Love and Revenge in an Elevator

Date: 01.07.2007

Keywords: Love, Elevator, and, Revenge, in, an,

Pages:
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A beautiful, outraged, and thirty-nine year old brunette with an elfin face, full lips, clean white skin that dove past her neck into an ample vertical line of cleavage, and authentic silk stockings – the seams of which climbed upward in a perfectly straight line from her trim ankles to disappear under the hem of her professional, side-slit skirt – swept down the long, richly carpeted corridor of the sixty-ninth floor like a small tornado, sweeping a cheap imitation dynasty pitcher from an expensive walnut sidetable with a vicious blow from her open hand and pausing not at all as it cracked like an egg on the plastered wall and tumbled to the floor. A heavy oak door flew open at the end of the hall – a door that she had blown through and slammed shut behind her just moments before with a strength that would have astonished a casual observer – and a flawlessly coiffed female head peeked briefly out before quickly withdrawing and quietly closing the door behind itself.

She turned at the soft noise, grinned fiercely at the rapid retreat of the bottle-blonde head of her husband's divorce lawyer's latest conquest-qua-secretary, shouted a final unprintable insult at the quickly closing crack in the rich, varnished wood, and took the last few steps to the elevator before punching the button. The door opened in seconds – she had exited it just minutes before and it had not yet been summoned to another floor – and she bolted inside before turning and cursing loudly, flabbergasting the well-dressed young man standing by the control panel who had not, it seemed, expected to be caught in the eye of such a powerful and unforgiving hurricane of feminine anger. Having greeted him politely as he served his button-pushing function on the way up, she now took stock of him in moments and gifted him with a contemptuous smile that made it clear she considered him to be of the some verminous gender that had so recently and so richly offended her. While he took in her angelic form and attempted to reconcile her heavenly cleavage with her unprovoked contempt, her ire quickly rose and spewed forth in a holistically understandable but nonetheless unjustifiable torrent of bile.

"P-One. Press the button. Press the goddamn fucking button. And stop looking at my tits you lecherous little fuck or I'll be in your manager's office in five fucking minutes and I'll have your sorry ass fired before you can fucking BLINK. PRESS THE GODDMAN FUCKING BUTTON!"

Paralyzed momentarily by her assault, which lay in deep contrast to her friendly and even warm nature just ten minutes prior on the pleasant and very long voyage up in the old-fashioned, non-express elevator, he tore his eyes from the plump line of her cleavage, averted his gaze completely, and stabbed the button for the parking garage so quickly that he stubbed his finger. He shook it frantically while he blushed, and tried to fade into the darkly-stained, mirrored wood paneling. It didn't help that she wasn't done cursing.

"Fuck, fuck, FUCK! No-good motherfucking cocksucking BASTARD!" She noted his discomfort as he tried to crawl inside his own shirt. "And fuck YOU too, you minimum-wage, button-pushing FUCK!" And with that, she was done. The anger faded as quickly as it had manifested and, leaning sideways until her shoulder touched the wall of the elevator, she raised her hands to her face in a sudden gestalt of shame and grief as the first tears rose in her throat, burst from her brown eyes, and coursed under her fingers and down her cheeks.

Jake did what any man would do who was subjected to such a moving and powerful display. He coughed softly and tried not to move until his immediate environment returned to a semblance of sanity – and for a few moments, while she wept, it seemed as if he would get his wish. Over the course of a dozen floors, she regained the composure necessary to stop the tears, and an awkward silence permeated the air of the small space. As they slowly passed the fifty-seventh floor on their way to the lobby, she inhaled deeply, sighed, wiped the tears from her eyes with her fingertips, and lowered them to her sides, brushing the salty fluid off on the dark fabric of her skirt. She spoke into the air of the elevator as if apologizing to the machine, but obviously speaking to her silent and intimidated elevator mate.

"I'm sorry. I truly am. I don't even know you and that was a horrible thing to say. It was intended for my husband... my ex-husband. I've only been divorced for two and a half minutes and so far, it's not sitting very well." Her elevator mate said nothing, and continued to press himself softly against the wall adjacent to the control panel. Feeling more than a small amount of shame at treating him so poorly, she turned to him, damp cheeks still showing the stain of her tears, and extended her right hand. "Please forgive me. My name is Tammy."

