Chapter Six
She had spent the weekend telling herself a reasonable story.
The survey was a standard onboarding tool.
She had reviewed it on a Friday afternoon after spending an hour watching provocative campaign materials for a lingerie client and she had been horny and reading everything through that particular lens.
The questions were about professional development and leadership philosophy and working style.
Normal things. The kind of thing HR departments sent to new hires at agencies everywhere.
She had projected onto it because of the state she was in and the state she was in had nothing to do with Xavier and everything to do with forty minutes of Agent Provocateur films in a locked office.
She had almost convinced herself of this by Saturday morning.
Almost.
The problem was Jason. The things he had said in bed Saturday night, his mouth at her ear, his voice dropping into something she didn't fully recognize.
Xavier's name coming out of him like something he had been holding back and then couldn't anymore.
Her body answering it the way it had been answering everything connected to Xavier Morrow for two weeks now, immediately and without her permission.
She had come so hard she couldn't speak afterward and had lain there in the dark beside her husband feeling like a passenger in her own skin.
She was carrying something else. Friday afternoon, his name on her phone screen, her hand under her skirt. She had silenced the call. Turned back to the survey with her fingers still wet and kept going until she came with her hand pressed to her mouth.
She had submitted the survey after. Sat in the quiet office with the feeling of someone who had done something they cannot undo and is not sure they want to.
She had driven home and kissed Jason hello and said nothing.
Now it was Monday morning and the secret was sitting in her chest with its own particular weight and she could not tell anymore if what she felt about it was shame or something considerably worse than shame.
The survey was a standard onboarding tool.
* * *
She opened her closet and reached for the charcoal skirt, the one that hit two inches above her knee, and paired it with a fitted navy top that showed nothing but followed the shape of her in a way her old work clothes never had.
She stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself and thought about Xavier's voice in her office on Friday.
I'm noticing the effort.
She wore it.
The compliment, if it could be called that, had been sitting in her chest all weekend.
Small and insufficient and somehow worse for being insufficient, the dissatisfaction of being given just enough to want more.
She had told herself that was a normal professional response to feedback from a new manager. By Sunday night she had stopped trying.
Monday morning Xavier passed her in the corridor outside the conference room and glanced at the skirt and didn’t mention it and she felt it like a physical thing, the absence of it, and then hated herself for feeling it and went into the conference room and sat down and opened her laptop and was completely professional for the rest of the meeting.
Tuesday she wore the black mid-thigh skirt for the first time.
She had put it on and taken it off twice before she left the house.
It was significantly shorter than anything she had owned three weeks ago and it pulled tight across her ass in a way that she was aware of every time she moved.
She paired it with a fitted white blouse, nothing low cut, nothing that could be called anything other than professional, and told herself the skirt was simply part of the new wardrobe and wearing it was simply doing her job.
She wore it into Xavier's ten o'clock briefing and sat across the table from him and watched him not look at her skirt for the first forty minutes and then look, once, briefly, when she stood to write something on the whiteboard.
She felt his eyes on the back of her thighs and kept writing and did not turn around until she was finished.
After the meeting he stopped her at the door.
"Strong instincts on the Velour positioning," he said. "You understood the brief faster than I expected."
She thanked him.
"The presentation Thursday," he said. "I want you leading the open."
She nodded and said of course and walked back to her office and closed the door and stood there for a moment with her hand flat on the surface of her desk.
He had not said anything about the skirt.
He had given her something better. He had given her more responsibility by telling her I want you leading the open.
She sat down and opened her laptop and crossed her legs under her desk and tried to focus on something that was not the way his voice had sounded when he said I want you.
Wednesday she wore the forest green mid-thigh skirt with the silk button-down.
She knew before she left the house what the silk did.
She had stood in that boutique dressing room and watched the fabric pull across her chest and bought it anyway and now she was wearing it to work with a mid-thigh skirt and her hair down and heels she had not worn to this office before and she stood at the mirror in the front hallway and said quietly to herself the thing that had started saying itself without her permission every morning.
You are the product.
She drove to work.
Xavier saw her at eleven when she stopped by his office to drop off the Velour preliminary deck. He looked up from his desk when she appeared in the doorway and his eyes moved over her once, the same brief assessment he gave everything, and then he took the deck from her hand.
"This is good work," he said, paging through it. "Very good."
She said thank you.
"How does it feel," he said, not looking up from the deck, "being client-facing after three years in project management?"
"It feels good," she said. And then, because she desperately wanted his validation and gaze: "Am I doing better at representing the product and creative?”
He looked up at that. Held her eyes and then scanned her body for just a moment.
"You are," he said. “I noticed. It suits you.”
She went back to her office and did not put the deep work sign up and did not review any materials.
She just sat there, heart still racing from the brief weight of his attention, already replaying it, already wanting more of it, and made herself open her laptop before she lost the next twenty minutes to it entirely.
Thursday of the second week she woke up and looked at her closet and felt something she could only describe as exhaustion.
A tiredness of two weeks of intention, of standing in front of a mirror every morning and assembling a version of herself and carrying that version into a building and feeling it being noticed and evaluated only to be found progressing but not yet sufficient.
She was tired of it. She reached past everything she had bought at the boutique and pulled out a pair of tailored grey trousers and a soft ivory blouse that she had owned for two years and wore at least once a week before the promotion.
She looked like herself. The previous version of herself. The project manager version.
She drove to work.
Xavier had two interactions with her on Thursday.
The first was a brief hallway exchange about the afternoon client call, logistical, thirty seconds, his eyes on her face the entire time.
