of the men have minded? It would have spared her the long trek around the twenty-sixth floor. But it wasn't even an option, given the problems Dmitri, Danny, and the others had been putting up with since Monday morning.

That weekend, both toilets in the men's room had begun overflowing, and when Kevin Tolman had arrived on Monday, he found the men's room nearly flooded. It was all clean water, thankfully, coming from the pipes that fed the two toilets instead of those that drained them. Maintenance had been up, but while they'd been able to slow the leak to a slow trickle, they'd been unable to end it completely. The plumbers were scheduled to come on Saturday, and in the meantime, the men of the twenty-sixth floor were required to ascend or descend to the twenty-seventh or twenty-fifth floors, respectively, if they needed to take a shit. The urinals were still functioning properly, and the men all used them, but every venture into the men's room meant stepping across a thin veneer of water on the floor.

"I'm just going to run to the rest room," Lauren whispered to Ginger over the secretary's cubicle wall. She had dared to leave her office for the first time since her meeting with Bramley that morning, and Lauren nervously scanned up and down the hallway to see if anyone was coming.

"Do you want me to go talk to the receptionist over in Audit?" Ginger asked. Like their own reception desk, where Melissa Cox sat, Audit's looked out onto the elevator banks, and the chubby, middle-aged woman across the lobby would undoubtedly see Lauren coming. "Explain to her what's going on?"

"No," Lauren decided. She didn't want the entire building to know about her nudity. And even if the Audit receptionist was going to see her, she didn't want to have to explain herself, or give her any clue as to the naked woman's identity -- she didn't want her to put a name to a face. Or, rather, a name to set of exposed tits.

In her heels, Lauren stepped quickly up the hall, past Rachel's office, past Dmitri's office, past the offices of Steve Ellison and Ken Fuji. At the reception desk, she saw Melissa for the first time that morning, and noticed that, once again, the girl was wearing a low-cut red top that seemed like it belonged more in a nightclub than it did in an office environment. She was twenty-one, Lauren had told herself on numerous occasions -- she just doesn't know any better. And, given Lauren's display that morning, it could have been argued that Melissa was significantly overdressed.

The blonde rounded the corner, set her jaw, and exited Suite 2600. Unfortunately, the receptionist in Audit was not alone. Standing beside her was a short, bespectacled man who looked to be about Lauren's age. From the way he was dressed, in tight pants and an ugly striped shirt, the girl was sure he was one of accountants that staffed Suite 2650. And, given the dorkiness that seemed inherent in this man, the blonde walking directly towards him that morning might have been the first time he'd seen a naked woman in real life. Both the receptionist and the accountant stared wide-eyed at the girl, neither believing what was transpiring in the elevator lobby.

Lauren rounded the corner, nearly jogging by that point, and hurried to the relative safety of the ladies' room.

The return trip was no less excruciating, though Lauren did have the option of keeping her back to Audit. Still, whether it was curiosity or concern, she glanced back over her shoulder in their direction. To her horror, the accountant had rounded up two other gentlemen while Lauren had been in the bathroom, and all three were staring at her naked ass as she hustled toward Melissa and Suite 2600.

"Yeah," she panted to Ginger when she'd returned back down the hall, "I think you need to go explain my situation to the receptionist. Just to make sure that she keeps men from congregating by her desk."

As Lauren sat back down at her own desk, she noticed that her nipples were hard. Her headlights were on. She remembered reading somewhere that fright could be considered a sexual stimulus in both men and women, something to do with the basic reaction of fight, flight, or fuck. Men sometimes could become erect in such cases, and women could experience lubrication, an engorged clit, or erect nipples. It had to have been fear that had Lauren's nipples at attention, and, she noticed as she crossed her legs beneath her desk, her pussy a bit moist.

As expected, Charlie Peasgood slithered his way into Suite 2600 just before lunch with a stack of papers. He could have emailed them to Lauren and Bramley. He could have sent his assistant down with them. But, no, Peasgood being the same odious creep he'd always been, he came down himself.