Chapter One

 

I care about my looks, about my image, about how the world sees me. Probably too much. It probably indicates some basic insecurities. I mean, I didn't take any liberal arts courses in school, no psychology stuff, because I was busy in my computer tech classes, but I know at least a little about almost everything, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you care that much for your appearance you're insecure.

Not that I'm entirely vain. I don't want to make you think I'm some kind of bimbo who agonizes over her looks and spends forever in the bathroom, because I'm not. I wear no makeup to speak of - which isn't much to brag about when you're twenty-two and have great skin, I know. But I like to look good, and like to wear nice clothes that flatter my body.

Nobody really dressed up for work, though. It just didn't have that kind of atmosphere. Even the managers and bosses tended to wear t-shirts and sweatshirts and jeans. I think that, for some of them, this atmosphere of camaraderie and boyish playfulness went against the grain, but the salaries were good, so they pretended to like it.

So I quickly realized my stylish sweater dresses were out of place and switched to T-shirts and jeans - mostly. There was a part of me that kind of liked to dress up sometimes, and I did pay a lot for the sweater dresses. So I wore them ever now and then, especially if there was a meeting of some kind.

When I first started, it soon became obvious that there were very few women working there. Instead the place was full of geek boys and their toys. Some of the geek boys were in their thirties and forties, with Master's degrees in computer engineering, but they were still geeks at heart, and still fascinated by almost any kind of tech toy or gadget.

And, need I add it, by women, as well, particularly women like me, who were, like I said, kind of attractive. In my form-fitting faded jeans and t-shirts I got an awful lot of admiring looks, and almost child-like, well, maybe that adolescent like attention. Honestly, it was sometimes like the average age of the men I worked with was fourteen rather than probably thirty. Most of them were socially adept enough to not stare like dogs at a steak, but every single guy who passed me looked at me, and any time I went anywhere the eyes of every guy I passed was on me.

If I actually stopped at someone's desk to talk to them, it was like, well, they'd drop everything, often fumbling it onto the floor, like some star struck adolescent boy confronted by a girl in a bikini or something. It was charming, in a way, flattering, and sometimes unnerving. They weren't actually deliberately rude, but I'll tell you, if I was the type to be filing sexual harassment charges I'd have had a whole file drawer of complaints working with those geeks.

It didn't really matter what I wore, either. I could wear loose overalls and sweatshirts and they still stared. Well, I couldn't cover up my face and not walk into things, and they knew that whatever I wore, I had a figure underneath. And every one of them had a very good imagination - or they wouldn't be working there.

One of the problems I had was that my job was to fix computers. It was your basic low level stuff. I mean, unlike them, I didn't have any Master's degree in engineering. All I had was a computer science diploma from the local community college. I had a knack, though, and I have to admit that computers and gadgets fascinated me, too, if not to quite the same degree as the boys.

So anyway, the problem was that in a quiet moment I did some stats, and compared them to the previous year, and I discovered that the requests for service had tripled since the previous year, so I went to my team leader, Theresa, and showed them to her, wondering if I'd stumbled on some kind of major fault in our server or the computers we were now buying. She just smiled.

Theresa - never Terry - was a slim, dark haired Italian woman in her mid thirties with glasses and dark, collar length hair which sort of curled forward at about the jaw line. She was as nerdy, I think, as the rest of them here. She always dressed quite nicely, though, but with somewhat more panache. She wore more skirts and tops, and no sweatshirts, but at the same time wasn't above leather pants and colourful vests. She was also one of the few women who wore high heels nearly every day, and I'm talking about three inch stiletto heels on pointy black boots and shoes. Yet she managed to carry it off easily.

She was very smart, and could have been a schoolteacher with that look, but a sexy one. She was one of those women that people wonder about, you know? I mean, I have a mostly wholesome, elfin look, but she looked so.... like maybe she went home and got out the whips and chains?

She was a soft-spoken woman, and we got along quite well. I'd never really even suspected there was a hint of sexuality in our relationship, that is, that she ever looked at me as anything more than a junior colleague

"It's because we hired you to service their computers," she said.

I stared at her in confusion. "Pardon?"

"You're hot. You're a girl. They like calling you to come and fix their computers.

"You mean they're making stuff up?" I asked indignantly.

She giggled a little. "I wouldn't be surprised, but no, that's not it. See, all of those guys out there are uber geeks. When something goes wrong, they tend to fix it themselves. But they're not techs, really, they're software guys. Oh they know tech, but they tend to overcomplicate everything. I mean, they have a small fault in a hard drive, they'll spend all afternoon scanning it and trying to repair it, where a tech would simply replace the thing and throw it out. They fixate on little problems and can spend hours trying to figure them out."

