Avery

It was 3:45 am on a gloomy winter Wednesday and I hadn’t left my office since eight the morning before, but I’d just had some sensational, world-class orgasms, so I was awake and calm and happy and ready for anything. The lighting was still dim inside as I hurried to the ladies room with my overnight bag, the offices of Kaplan & Keene Business and Wealth Management glowing like a romantic midtown restaurant—the kind of restaurant I’d love to go to—with computers and a strong Wi-Fi signal and no annoying people taking pictures of their food. It was quiet, and…no wait…I could hear a vacuum cleaner running inside the ladies room. I was not alone.

“Hey Magda!” I hurled words at the salt and pepper-haired cleaning lady as soon as I flung the door open, hoping to delay her favorite topic of conversation—my shameful lack of a social life. She turned off the vacuum as soon as she saw me. “I didn’t hear you!” I continued yelling even though it had gone quiet. “You’re here early! Is it freezing out? How’s your hip? How was your grandson’s recital? I like your sweater, did you knit it yourself?” I looked her straight in the eyes, no shame, meeting her Slavic maternal gaze, which was somehow warmly sympathetic and coolly judgmental at the same time.

I had played classical music on my computer and locked my office door in the unlikely event that anyone else was around. If she’d heard me groaning and moaning I’d just die. Most days, Magda was the only person I could talk to from four-thirty to seven in the morning when I was at the office, and the fabric of our finely-woven relationship dynamic would be shredded if she now thought of me as some pervert instead of the nice misguided work-obsessed single woman she’d always known me as.

“Why you spend all night here again, huh?”

“I have an early Skype meeting with London! It’s easier to stay here than trudge back and forth up and downtown in this weather.”

“You don’t say. I do this every morning.”

“Right. Well, I couldn’t sleep anyway, so. Better to work than watch Netflix all night by myself.”

“This is your choices? Work or Netflix? This is new American Dream?”

I shrugged and whipped out my toothbrush and toothpaste and proceeded to go to town on my molars while she lay into me.

“You! Beautiful girl with long hair! Smart! With apartment that don’t stink—why you waste life here all day all night when you can enjoy world outside with man and not computer, working, computer, other people’s money numbers, computer, no man, no friends, computer computer work work work?!”

Phew. She didn’t hear the vibrator.

“If you my daughter I lock you out of office until you come back with good husband.” This from a woman who was a successful pediatrician back in the old country.

I let her continue while I splashed cold water on my face, then applied a quick layer of BB cream, dusting of blush, swipe of mascara and hint of red lip gloss. My Skype meeting was in less than fifteen minutes and I needed to look professionally attractive for the sake of my company. I needed to get my girls into a push-up bra, squeeze myself into a size XS cashmere sweater, and pull my hair into a messy up-do so that I could dazzle my British colleague with my financial acumen, strategic synergistic decision-making skills, and All-American sexy librarian-ness.

Magda went on with her rant while I ducked into a stall and changed out of my pajama top. Any tension I had been feeling in my upper back and shoulders had magically disappeared after the brief but intense session with my Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator (“personal massager” if you believe the product description on certain websites). I call it Mr. Potter—which isn’t gross if you think about how Harry Potter is now an adult. Or maybe it is still gross, so I suppose I should make it clear that I’ve never thought of Harry Potter or Daniel Radcliffe while Magic Wanding (yes it’s a verb). I should also make it clear that this was the first time I’d brought Mr. Potter to work, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep and it had nothing to do with the fact that I hadn’t Skyped with Luke Mason in five days—I was just tired and excited at the same time and I didn’t want to have any nervous energy during our meeting. I mean yes, Luke made a few surprise guest starring appearances in my imagination over the course of those few glorious moments, but so did Jon Hamm and a guy I once saw at the library at Wharton Business School, and I certainly didn’t have any serious feelings for them either.

I gave Magda a hug before hurrying back to my office, promising to get her a cappuccino as soon as Starbucks opened, and to seriously think about how I was wasting the “best years of nude body life” sitting at my desk. I settled back into the chair in front of my desktop monitor, angling the desk lamp and the Himalayan salt lamp (that my sister Jackie insisted I keep by my computer), so they cast a flattering light upon my face. I signed into Skype and examined the image that Luke would be treated to in a few minutes. From the waist up, I looked pretty good, considering it was Kill Me O’clock. He’d have no idea that I was wearing plaid pajama bottoms and Ugg boots. It was one of the many reasons I considered this the best working relationship I had.

A little over a year earlier, one of our wealthy author clients had the charming misguided notion to purchase a struggling bookshop chain in the UK. Because none of the older partners or managers at my firm wanted to deal with the five hour time difference on a regular basis if they didn’t have to (because they had things like spouses and offspring to deal with—I mean enjoy spending time with), I was tasked with handling our clients’ transatlantic business. I was the youngest junior manager at the Kaplan & Keene—one of the largest boutique business and wealth management firms in Manhattan—so it was a great opportunity to stand out and make myself indispensable.

