I Deserve It

You can read a lot more about Gina Torrey in many of my earlier stories, if you want, but as always there's no need to read my other stuff if you want to enjoy this one. I'm entering this story in Lit's annual Holiday Contest; please read all the entries and vote up your favorites! We love writing for you, but we love it even more if you show your appreciation.

* * *

I woke up sticky-thighed, sweaty, because once again I was thinking of Ben.

He'd made eyes at me at work (once again) and I'd tried to strike up a conversation with him (once again) and I'd failed to sound sophisticated and flirty like my friends Gina and Monica (once again), and so I'd come home flustered. Once again.

Where I'd looked up and down the upstairs hall to make sure nobody would walk in on me while, once again, I dug my fingers deep inside me and brought myself to my usual smashing orgasm while thinking,once again,of Ben from Accounting.

And then? Once again, late in the night, after I'd woken up dreaming of Ben, I'd snuggled up to my oblivious husband and pretended he was... Ben. From Accounting.

But my dreams hadn't gotten any calmer, even with my husband's smell in my nose. I really, really needed to get laid. But it was clear that I wasn't going to get any from Steve, my husband. He'd shown no interest in me for many years, but to be fair? I didn't really want much to do with him anymore, either. He was familiar. He was always the same. Ben was different.

I often wondered whether Steve had anyone at his work he dreamed about, to wake up in the mornings with his stubby hard-on uncomfortable in his pajama bottoms. Probably did, I reflected glumly: at fifty, Steve still had most of his dark good looks. There were almost certainly women at Norbera, Inc who thought of him the same way I thought of Ben, but unlike me, they might not be too shy to ask him to bend them over in the employee bathroom.

There were reasons for me to stay married to him, of course, even if my mind (and, eventually, my secret fingers) wandered sometimes. None of those reasons included my personal happiness, but there were other people to think about: the friends we shared were among those, and the extended family, and they'd hardly understand if Lauren left Steve for her younger colleague from Accounting. Another was our son, and I felt a little thrill of joy when I reminded myself he was coming home for Christmas in just two days.

But that wasn't today. Today was work, then yoga, and always the memory of my sticky thighs. Especially when I saw Ben at work, smiling at me from Accounting. Because something told me he wanted me, too.

* * *

My mistake, as it often was, had been to tell Gina and Monica about waking up to thoughts of Ben. They werenotthe wisest girlfriends to confide in concerning issues of the heart, still less issues of the vagina. Monica was blunt. "I mean, why don't you just fuck him?"

"Jesus Christ on a unicycle," I snapped, exasperated, "he works with me. I can't 'just fuck him.' We're a law firm, for crying out loud."

Monica looked over at Gina, who took a long sip of her matcha. She raised her eyebrows, leaving it to Monica to continue trying to make me see the light, even if it was a red light over the door of a brothel. Monica shrugged. "Even law firm employees have cocks, Lauren. And you've got a place for him to stick it. So trust me: if you want to fuck him, you most certainlycanjust fuck him."

I glanced aside, both directions, because talking about things likecocksin Samurai's Teahouse was not how I usually handled my post-yoga coffee. We were getting glances, of course, for we were three reasonably fit MILFs in tight yoga clothes, but I couldn't see if anyone was paying closer attention thanks to Monica's choice of vocabulary.

Still. There was decorum to be maintained.

"Can't you use a better word?" I shook my head in disapproval. My best friends were bad when it came to holding me accountable for impure thoughts, but then that went with the territory: I'd long known that both Gina and Monica were frequently and gleefully unfaithful to a pair of husbands who had to be among the most oblivious men ever to walk the earth, for their wives here hardly shy. Around me, anyway. "Schlong, maybe? Dick? Or even the good old-fashioned penis?"

They both burst out laughing. "Does it matter what she calls it?" Gina snorted. "If you're not going to fuck it, it might as well not be there at all." Her matcha rose up her straw. "Did you guys see Meaghan today during Chair Pose?"

"Meaghan?" Monica and I glanced at each other. "I thought she looked good. She held it for a long time."

"Well-rested quads," Monica agreed, poking at the ice in her coffee. "She looked fresh as a daisy."

"Yeah," Gina gloated, sitting back in the chair with that saucy air that let you know she was about to come out with something outrageous, "I know. She probably got a great night's sleep. That's because I spent last night fucking the shit out of her husband."

