Gulp! I take a swig of the office watercooler water. Refreshing. I muse. So far, it’s been business as usual in the office. Papers and meetings and such. Yep, it was a normal day like any other…until it wasn’t.

“Hey four eyes, what do you think of that trash can?” A catlike, mocking, and just plain confident voice echoes down the office hallway. Jenna, the office bully I internally growl. Jenna’s wearing her usual getup, a white latex bodysuit that displays her prominent bosom with a tan blazer, dark gray slacks, and bright red high heels. Her belt leaves little to the imagination. Two less notable pairs of footsteps accompany her, no doubt her cronies Becka and Ella. One adult mean girl is bad enough, but alongside her two pets? A chore, to say the least.

Ugh. Blow me a river. I brood. If she wasn’t my boss, I would’ve reported her to HR years ago.

Still, I know I must maintain my composure (even if she is the worst). Smoothing out my angry expression with an inhale, and putting on my most natural looking cheery smile with an exhale, I toss my now empty paper cup into the trash. Slam dunk! I celebrate. I adjust my glasses and give Jenna, whose last name is Zhang, a polite wave. 

“I think the trash can is perfectly adequate, Ms. Zhang. Its structure is cuboidal-esque, making it optimal for slotting neatly into just about any office corne—GH!”

My evaluation gets cut short when Jenna, who is my boss and the office bully, slams her palm into the collar of my shirt. This similarly slams me into the corner of the watercooler room, where she slides her hand upwards against the wall, pinning me in the air against the aforementioned wall like a little, helpless, and submissive kitten held up by its scruff. Jenna smirks evilly. With a snap of Jenna’s free hand, Becka slides the trash can under my feet. With a flick of Jenna’s head and a whistle, Celia brings forth two handfuls of paper scraps and dumps them into the previously almost empty trashcan that is now under me. Becka and Celia reassume their positions at Jenna’s left and right side respectively, faces alight with chittering laughter.

“Cronies! Scram.” Jenna commands as she steps on the ground, clicking her sharp—and femininely wileful—stiletto heels on the aforementioned ground. Becca and Celia skitter off, not passing up the opportunity to point and laugh amongst themselves at my compromising, and dare I say, humiliating position. Once they leave, closing the door to the watercooler room and putting a DO NOT ENTER sign on a recently purchased command hook, Jenna locks her gaze to mine, tightening her grip on me possessively and using her free hand, which she had once used to snap at Celia, to hold my chin between her thumb and forefinger.

“Look at you…~” Jenna purrs, petting my cheek with her two sharp acrylic nails on her ring and pinky fingers while still holding my chin with the other two and a half fingers. I’m in the trash can right now so she has to bend down from the hip to reach me. Damn her sexy sexy hypermobility! 

“A little mousey nerd just for me…” Jenna removes her hands from my molecular structure, now standing at her full height with her hands groping her tits in a workplace-appropriate manner. “And it’s almost lunchtime!”

Jenna’s coily hair dances in the breeze of the office air conditioning. “Look here, Treebert Santos.”

I timidly raise a pointer finger and adjust my glasses. “I-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-It’s actually Oak, Ms. Zhang.” I bite back tears. Damn she’s good.

Jenna rolls her eyes an approximate 360 degrees, or two pi radians. “Look here, Oakbert Santos. Either you start putting in a bit of unpaid overtime to do my homework.” She drops a pile of labor-intensive-esque papers in front of my trash can. “Or I forgo my pescitarian diet and eat YOU. Whole. Permanent-style. I’ll give you five seconds. Five.”

I gulp and sweat fearfully, while Jenna leans back down to grab each of my shoulders with a different hand. That is to say, one hand to each shoulder. I bite my lip submissively as I begin to weigh my options. 

“Four…”

Do I run for it? I might trip over myself, and break my glasses. 

“Three…”

Do I fight her? Jenna is hypermobile and I’m not. She’d pound me for sure…

“Two…”

Do I find a new job? The perks here are too good! We have team huddles with guest lecturers and sometimes have days where we come to work in pajamas. Damn it! I can’t lose this job.

