Red Pumps

Two weeks earlier, Abby Wagner Williams had walked in on someone masturbating in the ladies' room.

The Junior Vice President of Talent Management for Park Place, Paramus, and Princeton was at USF Plaza for the day, checking in with her direct supervisor, Christine Klinger, and working with Human Capital to stack-rank Abby's Park Place mailgirl candidates. She was squatting in an open cubicle on the 18th Floor, in Human Resources proper, and surrounded by ER reps and HR strategy analysts; every time Will Barrow called her over to his office in Human Capital, she had the make the trek through the gauntlet of mailgirl panties in the corridor down towards Human Capital. Pink and purple, white and black, satin and lace, bikinis and thongs -- a reminder, each time, of how Human Capital had treated twenty-some women here at the Plaza. A reminder, each time, of what Abby had been tasked to do at Park Place.

But Abby stepped out of the cubicle for a few minutes around mid-morning, and headed to the ladies' room that was tucked around the corner from the elevator banks. As she crossed the 18th Floor's reception area, she passed an unoccupied mailgirls mat and a silver dog dish that was three-quarters full. The mat was nothing more than a thin layer of foam, no thicker than a standard yoga mat, colored pink and imprinted with the USF logo in one corner. In those moments that a mailgirl wasn't actively involved in a delivery or some other task, she'd be expected to take her "resting" position -- that is, "Knees" -- on one of these mats scattered throughout the building. On her knees with her legs spread, hands behind her back, and gazing emptily and submissively at an imaginary spot on the floor. There could be as many as two girls at a time on a particular mat, and Abby had seen a pair of girls holding hands on her last trip into the Plaza. It was vacant at the moment, however, and so Abby was able to make it to the bathroom without the distraction of having to pass a naked girl in what had once been a boring, conservative office.

USF Plaza, though, was far from boring anymore. If Abby needed any further proof of that, the moan that greeted her in the ladies' room would have sufficed.

It hadn't been a loud moan, and it had been cut short by the sound of the door as Abby entered. But it had been a moan all the same. The soft inhale-exhale-inhale-exhale panting that followed, and signaled that the moaner was working to catch her breath, was further evidence that Abby had just walked in on someone masturbating in the near stall. The pair of red pumps, visible beneath the stall door, was spread wide and frozen in place.

"Oh!" Abby gasped. And without even thinking about it, amended an "I'm sorry!" and backed out of the ladies' room.

She immediately kicked herself for doing so, and prayed that Red Pumps hadn't recognized her voice. She wasn't at the Plaza often -- one day a month prior to her current project, really only once every other week since -- and it was reasonable to think she wouldn't be placed by her "sorry" alone. It had been instinctual, automatic; how was she supposed to have reacted to someone playing with herself in a public bathroom?

Abby, too, was now frozen in place, unsure of what to do next. She should have been making a b-line back to her desk. That's what she should have done. Instead, she hesitated, stayed quiet, and listened. Red Pumps had let a moan escape before. But she'd just been caught with her hand in the proverbial cookie jar, and so it probably made sense that Abby couldn't hear anything else from the far side of ladies' room door.

Curiosity got the best of her, though. She wasn't going to wait here, and greet Red Pumps as she exited -- Abby didn't want to deal with the awkwardness of the masturbator knowing by whom she'd just been interrupted. Instead, Abby took up position out by the reception desk; she said a quick hello to the receptionist, and then made a show of flicking through her emails on her phone.

Whether Red Pumps had returned to her task-at-hand, or whether she'd simply remained in the ladies' room to avoid whomever had just caught her, Abby couldn't be sure. Either way, it was another six or seven minutes before Wendy Brown from Benefits came walking nervously up the hall, red pumps carrying her past Abby and back to her desk.

If she suspected Abby had been the one who'd walked in on her, Wendy gave no indication; she even offered a polite "hi" as she saw Abby, and returned to work as if nothing of interest had taken place that morning.

Abby wasn't sure who she'd been expecting to waltz out of the ladies' room, but Wendy Brown was a surprise. She had to have been no older than twenty-four or twenty-five. She would have been a little mousey and flat-chested to be tapped for mailgirl duty, but she wasn't unattractive -- rail thin and long straight brown hair. A respectable "6." What had made a girl like feel the need to get herself off at work?

The ER Reps with whom Abby was sitting had their theories.

"Mind control," Diane Harris offered.

"Drugs," Nicole Culberson disagreed. "Aphrodisiacs."

"Mind control drugs?" Diane joked, and the two laughed.

Abby hadn't shared the incident with the two women, and wasn't even a part of their conversation at that point. She was seated in her own cubicle, and Diane and Nicole might not have even remembered she was there. She was theoretically focused on her list of prospects, going back and forth as to whether the leverage she had on Erin Higgins outweighed the sheer, undeniable attractiveness of Casey Campbell, and whether Will Barrow would agree with her assessment. She was eavesdropping on Diane and Nicole, however, as they joked about what had transformed the social and sexual mores of USF Plaza so quickly.

"I mean, it has to be mind control," Diane laughed. "Women don't act this way in real life. There's no other way to explain it."

"Maybe they're putting something in the water?" Nicole speculated. "Maybe it was only supposed to be for the mailgirls at first..."

"It's a theory," Diane conceded. "Have you stopped and watched recently? There's two of them -- Meredith Ferris from Middle Markets, and what's-her-name from Asset Management..."

"Amanda Dobson."

"Right, Amanda Dobson. Two and Three. They're down there touching themselves in the shower every time they're on break together, making eye contact and googly eyes at one another."

Nicole laughed.

Diane went on, "They're not even gay. At least, they weren't before. Did you know Meredith was engaged before all this started?"

"That's too bad," Nicole responded, genuine empathy evident in her tone. It was obvious that, given her current predicament, Meredith's wedding had been called off. But Nicole seemed to recover, and whispered, "I heard they're all sleeping with each other."

"Like in a big pile?"

The two women both chuckled at this suggestion. Diane said, "But that's what I mean. God help me, but if you took off my clothes, and sent me running around the building in my birthday suit, I'm not going to suddenly become a lesbian. I'm not going to be all 'ungh, ungh, ungh' with myself in the locker room."

"So you think it's mind control?"

Diane paused, and answered, "I mean, no, not really. Maybe you're right? Maybe they're dosing them with something, and it's...I don't know...seeping out their pores into the rest of the building."

"Maybe they screened for exhibitionists?"

"I don't know. I mean, I don't know. Those particular twenty-four girls? Those twenty-four knockouts and visions were all secretly flashers and fetishists? And Will Barrow was able to sniff them out from everyone else here in the building?"

"What they're doing has to have some effect on them..."