My boss had suggested that we hire a UK-based consultant to help us with our more significant transactions, and thank Jude Law, that consultant was Luke Mason. I was so busy working up a list of initial questions that I hadn’t had time to Google him, so I was completely unprepared for the level of blue-eyed-chiseled-jawline-tailored-suited-handsomeness and eargasm-inducing English accent-ness that I was faced with during our first Skype meeting. With no background information on each other and no clue that our professional relationship would extend beyond this particular consultation, we flirted our professional asses off. It’s not like we were sending naked pics or describing what we’d like to do to each other’s bodies—it was just good old-fashioned, harmless, not-meant-to-go-anywhere flirtation to keep our long days of working for other people fun and just a little bit titillating.

My boss eventually talked our client out of the bookshop acquisition, unfortunately, but another one of our clients—a champion surfer no less—got a hankering for some transatlantic business not long afterwards. That deal went forward, and soon I had an excuse (I mean legitimate business reasons) to check in with Luke on a regular basis.

My brain had two modes—work it like a boss, and unconscious—so on the days when my calls with Luke were scheduled for the beginning of his UK work day, I’d just sleep at the office, because it was nearly impossible to go back to sleep at 4:30 and then get up an hour and a half later to get ready and make the trek from my little apartment on the Upper West Side to Midtown. Most of the time we scheduled for nine-thirty New York time, which was two-thirty in the afternoon for him. There had been days when our schedules demanded a ten pm Skype meeting, which was three in the morning for him. We never complained. Regardless of when we’d do it, it was always the most pleasant part of my day.

Less than ten seconds until Luke was due to initiate our Skype video chat. I tried so hard to stop smiling as I waited, but as soon as that delightful sing-song notification started and I accepted—oh yes I accepted—and his handsome face appeared on my screen, he was already grinning into the camera and I just gave up.

“Hello darling,” he said.

“Hello sailor,” said I. It was our thing. Ever since our first week of working and Skyping together, this was how we’d begun every conversation. It was adorable. We just smiled at each other for about five seconds. He was wearing his glasses. We matched! I loved it when he wore his glasses. The blue rims accentuated his blue eyes. I wished I could see the actual shade of blue, but it’s always hard to tell on a video call.

Here’s what I knew for sure: his voice made me think of warm caramel sauce on creamy vanilla soft serve ice cream. Everything I knew about him made me think of warm caramel sauce on creamy vanilla soft serve ice cream—you know how you just want to twirl it around your tongue and swallow? Oh my God you cannot keep thinking things like that! Focus, focus. We’re talking about a five million pound merger here. Spreadsheets! Profit margins! Cloud-based info tech integration!

We were each prepping for our separate debriefing meetings with the client, Buck “Bucket” Reynolds—a world champion surfer slash businessman who had merged his surfer lifestyle chain of stores with the UK’s most successful surf shop. Our duty was to inform him of the progress of post-merger integration.

Insert totally obvious debriefing of Luke and merging with Luke jokes here.

I am forever grateful to Bucket for his decision to broaden his investment horizons, so that I could stare at Luke Mason’s perfectly-shaped lips on my computer monitor while they formed the words “minor working capital adjustments” and made them sound like a line from a Lord Byron poem.

Focus!

I cleared my throat. “Lovely to see you.” I had a tendency to adopt a very slight English accent when conversing with him—not a Madonna level accent—every now and then I’d say something with a little English inflection. He seemed to think it was charming. “Long time no see—good weekend?”

“Excellent weekend,” he replied. “You?”

“Good great. Totally adequate. Very fine Monday and Tuesday as well.” Part of me was dying to know if his weekend was excellent because he’d spent it getting blown by some gorgeous French model on the Thames or whatever, part of me wanted to blow past the requisite superficial small talk so I could avoid having to talk to him about —

“Good great. Your beau back in town?”

Dammit. It had been weeks since he’d brought it up, I thought maybe he’d forgotten.

Allow me to explain: I had totally lied to him about having a boyfriend.

A few months earlier, during a video chat, I’d commented on his golden tan and he’d mumbled something about going on a “mini-break” over the long weekend. I’d instantly pictured him canoodling with a supermodel on some beach on a Greek island, felt overwhelmed with irrational jealousy, panicked, then blurted out that my boyfriend and I had “enjoyed a relaxing weekend in.” It wasn’t a lie if you counted boyfriends that you plug in and then put back into a drawer when you’re done with them, and I did, so I wasn’t lying. I referred to him as Mr. Potter, immediately realized how dumb that sounded to someone who didn’t get the joke, and then brilliantly saved it by informing Luke that my boyfriend’s first name was Haruki.

Luke blinked twice. “Haruki Potter? Really? Wow.”

“He’s half-Japanese,” I said. “He’s an electrical engineer.” This also was not exactly a lie, as my Hitachi Magic Wand was an electrical device and it had engineered dozens (okay hundreds) of orgasms. “He went to MIT. He’s out of town a lot, working on…international electrical projects.”

“He sounds wonderful,” Luke said. “Like a wizard.”