Monica giggled, and so did I despite myself. Gina was impossible not to like, even when she was at her most scandalous. "Jesus in a rowboat, Gina!" I scolded, but my heart wasn't in it. The truth was that I didn't really mind living my sex life vicariously through my friends. It was better than having no sex life at all.

Monica jabbed again at her ice. "Your place?"

"Hotel." Gina stretched her arms high, drawing a glance from some guy at the next table. Her boobs were tiny, but so was the rest of her. So everything looked great. "He's getting more adventurous."

I nodded soberly. She'd been fucking Meagan's husband for a couple years, as I recalled, with some breaks here and there; to hear Gina tell it, he'd have bouts of remorse that would lead to long, punishing arguments with her. Then he'd go home to Meagan, and a few months later he'd be back slinging his dick into Gina again. "The bloom is off the rose?"

"He said last week that he was starting to get bored," Gina shrugged, "which was why I started pegging him."

"No!" Monica perked her ears up, suddenly alert. "He let you peg him? He doesn't seem like the type."

Gina let a slow, easy grin curve over her face. "Hewasn'tthe type. And 'let me' might be a bit of a reach." The matcha rose up the straw again. "But I convinced him he liked it. He came like a fucking meteor." She chuckled. "That shit flew about ten feet, easily."

"Wow." Monica and I looked at each other. I'd never done any butt stuff, and I could tell from her face that she hadn't done much more. She pondered. "I don't know him as well as you do," Monica said to Gina at last, "but I'm impressed, G."

"Yeah." Gina's straw stuttered against the bottom of the glass, vacuuming the dregs of the thick green matcha. "Me too. I didn't think he'd let me do it." She pushed her glass away. "So you see, Lauren?" she added, looking squarely at me. "You can get a guy to let you do almost anything. This Ben of yours? The guy at work? You need a game plan, babe."

"Totally." I wasn't sure whether Gina and Monica had planned this out, like a mini-intervention, but that was how it was working out. Mon patted my forearm. "Seriously, Lauren, you need to decide what you want out of life. If you want to lie down next to Steve every night, pining for this Ben? Great. Do that. But if you decide you want some of that hard workplace cock?" She shrugged. "Get it, girl. Whichever makes you happy."

"You deserve to be happy, hon," Gina threw in, seeming sincere.

I wagged my head from one to the other, sighing. "Thanks, guys. I don't think that's the best plan, but I'll think about it. I've got other things going on."

"Yeah!" Monica, about my age, had older kids too. She perked up. "Your kid's coming home? From the Army?"

"Holiday leave," I nodded, a smile tugging at my mouth. I missed Dillon a lot, even though he was a big old hard-core paratrooper now. "He's showing up on Thursday!"

"Sweet!" Monica's smile was genuine, but Gina chose this moment to let her baser urges wake up.

She leaned across toward me. "Dillon. He's, what, about twenty?"

"Turns twenty-one in February," I nodded, my head cocking. "Why do you ask, G?"

She gnawed at her lip, studying me mulishly. "Look, Lauren, I'm not going to make a play for your son. But he's a fucking hottie."

"He'snota fucking hottie!" I squealed. I looked wildly at Monica for support, but got none.

"He's fuckable," she said at last, looking sad about it. "Fuckable, but unavailable. Gina and I have talked about this; we're very sad."

"Super-sad," Gina sighed. "He's got his dad's looks."

Suddenly wary, I squinted at my friend. "Are you fucking Steve, Gina?"

"Of course not. Girl code," she declared, flapping her hand dismissively. "Husbands are fair game, unless they belong to your friends. No. I'm not fucking Steve." Her eyes took on a mischievous glint. "But I would."

"Fuck. God bless your little kidneys, you sick bitch." I couldn't believe this. Again, I sought support. "I suppose you'd fuck him too, Mon?"

Monica shrugged. "You know me. I like them younger. He's very attractive, but I'd let Gina take him."

"Thank you," Gina smiled.

"Wait." Monica frowned. "Why aren'tyoufucking him? He's your husband..."

I did not want to go there. Not here, at Samurai's over a latte. "Don't ask," I snapped.

"It's gotten stale. I get it." Monica was married, too, so she understood.

"Very stale." I shook my head. "It's a rut that's hard to get out of."

"Sounds like he needs a good pegging." Gina giggled. "I'll loan you my strap-on."

