The Interview (short romance story) Read online

  The Interview

  V T Turner

  Copyright © V T Turner 2013

  [email protected]

  Also by V T Turner

  My Paid Angel

  5 Days a Week

  Sinister Touch

  Good, Bad, Girl

  Betrayed

  Voyeur

  Forbidden

  1

  Shirley was nervous. She showered, tried on half a dozen outfits and then, when the nerves kick started a flood of sweat, she showered again and sprayed herself with an atmosphere-clogging amount of antiperspirant. She redid her hair and her makeup, taking anther hour to set herself before she changed again.

  She settled on a casual suit. It fit her perfectly, curved neatly around her ample bust, hugged tight to her slim waist. The short skirt showed off her small bum and her long legs.

  She adjusted her appearance in the mirror with trembling hands, looked this way and that; bent this way and that, seeing herself from every angle. She sprayed herself with a subtle amount of perfume, not enough to overpower, but enough for them to smell as she neared.

  She retouched her lipstick, plucked a stray eyebrow and gave herself a hardened, stern stare in the mirror. You can do this, she told herself. You’ve got this. She breathed in deeply, closed her eyes and when she opened them she was set, ready to go to her job interview.

  It wasn’t her first and it wasn’t a particularly hard one. She was thirty-two, had worked for much of her adult life and had changed jobs as much as she’d changed outfits, but interviews, regardless of the job or how much it paid, always terrified her. There was something so innately horrifying about sitting in front of a panel of men and women and having them judge you; watching and trying to smile as they perused your appearance and body language, reading from a file which detailed your entire adult working life.

  Shirley was a social creature, but when it came to job interviews she would happily be a hermit.

  It was an office job, nothing too taxing. She would be sitting behind a desk all day answering phones, making calls and filling out forms and other menial nonsense on the computer. She wasn’t even sure she wanted the job, she still had a part time job in a restaurant, working most weekends and some nights, and she was happy to wait until something better came along. On her way to the interview, driving erratically and trying to keep her mind occupied by listening to the radio, she wondered why she even bothered going, why she was putting herself through the stress. She was fairly confident that even if they wanted her to fill the position, she would refuse.

  They had asked though, and she had applied. It would be rude to turn them down, and she still clung to the hope that the job would be better than she envisaged; that it wouldn’t be as tedious and soul destroying as she suspected it would be.

  She pulled up outside the office block, parked the car and looked up at the imposing brick building with her eyebrows arched into a hesitant frown. It looked like a prison, only the inmates here wore shirts and suits and shared gossip and bullshit around the water cooler. It was a square, unimpressive building that sat in a dark and dreary part of town, around the corner from a busy road that blared a constant wall of noise at the weather-stained three decade old structure; next to a line of smaller buildings that had seen better days and made the office block look like paradise by comparison.

  She sighed heavily, slunk out of the car and paused to straighten her skirt and study the building again, hoping it would look better in the open air. It didn’t.

  “Shelly Marshall,” she told a stern-faced woman at the front desk, a woman who looked as bleak and menacing as the building in which she sat. “I have an interview?” she frowned, not sure why she had phrased that as a question. She was wondering just how naive or strange she had probably sounded, in no small part down to her nerves, when the receptionist nodded towards a door at the end of a long hallway.

  “Through there, take the steps up to the second floor,” she said, looking down at her desk halfway through, as if she couldn’t be bothered to maintain eye contact until the end of her sentence.

  Shelly studied the corridor and the stairs that she could see through the glass panel in the door at the end. “Is the elev--”

  “Broken,” the receptionist cut in. “The walk’ll do you good,” she added, without raising her head.

  Shelly wondered why she had said that. She studied her own appearance for a moment, looked sternly at the receptionist and then shrugged it off, too nervous to start anything. She slumped down the corridor and slowly climbed the stairs. As she neared her destination she could hear the bustle of a busy room; a dozen voices or more all clattering together to create an apprehensive noise which awaited her.

  At the top of the stairs she paused before pushing open the door to the second floor office. She took a moment to calm herself and then gently swung it open.

  The floor was one large open space, cluttered with lines of desks, each occupied by stressed looking workers in formal clothes. She saw people that clearly hated their jobs: an overweight man with wet patches under his arms, swearing at a computer screen and slamming the mouse on the desk; a middle-aged woman who looked like she was ready to start a fight with her monitor. She also saw people who looked content and relaxed, including a number of young men who weren't entirely unattractive. Shirley was nervous, tense, not in the perfect mood for flirting, but she did catch the eye of one of those young men and she was sure she saw a sparkle of flirtation in his smile.