Not on her clothes. Not the assessment she had become accustomed to.
Just her face, the way he looked at anyone he was exchanging information with.
The second was a late afternoon check-in about the Velour deck revisions. He sat across from her in her office and went through her notes and offered two suggestions and thanked her for the quick turnaround and left.
That was it.
No pause at the door. No held eye contact. No brief word at the end of a meeting that landed somewhere below her sternum and stayed.
She sat at her desk after he left and looked at the closed door and tried to locate the part of herself that found this preferable.
The normal part of her that didn't need his attention, that the wardrobe was about the role, that the way his praise landed had nothing to do with why she kept reaching for shorter skirts.
That part should have been relieved. A normal Thursday.
A professional interaction with her manager. Exactly what she should have wanted.
She felt invisible to him and she hated it and she hated that she hated it.
She drove home in the grey trousers and the ivory blouse and sat in traffic and did not turn the radio on and had a conversation with herself that she lost comprehensively by the time she pulled into her driveway.
Friday morning she stood in front of her closet for a long time.
She had something in mind and was trying to talk herself out of it and making no progress.
She pulled out the black mid-thigh skirt, and then she reached for the low cut black top she had bought at the boutique and held them both and looked at herself in the mirror before she even put them on, just stood there holding them, and had one last reasonable argument with herself about the difference between dressing for a role and dressing for a person.
The conversation ended the way Thursday had ended. With her already knowing what she was going to do.
She put them on.
The top was lower than anything she had worn to the office.
Not exactly indecent. Not Sandra territory, not yet, but a visible departure from everything she had worn in the weeks prior.
She looked at herself in the mirror; the top showed a lot of her breasts, the skirt hit mid-thigh, and with the heels on, she barely recognized the woman looking back. Nothing like the grey trousers.
You are the product. You are the creative.
Her nipples were hard before she left the house. She told herself it was the cold.
* * *
The morning passed without Xavier.
He was in back to back external calls until noon and she did not see him and she was aware of not seeing him the way you are aware of a sound that stops, the presence of an absence.
She focused on the Velour deck and answered three client emails and reviewed Jeff’s briefing notes for the afternoon presentation and tried not to think about Xavier Morrow.
She thought about Xavier Morrow.
The presentation was at two. The full team plus Xavier at the head of the table and two clients from a regional account on a video screen.
Claire led the open the way he had asked her to, fifteen minutes, the positioning strategy and the creative rationale and the media framework, and she felt herself settle into it the way she always settled into things she was good at, the nerves burning off in the first two minutes and the clarity coming in behind them.
She was aware of her body in a way she had never been during a presentation before. The top, fitted and low cut, the lowest she had worn to the office, and she could feel where men's eyes went every time she shifted, the brief drop before they caught themselves and looked back at the screen.
When it came time to advance the slides she had her clicker in hand and did not use it.
She leaned over the table toward the laptop instead, reaching for the trackpad, and felt her tits push together and spill forward against the fabric, fully on display from the angle every man at that table now had, and she did not straighten up any faster than she needed to.
She stood at the front of the room and presented herself just as much as the deck and felt every eye in the room on her body and felt, underneath the professional competence, the other thing, the thing she had not had a name for until Xavier put it on a survey.
I hate to even admit it and would never say so publicly, but I privately like the attention and it heightens everything for me.
She had selected D.
She was selecting it right now, in front of a room, in a black mid-thigh skirt and a low cut top, and she was the best version of herself professionally and she knew it and Xavier knew it and the clients on the screen were nodding before she finished her sentences and the room was entirely hers.
She did not look at Xavier directly during the presentation. She didn't need to.
* * *
He called her into his office at four.
She had been expecting it and had spent two hours since the presentation deciding how to carry herself through it and still felt her elevated pulse when she knocked and pushed the door open.
He was at his desk. He gestured to the chair across from him and she sat and waited.
"The presentation this afternoon," he said. He looked at her steadily. "Walk me through how you felt it went."
She did. Concisely, honestly, noting the two moments she thought had landed strongest and the one transition she wanted to sharpen for the next version.
He listened without interrupting.
When she finished he was quiet for a moment.
Then he said, "The clients were engaged from the first minute.
The regional lead asked a follow-up question about the media framework that told me he was already thinking about implementation.
" He paused. "That does not happen when a presentation is merely competent.
That happens when the person delivering it commands the room. "
She felt it land. Kept her face even.
"You understood exactly what this client needed and you delivered it." His eyes moved over her briefly, the same once-over she had been cataloguing, and then back to her face. "The work was excellent. You were excellent."
Her chest was tight. She said thank you and meant it completely and waited for him to continue.
He looked at her for a moment in the way he had, the full weight of his attention sitting across the desk from her, and said, almost as a natural extension of everything that had come before it, his voice not changing register at all:
"Good girl."
The room went very quiet.
She did not move. Did not correct him. Did not reach for the professional response that should have been sitting right there ready to deploy.
She looked at him and he looked at her and two words sat in the air between them and she felt them land in her body before her mind had any say in the matter at all.
A heat that started low and moved upward.
Her nipples tightening against the fabric of her top.
Her thighs pressing together once, briefly, involuntarily.
"Thank you," she said. Then, a beat later, quieter: "Sir."
The word arrived late and on its own, separate from the thank you, like something that had been sitting in her mouth and only just found its way out.
She stood. She gathered her portfolio. She walked to the door on legs that felt uncertain beneath her and put her hand on the frame and did not look back.