Simple Pleasures - Fiction

The Jacuzzi bubbled around her thighs and tingled along her spine, caressing every inch of her tenderly and unwinding the build-up of tensions in her knot-bound shoulders. A long purr escaped her lips. Julio emerged from the terrace and dropped the small towel from around his tight waist. Ursula’s eyes bulged at the size of his glass of refreshing iced tea. He brought the glass up to his lips and swallowed the cool liquid. His bronzed, toned chest heaved with the motion and glistened in the light of the Mediterranean sun. He lowered the glass to the patio and climbed into the pool. His muscular arms broke through the surface of bubbles as he glided towards her. He pulled up in front of her, reached between her legs and curled his fingers around a bubbling hose. He lifted it from the water and held it over his head and let the liquid slide over his face and down his body. He lowered the hose back into the water and combed his finger through his long black hair back. He lowered himself onto Ursula’s lap and cupped her face with his large muscular hands.

“Come. Come to me, darling.” He licked his lips as a growl erupted from deep inside his chest. Ursula moaned and inched closer, closer, closer to his… 

“Can Hans Gunter please report to the front desk?” Ursula was dragged back to reality by the intercom buzzing over her head. The poolside of L’hotel de Rêve and the glistening body of Julio evaporated and disappeared into the ether of Floor Thirteen. She looked around her small cubicle and sighed.

As if I would be anywhere else. She checked her watch and realigned her tights at the groin. 9:14am.

How can I only be here twelve minutes? She lowered her forehead to the desk and sighed. Her mind wandered back to the Jacuzzi, to the heat of the sun on her skin, to Julio’s large glass of refreshing iced tea… Her body twitched and she shot up straight in the seat. She looked back to her watch.

Only four hundred and sixty-five minutes to go. Ursula pulled several books from her shelf and placed them on her seat. She sat down on the unsteady stack and peered over the partition. The room around her was grey and massive. She spotted the main door, only one hundred and six steps away. On the opposite wall the female rest room was only seventy-four steps away. The room was icy cold. The intercom buzzed somewhere in the distance. She could hear the hard plastic casing of a computer mouse nearby scrape against worktops in wide loops, stops and clicks somewhere in the distance. The stench of scented body lotions mixed with body odour and cheap coffee wafted through the aisles. She noted that for a room full of people, there was very little sound. The room should have hummed with the multitude of awkward small talk and early morning gossip happening around her, but she looked up to the high warehouse-like ceiling and realised that the enormity of it had probably drawn the life from the voices. By the coffee machine men reviewed the sloppy tactics of football games from mispronounced French teams. Three cubicles away two women older than Ursula scrutinized the romantic endeavours of their co-workers and consoled each other’s singularity. The only thing that unified the two thousand, seven hundred and thirty-four people that occupied Floor Thirteen was the bitter resentment of everything related to Floor Thirteen.

The cubicle in front of her was empty. The woman who usually sat behind the partition was probably only forty, but if carbon dating worked on wrinkles she would be as old as Methuselah. The saggy folds of skin around the woman’s eyes puckered and multiplied with every blink. They dragged her face down like fleshy anchors. She had beady blank eyes that she hid behind thick bottle-rimmed glassed. When she wasn’t too busy fixing her very-berry red lipstick, or puffing up her mound of black hair, she often plucked her eyebrows at the desk. She would grab the hairs with a pink tweezers and pull at them until all that was left was two thin black semi circles over her eyes. Ursula reckoned that someday the woman would pull at the hairs so hard she would pull the rest of her forehead off with it. Ursula was curious as to her disappearance and thought about asking someone where the woman in cubicle 11b went, but Ursula didn’t know the woman’s name and she didn’t really like talking to any of the people she worked with. The woman of 11b’s disappearance would have to remain a mystery, right up there beside the Kennedy assassination and the Bermuda triangle, or the contents of the yellow lunchbox in the fridge in the canteen with the blue fuzz growing out from under the lid.

Disheartened at the lack of activity, Ursula stood up and placed the books back on the shelf. They were warm to the touch and that only grossed Ursula out slightly. She looked to her watch. 9:19am. She sighed and reached for her briefcase. She opened it up and fished through the files on her lap. She pulled out a folder of sheets, a notepad, a handful of pens and a banana which had been sitting in the case for four days. Everyone in the office had converted to the more technologically advanced forms of note-taking. But Ursula had fallen behind. She called herself the last of the pencil-pushers. Although she had been given a second generation interactive tablet like everyone else, it sat gathering dust on the shelf beside her warm books with the electronic device still encased in its styrofoam prison. She saw herself as an anachronism, in the office anyway. At home she couldn’t go to the bathroom without her mobile phone and she often paid more per month for a strong Wi-Fi connection than food.  Apart from the fact that she didn’t want to bother updating her skills for work, Ursula always enjoyed the feel of a ball-point pen in her hand, or the glide of an inky nib across paper. There was something alluring, something endless about dragging the pen across the page and watching colour leak into the fibres in lines and squiggles. It made her shiver and think about a refreshing glass of iced tea. 

