I’ve noticed elsewhere that younger readers may no longer know what the term “zipless fuck” (a single, mostly emotionless coupling between two strangers) means. It was coined by Erica Jong in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying. She presented the idea in a satirical manner, and she wrote of it, “The zipless fuck is the purest thing there is. And it is rarer than the unicorn.”

*********

I came of age in an era when relations between the genders were more relaxed than they are now. That was true in a number of schools and workplaces I was in from the early 1980’s up to the first decade of the 21st Century. Thus I’m not merely indulging in nostalgia. Now it seems that there is a low-grade hostility – maybe it’s not always so low-grade – between men and women that affects everything about how people deal with each other.

Men certainly weren’t very concerned that a woman would bring up false or trumped-up charges against them; I would have heard about it from them if they were worried. And I think most women would have felt it was dishonorable to lie or exaggerate just to get revenge on somebody. 

Yet it was generally a rule of thumb that dating or having an affair with a coworker was a bad idea. Back then, the main issue that people worried about was what would happen if there was a break-up later. If things went sour, it would be awkward because the two people would be stuck together in the same workplace. It wasn’t like college, where semesters ended in a few months and the amount of time one spent in classes was relatively small. With work, one was committed to spending day after day, week after week in a confined place, possibly for years.

It was a rule that I followed carefully. It had some downsides, such as: where was I going to find a partner outside of work? The scenes at bars and clubs didn’t interest me.

Then in May 1992, when I was twenty-seven years old, I broke the rule, or rather one of my female coworkers broke it for me. The way she did it was both very strange and very abrupt. I suppose I could have turned her down, but the way she acted wasn’t subtle. Likely other guys would have reacted to her “charms,” if that is the correct way to put it, in the same way that I did

It happened just after my first anniversary at a Manhattan publishing company. The firm was located in an old building on lower Fifth Avenue, and the layout of the place was somewhat unconventional. There was a room in the back that functioned as extra office space and as a lounge. There were a couple of sofas and several desks in there.

At about 4:30 in the afternoon on the day before the Memorial Day holiday, I was at loose ends, sitting on one of the sofas in that room. Beyond the open door, the rest of the company’s sixth-floor space seemed to be deserted.

I didn’t go home because I felt there was nothing for me at my apartment. My wife had separated from me after a four-year marriage. She had moved out and I retained the rental unit we had shared. It originally was presented to me as a “trial separation,” but after ten months it appeared that it was becoming permanent. Since I was clueless about adult dating, I didn’t go out with anyone during that period.                  

No one had invited me to a holiday get-together. The next three days appeared to be empty for me. Thus I was just killing time in that back room so I didn’t have to face the weekend alone.

As I just sat there looking at old magazines, I was surprised when another employee, a woman, walked in. The first thing she did was close the door, which had been open during the time I had been there. It seemed like an odd thing to do, but I wasn’t too concerned about it. Then, even though she knew my name, she said nothing to me, not even a hello. Her demeanor was as if I wasn’t there at all. I guess I could have spoken first, but I had been caught unawares. Plus I had virtually no interaction with her during the time she had worked there.

She had been hired about two months after I had been, and she had some mysterious publishing house marketing gig that surely paid better than my job. Her name was Erin Delaney. Whatever she did had more status than my production job which was lower in the company’s hierarchy.

Since I had been ignored, I figured I’d just sit there and ignore her too. Thus I stayed there flipping through an old copy of Esquire. But I was distracted because she seemed so fidgety. Thus I found it difficult not to look at her while I was pretending to read my dog-eared publication.

She walked briskly to the desk directly opposite me and took an Apple PowerBook out of her bag. After setting that up, she took her jacket off and tossed it on the far side of the desk. She had been wearing a black suit, but she had a sleeveless white blouse underneath. While she sat there, I had a side view of her; she was only about six feet away. Her short black shirt had ridden up above her knees, and she had dark stockings and black strappy shoes. That room was not her office, so I had no idea why she had chosen to sit there.

Erin was several years older than I was, and I had never thought much about her one way or the other. Now I couldn’t help but examine her and watch what she was doing. Back then, the “Mike Pence rule” had yet to be invented. Men generally had few concerns about being alone with a female co-worker. In a later era, I would have just gotten up and left, especially since she had mysteriously closed the room’s door.

Without really thinking too much about it, I looked her over. This Erin was fairly tall, with blonde hair that had been styled in a severe bob-cut that came down to the level of her chin. I’m not that good at determining people’s ages, but I guessed that she was in her mid-thirties.