She sat forward at her desk and smiled at me. "We don't want them doing that. We pay them a great deal of money to develop software and games. We don't want them diverted by trying to diagnose and fix an operating system flaw when we ought to simply be rebooting the damned things. When tried telling them this, but they're like children out there." She waved her arms in mild irritation. "And they're so stupidly arrogant about their computer skills they wouldn't call Roger to come and fix something because they just KNEW they could fix it themselves."

She shrugged and folded her arms under her breasts. "So we hired a hot child to do the tech support. Now they call you when there's a problem, just to have the chance to talk to you."

"That's ridiculous!"

"I know, but they're kind of a ridiculous bunch."

"So you hired me for my looks!?"

"Not entirely. We needed someone technically capable, as well. If you couldn't actually fix the damned things you wouldn't be much use to us, now would you?"

"Do they know that's why you hired me?"

"Oh God no, they just think they got lucky. Now there's a hot babe wandering around the office who can admire them for their brilliant uber-geek skills. And they don't need a translator to talk to her! She understands geek speak!"

She laughed in delight while I shook my head, bemused.

"So maybe I should dress like a hooters girl," I said, raising an eyebrow.

"God no, we'd never get any work done around here. You're pretty enough it doesn't matter what you wear. They even stare at me!"

"You're pretty," I said.

"Oh please."

"You are."

Oh I'm sure they have lots of dirty little fantasies about me, but I'm thirty-six and married. You're fresh meat," she said, grinning. "And you look like an Anime character."

"I do not!" I said, scowling.

"Theresa laughed softly. "Well, no, even your eyes aren't THAT big. But you do have big blue eyes, that thick, glossy hair and a cute little button nose. Not to mention that bod."

She let her eyes flick up and down as she grinned at me and I blushed a little.

I was wearing jeans which were - well, not tight, but form-fitting, and a t-shirt which was not tight but - well - it was form fitting, okay. Hey, I wasn't dressed slutty or anything. I just looked good in them. My breasts are not huge, by any means. But my thirty-six Cs certainly, uhm, noticeable.

"Just act normal, do your job, tolerate their social backwardness, and learn. You're pretty smart, and pretty imaginative. Some of the ideas you've mentioned to the guys sound pretty good. You don't have their background education, but experience makes up for a lot, and you could be helping them develop games one day."

"You think so?" I said, pleased.

"These guys are super protective of all their little ideas and projects - with other geek guys, but there aren't many of them who would turn down the offer of help from you," she said with a knowing smirk.

I rolled my eyes.

"Just think of them as a bunch of high school boys, and treat them the same way."

"High school boys are pigs," I said.

"Exactly," she said, smiling again.

I sighed and left her office, going back to mine.

She and I were part of the "administration and support" area, so we were in high cubicles. Mine was actually a bit bigger than hers because I had extra counter space to work on computers and do installs. Most of the rest of the two floors which made up our division were the software developers, and except for the team leaders in their private, walled offices, everyone else was in smaller cubicles, with much lower partitions so they could see and talk to each other.

The gamer developers area was on the west side of the second floor. It had a different décor than the rest of the building. They were like a bunch of kids, after all - except maybe they didn't have very good social skills. Well, some of them didn't. Anyway, the difference about this area was that whenever I had to go over there I felt like I was on stage. They didn't - outright - stare at me, but everyone looked at me - repeatedly. You know, in that look at her, look away thing guys do when they don't want to be rude - or get aught staring?

Theresa's explanation about why I'd been hired had made me more self-conscious around them, even though I understood her reasons and they made sense. They were even quite clever, to be honest. But it still made me feel like I was some kind of entertainment package for all the uber geeks here.

So I kind of felt like I was on stage, you know, self-conscious every time I bent over - which I had to do often enough because of all the cables under desks, and the fact many of the computers were under desks. I was aware, more aware than usual, of the way my breasts strained against the thin fabric of my T-shirt whenever I arched my back a little, or how my little T-shirt pulled up to reveal my bare belly whenever I had to reach up to something higher.

It was weird. I wasn't attracted to any of these men, but the idea began to take hold in my head that they were all lusting after me, that every time they saw me they were undressing me with their eyes and imagining all sorts of filthy things with me and them. Partly, that grossed me out. But it also appealed to my ego, an ego I rarely thought much about but which was that part of me that really liked to be thought of as attractive.

I won't say it exactly made me horny, but, well, it did make me kind of sexually aware and gave me a kind of exciting little ego stroke whenever I noticed one of them looking at me throughout the day. I even caught myself sometimes wanting to pose in a certain way, like bend over where someone could see or yawn and stretch - like a nasty little cock tease! But I stopped myself in time.

