Chapter One

 

I'm not sure when I became a geek. I've always been kind of unusual for a girl in the way electronic gizmos and toys fascinated me. I didn't want any dolls unless they moved and spoke. And I way preferred the toy robot to them anyway.

Of course, I loved computers and cell phones, and I really fell in love with my first iPad. But I didn't just like to play around with them, I wanted to see what made them tick, to open them up and examine them and understand how to make one myself.

When I was in high school, my bedroom wasn't filled with makeup and clothes; it was filled with computer parts and things I was trying to build. But then I really got into music, and music streaming, and that sent me on a detour through sound systems and high speed data streams.

I liked playing around with things as opposed to people, because things were predictable, and didn't get angry or sad, and didn't cause me any stress or anxiety. People did all those things! Boys were... a big problem.

I mean, a part of me sort of identified with them in a lot of ways. I thought they were generally more logical than girls, and didn't spend so much time and effort on stuff like fashion and celebrities and hair and makeup. On the other hand, I never got the sports thing and I'm not that big into cars. Though the new AI systems for cars are fascinating!

Boys were always either teasing me or taunting and trying to get my clothes off. So much so that because I'd developed' fairly early, I became self-conscious about my body. I took to trying to disguise it as much as possible so guys didn't look at me in embarrassing ways, or say embarrassing things.

And since I skipped a couple of grades, I wound up in class with girls a couple of years older than me. That didn't mean they were smarter or more mature than me, just older. They seemed to think they were smarter and more mature, though, and looked down at me, and treated me like I was a little girl and they were the big girls. Annoying bitches.

So it was fairly easy to retreat to my 'things' because they were fascinating and didn't stress me out.

I was only sixteen when I started college. I thought when I got to college things would be different, especially since I would be taking classes in computers, electronics and audio visual engineering. I figured, well, all those arrogant, rude jocks would be taking something else, and I wouldn't have to put up with them.

Unfortunately, it didn't quite work out that way. There were no jocks in the classes I took. But there weren't many girls either. There were a lot of geeks, though, and they all showed even more interest in me than the jocks had in high school.

It seemed like a girl who could take apart a computer and liked video games was just what they'd been dreaming about, especially if she had blonde hair.

Blondes, apparently, are supposed to be slutty airheads with no interest in computers or electronics. So even with the bras I wore, which were designed to make me look flatter on top, and the totally unsexy clothes I wore atop them, these guys kept pestering me all the time!

I did not wear makeup, perfume nor jewelry. I mostly wore sweatshirts or T-shirts and sweaters, almost always long enough to cover my butt, and I didn't do anything with my hair. It didn't matter. I stopped wearing contacts and wore glasses instead. That just seemed to make them more interested!

I even considered cutting my hair really short and pretending to be a lesbian, but I had kind of fought against that reputation through high school. I mean, a girl not into fashion, boys, makeup and celebrities MUST be a dyke, right? Especially the way I dressed!

I have never been comfortable turning guys down who work up the courage to ask me out, and it's even harder when girls do it! It was all very uncomfortable! I hate disappointing people! But I'm so filled with anxiety at the thought of what could go wrong on a date that I force myself to make excuses for turning them down.

Now I don't want to suggest I had no interest at all in guys or sex. But I didn't have any interest in these guys. I think it was their needy attitude that turned me off - well, along with them whining and then getting sulky when turned down. That's just not, well... manly. I think I have a clichéd view of what a 'real man' is like, and it comes mostly from movies.

In addition to my interest in music, I watched a lot of movies, including old movies. I liked the big, tough hero guys. Not because they were big, so much as they were tough, both physically and emotionally. I couldn't imagine these guys, well, the characters, not the actors, sniveling about how someone was being unfair by turning them down for a date, or getting sulky and insulting over it.

I mean, can you see one of John Wayne's characters, or one of the Rock's characters, or Keanu Reeve's, pouting and insulting a girl because she politely turned down a date? No! They were these dangerous, but completely reliable guys who would always treat a girl right. Oh, they might be bossy, but hey, they were so bad-ass they deserved to be.

It might shock you, but there are no guys like that in high school. At least, not in mine. If there were any in college I didn't run into them there either. I did go to a few parties while there, and fooled around with a few guys, almost for experimental purposes, really. The guys were cute, had reasonably nice bodies, and showed a lot of confidence.

In bed, they were nothing to write home about.