She and Monica laughed, and after a moment I joined in. Try as I might, I just couldn't be upset around these two. "I didn't tell you all the rest of it," I added, still not sure I should; there'd been a reason I'd kept this to myself. I saw my friends perk up. "I'm hesitant to let y'all know, and you'll know why as soon as I tell."

"Then tell," Gina insisted, her voice icy. "You know the code: no secrets."

I leaned back in my creaky chair, glad to have something to contribute. It was easy to feel overrun by these two. "So you know how Dillon's unit has been on, like, alert." I was sure they didn't, even though they nodded. I didn't really understand it all myself; I just knew he'd spent the past month or so unable to be more than two hours away from his base. "And now that they're done with that, they all get two weeks' leave at the same time. Over the holidays." They nodded again, Monica looking impatient. "Well. He's inviting a friend whose family isn't around. Over Christmas."

They both blinked at me.

"And... well, another friend ended up getting invited." I laid my hands on the table. "They'll all be here on Thursday."

Monica blinked. "All about twenty or so?"

Yep. That was Monica. She was almost always horny. "I think so. They're in the army, so they must be over eighteen..."

"You're going to have three young cocks living with you for two weeks. After Thursday." Monica's hand found my arm again. "Is that what you're saying?"

"Three youngmilitarycocks," Gina corrected hopefully. She licked her lips. "I'm thinking abs. Muscles. Aggression."

"This is why I didn't want to tell you pervs," I sighed.

The two looked at each other, and I got the distinct sense that they were reading each others' minds. It was a very disturbing sensation. Monica was the one who decided to break the silence first. "Well, I'll just go ahead and say what we're all thinking," she shrugged at last, "and it's this: if I had three young cocks living under my roof, I'd fuck all three and not even care that one of them was my son." She reflected a moment. "Well. I might carea little."

"Oh, go fart on an orchid," I teased her, disgusted. Gina was laughing. "You're so gross."

"Not gross. Just honest." She finished her drink. "I'm off, ladies. Tomorrow night at seven? Advanced yoga?"

"Sure." I yawned, my shoulders protesting from tonight's session. "But I won't be there on Thursday, obviously."

"Too busy fucking Ben," Gina snickered, rising from the table. "See you tomorrow, girls."

I looked mournfully at Monica. "Ben," I groused, shaking my head.

"Gina's right, bitch." She patted my hand. "You deserve a little happiness. Or maybe a lot of happiness. How long do you think he is, this Ben?"

"Jesus in a kayak, Mon! He's my coworker!"

Her laugh was coarse. "So? I wonder about the cock size of all my coworkers." She gave me an air-kiss. "See you tomorrow, Lauren. And, seriously. Think about what you want." Her face showed concern, and once again I felt a surge of gratitude for these two. Sure, they were crass and amoral perverts, but they cared about me. And that mattered.

* * *

Think about what you want,Monica had told me.Happiness.It resonated. Which was why, the next day at work, I dug down deep, grabbed my courage by the short curly hairs, and actually decided to flirt with Ben From Accounting.

So? Like a high schooler on her first day of senior year, I paid attention to my outfit that morning. Our office is not all that formal, but we don't show up in tracksuits and t-shirts either: my usual December outfit was a long dress and something with a moderate heel. We've got younger people who dare to wear jeans, but only the expensive kind; I wasn't quite at that point yet, because I'm aseniorcopywriter and a woman over forty.

In my mind, such women don't wear jeans.

The dress that day was one of my shorter numbers, a nice green one that inched saucily above the knee with a neckline that made the most of my cleavage without making me look whorish. I was starting to get self-conscious about my legs, but I had to admit they still looked good in a pair of shiny black boots. Good, not great, I told myself, and without the seven hours of weekly yoga, I'd be fucking Jabba the Hutt. So would Monica, probably, though Gina would be her usual catlike self.

Still. The dress looked nice, and I pranced into work feeling sleek and proud. The corner of my eye told me the security guard stared at me as I keyed the elevator fob, and I felt a momentary sense of giddiness when I realized his eyes would be roaming over the back of my dress, seeking the shape of my ass. This was fine with me, and the shiny doors of the closing elevator flashed my own face back at me, grinning.

I'd decided I would just go to Ben's floor, lean against his desk, and strike up a conversation. Why not? It couldn't hurt, and I thought he'd caught me checking him out last week anyway. So he probably wouldn't mind some facetime with Lauren From Advertising. A brief, Gina-esque mental twitch wondered whether he'd get hard, a little.

