THREE - JEN

I ARRIVED HOME TO THE sound of arguing. Living in the city meant the luxury of a house to myself was an impossible dream. I was crammed into a flat above a Chinese takeaway with two housemates, Gareth and Sally. The three of us met online via one of those room letting websites. That had been a year ago and in that time they had got engaged, broken up, got together again and now were supposed to be planning a future life of wedded bliss.

“Maybe if you didn’t need two thousand bouquets we could afford somewhere less shitty,” Gareth was shouting as I closed the door behind me. I sighed, leaning back against it as Sarah replied.

“Don’t exaggerate just because you want the reception to be in the sodding Lamb and Flag.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s hardly Merchant Ivory and virginal white is it?”

“How would you know what virginal looks like?”

I crossed the landing. I wanted to cook but there was no chance of squeezing into the kitchen while they were still arguing in there. Even if I did, my cupboard contained stock cubes, salt, and dried pasta. It wasn’t exactly going to be a banquet tonight.

I sat on my bed, the mouth watering smell of Chinese cooking wafting up through the open window. I left it open all the time, the only way to stop black mould from spreading like a plague across the wallpaper. It meant the room was freezing but what choice did I have? I’d need a job that paid twice as much to get anywhere decent and that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

With two blankets wrapped around me, I curled up on the bed and closed my eyes, trying to drown out their argument by losing myself in a daydream.

It wasn’t easy with Sally refusing to say how many people she had slept with and Gareth demanding in ever increasing volume that he had every right to know the answer.

I knew how many I’d slept with. One. Aged fourteen, I’d somehow managed to get a boyfriend, even now I’m not sure how it happened. I think it was because I had a much better computer than him, seeing as he spent most of his time at my house playing multiplayer WW2 shooters. “Do you love me?” I asked him once.

“I love your internet speed,” he replied and I got the sinking feeling that he wasn’t joking.

At sixteen, we’d decided to do it, to go all the way. It had lasted two minutes. Our relationship had ended two minutes after that, him cheerfully informing me that he was “only in it to see what colour your pubes were.”

I swore off men then. Computers were more reliable. They made sense. Which was all fine. Until today.

With my eyes closed I could again picture the man who’d turned up in front of my desk.

It was just a coincidence that I was even there. During the day the office was pretty much empty, all of us running from one floor to another, fighting to keep everyone online and working, not easy with the cuts to our department in the last couple of years. We’d lost ten people who hadn’t been replaced and our work had increased fourfold since then.

Sometimes I dreamed of confronting the money men, telling them that if things crashed to the ground because we were too exhausted to keep going, they’d only have themselves to blame.

I didn’t confront them. I liked the idea of keeping my job. It wasn’t perfect but it was a job and that was more than a lot of people had.

I had returned to the office because for once I’d got a job finished early, the old turn it off and on again working well. As I got there I got a call about a laptop needing fixing so I scrawled a note on my to do list then booted up my own computer.

With the place to myself, I had a few spare minutes so I loaded up my favourite website. I won’t say the name but it’s one of those online romance story collections. I can’t sit reading my Kindle at work but with an internet window open, I look as busy as anyone else while having a sneaky few minutes getting my heart racing, dreaming of my own shirtless pirate captain dragging me away to ravish me on a tropical island. Or my other favourite, a dominating Victorian mill owner, draping me over his knee to spank me for not working hard enough.

Then a hero from one of my stories just appeared in front of me like I’d conjured him straight off the page.

I could hardly speak. One minute I’m reading about clothes being torn off by a stern alpha male and the next there’s one stood there smirking at me.

I didn’t recognise him but that wasn’t uncommon. In this building alone there was more than a thousand people and we had executives coming and going from the international offices all the time.

I nearly fell out of my seat when I saw him. My first thought was that I’d been caught, that someone had been remotely watching my laptop and he was from H.R, come to tell me to pack my things and get out, that smut reading on work time was not acceptable.

I felt a wave of guilt wash over me as I blurted out a greeting. Had he seen the screen? Were my cheeks as flushed as they felt?

His eyes had scanned down me and I felt under scrutiny like never before. Trust it to be the day when I’d walked to work. I’d run out of money for the bus and pay day wasn’t for another week, leaving me marching the entire journey and still sweaty when he appeared. I bet I looked a wreck.

“I called down about a laptop needing fixing.”

That was when I remembered the phone call. I’d been so engrossed in my story that I’d forgotten about taking that call.

What I liked, once I’d gotten over the shock of how good he looked, was that he didn’t ask if there was a man who could look at it for him. Far too often, people would come to I.T and assume I was some kind of secretary, that women couldn’t possibly understand how computers work. It had infuriated me at first but eventually, I got used to the casual sexism.

Not him though. He looked at me and clearly thought I.T geek through and through.

“Oh, okay. Where is it?”

He frowned for a second as if furious at being asked the question and then he just said, “I’ll bring it down.”

He smiled at me then and I melted in my place. Not only was he fucking hot, he had a smile that cut through my panties and made me want to rip my own clothes off, beg him to fuck me.

It was a stupid dream of course. Even when I was standing there, I knew it was impossible. A guy like that, he probably had about six girlfriends, one for each night of the week and then all together on a Friday night. Me? In my laundry day tee-shirt and sweaty as hell? I wasn’t going to be joining in his high class orgies any time soon.

He headed off without looking back. I watched him go with two thoughts in my head. One was that when he came back, I’d do my best to look more presentable. The other was that I couldn’t wait to see him again.

Sure, he was only smiling because he needed me to fix his computer. Once I’d done that, he’d forget I even existed. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t dream about things.

I lay on my bed that night, Gareth and Sally’s argument finally fading into angry make up sex, the walls thin enough for me to hear every grunt. With my eyes closed, I thought about my visitor again. In my head he blurred into the mill owner.

“Jennifer Murphy,” he growled, grabbing my arm and dragging me onto his lap. “Time for you to learn your lesson, you wicked girl.”

I screamed and protested, squirming to free myself but he was too strong for me, lifting the back of my skirts, his hand slapping down on my panties, spanking me red as I promised I’d do better tomorrow.

I wasn’t stuttering or shy in my daydream, I was submissive but in control, not the nervous wreck I had been when he’d spoken to me, my hands shaking so hard I’d had to clasp them behind my back. He’d looked down at my chest when I did that. I wanted to think he’d done it to stare at my boobs, to think of what I looked like naked. I knew that he was just disgusted with my tee-shirt, seeing how faded and lint covered it was.

Still, there was no harm in dreaming. I hoped he’d come back early in the morning. I might explode if he took too long. My mind yearned to see him again, to bring a little excitement to my dull little corner of the world. I was still dreaming while I cooked up some pasta, sitting and eating with a stupid smile on my face as I wondered what my mystery man would think if he found out about my daydreams, about how much I was aching for him to be in me. It was a stupid dream, to think of him wanting someone like me. But stupid or not, I dreamed it nonetheless.