Sophia's Office Christmas Party

The ballroom of the Copacabana hotel had been strung with white lights that tried to turn a humid December night into something northern and expensive. I stood with my back to the tall windows and watched Sophia Alves cut through the company’s summer Christmas party as if the marble belonged to her. She was twenty, the former lifeguard who had brought the beach into our office and never apologized for it, and I was thirty eight, her creative director, the man who still signed her contract. She had walked in already finished with private rooms. I could see it in the way she let people look and did not arrange her face for them.

She found me at the bar. The black dress held her when she stopped. She looked at the full glass in my hand and then at my mouth.

“You are standing here like someone might catch you,” she said. “Did you come because you knew I would be here, Rafael?”

I told her that was the only reason I had put on the jacket. Her mouth curved, not quite kindness, the look she used when she was measuring whether I would keep pace with her.

“Then we are leaving.” She did not lower her voice enough. “There is a door the waiters use. I am not doing this behind another lock. If they hear us, they hear us.”

I set the glass down. Heat had already gathered low in my belly. She turned along the edge of the dance floor and I followed her past a junior designer who said my name into empty air, through the service door, into a corridor that smelled of bleach and hot metal. The music thinned to a pulse in the walls. At the staff bathroom she put a hand on my chest and pushed me in first, then shut the door on the cheap white light and the single stall.

“You told me I could not fuck anyone else in this building,” she said, and that was all the past she was willing to spend. “I am not fucking anyone else. I am fucking you where they can almost walk in. Take your cock out.”

I had my belt open before the last word died. Sophia dropped to her knees on the tile without any theatre, the dress riding up her thighs, and she drew my cock out with both hands. She glanced up once, checking my face the way she used to check a horizon, and then she took me into her mouth, wet and sudden, and I had to plant a palm on the door above her head to stay standing.

She sucked me without patience. Her tongue worked the underside while her fist stroked what she could not yet swallow, and the sound of it was filthy in that small room under the muffled bass. When she took me deeper I felt the tight give of her throat and the small hungry noise she made around me.

I said her name and it came out broken. She did not ease off. She pushed forward until her nose pressed my stomach and held herself there, eyes shining, throat working around the head of my cock, and she swallowed on purpose so that I felt it like a fist. My other hand found her hair. I held her and fucked into that heat in short strokes until she gagged once and still did not pull away. Her nails bit my hips.

She came off me gasping, a string of spit connecting her lower lip to the wet shine of my cock. She wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and looked up, lipstick ruined, not ashamed of any of it.

“You can go harder,” she said. “You keep holding back like the floor is going to grade you. I came here for my throat, not for something you can deny in the morning.”

I held her head and pushed back in. I fucked her throat in earnest, the door shivering under my hand, and she took it, gagging and drooling and staring up at me with her eyes bright and furious with pleasure. I pulled out before I finished because I was not done with the rest of her, and she stayed on her knees a second longer, breathing hard, looking like the thing the whole agency had been trying not to say.

I pulled her up by the arms and kissed her, tasting myself in her mouth, and she kissed me back as if she still owned the pace. I got the dress up around her waist. She was wearing nothing underneath. My fingers found her pussy already slick and swollen, and she made a sound against my teeth when I pushed two fingers into her and curled them toward the front wall of her.

“You were wet before I even touched you,” I said, and felt her clench.

“I was wet in the ballroom,” she answered, rolling her hips on my hand, using me. “You can feel that. Now stop talking and put it in me.”

I lifted her. I hooked her legs around my waist and pinned her to the door with my chest. I lined my cock up and shoved into her in one long thrust that made her head knock back against the wood. She was tight and soaked and I bottomed out with a grunt I could not swallow. I felt her adjusting around me, that deep flutter, and then she locked her ankles and pulled me farther in, greedy for it.

I fucked her against the door. Each thrust slapped skin and made the cheap lock rattle. She held my shoulders and took it, her breath breaking into little punched sounds every time I drove up into her. The angle had my cock dragging over the place inside her that made her thighs shake. I watched her bite her own lip to keep from shouting, and I wanted the waiters to have to decide whether they had heard it.

“Let them hear you,” I told her, my mouth against her cheek.

She laughed once, wrecked. She came on my cock with her mouth open against my neck, pulsing hard, and I had to freeze or I would have followed her over. I held her there, still buried to the hilt, and I kissed the wet corner of her eye because it was there and because tenderness had no business in a staff bathroom and still arrived.

“You did not come,” she said after a moment, voice raw, legs still locked around me. “That is not what I asked for tonight.”

I set her down. I turned her toward the sink and the spotted mirror, bent her forward with a hand between her shoulder blades, and entered her again from behind in one push that made her grab the porcelain. I could see her face in the glass, flushed, mascara starting to fail, and my own face over her shoulder looking like a man who had stopped calling this a mistake.

I fucked her hard enough that her hips knocked the sink. One of her hands dropped between her legs and she rubbed her clit in tight circles while I used her pussy, and the wet sound of it filled the little room. I reached around and covered her hand with mine and made her press harder. She swore under her breath, a broken filthy thing, and I felt her start to climb again around my cock.

