A Not-So-Secret Desire

She hastily closed the bathroom door behind her, and hurried to the sink. She placed her hands on either side of the white marble and stared at herself in the mirror, Why am I feeling this way?.

She pushed some hair that had come loose back behind her ears, and wiped her sweaty palms on the sides of her skirt, before opening the tab fully. The water was cold on her face, and she could feel it sting ever so slightly on her previously warm cheeks. She couldn't remember if she'd put on water-proof make-up this morning, but in this moment, she didn't really care.

She thought back to only 10 minutes earlier. She'd been in a meeting with her colleague Stacy, and their boss. A typical formal meeting where he'd been sitting at one side of the desk, elbows on the table and hands interlaced, with the two of them sitting at the other side.

It was a performance review, and while they'd both known it was coming, there was a certain tension in the room. Unlike most bosses who were at least a little sympathetic and kind-hearted, theirs wasn't. She'd been wrecked with nerves thinking This is it, I'm gonna get fired, that when he ended the review with 'I expect more from you two in the next quarter', she'd been flooded with relief - more than she knew how to handle. This proved evident when Stacy, who was also relieved beyond words, had sat up quickly with a laugh, and grabbed May's thigh - squeezing it in a moment of recklessness.

There was nothing quite abnormal about that, per se. They were colleagues that had bloomed into friends over the years, and girls were stereotyped to not hold personal space in a high regard for a reason. But that's not the scenario that May kept replaying in her mind, no...

Because after Stacy had grabbed her thigh, she had - in a moment driven by all the built up anxiety and nerves - moaned.

She closed her eyes, although she didn't need them to know that her cheeks had once again taken up a lovely sunburned shade, and clamped her hands down tighter on the sink. How could she have been so stupid?! As soon as the sound had passed her lips, she'd stood up, throwing Stacy's hand off of her thigh in the process. They may have said something, and they'd certainly looked at her as if she's suddenly sprouted a third arm - they had to have - but she couldn't remember.

She tried to convince herself that the feeling she'd been overcome with was completely new to her, but to no avail. Pandora's box was opened, and such thoughts could no longer be repressed. Even May, in all her oblivious and naïve ways, had known that no straight female looked at her coworker and thought about how it would feel to loosen all the buttons on her white blouse one by one... To trail her hand slowly over her exposed shoulder, pushing the fabric further and further off of her, hooking a finger around the strap of her bra, inching closer to her perfectly arched neck as she-

The door to the bathroom opened. Her eyes opened with a start and she spun around hastily, feeling her cheeks heat up even more. She knew people weren't capable of reading minds, but she still felt like a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar. She looked up at the intruder, her breath catching in her throat as she realised who it was. Stacy.

Shit.