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“Corinne! Corinne, wait up!”
It was Barbara, hurrying to catch up with me. She had her usual pleasant look, but I had the feeling that something was on her mind. As Elijah’s secretary, she was probably responsible for maintaining his calendar.Had he told her to block out some time for a personal dinner engagement? Had she guessed that it was with me?I wondered.
When she reached my side, Barbara didn’t mention anything about my having dinner with Elijah. But, our boss was what she had on her mind anyway. “Dear, I know Elijah took you to Diamond’s Gym last week. He doesn’t usually invite people to come with him when he works out.”
Barbara really did seem to have something on her mind, as if there were something she wanted to ask me, but didn’t quite know how. I was starting to suspect that tongues had begun to wag in the building after Elijah came down and asked me to dinner, and I was getting a little concerned that perhaps I should try to nip some rumors in the bud. But, what Barbara said was nothing I might have expected. It came right out of left field.
“Corinne, dear, I adore Elijah. He’s a wonderful boss and a sweet young man. He truly is. And…honestly, there’s something I want you to know. Eventually, you might hear someone talk about him. You might at some time hear people say…things about him.”
Totally unprepared for this particular conversation, I looked off, wondering what was appropriate to say.What on Earth could she possibly mean?“Things? What kinds of things would anyone have to say about Elijah?”
“If you haven’t heard anything,” she said, “it’s not important now. I just want you to know that he’s for real. Being as nice as he is? That isn’t an act. That’s him. And, anything you hear about his past is in his past. It has nothing to do with his life today. He’s good, and he deserves everything he has now.”
“Elijah has never mentioned anything to me about his past.”
It was true; he hadn’t brought anything up to me about his life before I came to work here. The one really personal detail that I’d learned was that he once had a girlfriend and things went bad between them, and I knew that only because Ben brought it up. And frankly, there was nothing unusual about an incredibly hot guy who was worth a billion dollars having had a girlfriend. He could easily have had plenty of girlfriends. The only trouble with that would be if he’d been abusive to them, and I just couldn’t see Elijah being that kind of guy.
Barbara touched me on the arm as a kind of silent declaration that she was closing the entire subject, which was fine with me. “Then, we never had this conversation,” she said. That was fine, too, except that now the fact of her coming to me about this would be filed away in my mind, even if she never brought it up again.
“Okay, it never happened,” I said. “I’ll see you in the morning.” I turned around to leave, but another idea came to me. I turned to face her again and said, “Hey, Barbara, would you like to go and do something together sometime?”
She flashed me a delighted smile and said, “Oh, sweetheart, that sounds lovely! I would love that?”
“Okay, we’ll think of something and make a plan. See you tomorrow.” I excused myself and went home.
_______________
The beef stew that I’d put in the crock pot early this morning had simmered to perfection by the time I got home. I got myself a big bowl of it with some crackers and a salad on the side, and a big mug of hot tea with lemon, and settled down in front of the TV in the living room for dinner. Perhaps it was my viewing choices or perhaps it’s just the way television is, but wherever I looked on TV, there were scorching-hot men.
It was easy to understand, I guessed. The media had figured out long before I was born that sex sells. They had also figured out before I was born that they could make as much money using men’s looks as they could with women. Which was why, all over the primetime schedule, there were these guys beautiful enough to move you to tears of desire.
There was the star of that medical show, playing the hot doctor. There was the star whose hair was subtly greying on that other show about the first responders, playing the hot firemen. There were all the guys playing superheroes. Hotties, hotties everywhere, and I couldn’t help responding to them. There was as much beef on my TV screen as there was in my bowl.
People think of people who have put off or postponed having sex as being just not interested in it. But, I wasplentyinterested. I liked what I saw. I was a virgin, but I wasn’t dead.
I found myself thinking of the guy that I worked for, who looked just like the actors and was an actual person, who was starting to show a social interest in me. And, it brought me to the question of what I might do, what I might say or how I might react, if his interest started to become something more than social.
I put myself in the place with Elijah where I used to be with Blake. It wouldn’t be the same thing, of course. We were actuallydating.And, Blake was not my boss. With Elijah, it would be different. We had a totally different relationship. We were enjoying each other’s company without the obvious idea of it going anywhere else...unless that idea happened to be lurking beneath the surface.
I had admitted to myself how attractive — no, how heart-pumping, scorching, smoking hot — Elijah was. And, I presumed to think he probably found me attractive, as well. Not to be vain, but I was a pretty girl.So, what would I do if the idea lurking beneath the surface suddenly came up where we both had to deal with it?
It was no small question.Would it be morally right of me to act on my feelings of attraction for Elijah and let him do to me what a healthy, hot, straight guy wants to do to a pretty girl, if he asked me?Because the fact was that I was just moral enough, being a pastor’s daughter, that I would never make the first move myself. If it came to that, it couldonlybe ifheaskedme.So I put the question out in my mind where I could get a good look at it.Was it possible that Elijah would ask me? And, what would my answer possibly be?
What stirred the pot and made the question more compelling was what I’d seen of Elijah when he was working out. As beautifully as he filled the tailored suits he wore to work, Elijah Bennett happened to be waymoreof a sight when he was dressed for the gym. Every flex of those muscles that I’d seen in my stolen glances at him were etched into my memory, as was every spark of attraction that his workouts had set off inside me. There was no denying the possibility — assuming Elijah made the first move.
I went somewhere else in my mind where I hadn’t allowed myself to go with Elijah. It was somewhere that I had gone more than once with Blake. I imagined him in the shower.
In my imagination, I allowed myself to follow Elijah into the shower at Diamond’s. My mind peeled off Elijah’s gym gear and painted a picture of him naked — that body, with no clothes at all.
My imagination filtered out the distraction of other men in the locker room and put Elijah there by himself, sitting on a bench and putting his gear in his locker. He took off his sneakers and socks, peeled off his tank top, and slipped his short-shorts down the big, strong pillars of his thighs, revealing himself to my mind’s eye and no one else. He stood up and turned to face my mental camera, showingallof himself, every breathtaking bit, including what my imagination filled in below his waist.
The imagination has a way of not thinking small, so of course, it gave Elijah the most generously-proportioned penis. I basically knew what a penis looked like. But my imagination, not thinking small, gave him a long, thick whopper of a dick because that’s the way imagination fueled by desire works.
The camera shooting the sexy little movie in my head followed Elijah in the empty locker room I’d created for him. He turned around, showing the perfect muscles of his back and the muscular mounds of his buttocks. The rest of him was so perfect, his bottom couldn’t be anything less. My mind made those buns firm and tight, and made them flex so invitingly with the way he strode alongside the benches towards the showers. Elijah, I could only expect, must have a “reach out and grab me” kind of ass. And, something inside me would have loved to do exactly that.
I made the shower as devoid of other men as I’d made the locker room. There was no need to see anyone but Elijah in there. He took that dazzling nakedness into the shower and a cascade of warm water came bursting out to strike the muscles of that body. The steam that rose up in the shower, I knew, had to be partly from the temperature of the water and partly from the temperature ofhim.It splashed and flowed over those wonderful pecs and down the fleshy tiles of his abs, making rivulets down the columns of his legs, accenting every muscle up and down his frame with generous and glistening moisture.
The “editor” in my head filled in a missing detail and put a bar of soap in Elijah’s hand. As a bit of whimsy, there was the voice of a director murmuring that they’d forgotten to have him take the soap out of his locker and take it into the shower with him, so they’d have to go back and reshoot the whole sequence and edit it together the right way. But for now, the footage they were getting was good. I wholeheartedly agreed. The soap was a forgivable oversight; no need to stop this performance.