Games with Friends

Amabel Ignite was in yet another meeting and starting to wonder why she spent so much time getting dressed in the morning. After all, the men in her office were so into themselves and maintaining their positions in the corporate structure that none of them had bothered to notice that she was
sans
panties on this Wednesday afternoon. 

When she took her cab ride to work
that morning, she was sure the cab driver would have tried to sneak a peek up her pencil skirt through the rearview mirror, but he was only concentrated on weaving through Tribeca traffic, trying to get Amabel to the Flatiron building quickly so he could pick up another fair with the sweet spot time frame for taking big tippers instead of tourists. From the back seat, she felt the unyielding speed of the city, so to slow things down, as she always did, she took out her mobile and checked in to see who was trying to be the first of her besties to beat her in
Words With Friends.

“You a damn ho! Hate you!! :
)” the text came through from her bestie who she’d just forced into submission with her second 7 tile play of the game. Most of the times she toyed with her friends throughout the game until she dropped the hammer. They were brief moments of fun and helped in meetings where men took turns flexing what they knew or bragged about how their fantasy football team was doing. The fact that she could talk smack with texts after playing a word, or just talk freely, helped take some of the worries and stress that came with being the Executive Creative Director of
Fortress
, the hottest digital ad agency in the city. Clients were drooling to be put in Amabel’s hands, but she had difficulty finding anyone in the corporate world that made her drool.

She
wished she could turn the cab around and just crawl back into her Hastens bed and enjoy the way the light came in through the new arch window she’d just had put in her loft. It would have been even better if there was a man in her huge bed to be lazy with all afternoon after getting worked up sexing each other, but there was nobody waiting outside of her daydreams, and that damn cab wasn’t about to turn around.

“Do you know how much
thought I put into finding the right kind of skirt today,” she said, trying to see if the cab driver was paying more attention to her or to whoever was on the other side of the Bluetooth he had seemingly attached to his ear. “I mean, I sat in front of the mirror and opened and closed my legs every way I could to make sure I wasn’t showing. You know what I mean?”

Nothing. The guy kept talking on the phone paying no attention to Amabel
’s openness in the back seat.  It wasn’t that long ago, before the big promotion, when she would take two trains in from Queens reading romance novels by Marcel Preston imagining a Harlequin world rising up around her. Her active imagination gave her some fantastic moments and mini-daydreams that never went further than a random brush-up on each of her rides.

Now she
had to depend on her peers for stimulation, which proved tough because they were all so obsessed with stimulating themselves with their own delusions of importance and an inane need to hear themselves speak.

As she got out of the cab and walked
through that last bit of fresh morning air before entering the Flatiron Building, she took notice of the breeze that went up her thighs and moved gently over her outer lips when she moved her legs. Every man she rode the elevator with thought the smile on her face was for them, but it was for the wind – the only entity that dared reach under her skirt and glide against her.

The doors to the elevator opened directly to
the office, which occupied the entire floor and was filled with natural light flowing in from the giant windows that looked over the city. It was an amazing place to work, and even better one to be in control of, but the only time Amabel ever saw it without someone jawing in her ear was on her first trip to her desk in the morning, which she walked towards with a subtle strut, keeping her full breasts rested inside of Natori plunge bras that played well with the silk blouses she wore freely around the office. The rest of the day, she was either in meetings with strategists and account people, or talking clients down off the ledge. The bottle of Bullet Rye she kept under her desk helped to deal with some of the stress.

The first meeting of the day was a big prep for the client presentation for the new social networking site – the
latest in a long line of electronic replacements for a good rub around the clitoris. Countless hours of strategy sessions passed with people talking just to be heard, caused her, like most women in offices who have to deal with the egos of men who never went anywhere with their dreams, to reach in to her
Words With Friends
game to keep her occupied and interested.

T
he head of strategy was making it past page 46 of his Power Point presentation and said the word
intuitive
for the 5
th
time, when she received and invite to play a game from Dominic Conrad, a copywriter who she’d hired a few months ago and had been doing breathtaking work despite his being the only head of hair sporting a little bit of salt and pepper that always seemed to have a lock falling out of place.

She remembered the interview and how
she wanted to brush it back where it belonged. When she asked him why he was still a copywriter at 40 years of age, he replied that he loved writing and hated the bullshit of managing. She hired him right on the spot, and remembered the firmness of his handshake – how the motion was strong but the bottom of his palms were tender.

His only condition when he got hired was that he didn’t want to be cooped up in the office, and though he’d be there for meetings when he needed to be,
he had to write around the city to be creative. When she saw the quality of work he was turning in, Amabel had no problem with his conditions, and appreciated his uniqueness in an office full of same-kind-of-cookie men.

