Dalia Locks the Office

The last of the winter evening had already settled over downtown Cairo when I reached the final page of the grants file. Dalia Mansour sat at the edge of my desk with her notepad still open. She was twenty two years old and still wearing the black skirt she had arrived in that morning. I was Amir Fawzi, forty one, director of a cultural grants office that was supposed to close at five. The open plan around us had gone quiet after the last clerk took the lift. What remained was a paragraph I did not need and a tension I had been pretending not to feel since she started here.

I dictated the correction to line fourteen and listened to her pen travel across the paper. She wrote in a small even hand and did not look down, which meant she was listening for something other than syntax. She had taken this post to get out of a flat that would not keep her, and she had carried the same unfinished ask into my office as if a salary could answer it.

“Read that back,” I said.

She read the sentence I had given her and then stopped, leaving the rest of the thought in her mouth as if she wanted to know whether I could finish it for her. I had hired her for precision. I was keeping her late for a different kind of work.

“The rest of the building is empty,” I told her. “Lock the door.”

She stood without asking me to repeat myself. She walked the length of the deserted desks, turned the bolt with a clean metallic click, and came back toward me with a look that was playful and then suddenly still, waiting to see if I would match her. I started to tell her to come here and get on her knees. She was already under the desk before I reached the end of the sentence, her palms sliding up my thighs, her face lifting toward my belt as if the instruction had belonged to her first.

I should have sent her down to the street. I opened my trousers instead because her fingers were already working the belt with the same tidy competence she used on correspondence, and when she took my cock into her mouth I put one hand in her hair and left the other on the keyboard as if the grant letter still required a man at work. She sucked me slowly at first, wet and deliberate, heat and spit and the soft catch of her throat when she took more of me than courtesy required. I kept my eyes on the screen so that the corridor in my own mind would still show an office and not a girl on her knees under government wood.

“You are still on the clock,” I said. “Do not stop.”

She made a sound around me that was not protest. I felt her tongue along the underside and then the tighter pull when she hollowed her cheeks, and I pushed a little deeper because she had locked the door herself and because she was paid to be in this room and because she wanted the order badly enough to crawl under a desk for it. She pulled back to breathe, mouth shining, and looked up at me with an expression that asked for the next instruction more clearly than any memo she had ever typed.

“Put it back in,” I told her. “You can take it.”

She did. I pretended to type a sentence I would delete later while she sucked me with a hunger that had nothing to do with culture and everything to do with being used. I told her she was a good secretary when she could not keep her mouth off her boss, and she took me deeper for that until her eyes watered. I held her there a moment longer than kindness would have allowed, then let her have air, then guided her back because neither of us had stayed tonight for air. Her lipstick was ruined against my cock. I did not tell her to wipe it. I told her to keep working, and I felt her moan at being spoken to that way, the vibration of it going straight up my spine while the empty office hummed around us like a machine that had not noticed what we were doing to its furniture.

I pulled her up before I finished in her mouth because I wanted her on the desk where the file still glowed, and she came up flushed and obedient and already reaching for her own clothes. I turned her and sat her on the blotter and pushed the black fabric of her skirt up to her waist. The tights came down to her knees in one hard motion. She was wet through the cotton of her underwear, and I dragged that aside with my thumb and looked at her cunt the way I looked at a document I intended to stamp. She watched my face while I did it. She did not cover herself.

“This is still my office,” I said. “You will listen while I use you.”

I pushed into her in one long stroke and felt her take me with a sound that broke in the middle. She was tight and hot and already shaking, her hands braced behind her on the papers we were supposed to respect. I fucked her like that, standing between her knees, still talking in the voice I used for staff meetings, telling her the deadline on the Mediterranean file and the name of the ministry contact while my cock worked in and out of her and her breath kept catching on every other word. She was the centre of the room. Every reaction in her face mattered more than the paragraph on the screen. I watched her mouth open and her eyes go dark and her thighs try to close around my hips as if she could keep me inside by force of wanting.

“Say my title,” I told her.

“Yes, sir,” she said, and then she said it again because I had not slowed down. I gripped her hips and pulled her onto me harder so that the desk inched toward the wall, and she asked me not to be careful, the words coming out between thrusts as if care were an insult she refused to accept from a man who signed her pay. I gave her what she asked for. I used her roughly enough that the blotter crumpled under her ass, and I kept speaking as her boss while I did it, because that was the costume that let her stop teasing and be taken, and because both of us wanted the imbalance sitting naked on the wood between her spread knees.