I might have stopped assessing her, but she couldn’t seem to stop her restless actions which held my attention. Within a few moments, she reached down to adjust the stocking on her left leg, the one facing me. That gave me a chance to see the dark straps that came down to hold up her leg-wear. A lady who wears a garter; I don’t think I’ve ever met one of those before.

While pulling and then looking down to examine her stocking clip, Erin never acknowledged my presence at all. Thus I continued to look at her. Then she really went all out to display herself.  She got out of her chair and squatted down to look into the filing cabinet on the right side of the desk. Since she didn’t work in that room, what could she possibly have in there?

Whatever her motives, I could look up between her parted thighs to see the crotch of her black panties and the lacy tops of her stockings. For the first time, I wondered if she might be deliberately flashing herself at me. Either that, or she was completely oblivious to her surroundings including whoever was nearby.

She then sat down again and put her feet up on the desk. For some reason, she took her glasses off to peer at the laptop, which, true to its name, was now in her lap. The undersides of her thighs were showing above the lacy tops of her stockings. Whatever was on the screen absorbed her attention.

I thought, I’ve never noticed her before, but she’s really a rather sexy lady. I liked her sleeveless top that revealed her arms, the enticing black underthings beneath her skirt, her cute hairdo, her subtle red lipstick. Her skin wasn’t too pale, and that made me speculate that the light hair wasn’t its true coloring.

Well, Memorial Day is the beginning of summer, and this woman is certainly dressed for warmer weather. I got the impression that she was having trouble concentrating on whatever work project she had going on her computer. There was a languor in the way she sat with her feet up, trying to look at her laptop and yet somehow not that interested in whatever was showing on that device.

Yet I still didn’t say anything to her. This lady is way too classy for the likes of me. I knew I wasn’t going to ever approach her, not that day or any other. I still thought, man, these older women often had something going on that the younger ones just couldn’t match. Rather foolishly I was enjoying her sudden arrival and the intriguing way she was presenting herself.

There had to be some resolution to that scene, and Erin dramatically provided it for me. Suddenly, she sat up in her chair, put her feet back on the floor, and turned to face me. As she put her glasses back on, she put a finger of her right hand up to her chin.

For a moment, she glared at me, and I knew disapproval when I saw it. Trouble had arrived. I was busted, and I had carelessly let it happen. Her expression reminded me of a teacher who had just caught a student cheating on a test. I could feel my face warming up so I knew I was blushing in embarrassment. I decided to let her have the first words.

“Listen, I would really appreciate it if you kept your eyes to yourself. You have been sitting there staring up my skirt at my legs and you seem to be fascinated with my panties. You’re acting like a total jerk.”

I had failed to realize how intently I had been looking her over. For a moment I considered saying I was sorry and then simply leaving. But I changed my mind; there was something that wasn’t on the level about the way she had chided me. Thus, I decided to defend myself. That room belonged to neither of us. In addition, I was in there first and she hadn’t even said hello to me. She was acting like I was some random guy gawking at her on the subway.

As calmly as I could, I said, “Erin, it would help if you didn’t splay your legs out and flash yourself and your underwear at me. You’ve been doing that since you got here.” I hoped that using her first name, for some reason, might placate her a bit.

It didn’t seem to work that way. She said, “I beg your pardon?” I knew it wasn’t a good sign when a woman said that. There was a menace in her voice. “I’ll move myself around in any way I please. You really have a lot of nerve. I know that you are memorizing images of me so you can have some creepy masturbation fantasies later.”

Yeah, since you mentioned it, I am going to enjoy jerking off about you later. Her sexualizing the conversation in that way, her blatant lying about her behavior, and her faked disapproval were all bothering me. I also did start worrying about what she was capable of doing if she had cooked up a grudge against me. Such events were rare back then but not entirely unknown.

I didn’t want to lose my temper, and I also tried not to sound resigned but I probably did anyway. “I think it’s time for me to go. That’s what you want, right?”

No, that wasn’t it. Plus, I had made a mistake by phrasing it as a question. She raised her voice, “Oh no, you’re not going anywhere. I’m going to give you a good piece of my mind first, and you’re going to hear what I have to say.”

Her chair had wheels, and as she shoved herself towards me she moved her glasses to the top of her head. In a moment she had moved so close that her knees banged against mine. I had been caught completely unprepared. Some instinct told me to keep my wits together and not show any anxiety. I had to force myself to look into her intense gray-green eyes. Her gaze was steady, which unnerved me. Is this person more than a little crazy?

