Free Games with Friends by Stal Lionne

Games with Friends
     
    Amabel Ignite was in yet another meeting and starting to wonder why she spent so much time getting dressed in the morning. After all, the men in her office were so into themselves and maintaining their positions in the corporate structure that none of them had bothered to notice that she was sans panties on this Wednesday afternoon. 
    When she took her cab ride to work that morning, she was sure the cab driver would have tried to sneak a peek up her pencil skirt through the rearview mirror, but he was only concentrated on weaving through Tribeca traffic, trying to get Amabel to the Flatiron building quickly so he could pick up another fair with the sweet spot time frame for taking big tippers instead of tourists. From the back seat, she felt the unyielding speed of the city, so to slow things down, as she always did, she took out her mobile and checked in to see who was trying to be the first of her besties to beat her in Words With Friends.
    “You a damn ho! Hate you!! : )” the text came through from her bestie who she’d just forced into submission with her second 7 tile play of the game. Most of the times she toyed with her friends throughout the game until she dropped the hammer. They were brief moments of fun and helped in meetings where men took turns flexing what they knew or bragged about how their fantasy football team was doing. The fact that she could talk smack with texts after playing a word, or just talk freely, helped take some of the worries and stress that came with being the Executive Creative Director of Fortress , the hottest digital ad agency in the city. Clients were drooling to be put in Amabel’s hands, but she had difficulty finding anyone in the corporate world that made her drool.
    She wished she could turn the cab around and just crawl back into her Hastens bed and enjoy the way the light came in through the new arch window she’d just had put in her loft. It would have been even better if there was a man in her huge bed to be lazy with all afternoon after getting worked up sexing each other, but there was nobody waiting outside of her daydreams, and that damn cab wasn’t about to turn around.
    “Do you know how much thought I put into finding the right kind of skirt today,” she said, trying to see if the cab driver was paying more attention to her or to whoever was on the other side of the Bluetooth he had seemingly attached to his ear. “I mean, I sat in front of the mirror and opened and closed my legs every way I could to make sure I wasn’t showing. You know what I mean?”
    Nothing. The guy kept talking on the phone paying no attention to Amabel ’s openness in the back seat.  It wasn’t that long ago, before the big promotion, when she would take two trains in from Queens reading romance novels by Marcel Preston imagining a Harlequin world rising up around her. Her active imagination gave her some fantastic moments and mini-daydreams that never went further than a random brush-up on each of her rides.
    Now she had to depend on her peers for stimulation, which proved tough because they were all so obsessed with stimulating themselves with their own delusions of importance and an inane need to hear themselves speak.
    As she got out of the cab and walked through that last bit of fresh morning air before entering the Flatiron Building, she took notice of the breeze that went up her thighs and moved gently over her outer lips when she moved her legs. Every man she rode the elevator with thought the smile on her face was for them, but it was for the wind – the only entity that dared reach under her skirt and glide against her.
    The doors to the elevator opened directly to the office, which occupied the entire floor and was filled with natural light flowing in from the giant windows that looked over the city. It was an amazing place to work, and even better one to be in control of, but the only time Amabel ever saw it without someone jawing in her ear was on