Mostly.

Here's the weird thing, though. This sort of thinking, the excitement it gave me, did wind up leading to a hot, nasty sexual affair, but not with any of them.

Over the following several days I kept thinking about it. I'd like to say it didn't influence how I behaved, or my dress choices, but who knows. I know I kind of got off on the attention.

Anyway, one day, shortly after our little talk, I had planned to spend much of the day in my office, doing the paperwork I had let lapse and fixing a few software issues. Since I wasn't planning on doing much crawling around under desks I wore one of my sweater dresses, a cute, form-fitting blue dress which was almost the perfect shade to match both my eyes, and my hair.

Did I mention I had blue hair? No? Okay, it wasn't blue. It was very, very, very black, a shining, glossy black which fell down around my shoulders. But it had some thin blue highlights, especially around the bangs. I was kind of mutating away from the goth look I'd had for a while into something - else - I just didn't know what.

So my hair was mostly very glossy, very straight black, with bangs curving diagonally across my forehead. I had even worn a bit of lipstick, and my black boots with stiletto heels. The sweater dress was modest enough in length. Think of it as your basic ribbed turtleneck which went all the way past my waist, almost to the knees. It was thin enough that the outlines of even a thong would have shown through, so I didn't wear any panties.

And I think it was this new - awareness - if you want to call it that, combined with the low grade sense of purring sexual - awareness - that had me acting a bit like a coquette, smugly and coyly aware of my sexuality around others, and enjoying their response - which led me into the strange, dark affair with my "team leader".

I was in her office, bent over, going over more figures related to the number and types of computer breakdowns, and the kind of parts needed to replace those which burned out.

I was leaning over her desk as we went over it - something I did fairly commonly. As I said, I was beside her, leaning over and pointing out some features of the numbers and formulas. I caught her eyes flicking - just flicking - sideways in the wrong direction. That is, instead of to my face, to my breasts.

I thought little of it the first time, but the second time, I felt a strange sense of wonderment, and the third time I felt a breathlessness at the thought Theresa was looking at my breasts. They were fairly obvious in that sweater, especially bent over with them hanging right next to her head, but still, she shouldn't have had any interest in looking there. Her eyes should have been on the screen!

Now if she had been a guy, and I had been in my normal mind, that is, not in this strange state of sexual "awareness" I wouldn't have paid it any heed. But the boys had given me, not only a new awareness, but a new confidence in my sexuality and attractiveness. And a hair-trigger sense of excitement, which now had been "triggered".

I continued going over the data, but watched her out of the corner of my eye, waiting for that flicker of change in her vision, and when I caught it I turned and smiled at her. She blushed a bit, and I straightened. "Do you like this dress?" I asked with a coy smile.

She licked her lips a bit nervously, her face a little flushed. "It's very nice," she said. "It sets off your hair very well."

"You have dark hair too," I said. "You should wear more bright colors."

"Oh I don't have the figure for it," she said with a little head shake.

"You have a great figure," I said. "You look very - healthy, athletic. You must do a lot of exercise."

"My husband built a home gym," she said. "I do work out. I've never been able to abide weakness or flabbiness."

"I turned and kind of perched my bottom on the edge of the desk. This particular sweater dress came down to about three inches above the knee, so sitting back like that slid the hem up several inches. Still quite modest, but - my bare legs were very close to her.

I like to swim," I said.

"That's very good for your body," she replied.

"We have a backyard pool, so I can swim laps, then just lay there and bake a little in the sun."

"Oh I envy you," she sighed. "We live in a condo building. There is a pool but it's full of kids and seniors most of the time."

"Oh I don't think I'd like that," I said. "I like to swim naked. It's very invigorating."

"Okaaayyy," she said. "You have to watch out, though not to get too much sun or your skin will look like leather when you're forty."

"Oh I use a high sunscreen," I said. "I make sure I spread it over every inch of my body before I lay out in the sun."

There was an - undercurrent - to this conversation that had my pussy throbbing softly. I was speaking in a low, somewhat throaty fashion, with a little half smile at Theresa, who was kind of smiling vaguely back at me, holding her coffee cup in both hands. But she set the cup down on her desk, then, and leaned forward a bit.

"Oh that's good," she said. "You have really good skin, from what I've seen of it, and you're very fair-skinned like me, so you probably burn easily."

And as she said this she laid her hand on my leg, just above the knee, and stroked it lightly.

"Yes, sun burns aren't the kind of heat I like," I said.

"And what kind of heat do you like?" she asked with a coy smile.