And then I remembered what Monica had said about her speculation about her coworkers' penis sizes. That's why I was blushing as the elevator coughed me out onto the Accounting floor.

It didn't occur to me that I'd need an excuse to be there, visiting: we were an informal company, in general, and Ben and I had often exchanged friendly greetings in the corridors. We'd even sat across from each other at that forecast meeting with Brose and Harmon last month, so stopping in to talk to him would not be allthatweird. He was still junior enough that he worked in his department's cubicle farm, but I hoped it was early enough in the workday that he'd be alone.

Alas, it never occurred to me that he wouldn't have arrived for work yet.

But so it was. And I stood there at the entrance to his cube like a country rube who comes into the city only to realize everything is closed for the holidays. The whole massive room settled silently around me, but for the shuffle of a few employees coming in. One of them peeked her head over a neighboring cube and smiled at me. "Hi! Can I help you?"

She was cute. Irrationally, I wondered whether she was making moves on Ben. "Uh, I'm looking for Ben?" I hoped she'd know him, because I didn't know his last name.

Judging by the dimple that pocked her face when I mentioned him, she sure did. "He's not around yet. Want me to give him a message?"

I felt my eyes narrow. It's amazing, some part of my brain realized, just how quickly women can become rivals. I wanted to claw her lungs out. "No. I'll catch him later," I told her, much more coldly than I needed to. "Thank you." My mind raced angrily into a future where I couldn't possibly come back, now, and flirt with him here. Not while Ms Perky Smile was sitting a few cubes away, listening. I shuddered. "Yeah. No. I'm fine." I watched as her head sank back down like a lurking U-boat, then took inspiration from a little fan of post-its next to Ben's keyboard.

In a flash, I planted my butt in his chair and swept a pen toward the little square of paper. This called for a note, cute but not desperate. Fortunately, I write for a living.

"Just a note to let you know I dropped by. Feel free to come on up to the eighth floor if you want to chat!"

I signed my name, Lauren Wager, in a swoopy cursive line that I made sure would be legible. I pondered, then slapped the note to the top of his monitor and skedaddled like a snake on a hot rock, the elevatorsnikking closed behind me with a weird sense of espionage, as though I'd done something I somehow shouldn't have gotten away with.

I was plowing through some of my department's copy with the morning wearing away when a shadow loomed in from the door of my office. By that time I'd forgotten all about my attempt to flirt with Ben, figuring it was just one of the interns coming in to ask for something. "I'm busy," I snapped without turning around. "What is so important that it can't wait?"

A throat cleared itself softly into the room. "Your note was a little more polite than that."

I whirled fast enough that my swivel chair couldn't keep up, overrotating me like a drunken figure skater until it swayed to a stop with my legs aimed vaguely at my visitor and my hand steadying me against the filing cabinet. "Fuck. Ben? I'm sorry!"

What I'd first noticed about this man was his clothes, just a shade better than the norm down in Accounting while not crossing the line into Too Much. He looked natty, retro, all horn-rimmed glasses and brown corduroy. His watch would not have looked out of place on the instrument panel of a World War Two bomber. He leaned against my doorway, taller than I remembered, smiling down at my wildly splayed legs and, I'm sure, a facial expression that looked like I'd been caught starting a fire. "Nothing to be sorry about. You wanted to chat?"

Well. Shit on a cracker. This morning I'd been streamlined, confident, a jet headed straight for Mach One... now I was trying to keep my balance in my own office chair. "I did," I spluttered, "but then I nearly fell out of my damn swivel chair. So now, I just want to curl up in a hole and die." I collected myself as quickly as I could, smoothing the dress down my thighs as I straightened carefully behind the desk. "You should step out for a sec. We can do a do-over."

His laugh was quick and low, and he didn't move. "You're fine. I won't tell everyone in the entire company what a klutz you are."

"Yeah, that's real big of you." But I laughed regardless, his smile infectious. He had great teeth. "I think most of the long-time employees know, anyway. I was once famous for spraining my ankle at a corporate softball game." I shook my head.

"Injured during a softball game? There's nothing all that klutzy about that."

"Well. See, I was in the stands at the time. I wasn't even playing." We laughed again, my heart slowing down. Goddamn, I told myself, but he was an attractive one. "This was... ten years ago?"

"Before my time," he nodded. His face took on a thoughtful air. "Ten years ago, I was learning how to drive."