The young man looked up briefly, turned just enough to extend his right hand for a quick handshake, and retreated to the relative safety of the elevator panel. Tammy had already begun to turn back towards the elevator door when she heard his soft tenor voice, in what was barely more than a whisper.

"Jake. And your ex-husband is a blind idiot."

For reasons she couldn't begin to explain to herself, she blushed from the cleft of her cleavage to her cheekbones. Nonetheless, she smiled in honest appreciation and retained the presence of mind to reward his forward but well-intentioned compliment with a reply.

"An idiot, yes, but no so blind. His new fiancé is fifteen years younger, three shades blonder, and a cup size larger." She sighed softly to end the sentence, in a tacit admission of the unkindness and inevitability of time. So certain was she that etiquette had been satisfied and that the conversation was at and end, that she was unprepared for his next, equally soft-spoken sentence.

"Then he's as careless as he is blind."

Surprised by the both the unexpected continuation of the conversation, and the ambiguity of the statement itself, Tammy laughed briefly to cover her own awkwardness before thinking the statement through and realizing that it made little to no sense. She paused, as the small circular light on the panel passed from fifty-two to fifty-one, and decided that it would be harmless to ask for an explanation.

"How so?"

He paused before turning his head to the left, meeting her eyes, and answering her question.

"Careless because he spills fine wine. An idiot for thinking she'll be with him twenty years from now. And blind for failing to appreciate a face that can stop traffic, a perfect, heart-shaped ass, and flawless natural breasts that make a young man regret being young." His deadpan explanation was delivered so softly that it took a moment for it to register.

She had smiled broadly and openly at his first two comments, but her jaw dropped past her bright white teeth and her eyes popped open as her mind processed the third and realized that he had, without hesitation or apology, just expounded on the qualities of her tits and bum. The elevator chimed cheerfully and slid to a quick stop on the forty-eighth floor, temporarily liberating her from the obligation of deciding whether she was gratified or offended. She stepped quickly to her left, away from Jake and the panel, to make way for a paunchy, nondescript, middle aged gentleman who casually claimed the space directly between them. Jake and Tammy both moved to the back corners of the elevator to space themselves equidistant from the new arrival in a casual triangle. The suit leaned forward and to his right to press the button for his destination, only three floors lower in the skyscraper on forty-five, and Tammy suppressed a contemptuous snort at his sloth.

Tammy decided, in the moments provided to her by the interruption of the unexpected stop, that her response to Jake's compliment – either offense or quiet satisfaction – would only be decided after she stole a look at him. Yes, she had apologized to him for her forwardness. She had even shaken his hand. But she hadn't actually looked at him. If he expected her not to slap him as soon as they were alone in the elevator, he had better be worth not slapping. The elevator chimed blithely once more, and Tammy used the moment of triploid motion, as the new arrival walked out and both she and Jake re-adjusted their positions in the elevator to reclaim their former spots, to spend a moment appraising her elevator-mate. She paused for a fraction of a second as Jake moved forward, to put herself just behind his motion, and turned her head slightly to the right to take him in.

Jake stood just under six feet, and Tammy pegged him, at first glance, at just under two-hundred pounds – athletic, muscular, and fit in the way that comes so naturally to young men in their twenties. His brown hair fell in waves past his ears and ended midway down his neck, in line with a strong, masculine jaw. He was clean-shaven, but already had a healthy scruff of shadow, at almost five in the afternoon, on his neck, mouth, and cheeks. She turned her eyes down the line of his neck and noticed, with approval, broad shoulders and a strong chest covered by a classic, beige, button-down shirt that flowed into a nearly flat stomach. She skipped past his khaki-clad thighs and looked, out of habit, at his bare left hand at his side before moving her eyes down past his ankles to his black, well-polished shoes. Too artistic, perhaps, to be a prima facie babe, but the shoes made up for the hair, and her curiosity had won out over anger. Before she could speak, she noticed that he had begun to turn to his left, towards her, and she averted her eyes forward, to focus on the seam of the polished steel elevator door as it finished closing. As the elevator chimed yet again and began to sink towards the lobby, sending a brief flutter through Tammy's stomach that could have easily been mistaken for quiet butterflies of approval, he spoke in the same soft, tenor voice she had heard him use moments before in describing her rather flattered and suddenly shy anatomy.