Chapter 11
Bridget
It was another few days of Victoria not looking at me until, one morning, out of the blue, I found her not cleaning up from her own breakfast but sitting on the floor in the living room with the coffee table drawer removed, the one that had been stuck, and she was using a pair of pliers to fix what looked like a warped track for the drawer. She took a long breath and looked at me, and she smiled in a way that made my insides tangle, that kind of breath-stealingly sweet smile I hadn’t seen on her since Saturday.
“Good morning,” she said. “I got the orange scones you liked before. I thought you could use them after your run-in with my family.”
“Um… hi.” I think I’d slipped and fallen into another timeline. “When did you do that?”
“I was up early this morning, so I figured I’d just go do it while the thought was on my mind. They’re in the kitchen, andI can join you to have some in one minute. If you like. If you’d prefer I stuck to trying to fix this drawer, then I can stay here instead.”
I stared for a minute longer before I knelt on the rug next to her. She had music on again, that soft jazz we both liked, and with the low lights and the smell of orange and cinnamon, it felt impossibly blissful. I felt like this was a trap. “You’re… fixing my furniture.”
“You’d mentioned this thing had been stuck for a long time and you just stopped using the drawer, right?” She held up the track, unscrewed from inside. “The culprit is right here. I took it out and I’ve been working on getting it straight again. It’s almost done. What exactly did you do to bang it up so badly?”
I’d put too much of my weight on the drawer while it was open for a position I was fucking myself in. “No idea,” I said. “Maybe sabotaged by the enemies of the regime.”
She laughed. “Well, you now have an amateur engineer on your side, so, lucky for you and for your despotic overlords.”
“Why are you fixing my drawer?”
She sighed, her demeanor flipping like a switch, and she dropped the pliers and the track onto the rug, putting a hand to her head. “Because,” she said, her voice making it clear she’d practiced saying this, “I want to make it clear I know I was wrong. I wanted to apologize for my demeanor over the past few days.”
I let out a whoosh of air, and a nervous laugh, as I settled down on the rug with her. “I’m not looking for an apology,” I said. “I’ve just been worried about you. All I’m looking for is to know whether you’re okay. And if there’s anything I can do for you.”
“I’m… perfectly fine. It’s my own issues brought about by my own deeds.”
“Okay, Sartre, very poignant. Do you want to elaborate?”
She sighed, looking down at where she fussed with the things on the floor. “I apologize for… overstepping and ignoring your very clear implications that you want privacy. But I, er, well… found out what exactly your work is.”
“Oh—” I felt my stomach drop through the floor, hands cold, as I swallowed hard. “Oh,” I said again. “Oh, okay.” How much had she looked at? She wouldn’t have had to look far to know that I’d masturbated in every room of this apartment. Including hers. “Um… do we have, like, an issue now?” I said, trying to sound casual.
She winced. I think we had an issue. “I mean, there’s nothing wrong with, er… that…”
God, even when she was trying to let me down easy, she was just so pretty and so perfect, it ached. “If you don’t want to live with me anymore and you’re weirded out by it, I mean, that’s fair. I probably should have been upfront.” Oh, god, did she see how much I’d been posting things aboutsexy office girlssince she’d moved in with me? If she had any idea how many times I’d fantasized about her…
“No, that’s not the problem,” she said, voice strained, a hand to her forehead.
“What… what is?” I already knew the answer, it was that she knew I’d been making content lately as an outlet for how badly I wanted to fuck her, like a creep, like I was no different from her asshole of a boss who wanted to take advantage of—
“The problem is that I masturbated to your video and now I can’t look you in the eye,” she blurted, slapping my train of thought clear off the tracks and leaving me staring. Victoria blushed violently, covering her face, as she kept her gaze focused on the floor. “I know Ishouldn’thave,” she said, rambling now, “but I couldn’t get it out of myheadand I’ve been… well, I guess I’ve been out of it so long and—I grew up with very puritanical views on these things, and so it was something I didn’t have themental tools how to handle, and it was… I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I thought… I don’t know what I thought,” she mumbled, her voice trailing off. “I don’t know what to say right now. Do you want me to just leave?”
Victoria Jameson had gotten off watching me. Holy shit.Iwas suddenly unbearably turned on, and I’d just gotten myself off half an hour ago. Thinking of her… in that room, watching a video of me, touching herself… holy shit. “Which video?”
She gave me a desperate look. “Which video?”
“If you, uh, don’t mind sharing. You know, I just love… analytics.” I squirmed a little. I’d never been this horny in my life. She looked mortified, horrified, and she put a hand to her forehead, looking away.
“Oh my god. I am so sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Are you going to tell me, or what?”
“The… it was the…” She put both hands over her face. “The one in the… kitchen.”
“Which one?”
“There’s multiple?”