  She walked down the long aisle that cut through the centre of the office and led to the back. There were number of offices there; these ones enclosed and solitary, with their own doors to shut out the noise from the main room and their own windows looking out onto the street below. There was also a decent sized kitchen, complete with communal cooking facilities for the workers. She sneaked a quick peek, saw that it was empty -- except one man who had his back to her and seemed to be busying himself with a microwave -- and then she walked on. She stopped at the door marked ‘interview room’, a temporary sign on a room that was probably used as a conference room.

  There was a chair outside the room but no one around to tell her to sit in it. She tried to peek through the large windows that looked into the room, but the blinds were drawn. Just as she was about to sit down, to wait in the hope that someone would come and tell her what to do, the door opened and a woman with short stumpy legs, huge breasts and a fake smile exited. She was followed by a man in his thirties wearing a smart shirt and tie. He was also smiling, his smile seemed more genuine, less exaggerated.

  The woman gave Shirley a contemptuous look as she passed. The man stood in the doorway, said a final goodbye to the departing woman and then cringed slightly when she replied with an over exuberant squawk.

  He turned to Shirley. “Shirley Marshall?” he asked, his voice soft and soothing.

  Shirley nodded, made a move to stand and then hesitated.

  He stepped aside, showed her the doorway. “Please come in,”

  She stood, tried to hide her earlier hesitancy with a repositioning of her skirt and then brushed past him, throwing him a smile as she did so.

  There were two other interviewers waiting for her in the room, neatly space behind a rectangle desk with papers in front of them. The man who had greeted her closed the door and joined them, then the oldest one, a man in the middle who had a professional look that attempted to be friendly and informal, but failed horribly, seemed to take control.

  They asked her the typical questions and she gave them the typical responses, ones that she had rehearsed time and time again, ones that she had given plenty of times to plenty of panels like them. Despite her expe
rience in interviews she still struggled, feeling tense, like she was going to explode in a fit of hysterics at any moment. She maintained her calm though and did her best not to look like the wreck she knew she was.

  She warmed up as the interview progressed, felt a little more human when it came to a head. By the time it was over, when they asked her their final questions, then asked, as they all did, if she had anything to ask them -- the one question that usually stumped her, and one she usually responded to with a polite smile and a shake of her head -- the interview was over. They seemed happy with her, Shirley didn’t know if that was because the competition -- like the crazy woman with the short legs and loud smile -- were useless or because her practiced manner had won them over.

  They seemed ready to offer her the job but stopped short their eagerness when they noted the apprehension on her face.

  “Why don’t you have a look around, mingle a little bit if you want,” the main questioner said. He checked his watch with a smile and a flick of his wrist. “Most of the staff will be starting their dinner break around now, so you can talk to them, get it straight from the horses’s mouth,” he said with a grin, adding, “you can make yourself a coffee in the break room if you’d like.”

  Shirley nodded. “I might just do that,” she said. If she wasn’t going to take the job she didn’t really think anything would change her mind, but after the morning tension, she felt like she needed a coffee.

  She shook their hands, left them with pleasant smiles and then shifted out of the room. The remaining tension rushed out of her like air from a deflating ballon. She sagged into a hunchback, groaned delightedly and grinned.

  There was only one person inside the kitchen. A man sitting alone, looking boredly into a steaming cup of coffee. She thought it was the same man she had seen when she walked past, the broad back hunched over the counter. He was thickly set, his biceps prominent through a slim fitting blue shirt that hugged his muscles. He looked up at her when she entered, smiled broadly. She melted. She didn’t know if it was because her heart was still beating fast, if it was because she was still deflating from the tense interview and he was the first man she had seen since returning to normality, but as soon as she set eyes on him she couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop admiring him. He had a gorgeous smile, handsome with the right amount of mischief that curled the corners of his lips and indented a slight dimple on his right cheek. His dark eyes were deep and suggestive. He was a good ten years younger than her, but his stubbled chin and rough, wavy hair suggested a hard working, hard living man.

  She sat down opposite, her eyes never leaving his.

  “Hey,” he grinned.

  She tried to reply but her words caught in her throat, she just smiled instead.

  “Coffee?” he asked after a few moments of silent staring.

  She snapped out of her trance, nodded and then moved to drink her coffee, before realizing she hadn’t actually made any. She stood up, but he bolted up before her and held out a hand.

  “Allow me,” he said, gesturing for her to sit as he wandered over to a coffee machine.

  “One sugar or two?” he asked as she stared at his broad back, at the way the cotton fabric of his shirt seemed to stick to his muscles.

  “None, please.”

  He looked at her over his shoulder, gave her a cheeky wink, “Sweet enough, eh?”

  She nodded, perhaps a little too enthusiastically. She tried to tone it down with a smile.

  He came back to the table, put the cup down in front of her. She wrapped her palms around it, thanked him with a smile and then they returned to their stare; him with his hands clasped on the table; her beaming over the steaming cup of coffee that she held close to her lips. She instinctively, almost inadvertently, began to kiss the rim of the cup, her bright red lips toying with the heated edge of ceramic as she stared into his eyes. He watched her lips, watched as she took a small sip of coffee and then set the cup to one side. They stared at each other again, she moved her eyes to his lips, licked her own heated lips and then dove in.

