Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms (4 page)

And this brings us to ‘the line’.

My job description—as written by my grandfather, personally— contains just three words, though one is a contraction. ‘Don’t get sued.’

So you might be wondering why I didn’t simply exit the viewing room once the water bottle had made its interest in me known and put an end to the relationship quickly and cleanly with a minimum of water bottle sex. Any sane man would have. The answer to that is quite simple really: I am not sane. And besides that, more tellingly, I wanted to continue looking at Ms. Nuckeby.

Hence-o, Facto, Problemo.

I’d seen many a beautiful woman in my years with the family business; a high percentage had been erection-worthy. But there was something
electric
about Ms. Nuckeby that clearly revved up the old lust-engine where others had left it merely idling in park.

Even now, here in my office several minutes later as I stood shaking out the front of my trousers in an effort to—I don’t know, give the water molecules a ride—I was still fighting my way out of the ‘undergrowth’.

“Your grandfather’s going to be furious,” said Mrs. Abrososa, watching me pace in a failed attempt to hide my obvious and continuing attraction to Ms. Nuckeby.

What was in that water bottle, topical Viagra?

“Furious? Why?” I asked, stunned, and somewhat frightened. Being at Wopplesdown Struts and hearing the words ‘Grandfather’, and ‘furious’ conjoined was a lot like being lost in the jungle while wearing barbecue sauce and hearing ‘lion’, and ‘ravenous’ in the same sentence. It instilled the kind of reaction the makers of incontinence briefs live for. “Why furious?”

“You just did a pole dance with a water bottle in front of a naked girl. A naked girl
employee
.”

“It was an accident! I didn’t do it on purpose!” I studied her for a moment. “You were there. You don’t think I
planned
that, do you?”

“No, I don‘t think you
planned
that,” she said, irritated, as if she were a motherly sixty-year-old woman, and I was headstrong child, young enough to be her…

Suddenly our relationship made much more sense.

“But don’t you think,” she continued, “you should have called off the meeting—maybe unstuck little Corky there and not made her stand around and watch you do…whatever it was you were doing?”

I gasped. I steadied myself against the desk. I looked around the room for a clearly marked exit.

“Make her
stand
there?” I said. “I didn’t
make
her…” I paused. I studied my secretary-slash-mother-figure and slowly felt sadness and fear overwhelm me as I realized she was right.

“Well, I didn’t
mean
to.”

“What
did
you mean to do?”

“Nothing. I just…” I paused, unsure if I should admit it, then suddenly realized that in retrospect maybe it wasn’t all my fault. “She could have walked out.”

“Don’t be such a Wopplesdown!”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re being a sexist pig! She couldn’t have walked out! You’re her
boss!
Her employment hinges on staying and doing what
you
tell her to do—even if it makes her uncomfortable! Do you understand that this is why they call it
harassment
?”

Well, I did
now
.

“Oh, God. Really?”

Her expression said: ‘Yes, dumbass. Really.’ She could be brilliantly nonverbal, Mrs. Abrososa.

“Oh, God,” I repeated. “What have I done? This isn’t what I wanted, I just… ” I looked at her sheepishly and decided to just get it out there—as if it wasn’t already. “I’ve just never seen anyone so beautiful in my life. I didn’t want either of us to leave. I just wanted to stay there, and…be near her.”

Mrs. Abrososa’s sarcastic demeanor faded, and she studied me with deepening sympathy. After a tender moment, she moved closer and put a gentle hand on my shoulder, looking me in the eye with genuine affection.

“What are you, an idiot?”

I flinched, physically.

“That’s how it always starts!” she said and smacked the side of my head. “Men
never
mean to. But they still
do!
They
like it, and they don’t think about the woman! This is why we need laws—and more lady judges appointed by Democrats!” She put her hands on her hips and glared at me. “That girl was
naked!
Vulnerable! And you made her stand there and watch you with your dick in a bottle! You think she found that attractive? I sure didn’t. If she doesn’t sue you, I should!”

Blood left my brain. My knees wobbled. My breathing shortened. I could already feel Grandfather approaching with my severance package in his right hand and a one-way ticket to shantytown in his left. I had no job skills. No interests. I would be homeless, and probably still erect. I wondered how much money one could make as a male prostitute. Maybe Mervin Wosserman could point me in the right direction.

Mrs. Abrososa was right. Unfortunately for me, and our family coffers, staying to enjoy Ms. Nuckeby’s immense beauty while performing ‘Live Sex Show with Plastic Container’ could also be interpreted as ‘intent to further inflict suffering, and harm’ by the sort of masterful legal minds who spend their days handing out business cards at funerals. At its simplest level, my staying in the Garment Viewing Room might have seemed innocently lecherous. But there’s another, very fine line between innocent and
stupid
, and I think it’s becoming rather obvious that I am on the other side of that particular line.

The…er…stupid side.

Quite plainly, I am not in a position to judge the ‘reality’ of the situation. I am too close to it. And I am a man.

If you’re not a man—and I’ll assume some of you may not be, or are unsure—you may not have experienced precisely how incoherent a male can become when confronted with an object of immense desire, and/or female, so I’ll try to make this as visual as I can. Are you familiar with how cattle are slaughtered for their meat? Do you have access to the Internet? What happens to a heterosexual man in the presence of a deeply attractive woman is really quite similar to what happens when meat producers fire those bolt-gun things into the unsuspecting brains of a cow: instantaneous brain death followed by several minutes of wide-eyed tongue lolling, and mindless squirming. It’s enough to make one a vegetarian. Or celibate.

Jokes seem funnier, especially your own, the sun shines brighter, and what happens for the woman really doesn’t enter into it.

Given all this, surprising as it may be to you, in my line of work until today I had never felt the need to impregnate a Sparkletts bottle. Even with the seemingly endless parade of stunning young nubiles that have wandered up, and down the halls of Wopplesdown Struts, I have managed to avoid—aside from the occasional brief stiffy—any more significant attraction, and the resultant gibbering, thrashing, and lawsuits that proceed therefrom. Because for some reason, in order to overcome my intense, mind-numbing shyness, and fear of failure in order to actually
approach
a woman,
I
—until
today
—needed to be stimulated by a woman’s
mind,
as well as her body. My grandfather believes this is because I am a homosexual.

So in my case, the fact that I have found some woman
a
ttractive
—debilitatingly so, even without so much as knowing her political affiliation—and have managed to overcome my innate insecurity and forced her to remain in my presence while I kept throttling my bottle, so to speak, puts me way,
way
,
way
over that damned line I mentioned earlier, and into a part of the world where English is, at best, a second language. Worse still, even now—as lawyers’ numbers are likely being speed-dialed throughout the building—I am continuing to feel a junkie’s desire to rub up against poor Ms. Nuckeby while removing Satin-Lace-Babydoll # 43 with my tongue, entirely convinced that she might find it appealing.

Brain-bolted indeed.

‘But…’ you ask, being the romantic that you are, ‘…isn’t it possible, by some miracle not yet known to modern science, that she might actually
want you too
?’ HA! You obviously know nothing about me.

Beyond that, there is a
reason
the number of company lawsuits far,
far
exceeds the number of successful model/boss relationships at Wopplesdown Struts (the actual number of the latter being zero.) Take a moment to refer back to my job description. I’ll wait.