Submitting to Her(9)

After that particular day of work, the absence of interrogation came as some relief. I couldn't even get my own head around what had just happened to me in the office, so how I might explain to these guys and keep any kind of dignity intact was anybody's guess.

"Thing is, every time I look at her now, I think this is what she wants to do to me. It kind of… turns me off."

"Don't have to look at her, Benny. Just roll her over, pretend she's your sister."

It was only Robin who, later on, inquired about my uncharacteristic introversion that evening. Well, we did share an apartment, so it was perhaps unsurprising he should notice the change in me.

"Something on your mind?"

"Oh, you know," I said, fending off his question before I'd constructed a fully-functional excuse. "Hard day at work and all that."

"I thought you were on strike at the moment," Robin said, and I felt myself actually blush.

How stupid it now seemed to me, my whole passive-aggressive resistance to Zoey's appointment.

"Well, there's only so far you can take that kind of thing before you get fired," I said, and Robin merely nodded.

Actually, as the evening progressed, and the Irish stout flowed freely, I did manage to loosen up and temporarily forget the working week's curious conclusion. By the time the daylight faded, I'd even begun to think I'd somehow imagined the whole thing.

Well, it had been pretty unreal.

Once the married members of our group had made their usual excuses, Benny, Robin and I ended up in a downtown club, Sonar, in another vague attempt to prove we still had it where it counted on the social scene, not to mention the dance floor, as drink and pounding music put paid to our conversation.

I was getting fairly drunk, it has to be said, but I felt I needed to. At one point, I remember waiting at the bar with Robin, both of us bellowing into each other's ears just to be heard, and I felt the sudden need to share my bizarre experience with a neutral party. But how on Earth could I explain my being used in such a way?

Robin was a fairly enlightened hipster on the surface of things, but even so. If word got out, I'd be a laughing stock.

I shouted in his ear: "Something weird happened to me today."

Robin looked at me through those Buddy Holly glasses of his, his face creased in confusion. "What?"

"Something… weird… happened… to me… today."

Really shouting. It was ridiculous.

"Yeah. I mean what happened?" He'd heard.

"I… uh…" my mind fumbling with possibilities, every collection of relevant words sounding emasculating to me. Finally, I took the coward's way out. I bellowed: "Somebody at work gave me a blow job."

Surprise lit up my roommate's face. And the faces of a few girls nearby.

"Somebody what?"

"Gave me… you know… went down on me."

Robin broke out in unbridled, hearty laughter. I just felt like an idiot. Was it so offensive to my masculinity just to admit I'd bowed down at the altar of perfection and worshipped her with every ounce of energy I had?

He slapped me on the upper arm. "No wonder you were so late at the office," he said, and I could just about hear him, with a touch of lip-reading support. "Who was he?" he joked. "The janitor?"

I gave him a bemused ha-ha face.

But then I gave him a serious look. I said: "You think I'll get in trouble?"

Robin shrugged. "You didn't force her, did you?"

I shook my head.

"She wasn't drunk?" Another head-shake. "What does it say in your contract? Anything about dating co-workers?"

I said: "Don't think so."

"So then, you're okay," he said with a congratulatory thumbs-up, before adding: "Not that you should feel free to just go ahead and get caught skull-fucking at the office."

I said: "I'm not sure it'll happen again."

He laughed. Somehow his bearing seemed a little more up-beat, as though I'd just given him the answer to some kind of riddle that had been bothering him. He said: "Probably not a good idea anyway."

I nodded. He was probably right. I didn't know what had happened between Zoey and I. I didn't know where it left me. She seemed to have claimed some kind of ownership of me, and at the time that had seemed just fine to me. But here I was hours later, and I couldn't quite believe it had happened, let alone what it all meant.

Were we now dating?

Robin and I got split up on the dance floor, and I was getting steadily more unstable on my feet the more booze slipped down my throat.

I kind of faded in and out, and later on as I faded in again, there was a former fling by the name of Taylor dancing with me, her arms locked around my neck, filling my nostrils with a cloud of her cheap perfume.