They weren't men in bed. They were boys; eager, slobbering, panting, grunting, groping boys. I learned about sex, and learned that it wasn't that good. At least, not with those guys. It was certainly nothing like the girls I saw in videos on the internet! And I don't mean the fake ones with actresses, but the real ones.

The only orgasms I ever had came from my own hand - and assorted toys I bought. Remember how I said I liked electronic stuff? Yeah.

I graduated when I was nineteen, and got a job as an audio visual technologist for a place called APL - Applied Electronics, doing installations for home theaters and home entertainment systems. I loved it from the start! It was like... I was getting paid to do what I loved, which was put stuff together and make it work!

After about six months I got promoted, which gave me more responsibility, and let me work on bigger projects. More fun! The bigger the system, the more stuff! And some of these things were complicated as shit!

And then I got assigned to a project in this huge skyscraper that was under construction. The shell of the building itself was completed. We were wiring up a very fancy board room, or at least, an empty room with no door, a stone floor and no furniture and open walls which would become a board room.

Our AV engineer drew up the plans for us, and we basically just ran the wires and then went away for a month. When we came back the interior walls had been put in place, along with the flooring and the furniture. Wow! Talk about a difference!

The flooring was this sleek hard-wood they put mats down to keep from being scuffed. The walls were dark mahogany panels which gleamed. The lighting was a combination of showy, bright, warm LED pot-lights, track lights, and hidden lighting under a lowered false ceiling.

Then there was the board room table. It was long and rounded at the edges, sort of oblong, but could seat about a dozen on each side in these thick, plush upholstered leather chairs.

Yeah, it was a board room for some kind of bank, of course. Those bastards have all the money.

We were wiring it up for video conferences, which meant microphones at each place on the board room table, cameras on the walls which could be controlled to zoom in or pan to different speakers, giant flat screens on two walls, and of course, sound systems.

This was on the eighty fourth floor of a building in the financial district of Manhattan, and the views out its enormous windows were breathtaking. I mean, I lived in Brooklyn in a basement apartment. This was how the other half lived - or at least, worked. The windows were floor to ceiling, and the ceiling was fourteen feet high.

In addition to the cameras, microphones and TVs we were installing a computer to control it all, and pass the data stream out in a secure feed to whoever they were conferencing with. It was a bit more complicated than that, too, since the client wanted to be able to control the lighting from the same control board.

That included the blinds, which were these fancy things that would rise or fall to block out the big windows at the touch of a button.

All this meant a certain amount of crawling around on hands and knees to attach wires, and it was kind of hot in there, so while I'd worn a sweater (it was February) I had taken it off and was just wearing a black and white T-shirt and gray cargo pants.

The T-shirt was from Game of Thrones, which I loved, and had a direwolf on it, and said 'Winter is coming', which confused people who didn't know anything about the show since it was already winter in New York.

Anyway, I was rolling around under the boardroom table stretching wires up along the inner legs and into the waiting openings above so I could then attach them to the microphones which would be set in place when some big shots came strolling through.

I could tell they were big shots just from their shiny shoes. I didn't see much more of them from under there. One of them was talking about the walls and the lighting, and explaining the AV set up. They talked with Jerry, who was bossing the install, and he gave a brief description of things, including how the panels over the flat screens would slide up and down at the push of a button, which was way cool.

I pretty much ignored them until I had to crawl out from under the table again to take the wires I'd run up and install them into the microphones. Then they all turned to stare at me, I guess because they hadn't known I was there.

There wasn't a lot of them, just three, and they were all old men, like, in their forties or fifties or something. So I didn't pay them a lot of attention. I jumped onto the table and crawled over to the center (It's a freaking wide table) and then reached through the opening to pull some wires up.

I reached down and pulled one of the screwdrivers out of one of the pockets along my left thigh and began to attach the wire to one of the microphones. I was intent on that and paid little attention to what else was going on in the world, but when I finished, I straightened and noticed one of the old guys was looking at me.

He was like, I don't know, over forty anyway, with tousled brown hair, and a kind of light beard - the kind that looks like they just haven't shaved in a few days. He was tall and looked good in a dark blue suit - an expensive one. And he was looking at me in a way I had never before encountered.

I'd seen guys ogling me, leering at me, you know, pretty blatantly. I'd seen guys get caught looking and look away quickly. I'd seen guys look and smile when I noticed them. This guy was just... looking. His eyes flicked up and down a bit, then, without smiling or showing any particular emotion, he turned away.

It made me feel a bit weird!

It was like he had sort of sized me up, very unemotionally, and hadn't shown either approval or disapproval or given any other idea why he'd been looking at me.

