On January 2nd, Alex stepped into the crowded lift that took him to his compact office on the 44th floor. The other passengers were dressed snugly protecting themselves against the bitter Lancashire winter. Some looked amusingly tanned from recent winter holidays in warmer climes, but all exuded that air of exhausted temper that inevitably haunts everyone who has had a family Christmas break and is not feeling ready to come back to work quite yet.
He shuffled, as politely as possible, to the back of the lift, mindful that a great many passengers would alight long before reaching his floor. He closed his eyes and made a mental list of all the tasks he should, no matter how reticently, complete by the day's end. If he were to be honest, his life was a very long list of things he didn't want to do. Even his spare time seemed to be purely for the benefit of others who had constant need for his skills and moreover his inability to say no to do things for them.
The bell chimed at the first stop jolting him from his maudlin thoughts. He opened his eyes remembering that he had omitted to depress the button for his floor. He reached awkwardly through the crush of passengers toward the panel, but there was no chance of reaching it. With a mumbled apology, he leant forward, trying to reach, but to no avail. Finally, he asked if someone would push it for him. It was then he noticed the short, unremarkable woman standing in front of him. Not facing, as so many people do, the closed metal doors, but side on. In fact, the entire side of her body was pressed up against the front of his. As he drew back his hand it brushed the front of her blouse and, with that rare clarity that occurs every once in a blue moon, he awkwardly realised that he had grazed a covered but extremely erect nipple with back of his somewhat clumsy hand.
''Terribly sorry" he blustered downwards towards her, the heat and colour rising against the collar of his shirt which seem to stiffen further as he tried pathetically to swallow the embarrassment which was rising in his throat. Being almost a head shorter than he was, it was difficult to see her face given her close proximity. Instead he gazed down over her head, at the neat slope of her neck. Her auburn hair was sleek and smelled like honey, and wayward silky wisps lay against the pale skin of her nape. Inexplicably he could not pull his eyes away from it, and his heart went thundering on.
He felt ridiculously embarrassed and childlike. Telling himself to get a grip he closed his eyes and tried to melt back into the cold confines of the lift. It wasn't as if he didn't already have a perfectly good wife. In reality Liz was, in Alex's estimation, the perfect wife. Their lives we full and content, they communicated easily, their intellects were delightfully compatible, they were in fact the best of friends. So why was he reacting like an adolescent who'd never been laid? And why was he doing it over a very unremarkable woman in a crowded lift on a cold and even more unremarkable day?
All this didn't stop his blood from rushing, nor did it pacify the uncomfortable swelling in his groin. Worse still, with the woman pressed against him as she was, there was no way she would not notice if he were to develop a full erection. He tried to think about the myriad of jobs on his to do list to attempt to reroute the concentration to the brain that he needed to get into gear...
Seconds ticked by. The elevator door opened and disgorged passengers. However, for all the people who got off, at least as many joined the congregation. Alex's hope for a little more personal space died a slow death in the shuffle and jostle of the upward commute.
A blast of airconditioned cool air wafted the loose tendrils on the back of the woman's neck. Her scent which was exotically tinged with bergamot and musk wafted up to his nostrils causing him to mechanically take a deep breath in a savour the enticing aroma. With mortifying predictability, blood pumped into his groin, swelling his cock by degrees. This, he thought, was ridiculous. It was also a subtle sort of hell.
By the time they reached the 28th floor, his tight boxers were struggling to swaddle his rising interest. Surely, he thought, she could feel it against her arm. As he formed the thought, she moved. Not, as he hoped, to exit the car, but a slight shrugging of the shoulder, which drew her arm upward. Only with a monumental effort did he manage not to gasp. The contact was so slight and, somehow, so powerfully pleasurable, as if no one had ever touched him before. The intensity of the sensation shocked him.
She shrugged again, and then, after a minute or so, a third time. Each movement caused the back of her lower arm to graze over his painfully hard cock. It twitched of its own accord, pressing back against her. Alex closed his eyes and tried to talk himself out of his current predicament. He thought of all the sad things that he had seen on the news that morning, of the time had had to spend placating his mother in law at the Christmas dinner table. That should do it, he thought, as he slowly exhaled feeling his cock slowly relax somewhat.
Then, in what seemed like time trapped in a vacuum, she moved again, this time to raise her hand. The back of it slid up the length of his throbbing cock, each of her knuckles edging deliciously over him, before reaching and taking a firm hold of the shoulder strap on her purse.
With a loud chime, the doors opened and the woman eased her way through the crush of passengers and out the elevator. The siren exited Alex's dream world on the 35th floor.
In the hallway on floor 44, he loosened his tie and took the first really deep breath he'd taken in what felt like a lifetime. He sank into the privacy of his cordoned work space and collapsed onto his chair. He looked down and realised his hands were full of tension as his fists rested at either side of his keyboard. How could a stranger, and a particularly plain one at that, have caused him to feel such instant and intense lust? He shook his head slowly and tried to focus on his work. In truth, his mind was somewhere completely different.
* * *
It wasn't until he was crammed against the far wall of the elevator the very next day that Alex remembered the previous day's incident. In truth, he wouldn't have remembered it at all had the very same woman not been standing in front of him. It would have been impossible for him to pick her out of a line-up since he had never had a decent look at her face, but her hair, the edge of her brow, and the long sweep of her neck was enough: it was her. The day before, her blouse had been white. Today it was a shimmering pearl grey silk. There was a cruel irony in the fact that, although he could only see her face from an idiosyncratic angle, it was very easy to look down the front of her blouse. God in heaven, Alex thought to himself. What have I done to deserve this?
He told himself not to look, but the more he forbade himself from doing so, the louder the singing of blood in his ears. Finally, as if giving into Eden's serpent, he let his eyes drift down. From any other vantage, there would have been nothing to see; the shirt was quite modestly buttoned. But Alex's perspective offered him an intimate view of the edges of her bra cups - a darker grey lace - nestling two perfectly shaped ivory globes. More painful still was the way her nipples, clearly erect, tented both the fabric of her bra, and the silk of her blouse. His hand itched to brush past them. But he'd pressed the button to his floor as he'd stepped into the elevator. Nonetheless, he toyed with the idea of pressing the button to some other floor, just to have an excuse to feel the hard little nub of one nipple graze the back of his hand again. It didn't matter that he'd never do it. His mind began to play the event, the sensation, the transgression, in slow motion over and over. He shut his eyes to make it stop, but it only made the images more vivid.
