She hated to admit it, but Claude was right. Right about everything. She felt her body relax. Still anxious, still needing to sort it through one more time, make sure she had it all set perfectly in place, but not now. Later. When she was alone, when she could think. Not with this meathead grinning at her.
“Okay, good, we got that settled,” he said. “Now tell me about Sheffield’s cock.”
“You’re fourteen years old.”
“So?”
“Not even that. You’re twelve.”
“How big is it? Go on, tell me. I can take it.”
“I warned you from the beginning, Claude. I told you I’d already been with Frank once, and if things worked out, we were going to be intimate again. You said fine. You didn’t mind. So cut the jealousy shit.”
“It’s bigger, isn’t it? That’s why you don’t want to talk about it.”
“I didn’t notice his dick.”
“You were with him all night and didn’t notice the thing sliding in and out of you? The thing you had in your mouth when he was busting a nut?”
“It was normal. Average, nothing unique about it.”
“Fatter or skinnier or identical to me?”
“I’m not doing this.”
“’Cause I’m pretty thick myself, right? Fatter is better than longer. I never met a woman thought otherwise.”
“He’s a pencil dick. Okay, Claude? A pencil dick.”
“Number two pencil?”
“Yes, that’s right, superskinny. Kind you can break in one hand. And you’re thick as a German salami. Okay, you happy now?”
“Tell me you’re not sweet on him.”
“What matters is, he’s sweet on me.”
“Is he?”
“Most definitely.”
“Okay, then, I’m not jealous anymore. I’m over it. I was, but now I’m okay. I’m totally secure. I know you’re sacrificing your sexual dignity for the plan, to get the big advancement, office with a view. I know that. So I’m not jealous.”
As he cuddled beside her, pressed his cheek against her left breast, Nicole stifled a shudder, took a long breath, forced herself to stay loose because he was right, damn it, right about her needing him, even if it meant she had to endure his bungling sex, his juvenile insecurities, his rancid Old Spice smell. She’d become a pro at swallowing her disgust.
Reminding herself, as she did so often, that this degradation would be purified later. She would absolve herself, isolate these hours with Claude, keep them compartmentalized. A skill she’d begun to develop a decade earlier, on her first job out of college.
Assistant to the senior special agent at GAO, a step above a flunky. Herbert Marshall, an investigator of white-collar crimes, waste, fraud, abuse, government corruption. Less than a year into that first job, off in Las Vegas at the yearly GAO convention, she’d joined Herbert in the hotel bar. She’d expected the whole gang, but it was just the two of them. Nicole sipped a martini. She wasn’t a drinker, never had been. But after two sips the night was an ugly whirl of violent colors and music and noisy voices, and she woke in her hotel bed at ten the next morning in agony.
Remembering nothing after the second swallow, but feeling the ripping ache between her legs. She touched herself, screamed at the blood, screamed when the hotel doctor touched her, screamed again at the hospital. Herbert showed up, acting horrified, telling the female police detective that he’d helped her back to her room the night before, that she was drunk. There’d been no sex. None at all. He claimed Nicole had tried to kiss him, said she wanted to party, do the town, but he refused. A happily married man.
Her urine test was positive for roofies. Drugged and raped, the physician said, multiple times. Bruised cervix, a tear in the posterior fourchette. Injuries that would take months to heal. Others that never would.
The detective urged her to press charges against Herbert, but she didn’t want to expose herself to the public shit that was sure to follow, that would dog her forever, stain her career.
She stayed on the job, applied for promotions, transfers, but was passed over and passed over again. Her workload increased. Herbert ignored her. For a year she hung on, and then 9/11 came, the Twin Towers went down. Overnight new federal agencies were born, new opportunities. She moved to NIPC, a demotion, a pay cut. But it was work.
A month on the job, her new boss hit on her. She was aloof, simmering with fury but hiding it. When he persisted, she made a decision that altered her trajectory.
She flirted back, discreetly at first, bedroom eyes, keeping a tantalizing distance. A mirage, a temptress, beguiling insinuations that were never kept. The false promise of promiscuity. She kept him in a low-grade swoon and won a small upgrade and another.