Whatever.

I returned to working as they shuffled on out of the board room, with Jerry leading them off to show them some other part of the floor we were wiring up. We were doing the internal communications system too.

Now the way this fancy board room table was built was that it had a sort of foot wide cutout running down the center. You could run wires and stuff through it, and then put these mahogany panels in place over it when you were finished. But at the moment, the center was open. It wasn't very wide, but it was wide enough for me. Because I wasn't very wide either.

Most of me.

I had moved down a couple of positions, hooking up the microphones one by one, and when I got to where a group of wires ran up along one of the legs down below I decided that rather than getting off the table, crawling under it, and trying to shove them up higher, I'd just reach down inside.

I couldn't get it with my arms, but I was able to stretch down, slip my head and shoulders in fairly easily to extend my reach, but I couldn't quite reach them. So I pushed lower. What got in my way was my boobs. I had to kind of squeeze them in to slide my upper chest down inside.

I grabbed at the wires but just managed to knock them down a bit further. Cursing, I pushed myself down deeper, like, way deeper. I can be obstinate when I set my mind to something. By the time I was able to grab the things my torso was upside down under the table all the way to the hips.

The wires had come apart, and I cursed, gathering them in, and then tried to pull back. That wasn't as easy as you might think. I held the wires in one hand and stretched the other upward along my body so I could grab the edge of the table and then squirmed slowly backward.

I bent my knees, raising my butt, and pushed against the table top, sliding my torso slowly up out of it. I was focusing mostly on the wires and on my balance, and I hadn't really given a lot of thought to my T-shirt, which had, of course, fallen down almost to my bra while I hung there upside down.

And then when I got to where I had to get my boobs out, well, of course, that sort of pulled it back a bit more, and I had to grab at it, and push down on my breasts to flatten them to get up out of the damn hole. I finally did, and my T-shirt fell down again. And that was when I noticed that guy was back.

And looking at me.

I flushed, wondering how much he'd seen. Just my bare stomach, I thought, though probably he could have been staring at my butt, which would have been pretty nicely presented.

"You're very nimble," he said, in a British accent. "The benefits of youth."

He smiled slightly.

"Uhm... yeah," I said, flushing.

"My name is Jeremy Stone," he said, extending his hand.

I shook it awkwardly. He had a big freaking hand. I did not. Mine was small and very soft. His was big and strong and ... hard.

"This is my bank," he said.

I blinked in confusion. "You own a bank?"

He smiled. "I and my family. So I have a considerable interest in everything related to the construction of our New York facility.

"Ah, well, it looks... nice," I said awkwardly.

"I think all of us do our best to surround ourselves with whatever looks most attractive to our eyes," he replied. "Beautiful furniture, beautiful buildings and interiors. Beautiful works of art, beautiful cars... beautiful women."

"Uhm huhhh," I said.

"What's your name?"

He said it in a way of such... certainty, like he couldn't imagine my not answering. And neither could I.

"Uh, Quinn."

"Quinn? Interesting and unusual name. But then, you're an unusual girl."

"Uh, how do you know?"

"Because of what you do for a living, my dear. There are very few women involved in technical jobs like this."

I shrugged. It was true enough.

"And a true blonde, as well."

I frowned, surprised and confused. How would he know?"

"Maybe I dyed it."

He shook his head. "I can always tell. You were born blonde."

He headed for the door, and turned to look over his shoulder.

"Blonde suits you. Though red looks quite good on you, as well."

He smiled and left, and I frowned in confusion, then flushed, because my bra was a dark red, and that was obviously what he meant! I felt indignant for a few moments. Pervert! He shouldn't be looking at me like that! And then I realized that my thong was showing, and it, of course, matched the bra. I flushed again and jerked my pants up higher!

They weren't just red, really, but very dark red, practically purple! And my lingerie was my sort of secret concession to being a girl. I didn't dress like a girl - ever! But underneath my clothes... well, I had developed a kind of ... fascination, for sexy lingerie.

And I wasn't used to flashing it at people!

I started wondering how much he'd seen with my butt in the air and the rest of me under the table. I didn't wear my pants low enough to show off my thong, not usually, but they had been kind of pushed back by me getting lodged in the narrow opening too. Damn!

Oh well. Whatever. So some guy had seen parts of my underwear. Big deal. I'd be more careful in future. It was weird the way he'd looked at me, though. His eyes were so... intense, but without ogling or leering or anything.