For sure, I knew that I was flinching and I couldn’t do anything about it. It seemed that it was my turn to say something. I knew I shouldn’t sound apologetic or self-pitying, but I didn’t do a very good job of it. “Look, I don’t know anything about you. I was just here minding my own business when you came in.”   

That was another good point to just get up and leave, but she grabbed my lower arms and clamped down on them just hard enough to let me know to keep still. Well, she touched me first, that might help my case if anyone would believe me. Probably I could have gotten out of her grip if I wanted to but I didn’t try. In truth, I was curious about what she would do next. She made a pretense of sounding offended as she responded, “I also can go anywhere in this office that I choose to go.”

Never try to reason with the irrational, never show weakness in the face of a personal attack.  But I was flummoxed enough to do both anyway. And it was strange that I was disliking her at the same time I was feeling attracted to her.

“Of course, you can go anywhere. That’s not the point. I offered to leave, but you told me to stay here.” It struck me, if she is so bothered by me looking at her, then why did she come so close and grip my arms? She had some kind of game going with me, although I didn’t know what its purpose was yet.

“It’s too late now. I know what you really think about me; I’m only a bitchy cunt in your opinion.” She was quivering with some kind of emotion that she couldn’t contain.

I was still saying too much. “Hey, you used those words, I didn’t. You can’t read my mind.” I barely knew her and I was rattled by the explicit language she was using. Until then she had only been a face among one-hundred others in that company.

“What words? Like cunt? Like you weren’t thinking that yourself. I know you want to see mine because of the way you were examining my panties. You’re imagining what I look like underneath them. I know how guys like you think.”

I went with the tactic of feigning indifference mixed with a bit of aggression. “I’ve seen them before. What makes you think yours is so special?” There was just enough anger in my own churning emotions to give me the courage to say that.

She seemed to not like that I had perhaps spurned her, which was surprising. Her expression was of both agitation and also anticipation. But anticipation about what exactly? She said, “What’s special about it is that it's right here, it’s not hypothetical in other words.”

“Okay, so what?” Is this woman really talking about her own pussy?

“Don’t try to fool me. I know what you really want.”

This must be some kind of bizarre test on her part. A shit test perhaps, but I had never heard that expression back then. I knew that I had to stay as calm and unruffled as possible, even though I didn’t feel that way. “You don’t know anything about what I’m thinking.”

“Oh yes, I do. If you are so concerned with my body, I assume then that you must want to fuck me.”

Wow, a key moment had arrived. I had never known that a woman could sexually escalate so quickly. I answered indirectly. “How about you? Are you serious or are you just playing around with me because you think you can get away with it?” Maybe she thought I’d just fold at that point and babble something to get out of there. But I didn’t fold, and I could tell by her expression that she was assessing me too. Her intense look had some puzzlement in it, but she didn’t break eye contact with me.

Okay, this icy but weirdly assertive lady is not going to intimate me. I was intimidated, but I also found more reserves of boldness. “It’s a simple question, Erin. What do you want from me?”

She tried her sneering act again, but it wasn’t very convincing. “You don’t have the nerve for that, to just take me right here, I can tell that. I dare you to try it.”

It was a direct challenge. I tried to keep my voice at a normal pitch, although I was very agitated too. “You should never say that to a man unless you really mean it.”

“Oh, I mean it, that’s for sure.”

“I think I believe you, because of the way you rolled yourself over right next to me.” Yet I had just about reached the end of my brashness. I was feeling more than a bit paranoid; I wondered what kind of hassles I could be getting into.

Erin hadn’t reached the end of her brashness, however. She got off her chair and straddled me, facing me. Her hands went to my shoulders, and she pressed her crotch down on the lap of my trousers. “All right, if you think you’ve got the nerve, let’s see what you can do.”

It was hard to believe she would attempt something sexual with me right there on that couch, but I didn’t question her. In the beginning, she was merely dry humping me, grinding her undersides against my stiff cock which was pressing up against the cloth of my trousers. I could tell that she liked it by the way she raised her hands and tightly held my shoulders. “You guys are all the same. I can feel how stiff you are under there.”

Well, she was certainly liking it too. It may sound like hyperbole, but I had crossed some event horizon with her, I’d call it. Maybe she wanted me to come inside my pants, and she might do the same inside hers. I was reminded that a girl and I had done exactly that years earlier in a parked car.