“One…”

Suddenly, I remember the app I have been developing. What Jenna doesn’t know is that all of my hours of unpaid overtime and cunning business acumen attracted attention from corporate, namely the CEO’s personal friend. This personal friend of the CEO’s name, it turned out, was Hypno Spiralson-Cummington, heir to the Spiralson-Cummington fortune. With generations of money accrued from pendulum manufacturing and distribution, Hypno told me that she had a new business venture in mind and that she wanted me in on the ground floor. Now, I didn’t know what it was at the time, but she wanted me to develop an app. And over the course of several years I had been developing this app, I came to understand that Hypno’s interest was in controlling other people. I don’t know how, or through what methods, or in what course of action, or which processes of getting there this app would control a person, but all you had to do was enter their name. Fortunately, as a mobile developer I had a prototype of the app on my phone. Unfortunately, it was a different phone than my personal phone. Fortunately, I had both on me as I like to bring both to the watercooler so that later I could look at my step counter app I had also invented at a previous job and pretend that I had gotten double the steps in over the duration of my jaunt. Cheap tricks, I know, but it seems my vice was paying off! I take out my phone, realize I grabbed my personal phone instead of my app-testing phone, put back the aforementioned phone to get out the app-testing phone, successfully took out the app-testing phone, open the app, wait for it to load, smirk as the app successfully loaded (I was on a roll), enter the name ‘Jenna Zhang’ into the textbox, close the keyboard, and press a button to submit the name (I hadn’t yet enabled form submission via the keyboard or pressing enter, so this would have to do for now). I then pray for something, anything, to happen that would show Jenna the what-for.

“Zero. What will it be, dweeb?”

Suddenly, the watercooler room doorbell rang. Jenna eyes me suspiciously before stepping back to check the peephole. From the look on her face, she hadn’t seen anyone…which explains why she jumps back in surprise when a note slips through the watercooler room mail slot. The note was contained in a spiral-pattern envelope. Little black spirals coated with iridescent ink, glittering like dragonfly wings under the soft, flickering white light of the watercooler room LEDs. Please let this work! I silently cry out in my head, which is on my body, which is in a trash can.

“Calling for backup, Santos?” Jenna sneers. “Paper won’t save you here. Not in the watercooler room, where things tend to get…” her voice softens to a raspy snarl “...wet.”

I adjust my glasses, watching as she methodically plucks the letter from the floor with just her right middle and pointer fingers. Damn, she’s good! I exclaim in my head. She slices the package open with a single painted pinky claw, extracting the letter and brandishing it with an unamused shake. But when she begins to read, some part of my intuition tells me that it’ll be enough to save me. That her fate is etched in ink.

Jenna’s eyes dart left to right, line to line, focused with the urgency of someone trying to gauge the distance between them and a tornado. She clutches her forehead, wincing but still reading. Her eyes dart back and forth and back again, like waves against the shore. Back and forth, like a fishing boat caught in a tsunami. There is no trash can. There is no watercooler. There are no papers. The world is a landless water-dark expanse and I am her keeper. I watch her drown from a bird’s eye view.

“Santos!”

I blink to find that I’m somewhere else entirely. I adjust my glasses, turning towards the warm voice that called my name. It’s night. The moon is a waning crescent and the stars…the stars are alive. Is this what the sky looks like without light pollution? I never understood our species fascination with the cosmos, but in this moment I know that god is real and terrifying. We’re on a curb outside of some gas station. Me and Jenna. Me and…

She pushes me on my back, my head landing in the soft grass with forceful precision. Though her face is obscured by shadow, her eyes reflect the glow of the celestial light. She pushes her lips to mine as I moan in shock and pleasure. Her tongue swipes the length of my lower gums, then pushes back, back, back until I’m sure that I will choke.

“I love you.” She whispers from the corners of her mouth. “I love you I love you I love you I love you I–”

We’re on a couch in someone’s living room and she’s handed me her phone. She stares at nothing while I read text message after text message in a group chat simply titled “everyone”. I see the name of her mom, dad, and a few of her cousins and aunties, but most are unnamed phone numbers. The group chat was formed a few days ago, when her grandma was hit by a drunk driver at a cross walk. Today she has died.

I hand the phone back to Jenna and wrap my arm around her, running my fingers through her curly black hair. She turns to me, as if to say something, but nothing comes out. 