He is a wizard. By harnessing the power of electricity, he can give me a full-body orgasm in three minutes or less. I don’t have to make shameful trips to the drugstore for batteries in the middle of the night and I don’t have to waste time going to a restaurant and making small-talk with him before getting to the good stuff so I have time to do things like laundry and catch up on work emails, give myself a pedicure, think about how good you look in your crisp white shirts…

“He’s very effective and efficient,” I had said, and then immediately changed the subject back to my client’s closing contracts. In order to emphasize the fact that our flirtation was purely professional and had in no way meant that we were genuinely interested in snogging each other, as they say across the pond, after I’d revealed my relationship status we maintained the same way of relating, toning it down only ever so slightly. I honestly kept meaning to tell Luke that I didn’t actually have a boyfriend but it was never the right time.

This time I pretended I hadn’t heard his question and proceeded to ask him about accounting and the steering committee. After shifting gears and launching into a five-minute lightning round of catch-up regarding the status of various aspects of the merger, to my surprise, he casually brought it up again.

“That project in Venezuela wrapped up yet?”

Shit I wish I knew how long electrical engineering projects took to complete, or even if that’s what they were called. Best to remain confident yet vague. “He’s done with that one but now he’s in…” I scanned my office for ideas and landed on the Russian nesting dolls on a shelf. “Moscow. Another project there.”

“Wow, he’s really all over the map. You must miss him.”

“Yeah well, you know, you get used to doing things on Skype.” I froze. What did I just say? “I mean, talking about things on Skype. We just talk. About work stuff, mostly. His and mine. But, you know, in a fun way.” Shut yer pie hole, Avery Davis. “We’re both really work-focused right now, so, that’s why it works so well. I like to focus on work.”

“I can see that,” he said, with a tone of voice that I could not decipher.

I didn’t want to end our video chat on this note. “Oh—did you end up picking out a gift for your client’s wife?”

He smiled. “I did, yeah.” He had been in a bit of a panic last week when he was invited to a client’s home for dinner and found out that his American wife was celebrating a birthday. He’d asked for advice and when I’d asked him the woman’s age-range I recommended a biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and some good hot cocoa. Seemed like a safe present for an American woman in her sixties. “She was delighted. You got it—spot on. I’d been meaning to thank you, sorry I didn’t.”

“Oh no, I’m glad I could help.” There. I had reminded him of how awesome and not at all ridiculous a woman I was.

It looked like he wanted to say something important, but then he said: “Well, I’d better let you get back to it, then. Or maybe you’d rather get some sleep.”

“Oh I can never sleep after talking to you, Luke.” I said it lightheartedly, but betrayed myself by looking away before I’d finished the sentence and not looking back up when I should have, blushing when I should have been smirking, pausing to catch my breath instead of giggling. I felt naked, and not in the good way.

“I know what you mean,” he said finally, voice barely above a whisper.

There was a fairly long silence, and I was quite certain that we were both saying things to each other in our heads, things we wouldn’t dare say out loud. In my head I was saying: I want to lick your face. In his he was probably saying: You American women are sodding bananas and I need to end this call immediately.

He finally nodded and looked away from his computer and said, “Yep, coming.” To his assistant, I imagined, or possibly he just pretended that someone was beckoning him so he could escape from me “Right well, I’ll message you after my meeting with accounting and the steering committee later then.”

“Literally can’t wait,” I said, and then ended the chat before I could say anything else.

The sun had not yet risen over the Statue of Liberty on that hump day, but my favorite part of it was already over. Despite how foolish I’d felt, my cheeks were sore from smiling so much and my heart was racing.

Luke

I really ought to have been concentrating on the conference call with my client’s accountants, but I could not stop thinking about Avery. That was the problem with scheduling our Skype chats at the top of my work days—it was so difficult to focus on anything besides her beautiful rose-tinted lips for at least an hour afterwards, and I always had a ridiculous grin on my face. It hadn’t helped that that morning she’d had a glow about her, and when her hair was up in one of those loose buns all I could think about was what it would feel like to kiss her long smooth neck. I was not grinning at that moment, though. I couldn’t get over this Haruki situation. Part of me couldn’t believe that Avery was still in a relationship with him, but part of me believed she was just maintaining a long-distance relationship with someone so she could keep her career on track. Which meant she was not so unlike myself, really.

I say “indeed” when someone on the other end of the call pauses, and it is all I can offer before my thoughts return to Avery’s smooth, pillowy lips. I often wished I could simply ask her to stand up and tilt the camera down so I could see the rest of her, wished I could reach through the monitor to touch her creamy skin and shiny hair. I’d never known a woman who could interest me so thoroughly without even touching me or jauntily exposing a hint of flesh. I simply liked who she was and how I felt when I was talking to her.

If it weren’t for her boyfriend, would I have flirted with her more or less? Probably less. As if the Atlantic Ocean weren’t enough of a buffer between us, I think I found her so attractive that if she didn’t have a boyfriend I might have kept finding excuses to visit New York, and that made me uncomfortable.

Truth is, it was the simplicity of our relationship that made it so appealing. Or to be even more truthful—it was the fact that it could barely be categorized as a relationship at all that I found whatever we had so irresistible.