But I was older now, and I wanted to go further. I figured I’d do whatever came to mind and see what happened. It was all in the spirit of experimentation, right?

On my first attempt, I put my hands behind her and I lifted the hem of her skirt. Then I got both hands into the rear of her panties and began fondling both cheeks of her ass.

It was a success, and she put her head back and softly moaned. With that going so well, I went a little further. I moved my right hand around into the front of her panties. I got two fingers into her cunt and began to finger fuck her. I’m never going to get away with this. But I did get away with it. I was impressed by how well-lubricated she already was. Now I understood what her expression of anticipation had been about.

“Let me take care of something.” She raised herself a bit and grabbed the sides of her panties. After she had pulled them down below her knees, they wound up stretched between her feet.

For the first time I saw her smile, and she said, “It’s only fair that we even this out.” That meant that she was going to reach down out and undo my pants. My cock was quite erect as it popped out, and she wasted no time in grabbing it and stroking its full length. Jesus, this lady is no longer teasing me, she engaging in foreplay.

“How long has it been stiff like this?”

“A while I guess.” I dared turn it around on her. “How long have your panties been damp?”

“Since sometime when I was ragging on you before.” She meant that in the sense of nagging or having her little tirades against me. I had already suspected that it was a strange tactic to seduce me, but it certainly worked well anyway.

I expected she would comment on my fondling of her. That’s what seemed normal for a woman to do. But she had something else in mind, which was to unbutton her white blouse and pull her black bra up. Somehow, which was common with me, I managed to say the most irrelevant thing possible. “I see your underwear must be a matched set.” That was so obvious that she smiled at me again but she didn’t comment on it.

I touched her small breasts and erect nipples with my left hand. But she wanted more from me, “I want you to suck on them if you please.”

“Sure, I can do that.”

She seemed so polite now, and she leaned forward to put her body next to my mouth. She liked my lips on her nipples, and she did some more moaning. She also remembered to keep stroking my cock in the way that I was liking so much. I, however, had forgotten what I had been doing, which was working my right hand between her legs. She grabbed that arm and said, “I need more down there, and you definitely know how to do it.”

It was nice to finally get some praise from her. It was still all her show, and I figured that maybe she was going for mutual masturbation. We’d give each other orgasms, which would be the finale of this bizarre evening. Surely she wasn’t going to have intercourse with me that quickly.

Again I had underestimated her. She moved her cunt right over the tip of my cock and rubbed herself against me. I had trouble believing what was happening. I looked into her face but I couldn’t read her expression.

“Do you really want me to go into you?”

“Of course I do, isn’t that obvious?”

I supposed that qualified as consent. I gripped her hips and I pulled her down on me. We both made soft grunting noises as I penetrated her.

Erin must have liked the cowgirl position because she was so enthusiastic about it. She didn’t do it too quickly, but she was very firmly moving up and down on my cock. Her hands gripped my shoulders. I took my fingers out of her and tried to feel for her clitoris. Based on the noises she made, I must have found it. 

I was suddenly feeling ebullient, and cockiness emerged as my long dry spell ended. I haven’t figured you out Erin, but you sure do have a sweet pussy. You’ve acted like a cocktease and now you’re going to get exactly what you wanted. But I couldn’t bring myself to actually say any of that to her. I was in the middle of the strangest and most abrupt fuck I had ever had in my life.

I had never had a one-night stand, but I wondered if they were anything like that time with Erin.  I had only been involved with three women before, including my ex-wife. But in those cases, we always talked to each other a lot during sex. I barely knew this Erin at all, however, and she did not know me. Thus we groaned a lot during our coupling, but we hardly said anything to each other. Also, I had trouble looking into her face while she was bouncing on me, and she seemed to have trouble looking into mine. It was all very pleasurable, but it was also kind of abstract. My body was present, but most of my emotions seemed to be missing.

Erin came first, and it was very sudden like everything else she had done. She didn’t say anything about it, but I had no doubt that it was happening. She started moving faster and faster. Somehow she got her feet up on the sofa cushion and made her last pushes on me. She put her head back during her climax and made she made a lot of noise. I was briefly concerned that there might still be someone else on the sixth floor that would hear her, even though the door was closed. But there was nothing I could do about it.

However, I was inspired to say, “Don’t stop now, baby, I’m almost there myself.”