He started out with the wor
d HUNTER. There was a small quiver that shook the inside of her thigh, and she was sure someone else might have felt that vibration, but subtle movements of pleasure were never noticed by the same cookie crowd. She countered with the word REVEL, and just as she submitted, a message came in from Dominic.

Looking forward to seeing how you play.

She responded with:

I’ve never been beaten.

She loved the little back and forth, then put her iPhone down and turned her attention back to the meeting, but when she did, she found the same mindless talking still going on. She stood up, straightened her Fendi skirt, and headed for the door.

“Where are you going Amabel
,” one of the other cookies said. “There’s still more of this presentation to get through.”

“When you start saying something I haven’t heard a million times before, you’ll have my full attention.
I’ll be ready for the presentation. Sometimes it’s best to leave something in the gun for when you shoot, you know what I mean? No, probably you don’t.”

His eyes glanced down to her blouse that was only
unbuttoned once at the top, but her breasts still pushed out the fabric enough to keep the other cookies eye’s searching for something between the spaces of the buttons.

She walked past the rest of the
men and women typing away at their desks trying to look busy, when her phone vibrated again. Dominic had sent in the word VENTURE, with another message:

Don’t be mad if I take you down. I’ll be gentle.

She smiled at both the word he played, as well as him mentioning being gentle –as gentleness never had much to do with strength or pain for Amabel. It was all about intent with her. The men she’d been with as of late never seemed to take their time. Sure, the first time they made love, it was gentle and slow, with him taking off everything slowly and touching her over the small shaved part of her perfect V so that the warmth of his fingers transferred to her skin and then made its way onto her, which turned on her moisture and opened her up enough to be ready for his entrance.

After a few times though, and after a few dinners, there was no slow taking off of clothes, no touching before entering, only waiting for the first hint of wetness before he did his business and rolled over to start thinking about what was next for him in the day.

Rather than go back to her desk, she went out to Madison Avenue and walked to Madison Square park enjoying the stimulation she received from the back and forth with Dominic’s game.

She smiled and looked around at the others wh
o seemed so free at the moment while lying on the lawn. A few women brushed back the hair of men lying in their laps.

Amabel
thought of what it might have been like to have Dominic out there – how he would find out that she wasn’t wearing any panties when he moved his head just right and rubbed against her while she looked up into the sun.

Her mobile
buzzed again, a new word from Dominic:

Rules

She played the word:

No

This time, a text came instead of a new word:

I don’
t have the letters to say what I feel, but if you want to stop with the games, meet me at room 408 in the Chelsea Hotel.

She didn’t need to think about it and was sick of looking at screens.
Amabel moved quickly out of the park, the tops of her thighs providing her own foreplay as she walked out down 23
rd
Street past all the people carrying their lunches back to their desks.

Amabel
picked up her pace crossing 7
th
Avenue. The sign for the Chelsea Hotel was a half a block away and looked like a dream inviting her to take a break from computers and lose herself in one of the last vintage establishments left in the city of New York. The feel and weight of the maroon paint on the walls and the black sign with white letters standing in front of those old balconies eased the stress in her neck. The closer she got, the more she felt the muscles in her thighs relaxing. Her entire body was starting to open, as if the hotel was providing a strong grip around her waist, pulling her into a midday adventure.

Finally
at the entrance, even the people hanging outside looked like they belonged to an old New York that had been swept away in the name of family tourism. It was all so authentic, real and thick in detail.

She
sauntered up to the desk clerk, who was actually wearing a suit and tie, something that was lost among the men in offices still thinking they were 19 years old.

“I’m su
pposed to meet someone in room 408,” she said, throwing her voice into a deep accent of an old spy making sure nobody noticed who she was. “Were you told?”

He smiled like he was playing th
e game, then slid her the key across the front desk. The sounds of the metal against the wood vibrated down her arm as she moved her hands to grab them, but she regained her composure and vanished into the old school elevator that she had to open and close by the steel gate.

The only other time she’d been in the Chelsea Hotel was when she was in her living room
as a 13 year old watching the
Sid and Nancy
and wishing someone would love her that much but not hurt her as much. For now, she’d settle for the continuing excitement she felt between her legs since the first minute Dominic started up their game.

As she got off on the
4th floor, the shadow from the old hotel sign blanketed the floor enough to cause a noir moment to fall across the path she needed to walk down to arrive at room 408. She walked down the red velvet lined halls and loved the way her heels felt sinking into the carpet just a bit until she found herself in front of room 408. Now some women might have had that moment when they thought to themselves –
No, no this isn’t me. I better turn around and not risk work relationships
. But Amabel Ignite wasn’t one of those kinds of women. She had been seeking this. What good was being plugged in to the madness of the city if you couldn’t go on adventures?