Heavy Is The Head

You are about to embark on an erotic journey; however, you do not know you are about to embark on any journey, erotic or otherwise. To you, you are Will Saxon, bachelor, unlucky in love, but lucky in attaining a broad range of averageness in most other arenas.

By day, you are a self-employed IT security consultant, drawing on your years of experience as a data pusher at TechTitan. In your short time as a freelancer, you’ve enjoyed your share of freedom from the middle men – and your domineering TechTitan middle manager Makaylyn – while having to cut corners and dance around the competition to keep steady work. By night, however, you go home to your dog Quasimodo in an otherwise empty apartment to play video games and watch TV. It leaves plenty of time to lose yourself in your work.

In the end, it’s you and Mo. (Mo, because it was your ex-girlfriend Felicia who spent five years and $80,000 studying French on her parents’ dime who gave the poor mutt his full name, and who has time for that?) Mo’s aspirations run as far as getting a leash with a longer lead, though he keeps his discontentment to a minimum. And you? Well, your aspirations for what you want out of all this is left for you to decide.

Your journey begins on a day like many others. A Monday, as it so happens. The alarm goes off too early, but you wake up too late. You shower quickly, nick yourself shaving and once more curse yourself for being too cheap to spring for the electric. Then it’s off to battle traffic in what becomes a ninety minute slog to arrive at your client’s office building. By the time you do, you’re left parking a ways off down the street, paying the meter to ward off Brooklyn, the remorseless meter maid who’s managed to peg you with three tickets since beginning the Monarch Innovations gig. You pay what you hope is enough time to last you through such time when you can steal a spot from one of Monarch’s employees during their lunch break.

Today, your lunch consists of an egg salad sandwich. You are not looking forward to lunch.

Your arrival is right in time for your morning meetings, today consisting of a series of interviews with select members of the sales staff about their IT practices. It’s mostly as engaging as it sounds, but you do spot a few notes worth making for your ultimate report so it doesn’t look like you were a waste of money. Plus, another opportunity to sit across the table from the lovely Avery Parker, regional assistant to the manager of sales. The title was a mouthful, but then, anything that puts more Avery Parker in your mouth is fine by you. The woman was impossible not to notice. Strikingly beautiful features, great body, didn’t seem to own anything with sleeves, never a strand of that scarlet red hair out of place, even held a conversation without having to fall back on all of the above. Best of all, though, were her fingers. Not a ring in sight.

Still, you can’t exactly ask a woman out when you’re contracting at a business. On the way out the door, report submitted and hat in hand, maybe. Maybe. Too damn bad for this particular gig, because Avery was far from the only looker at Monarch. Chloe the receptionist, chipper and cherubic, round in all the right places. Nora in IT with her perfect stockings clinging to more perfect legs. Hell, there’s even that anonymous security guard who nearly snapped your neck with a double take, a woman whose name you never learned but whose ass you’ve gotten to know intimately as she paces around the building.

You almost wonder if somebody in human resources is pushing a certain profile of applicants in hopes of scoring a date. Or else maybe Monarch’s want ads are explicitly looking for single, gorgeous 20- and 30-something women. Either way, the results don’t lie. All in all, the company seems well-run from your perspective. Not flawless, but they’re definitely taking their data security more seriously than most. Serious enough to have an NDA as long as your leg for anything you learn on the premises, and serious enough that what you have learned would fit on a list as long as your dick in winter. So far the holes you’ve found have been much more IT than human; strange, considering it tends to be the other way around.

Take the donut gambit. If you had a nickel for every time you’d bypassed a client’s security by putting on a suit and bringing in a couple boxes of donuts, you’d have paid the parking meter with it. People really loved to help out the poor donut guy with no hands to grab his key card, it turned out. $30 worth of donuts and you were walking through fields of vacant desks snapping images of post-its full of passwords. The only difference between what you did and corporate espionage is that you don’t get to sell the company’s info. You do get reimbursed for the donuts, though. Not a total wash.

Monarch, though, ran a tight ship. The morning’s interviews completed, you get back to sifting through code, looking for all those cracks in the cybersystem. Bleary-eyed, you look up to find it’s already almost 1:00. Only about ten minutes to evade the meter maids. Perfect timing to move to a spot in Monarch’s lot, too. You pack up your laptop and make for the exit.

On your way out the door, however, you are interrupted not once, but twice.

First, as you pass the third floor break room, you can’t help but notice through the open door that it is presently occupied solely by Avery Parker. She’s about halfway through her meal, looks like. She looks bored, her usual gleaming, amiable smile on a rare hiatus.

Second, as you’re imagining what you might say to Avery if you had the nerve to go sit with her, your phone buzzes. Programmed by your device, you snatch it from your pocket automatically and see that the text has come from none other than Aubrey Merriman herself. Which was to say, the executive assistant to Nolan King himself, founder and CEO of Monarch Innovations.

Mr. King was hoping to talk over some matters regarding your contract with you. Are you free now?

Brooklyn is assuredly out there, waiting to pounce once more on your expired meter. One more ticket, and Mo may have to give up his dreams of a fancy new leash. Still, if the CEO himself had business with you, only an idiot made him wait. Nolan King was a tycoon’s tycoon; a favorable impression could make your career. Then again, a chance to chat up Avery one on one… maybe she was worth the wait. Women like her came along… well, so far just the once.

Author's note: I am writing this piece as a patreon benefit for my patrons (www.patreon.com/icebear). We'll be following a single linear continuity according to the votes of patrons $10/mo, aiming for ~72 hours to vote, but the results will always be posted free to all here. If you like what you see and want more, come on over and check it out, join our discord server, comment here or send me a DM. More to come!