She complied, and shortly after I ejaculated up into her. She felt it happening, and she commented, ”Oh, yes, please, shoot your shot; it feels so damn hot in me.” I think she had misused that phrase, but I was happy to oblige her wishes.

When we were both depleted, she fell forward against me and put her arms around my neck. I in turn put my arms around her torso and hugged her. It was completely spontaneous, I suppose, but it was the first real affection from either of us. In my now rattled state of mind, the first thought that came to me was, what is this eccentric lady going to do next? It occurred to me that she might take a short time to pull herself together, then she’d pack up her laptop which she had abandoned on the desk and walk out the door without saying goodbye.

On Tuesday we’d be back at work and she’d disappear back into her marketing department duties. It would all be as if nothing had happened on Friday evening. It would be my version of a zipless fuck, not that I had ever fantasized about having such a thing. I had mixed feelings about imagining her leaving. I’d be facing the weekend alone, but at least I could have some predictability back in my life. However, my musings about what would happen next were again wrong.

Erin rolled off of me and sat by my right side. She put one arm around my shoulder and pressed her face against the side of my head. It suddenly was a very cozy situation. I saw that she had pulled her legs up on the couch and that her black panties were dangling off her left ankle. I decided to pull my pants back up but I didn’t buckle them.

Oh, man, with hardly any preliminaries, I’ve just banged a coworker that I hardly know.

She may have been thinking along the same lines as I had been because after a couple of minutes, she said, “I suppose you’re going home now.”

I decided that I wasn’t going to do that. Instead, I made up something on the spot, “No, I’m not going home.  You and I are going out to have dinner and drinks tonight.”

“Why, do you want to have a date with me?”

“I just said that, didn’t I?” Women had turned down my requests to go out with them, but I never had one wonder why I had asked.

Despite my somewhat snotty delivery, what I had said put Erin in an upbeat mood. “Sure, that’s fine, I’ll go with you.” She immediately grabbed me and kissed me passionately on the mouth. So I guess I’m not a creepy jerk anymore.

Usually, I didn’t inquire about a woman’s motives for being interested in me, but I was curious about why she had chosen me for that very sudden tryst. Had she thought about me sometime earlier and then went back there to get me? Or was it purely a random, spontaneous act on her part? Maybe I’d find out soon enough.

She told me, “I live pretty close to here, I mean up on 27th Street.”

I got that she was inviting me over later. My answer was a bit churlish, “Let’s see if we can first treat each other like human beings for the next hour or so.”

She wasn’t insulted; instead, she was the one now being apologetic. “You should know this is not the way I usually behave.” That must have been referred to her entire performance from the moment she had walked into the room.

I didn’t know whether to believe her or not, so I evaded the issue. “Then let’s get going already.” I was trying to remember places my ex and I would go to back when we were dating during our time in college. However, restaurants came and went very rapidly in New York. Well, it was my job to find someplace, so I figured we’d go down to the Village and look around. We’d have to take a cab because I wasn’t going on the Fifth Avenue bus with her at that early stage.

Erin and I got our clothes back together – we had hardly removed anything – so it didn’t take long to get ready. The last thing she did was put her laptop back in her bag and set her glasses back in place. With her severe hairdo and her crisp business outfit, she looked the same as when she had arrived. We stood there looking at each other, and I thought, who exactly is this person? I couldn’t decipher what her expression indicated.

She did ask me one question. “You’re divorced, right?”

“Separated actually, about ten months ago.” How did she know that? I had only mentioned it to a few coworkers, but in an office information like that readily got passed through the grapevine. I asked, “How about you? What is your situation?”

“I was divorced, let’s see, it was four years ago.” I wondered what Mr. Delaney had been like, assuming that she had taken his name.

As I opened the door, she put her left arm through mine. It seemed like a rather formal gesture to make at that point. I looked at her and she sort of shrugged, well, why not?

I accepted whatever was going to happen next, although there were some downsides to consider. Erin had to be six or seven years older than I was. She had also proven that she could be extremely unpredictable, even reckless in her behavior. And I hadn’t liked the fake snippy attitude she had used just before she started our tryst. Yet I somehow knew that she wasn’t going to drop a dime on me for my own reckless part in that impetuous coupling.

And, I  had a date for that evening although I didn’t have one less than an hour before. I supposed the situation could have been worse. Erin had already proven herself to be a “sure thing.” Any woman who could pull off a stunt like she had just done was worth further investigation. The main issue now was figuring out if we were at all compatible with each other.

We walked out of the room and I left the door open on the way out.