Chapter Four
She read it twice and then forwarded it to Jason with no message attached.
By noon she had an office.
It was small, an interior room with a window that looked onto the open floor rather than the city, a desk and two chairs and a whiteboard she hadn't written anything on yet. Not impressive by any measure, but it was a private office with a door and blinds.
Xavier appeared in the doorway at half past noon. He looked around the space once, orienting, and set a small laminated sign on her desk without ceremony.
She picked it up. DEEP WORK IN PROGRESS.
"Every person on my team with a private office gets one," he said.
"When you need uninterrupted focus, put it on the door.
Lock it. The sign tells the team you are unavailable and that boundary is respected absolutely.
Deep focus is what separates work that is merely done from work that is actually good. "
She nodded.
"I mean the lock literally," he said. "Not as a suggestion."
He was gone before she could respond.
The rest of Tuesday was onboarding. New systems, new access, new email signature with Account Executive beneath her name.
Wednesday she shadowed Jeff, one of the other AEs, through a client call and a briefing prep session.
He was efficient and patient with her questions and she absorbed what she could.
She had worn a skirt Tuesday. Then Wednesday. Then Thursday.
She had never worn skirts to work. Not once in three years at this agency.
She owned them, had bought them with good intentions and hung them in her closet and reached past them every morning for the trousers and fitted blazers that had always felt like the right armor for the job she was doing.
But the job had changed, and on Tuesday morning she had stood in front of her closet and reached for something different without fully examining why.
The skirts she pulled out were longer ones, midi-length, fitted through the hip in a way her trousers never were, paired with slightly more fitted blouses.
She told herself it was simply the nature of the new role.
Client-facing now. Presentation mattered.
Though if she was being honest with herself, and she was trying not to be, it might also have had something to do with the things Jason kept saying in the dark and the mantra Xavier kept saying to her.
He said it in the Thursday morning team meeting, though she suspected it wasn't the first time everyone else was hearing it given how often she’d heard it already.
"You are the product," he said. He was standing at the head of the table, scanning the room.
"You are the creative. Before a client hears a single pitch, before we show them one concept, they have already made a judgment about this agency based on the people sitting across from them.
You are the first impression. You are the scroll-stopping image or you are the one they keep scrolling past." He let that land.
"I need you to understand that the standard I hold for the work we produce is the same standard I hold for how this team presents itself.
We do not make forgettable creative and we do not send forgettable people into rooms with decision makers. "
Nobody said anything. Claire looked down at her notepad and wrote nothing and felt the words settle somewhere below professional comprehension.
You are the product. You are the creative.
She thought about it on the drive home Thursday night. Thought about Sandra Holloway and how Jason wanted her to dress like that. You would have made Sandra invisible. Thought about the way Xavier had looked at her in that first meeting, steady and total, and the mantra he kept repeating.
She did not connect these thoughts in any deliberate way. She just let them sit together in the dark of the car and drove home.
Friday morning she stood in front of her closet for longer than usual.
She reached past the midi skirts. Pulled out something she had bought two years ago and worn maybe once, a charcoal wrap skirt that hit just above the knee. Not short by any real standard. But shorter than anything she had worn to work before. She held it for a moment, then put it on.
In the bathroom mirror she saw immediately that it hugged her ass in a way the midi skirts hadn't, fitted and deliberate, putting the curve of her on full display. She looked longer than she needed to.
You are the product.
She wore it.
Xavier called her into his office at ten. He glanced at her skirt when she sat down, a brief deliberate look he made no effort to hide, and then met her eyes. "I'm noticing the effort," he said.
She felt it in her chest the whole time he was talking. The praise was small and she knew it was small and she wanted more of it anyway, which was its own uncomfortable thing to sit with.
"I have a prospect I want to bring you into," he said. "They are not a current client. I cultivated the relationship at my previous agency and they came with me when I moved. I want to run a pitch process in the next month and I want you on that team."
She had her pen ready.
"The brand is called Velour." He said it without particular emphasis.
"Lingerie. Their positioning goal is to become the American equivalent of Agent Provocateur.
High-end, unapologetic, creative that pushes as close to the line as platforms will allow, and sometimes over.
They want to stop people cold. Their brief is about desire and they are not interested in playing it safe. "
She wrote the name down.
"I am sending you a file this afternoon.
Campaign references, brand assets, some Agent Provocateur material they have identified as directional.
I want your first impressions before we get into strategy.
" He glanced at her skirt, briefly, the way he glanced at everything.
"Use your deep work time. Lock the door.
You need to be able to sit with this material without interruption. "
She thanked him and went back to her office and waited.
The file arrived at half past three.
She put the sign on her door, stepped back inside, and turned the lock.
The click of it was very quiet in the empty office.
She sat down and opened the folder.
The still images came first. Agent Provocateur campaign photography, high-gloss and unapologetic.
Women in intricate lingerie in various states of undress, their expressions not coy but direct, fully aware of being looked at and entirely unbothered by it.
Black silk. Pale skin. The camera close on a woman's thighs, her ass, the lace edge of something barely covering her.
Claire scrolled through them with professional consideration, noting composition, lighting, the tension the images created.
Then she opened the first video file.
Love Me Tender.
She clicked play without reading anything more about it and within ten seconds understood she was not watching a standard campaign asset.
The setting was an office. A woman in black lingerie, her body impossible to look away from in it, her dark hair loose, moving toward a man in a suit who was seated at a desk.
The way she moved was not subtle. The way she lowered herself into his lap was not subtle. Claire's hand went still on her mouse.
The woman ground against him through his pants. Claire watched it in her locked office, and the heat rose in her face and then moved lower.
The ad ended with a punch and a one-liner about Valentine's Day and the agency logo and Claire sat there for a moment after the screen went dark just breathing.
She clicked the second file.
Tied Up at the Office.
A woman alone at a desk in amber late-afternoon light, on the phone, the conversation low and suggestive and not about work. One hand held the phone. The other traveled down the front of her open blouse, down her stomach, lower.
Claire shifted in her chair.
The woman put her heels up on the edge of the desk and her hand went to the front of her panties, and Claire's breath caught because she could not believe what she was watching, could not believe an actual brand had produced this, could not believe Xavier had sent it to her.
She did not stop watching.
On screen, another woman walked into the office, froze when she registered what she'd interrupted, and then the scene cut forward: the first woman now bound to the chair in nothing but lingerie, her bra peeled down, her tits completely exposed.
Claire felt her own nipples harden against her blouse.
The second woman's mouth moved between the bound woman's thighs, and the woman in the chair strained against the binding, and Claire's hand dropped to her lap before she could think better of it.
She pressed her palm between her legs over the charcoal skirt. She could feel her own heat through it.
When the video ended she sat in the silence of her locked office, wet, at work, her hand still between her thighs, losing control of her own body.
She opened the next folder.
This one wasn’t reference material. It was Velour's own campaign assets. Photoshoot images, a female model in the brand's lingerie. Black lace. An office setting. The model was extraordinary, her body offered up to the camera in each image, her expressions ranging from languid to openly wanting.
Claire scrolled.
A boardroom table, the model seated on it, legs slightly open, the lingerie doing almost nothing to cover her. A corridor shot, her hand trailing the wall, looking back over her shoulder at something the camera implied rather than showed.
Then the image that stopped her scrolling entirely.
The model bent forward over a desk, the lingerie riding up over the curve of her ass. A man in a suit behind her, his hand raised, her expression caught in the precise moment between anticipation and impact.
Claire's thighs squeezed around her own hand.