“I-”

She avoids my gaze, eyes glossy.

“I didn’t go see her”

The water in her eyes bubbles with unbroken surface tension. I use my other arm to pull her closer, hugging her head to my chest. Her body is tense, like a limb about to snap. She breathes fast, faster, then faster still. Suddenly, she grabs both of my shoulders and looks up at me in desperation.

“I didn’t think she’d–”

All pretense is lost as she collapses limp, unable to finish her sentence. She sobs into me, a pained animal wail that could only come from a creature that thought it was dying. Her face is wet with snot and tears and slime as she starts to gasp from pain and lack of breathing. It’s all I can do to hold her, to place my head in her hair and tell her that I love her. I pull my legs on the couch and she curls up between them, head buried in my torso. I lean over her. She nestles into me. For a moment, she is safe. As if, surrounded by my body, death itself could not hurt her.

We’re in her apartment now. Her bed is a mattress on a floor without a bedframe. She is wearing a bra and underwear while I am shirtless in a pair of athletic shorts. I’m straddling her, hands planted next to each shoulder. She’s been here many times but never like this. And never with me. I lower my face to hers. Her heartbeat is racing. How can it move this fast without killing her?

She stares at me with question in her eyes. Will you hurt me? Was I right to trust you? Do you know how much you could ruin my life right now? I don’t have answers, at least none worth saying out loud. All I know is that we both want this. 

I run my mouth against her jugular vein, kissing and biting until I reach the underside of her jaw. I blow a puff of air into her ear as I nibble her earlobe. She giggles in surprise and I smile in turn. My hand traces from her shoulder, to her chest, down her obliques, and finally onto her right abductor. Reflex causes her to shiver. I rest my hand on the hem of her underwear and look to her expression. She doesn’t say anything, but starts to nod. She takes off her bra while I delicately pull down her underwear. She uses her legs to help push it off. And now she is naked. Vulnerable and completely exposed. She is hungry; I am her keeper.

I twirl a finger around a lock of her pubic hair and give it a slight tug. Again, she laughs in surprise. I gently rub the area of injury before leaning down to kiss her bush. Her fingers and toes curl into the mattress.

“Keep going.”

I bring my focus between her legs and simply sit with what I see. She doesn’t shave; strands of pubic hair poke out from her inner thighs. Her labia minora protrudes outwards, a little wrinkled and a little off center. I look back up at her face to see her open eyes, enchanted and terrified.

I place my hand against her vulva. It’s warm. A bit sweaty. Positioning my pointer and middle fingers on opposite sides of her clitoris, I take my time stroking down towards her perineum before circling around the rim of her anus, fingers slick and cold. This alone causes her to convulse, body twisting against itself while I hold stable. She reminds me of her hypermobility when I see her thigh momentarily stretch past her knee. 

“Keep going.”

I suck and bite her nipple while palming her pubic mound. We move back and forth in undulation. She needs this. She wants this. I tell her she’s perfect, that she’s beautiful, that there’s no one I want but her. 

That I love her.

“Santos…” 

She says my name like it’s the only thing that matters.

“Santos….”

My name like I’m the only one that matters.

“Santos…..”

Like I control her.

An alarm blares and flashes.

Is blaring. And is flashing.

The LEDs are bright. The watercooler room I muse in confusion. I am in a trash can and Jenna is holding a letter. Tears are pouring from her eyes and I honestly can’t deal with that right now so I get up from the trash can in order to evacuate the premises. If I’m right—which I often am, I muse in certainty—there probably was a microwave accident in the microwave room, the room where we keep our microwaves. We’d usually be safe from fire in the watercooler room, because it’s so wet, but safety protocol mandates that we go outside to our designated “not a real fire but we still have to go outside” waiting area.

“Ghh—oops!” I cry as I stumble over the stack of papers Ella dropped in front of my trash can. Jenna turns to me with a look of desperation as if I was the first person she’d seen in a thousand years. I cautiously step past her and put my hand on the door handle.

“After you, Ms. Zhang.” I offer.

She passes me, but stops to rest her hand on mine, squeezing it slightly.

“It’s Jenna, Oak.”

With that, she leaves the room and I shortly follow.