Office Retreat - Part 4

 

The dinner went smoothly, all things considered.

I wore a black mesh dress Jessica had packed for “the nice dinner,” and it was so sheer I nearly panicked when I first put it on. The fabric clung to my unfamiliar hips, fluttered at my thighs. I couldn’t stop checking my reflection—was this how women felt before every event, this tightrope of wanting to be seen but not wanting to be seen too much? Jessica—Jake now—stood behind me, coaching me on lipstick, fixing my hair in loose waves.

The dinner was held on the terrace of the lodge, all string lights and white linen and a view that stretched, syrupy and gold, across the lake. I spent the first twenty minutes anxious and hyper-aware of every forkful I put in my mouth, the way I crossed my legs, the way the men at the table glanced at my breasts, then away, then back again. But then the first round of wine hit, and I started to have fun. People deferred to me in a way they hadn’t before; they laughed at my jokes, angled their bodies toward me, waited for my opinion before moving on. It was heady, and I let myself drift with it.

The more I drank, the more the new body felt natural, automatic. I found myself leaning in, laughing louder, touching people on the arm when I talked. Even the old guard of the company—the ones who’d barely acknowledged me as Jake—seemed to soften, letting me in on their gossip, their stories of industry gore.

The wine suppressed the last of my Jake-ness, the cultural ballast that kept me on the outside looking in.

I thought I’d mastered it by the end of the meal, but on the walk back to our rooms, I felt suddenly exhausted by the effort.

I shut myself into Jessica’s room.

The room was dark, the thin line of porchlight blocked by blackout curtains. I stumbled to the bed and flopped face-first onto the pillow, legs dangling, arms boneless with relief. A dozen competing feelings wrestled for supremacy inside me: pride, mortification, elation, envy.

The day had felt like a fever dream, too vivid to be real, but the ache in my calves and the tingle of wine in my blood assured me it had happened.

For a long time, I just lay there, feeling the strange texture of Jessica’s hair against my cheek, the way the nylon mesh of her dress pressed into my ribs with each long breath. The adrenaline faded.

A soft, insistent buzz from the nightstand sliced through my haze. I groped for the phone, almost knocking over a half-full water glass, and pulled the device to my face, blinking in the gloom.

It was a text, and the sender was Adam: a simple, "Hope you’re winding down okay. Good night, love you!"

He’d attached a picture of Jessica’s kid grinning in a soccer uniform.

"Charlie," I remembered, and opened the photo, letting my thumb dwell on the image. There was a resemblance to Jessica in the set of his jaw, in the alertness of his stare.

There was a human being out there who looked at this face—Jessica’s face, my face now—and called it “Mommy.”

On some level I knew it was deranged, but I couldn’t stop.

I whispered, “Mommy’s on a business trip, honey,” and felt the words ripple down my borrowed spine, absurd and thrilling in equal measure.

I let my hand roam, cupping the warm weight of my borrowed breast, letting my thumb circle the nipple through the mesh until it peaked and a thrill ran straight to my stomach.

“Mommy loves you, baby,” I murmured, feeling ridiculous and a little dangerous.

I tried out lines in a sing-song falsetto, “Mommy’s tired, baby, but she’s thinking about you.”

I just let myself exist in the impossible, ridiculous reality: I was here, I was her, and in the morning I would continue to be her again.

I kneaded in slow, measured pulses, chasing the strange pleasure until it blurred into a kind of comfort, and let my eyes fall shut.