She shook her head from the traces of an elaborate day dream and looked to her pull-away page calendar. It was Friday and all that meant to Ursula was that the weekly reports had to be filled out before she could go home and spend the night watching movies from the 1950s with her cat Spoofy. She straightened out her notebook and her pens and placed her banana in the top right corner of her desk, out from the lines of her peripheries, because she couldn’t straighten the banana and it would just unsettle her to see it while she was working.

She pulled out a bundle of typed pages from the file labelled Financing and straightened them to the left of her notepad. She fingered the cover of the notebook, the dapple skin of her fingertips was enough to grip the slick exterior. She lifted the shiny page, brought it above and tucked it in behind the rest of the notepad and with a cool hiss of friction, settled it on the cold countertop. She picked up her black pen, turned over a clean page in her notepad, tucked it back under and began writing out the weekly report. Black globules trickled out of her pen and stained the paper. By the time she had finished writing she had filled six pages, single sided in her notebook with black ink. She flicked the pages back and forth and admired her handiwork. It made her smirk because she knew the best was yet to come. Ursula was a woman of simple pleasures, and pleasurable those simple things were. One of the activities that gave her the greatest please was to gently rip the pages from her notepad.

She closed her eyes and lightly gripped the edge of the pages. And pulled. The separation of the tiny linkages from the remaining pages vibrated through her fingers. In the darkness, she could hear the layers of pages tearing all at once and quiver through her highly sensitive fingertips. She fought against the sensations and the itching in her groin, but as her heartbeat quickened, a low rumbling purr escaped her lips. She pulled each bond apart fluidly, like unzipping a perfectly fitted dress. Her skin prickled and the fair hair stood tall underneath her blouse. She could feel her scalp tingle and her eyelids flutter with anticipation. She could feel it, the end was coming. Without even looking she knew she was close to finishing. Towards the end of the sheet she slowed her pace and her hand tightened its grip by the strength of a butterfly’s wing-beat. Her eyes rolled beneath her lids as she tried to prolong the movement and savour the moment. She didn’t even notice she was holding her breath until pressure started building up in her chest. But she held it and let the pressure build. Her skin crawled as she ripped and counted the last connections. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six… Her heart pounded loudly in her ear. Five, four, three, two… She tightened her grip once more and paused at the penultimate link. Her chest was burning with pressure and her body trembled, yearning for release. One. She ripped the last connection between the pages and the notepad. A deep lengthy moan escaped her, one she had forgotten in her throat.

She opened her eyes to the harsh static light of the office, forgetting her place. She twisted her neck and scanned for any sign that her engrossment had been witnessed. But the stalls around her buzzed with inactivity. She stood up on shaky legs and looked around. New recruits watched and re-enacted the appropriate responses to soccer goals on the internet in hushed tones. A man and woman chatted eagerly at the coffee machine. Everything was as it should be. Ursula’s secret was safe, for the time being. 

She turned back to the pages, now separated from their bonds. She picked it up and brought it close to her face and inhaled deeply, spreading open her chest to increase her lung capacity. The wet inky reignited the lax nerve points of her skin, bristling the hair molecules. She brought the page back to the table and aligned it meticulously against the pre-ruled margins of a rubber mat she recovered from under her desk. She retrieved an empty blue hole-puncher from her drawer, wiped clean from its previous use. She threaded the pages into the small mouth of the blue machine that hungered for small perfectly circular cuttings of pre-lined paper. She rested the entire length of her thumb against the handle of the hole-puncher and in one fluid motion, the circles were forced from the pages and captured in the small plastic containment beneath the belly of the fierce tiny machine. Her chest heaved over and over as the pain of the pressure continued to burn her lungs. She grabbed a blue inhaler from her desk drawer and took a long gasp from its mouth. When she had composed herself, she reached for a blue folder. She opened it up, wrenched apart the large spiral prongs, slipped the curled prongs into the punched holes and snapped them shut. She looked at her watch. 9:43am.

A good day’s work, if I do say so myself.

She pulled a small square pillow from her drawer and placed it on her desk. She pulled her desk lamp from the corner and positioned it over the pillow. She lowered her head onto the pillow, switched on the lamp and let the heat of the Mediterranean sun and the intoxicating scent of a refreshing glass of iced tea wash her away.