The Transfer
I haven’t seen or talked to Holly since the party, and when I walk into the office Monday morning I’m not exactly sure what to expect. It doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility that she’ll be sucking Lonnie’s dick while she’s getting fucked by some asshole from Legal or something similar. This is not the case, though.
I walk out of the elevator and onto our floor, and just as I do every morning, I pass Holly’s desk on the way to my office. And, just like every morning, she’s on Facebook and she says, “Hey,” when I walk past. But in a divergence from my usual practice, this time I don’t respond. I just go to my office, sit down, and open a spreadsheet. I don’t look at her Facebook page. I don’t send her an IM. I even try not to look at her, but that can’t be helped. I take in a few long glances at her ass and her back and try as hard as I can to remember the good things about her. In some way they all involve fucking.
I go back over almost every second we spent together and I can’t recall one in which I was having fun with her that my dick wasn’t in her or I wasn’t high or drunk. Even if this isn’t true, I force myself to believe it is. I force myself to take the image of her I have in my head and transform it into that of a retarded person who’s really good at fucking and nothing else. Then I get an IM from her. It reads, “Are we cool?”
I’m not sure how to respond to this. The fact that she’s even asking this can only mean that there’s still some possibility of fucking her again, and I can’t discount this. I try to force myself to imagine the taste of some other guy’s semen in her mouth, but I know rationally that she’s probably brushed her teeth and possibly even used mouthwash. I’m not sure I’m capable of never fucking her again if I know I still have the opportunity. The same logic the Four Seasons prostitute gave me about my marriage can also be applied here. Holly just fucked up. Her IM is her way of saying she fucked up. My fingers are on the keyboard and I’m about to write her back. I’m about to tell her that we’re cool, and to see if she wants to get dinner after work, which always leads to fucking in my hotel room.
Then I look out at her and see her flirting with one of the young guys from the mail room. He has his hands on her shoulders. They’re laughing. I don’t know if it’s her age, or her looks, or a combination thereof, but with a girl like Holly this will always be the case. She has too many options and too little regard for the importance of intimacy to ever give anyone anything approaching normal. I imagine her at my age, after her tits have started sagging, after her ass isn’t quite as perky, after guys stop paying her the same attention they do now, and I feel like I know what she’ll be. She’ll just be another pretty girl who wasted her youth thinking it would never end, or not even realizing what she had while she had it. It’s kind of sad, but I take comfort in the fact that I had my dick in every one of her holes when she was in her prime.
I minimize my IM window and compose the following e-mail to the head of HR:
“Holly McDonnel has performed with skill at her position of unpaid intern in the Accounts department. Her assignments, however, have come to a conclusion, and I strongly recommend utilizing her talents in another department, possibly Legal. Thank you.”
I send the e-mail, and by the end of the day someone from HR comes up and talks to her. Before she leaves our floor she comes into my office and says, “Hey. They’re moving me to Legal.”
I say, “Oh. Good luck.”
She says, “What’s up? Are you, like, still pissed off about the other night?”
I say, “No, Holly, I’m not mad at all. I get it. I get your whole thing and it’s fine. It’s just not something I’m interested in anymore.”
She slumps down in the chair across from my desk and starts crying. I panic. I don’t know if I should shut the door so that no one sees her crying in my office or if that would be even more conspicuous. Through tears she says, “I’m sorry. Please can we still hang out?”
I say, “No. I don’t really think that’s a good idea anymore,” and then I realize: She’s never been rejected before in her life. Every one of the hundreds of guys that comment on her status on Facebook have all either fucked her and want to again or are trying to for the first time. And that’s the thing she needs. She needs to know that every guy she ever meets approves of her and wants her, and that’s more important to her than having anything real with any one of them. I kind of feel bad for her. I kind of feel bad for her entire generation, because they all seem to be like that to me. I hope that, by the time my daughter is Holly’s age, Facebook has become something else and girls have become something else. I briefly wonder what I’ll be doing in twenty years, if I’ll be fucking a girl who is my daughter’s age.
I hand Holly a Kleenex and say, “We had fun. I think we just wanted different things out of this and that’s fine.”
She says, “What did you want? A girlfriend or something?”
The simple answer to that question would be yes, but I say, “I wanted a connection, I guess. You know, just to feel like you gave a shit about it.”
She says, “But we have a connection. You bought me a MacBook.”
I say, “No, we don’t. I don’t think we ever really did.”
She sucks up her tears and says, “Okay. Bye, I guess.”
I say, “Bye,” and she walks out of my office.