Eventually Vera went stiff. As stiff as Dick. She threw back her head back and uttered once last primeval, guttural scream.
The following silence was deafening. Vera remained straddling Dick. Sweat was dripping off her face and hair on to his face and hair. A few salty drops went in his mouth and he gagged. Sensing her momentary weakness Dick tried to extricate himself from beneath her enormous thighs. It was like trying to escape from a giant mattress. A giant warm, moist mattress. Like an escapologist using extreme muscle control to liberate himself from a confined space, Dick managed to wriggle his way free inch by inch, sliding out from under her enormous bulk as she gently flopped on to the table.
Dick dressed himself and took stock of the situation. There was a massively semi-naked fat woman making the sounds of a buzz saw asleep on the meeting room table. Drawing on huge amounts of will-power to prevent himself from being sick, Dick used Vera’s discarded blouse to soak up and wipe away any traces of sex from her sweaty thighs. The whole exercise was, he felt, like swabbing the deck of a very large and very smelly trawler after a record-breaking catch. But a hundred thousand times less fulfilling.
Summoning every single reserve of strength he had Dick dressed Vera as best as he could. The keys to the meeting room and the department door had flown out once Vera had removed her corset. Dick retrieved them and after a short while, returned to the room pushing the trolley that delivered the mail each day. Fortunately the trolley was almost the same height as the table so it was a relatively simple task to roll the still sleeping Vera on to it. The trolley groaned and one wheel buckled but Dick managed to push her back into the office and up to her desk. He didn’t have the strength to lift her up to her seat so Dick rather unceremoniously pushed her on to the top of the raised platform. Vera’s head hit the floor with a dull thud that made Dick wince but which remarkably, failed to rouse her.
Going back into Meeting Room A, Dick moved the table back into the centre of the room and with a cloth, wiped it clean of any traces of bodily juices then threw away the bottle and glasses. He knew the ultra efficient air conditioning that kicked in an hour before work would remove the tell-tale smells of brandy, sweat and sex, while the garbage compactor programmed for the same time would take care of the rest of the evidence. Before he left Dick looked once more at the peaceful Vera laying next to her desk. He wiped some drool from her mouth and adjusted her clothing as best as he could. Dick thought she would probably wake up after a few hours and take herself home. Looking at her current state he doubted whether she’d remember much about of what happened; the problem was that he did.
He felt dirty, cheap and violated. He shook as if a whole platoon of soldiers wearing heavy boots and 60lb combat packs had just walked over his grave. Then he shrugged. At least he’d got laid.
CHAPTER 15
Vera didn’t appear the next day at work; her staff was told she was feeling unwell. Dick looked around at his dull colleagues and wondered if any of them had the remotest idea about what had taken place in Meeting Room A. He sincerely hoped they didn’t. Vera returned to the office the following day and if she remembered anything about their liaison, she didn’t reveal it, well not until just after lunch. Dick was in the large reference library on the eighteenth floor when Vera appeared at the end of a narrow corridor of books, blocking both the light and any chance of escape.
‘Mr. Brunel’, Vera whispered as she approached, ‘I must sincerely apologise for my behaviour the other evening’.
‘Shit!’, Dick said, quite loudly.
‘Pardon’, Vera said, slowly approaching.
‘Books!’, Dick said. I said ‘books’.
Dick knew that ‘books’ didn’t sound remotely like ‘shit’ but it was the first thing he thought of.
‘Books’, he continued, ‘There’s so many here. And they’re really useful for my research’.
Vera was now completely within his personal space. Not as completely as she was on the meeting room table the other night, but still uncomfortably close. If she had been confused about the shit/books reference she didn’t show it.
‘As I was saying, Mr. Brunel. What happened the other night was totally out of character and I can only put it down to a combination of loneliness on my part and a wish to celebrate your magnificent proposal’.
Dick turned round because he thought Vera was looking at something interesting on the shelf directly behind him. He turned back again and realised that she was in fact looking directly at him, waiting for a reaction.
Dick didn’t know whether to comfort Vera who genuinely seemed full of remorse over what had taken place, or laugh the whole episode off. But then he thought if he did comfort her she might take this as a sign that he wanted to continue the relationship, and he wasn’t sure if his internal organs or spine could stand the strain. Of course, if he laughed it off she might think that he didn’t care and that he had just taken advantage of her, and this might turn her into some 22nd century bunny boiler. Dick was considering this dilemma and whether he was safe as he didn’t actually own a rabbit, when Vera moved even closer to him and whispered in his ear.
‘I’m sorry I thrust myself upon you like I did’.
Dick gave a half smile. ‘That’s OK. I wasn’t sure if you would remember what we did’.
‘Remember? How on earth could I forget! How many times did we do the deed? I think it was eight or nine times. Probably more’.
Dick gave another half smile. He knew he could satisfy women but could one fuck with him really feel like eight or nine?
‘No. I think it was just the one’, Dick replied.
‘Poppycock!’, Vera exclaimed, emitting a sort of cackling laugh that caused a few other employees in the library to turn their heads in their direction.
‘I might not remember all the details of that evening but we definitely did it more than once. Otherwise, how could I feel like I did? I’m still very sore’.
She punched his shoulder, supposedly in a playful manner, but with a force that he was certain had left visible bruising. ‘There’s no need to cover up for me Mr. Brunel!’. She leaned towards him, ‘And thanks for cleaning up all the stickiness after I’d passed out. You were a true gentleman’.
Dick shuddered. He’d shuddered a lot since he arrived in 2150 but recollecting what he’d had to do while Vera was unconscious more than justified the reaction this time.
‘Ah yes…’ Dick shuddered again. ‘The stickiness’. More shuddering.
‘I still had the taste on my lips’.
‘Your lips?’ Dick was confused. Perhaps more went on that night than he recalled. Perhaps they had oral as well and it was so traumatic that he’d forced the whole event into a dark recess at the back of his brain where it had remained locked away until now.
‘Yes. When I woke up I licked my lips and tasted the brandy’.
‘The brandy’. Dick frowned.
‘Yes. On my lips. What did you think I was talking about?’
Dick wanted to say semen. Or even spunk, jizz or man-goo. But he didn’t.
‘My memory is very hazy that evening but that taste is how I knew we spent the evening drinking. That and my sore head. She rubbed her temple and Dick had a flashback of Vera falling off the trolley. ‘I’ve never downed eight or nine large glasses of brandy in a single session before. No wonder I felt so ill’.
Dick sighed a huge, huge sigh. It was now obvious to him that all Vera had remembered about the night together was the drinking.
‘Yes. The brandy. We certainly put away a lot that night’. Dick mimed zipping up his mouth. ‘Don’t worry Miss Darling. What happened will remain our little secret. Nothing will pass my lips’. Dick winked, ‘Unlike the brandy’.
Dick was rather pleased with this quip and so, apparently was Vera who smiled and punched him again on the same shoulder, this time with even more force, breaking a few surface blood vessels. Dick smiled weakly.
‘Thank you Mr. Brunel, I knew I could rely on your discretion. I just hope no one else is aware of what took place’.