  She wasn’t usually like that, she usually left it until the third date before sleeping with anyone, if she managed to get that far, but she let her lust take over. She was on the table, her feet dangling off the edge, her stomach and breast pressed tightly against the Formica top; her lips locked tight onto his. He tasted warm, like sweet coffee and sugared treats. She dug her tongue into his mouth, clasped her hand around the back of his neck.

  He mumbled something, then pulled back. She feared he was trying to pull away, worried that she had made a mistake and that, most importantly, she wasn’t going to get what she wanted, but he allowed the kiss to hold. He moved backwards, stood and lifted her off the table, their lips separating for a split second as he stood her on her feet, kissed her again and then dipped her over backwards, back onto the table.

  She grabbed at his arms, his chest, his back; felt the heat of his skin through the thin material of his shirt. She felt his hands on her thighs as he kissed her deeper and with a greater sense of urgency. At that moment she wanted him more than she had ever wanted anyone and she was prepared to give herself up to him, regardless of where she was and who could see them.

  She clawed at his trousers, ripped open the belt and the buckle, feeling the clasp snap in her hand. She ripped down the zipper with a grating sound that erupted over the moans of their kissing, the ecstasy of their embrace. She felt his cock underneath, bracing hard against a pair of slim underpants. She felt its heat, its size and its thickness and she wanted him even more.

  She thrust her hips down and up, until her skirt rode to her hips, until she felt his erection, still encased in his pants, brushing against her moist underwear. He pushed against her, as eager to feel her as she wanted to feel him. She felt the wetness in her own knickers, felt the desperation in his throbbing cock. She slipped a hand down there, slid her knickers to one side and pulled down the waistband of his underpants. She touched his cock first, feeling it; it was thick, long. She ran her finger over a pulsing vein that throbbed down the shaft, down to his scrotum which she held and squeezed gently. Then she moved her hand away, lifted her hips closer and allowed him to enter her.

  He released his lips from hers when his cock slid inside her. She threw her head back, ignored the pain as her skull slammed into the table. He arched his back, thrust in deeper, until she could feel him inside every inch of her. He held it there, let her feel his length, his desire, then he slowly released, gave her another cheeky smile -- this one tinged a breathless, red-faced glimmer -- and fucked her hard.

  She grabbed at his back and chest, clawed madly at whatever skin she could find as he dug in deep inside her. She screamed, she couldn’t hold it back. He kissed her into silence, his body hunched over her; his cock still deep inside. They both came in that position, her screams muffled by his mouth; his groaning ecstasy caught in the same embrace.

  She felt him release inside her, felt herself shudder.

  He stayed on top of her, his cock still twitching inside of her, releasing his fluid. She breathed heavily into him, looked deeply into his eyes, then he pulled back, left her sprawled out on the table, her legs open, his fluid slowly drying in the air as it trickled down her buttocks.

  He looked over her as he buttoned his pants as best he could, holding up the broken clasp by wrapping his belt tightly around his waist. He checked his watch and smiled at her. He opened his mouth to say something, perhaps to offer his gratitude, his phone number or even his name, but then he closed it firmly, gave her one last mischievous and handsome smile, and then left.

  She watched him go, dropping her head over the back of the table to see him depart and head towards the main room. She heard him talking to someone, his pleasant voice cut through to her, made her smile, then another voice answered him and made her jump. She rushed to her feet, slipped her knickers back in place, straightened her skirt and repositioned her top.

  She smiled innocently at the d
oorway just as a young man, the one who had flirted with her in the office, strode in. He gave her anther flirty smile as he walked to the counter, she returned it warmly and quickly left. He was cute, but she’d had her fill and he was nothing like the man that he replaced.

  She walked back to the office with her head held high, staring straight ahead. She didn’t look for the handsome man whose ejaculate she could feel soaking into her knickers, didn’t dare let the rest of the office know that she needed his verification, even if she did. After all, that was the first time she had climaxed in a long time, the first time ever that she had felt such an instant attraction to someone.

  As she left the building, made it back to her car without a falter in her smile, she knew one thing for sure: she was going to take the job. It didn’t matter that it was boring and would probably suck the life out of her within weeks; she was confident that whatever life the job sucked out of her, the handsome stranger would put back into her.

  ***

  As she expected, they offered her the job. The confirmation of their interest was on her answering machine when she got home, after stopping off to buy herself a bottle of wine in a preemptive celebratory mood. She phoned them back, told them she would love to take the job. They said she could start at the beginning of next week. She would have started straight away if it meant another run-in with the man in the kitchen, but she accepted their offer.