“On me,” she said. She lifted her head and found my eyes in the mirror. “I want you to come on me. Chest and mouth. I am walking back in there with it on me. That is the whole point. Come where they will have to see it.”

The request sat on the back of my neck like a hand. I pulled out of her with a groan that hurt, turned her, and she sat on the edge of the sink. She tugged the neckline down herself so that her tits were bare for me, skin already marked by my mouth from earlier nights she refused to treat as secret. I stroked my cock, slick with her, and she leaned forward and opened her mouth and looked at me as if this mess were the only honest document in the building.

I came hard. The first pulse hit her chest, thick and white across the tops of her breasts and the black fabric. The second I aimed at her mouth and she took it on her tongue and on her lower lip and she did not swallow right away. I kept coming, shaking, and she watched my face the entire time as if the come on her skin were the proof she had come into this hotel to collect.

When I was empty she closed her mouth, swallowed some of it, and left the rest shining on her lip. She pulled the dress back into something like order, which only smeared what I had put on her, and she stood up on those unsteady legs and faced me.

“Do not wipe me,” she said. “You put it there because I told you to. What are you going to do when we walk out, hide behind me, or walk like you meant it?”

I told her I would walk beside her. She nodded once, as if that were the only acceptable sentence I had left, and she unlocked the door.

The service corridor was empty. Music leaked from the ballroom. We walked back the way we had come. Sophia’s mouth was swollen. The smear on her chest was visible above the neckline if anyone cared to look, and she did not tug the fabric up.

We stepped into the lights. Heat and talk closed over us. I put a hand at the small of her back because I could not stand not touching her.

Camila from accounts was coming the other way with two glasses. She was in her thirties, sharp, the kind of woman who noticed a smudge and filed it. She looked at Sophia’s mouth, at the mark on her chest, at my face, and something in her expression closed and then opened again into knowledge she would not pretend not to have. She passed us close enough that her perfume mixed with the smell of what we had just done, and she said my name in a tone that was no longer professional.

“Rafael.” That was all. Then, to Sophia, quieter, almost kind: “You might want a napkin.”

Sophia smiled at her, slow and unbothered, the beach still in it.

“I might not,” she said.

Camila’s eyes flicked to me and away. She kept going toward the bar. In ten minutes the junior floor would have a version of this, and it would not be a rumor. Sophia took a glass from a passing tray and drank as if her throat were not wrecked.

“You still have my job,” she said. “I know that. I wanted them to know the rest. Do not send me a message tonight asking if I regret it. I watched you do exactly what I asked. That is the part I am taking home.”

I stayed near her for another hour because leaving her in that room alone felt like a different kind of cowardice. We stood at the edge of the crowd and let people look. A visiting producer asked Sophia about the new deck and she answered him with a clean sentence while my drying come sat on her chest. I watched his eyes drop and then jerk back to her face. She asked him about timelines until he had to talk.

When the speeches started I leaned in close enough that only she would hear.

“HR is going to hear before morning,” I said.

“I already knew that when I asked you to come on me.” She kept her eyes on the stage. “I am staying until they turn the lights up. You can leave if you need to look like a director. I am not going back to that bathroom. That part is finished.”

I wanted to take her home. I wanted a car and a shower and a bed that did not belong to the company. She would not have come with me. She finished her drink and set it down and touched my wrist once, two fingers, a contact that was almost tender and almost a warning that the power in my title did not get to tidy this.

I left twenty minutes later because remaining would have become another scene. The taxi along the beach ran with the windows down. Heat came in off the water. I could still taste her and hear the door rattling in that white room, and I could still see her choosing the mess.

The call came at eight. I was already in the office in a clean shirt, the previous night sitting under my ribs like a bruise I had asked for. HR wanted both of us. The room was glass on one side, and the woman across the table had a folder and a voice trained to make ugly things sound like favors.

Sophia arrived in jeans and a white shirt, hair still damp from a shower that had not erased anything that mattered. She sat without apologizing for being three minutes late. I sat beside her and did not touch her.

The offer was a quiet transfer. Another team. Another floor. A story about growth and fit. Nobody would write down what Camila had seen. Sophia would keep the salary and lose the proximity, and the rumor would be given nothing to eat.

I watched her face. She listened all the way through, still as water before a break.

“No.”

The HR woman blinked as if the word had arrived from the wrong climate.

Sophia leaned forward slightly, elbows on her knees, and spoke to the folder and to me at the same time.

“I walked back in with his come on me. That was not an accident and it was not something that happened to me. If I stay, I stay in this office as the woman who did that. If I leave, I leave for Copacabana on my own clock, back to the water, not because you found me a quieter desk. I am not taking the hiding place.”

Silence held. I still had her job in my hands, the signatures and the reviews and the power she had refused to let me throw over her like a coat. I looked at her profile, at the damp hair and the unbothered mouth, and I understood that I did not know whether she would keep the contract or walk down to the beach and take her old life back. She did not know either. The not knowing was the cost, and she was holding it in the open where the office would have to look at her, and at me, and at what we had done on company time.