She asked for it harder a second time, her voice gone low and certain, and I gave her that too. I hooked her knees higher and drove into her cunt with a rhythm that had nothing left of courtesy in it, and she took every stroke with her head tipped back and her throat exposed as if she wanted the whole empty floor to hear what she was willing to be in this room. I told her she was here to finish a file and that she would finish it with my cock in her, and she said yes in a way that made the yes sound like relief. Her pleasure ran through her in visible waves. I felt her clench and flutter and then clench again, and I did not ease off when she came the first time. I kept fucking her through it while she shook and tried to find a sentence and failed, because the subject was no longer hers to explain.

“Do not be gentle,” she said when she could speak. “I did not stay for gentle.”

I was not gentle. I used her until the desk protested and her voice broke on my name, and the power of it sat in me like heat because it was only real while she was on my payroll, which was not the same as keeping her. I knew that even then. I knew I would send her home when the work was done. I still held her open and fucked her like the office belonged to me and her body was part of the inventory, and she asked for more of that, not less, her fingers in my shirt, her mouth against my ear telling me she wanted to be ordered so she could stop performing competence and just be used. I gave her the order. I told her to take it and to look at me while she took it, and she did, eyes wet, lips parted, the most honest she had been all day.

I pulled out before I came and stroked myself over her stomach, and I spent across the pale skin above her cunt in thick stripes that she watched with her mouth open as if this too were an instruction she intended to follow. She was still breathing hard. I was still her employer. I reached past her hip and woke the screen and told her to sit up and stay like that.

“We have one more email,” I said. “You will sit through it.”

She sat on the edge of the desk with my come cooling on her belly and her skirt still bunched at her waist, and I dictated the message to the ministry while I looked at what I had done to her. She typed with hands that were not quite steady. I made her read the draft back. She read it in a clear voice, professional and wrecked at the same time, and I corrected a comma and watched a line of me slide toward the waistband she had not been allowed to pull up. The degradation of it was something she wanted. I could see that in the way she did not wipe herself and in the way she waited for the next sentence from me instead of covering her body. I told her she looked like what she was, a secretary who had been fucked on the correspondence and who would send the letter anyway. She held my gaze and did not flinch. She asked if the email was finished. I said almost. I made her wait through the signature line with my spend on her skin because I could, and because she had asked not to be handled carefully, and because the only power I had was the kind that ended when I clocked her out.

When the message was gone I turned her again and bent her over the chair I used for visitors, the one with the worn arms that faced the dark glass. I pushed into her from behind in one motion and found her still wet, still open, still willing, and I fucked her over that chair with my hand in her hair and my mouth at the back of her neck telling her she would take this one inside her. She braced on the seat and pushed back onto me, deciding that for herself, meeting every thrust as if the office could be made into a place that kept her if she only asked hard enough with her body. I reached around and rubbed her clit while I used her cunt, and she came again with a sound she tried and failed to keep small, her whole frame going tight and then loose in my hands.

I did not pull out. I drove deep and spent in her with my forehead against her shoulder and her name in my mouth, and I felt her feel it, the heat of it, the claim that was only a claim until the lights went off. She stayed bent there for a long moment after, breathing, full of me, her cheek against the upholstery. I eased out and watched it start to slip from her. I told her not to clean it. She stood on unsteady legs and drew her underwear back into place over the mess and smoothed her skirt down as if the costume of employment could be put on over what we had just done. She looked at me with a warmth that had nothing left of teasing in it, and I knew I would still tell her the building was closing.

“Go home,” I said. “The file is finished.”

She walked out of the office with me still inside her clothes and did not stop at the washroom down the hall. I watched her cross the open plan in the same winter coat she had arrived in, her hair slightly less pinned, her mouth without the lipstick she had left on my cock, and I understood the cost of what we had just used each other for. She had gotten the order she wanted. It still belonged to a man who would send her home at the end of a page. Catharsis without a house to stay in until morning. That was what I had to give her. She paused at the door with her hand on the bolt she had turned for me, and she mentioned, almost lightly, that a family holiday was already booked at the coast house, and that her adult stepbrother would be there, and then she did not finish the thought. I did not know whether she was going in order to behave. I knew only that this room could not hold what she had actually asked for, and that she would come back to work for this if I let the job become another costume, and that I would unlock the same door for her on Sunday night and still not be the man whose house she was willing to remain in when the lights went out.