The Glass Office

The thing about Calloway & Voss is that it smells expensive.

That was the first thing I noticed on my very first morning — that particular scent of polished stone floors and fresh coffee and whatever diffuser someone had installed near the lifts. Something dark and floral. Deliberate. The kind of smell that makes you pull your shoulders back without being asked.

I’d arrived in London two weeks earlier with two suitcases, a folder of printed references, and the specific breed of nervous energy that comes from being twenty-six and having absolutely no idea what you’re doing. The internship had been arranged through my university — twelve weeks, expenses covered, supposedly transformative for my career. My best friend Jess had seen me off at Paddington with a gin and tonic in a tin and the advice not to sleep with anyone whose name appeared on the company letterhead.

I was already wondering if I should have asked her to elaborate.

Calloway & Voss occupied the top four floors of a glass tower just off Bishopsgate, in that particular stretch of the City where every building seems to be competing to look the most ruthlessly modern. Floor-to-ceiling windows, clean sharp lines, views that on clear mornings stretched all the way out past the Thames to the soft smudge of South London disappearing into autumn haze. I knew this because I arrived early every single day. Not out of any remarkable professionalism, but because I shared a hot desk in an open-plan bullpen with fourteen other people and the only window of genuine quiet was before half eight, when the floor belonged almost entirely to me and the distant hum of the building’s ventilation system.

I’d been there just over two weeks before I properly encountered Anais Voss.

I’d seen her, of course. Everyone had seen her. She was the kind of woman who changed the quality of the air in a room simply by entering it — not noisily, not with any obvious theatrics, but with a concentrated, unhurried authority that made people lower their voices and find sudden urgent interest in their computer screens. She was perhaps forty-five, perhaps a few years either side. Genuinely difficult to tell. She had the sort of face that was arresting rather than simply pretty — strong jaw, sharp cheekbones, a mouth that seemed permanently set at an expression of faint, considered dissatisfaction with the state of things. Her hair was a very specific shade of cold platinum blonde, always immaculate — sometimes pinned severely back, sometimes falling in one precise wave over her left shoulder, as though even that had been decided in advance. She dressed exclusively in black. Black tailored trousers with a crease you could have used as a ruler. Black silk blouses. Black blazers cut so close to her body they might have been made specifically for her, which I later found out they largely had been. Occasionally — very occasionally — she wore deep charcoal grey, which I came to understand was her version of dressed down.

She had the posture of someone who had simply never learned how to slouch.

Her full title was Director of People and Operations, which in practical terms meant she was in charge of every single person in the building below the two founding partners. She reviewed performance figures. She approved budgets and denied requests. She walked through the office twice a day — once in the morning, once in the late afternoon — and on both passes she absorbed everything without appearing to look at anything in particular. The cluttered desk. The personal call taken at slightly too much volume. The report that arrived eleven minutes past its deadline. She rarely said anything about these things in the moment. She simply registered them, stored them somewhere behind those pale grey eyes, and you would hear about it later, in a brief and perfectly level meeting that somehow managed to be more unsettling than any raised voice could have been.

Her name appeared on the glass door of a corner office at the far end of the fourteenth floor.

A. Voss. Director of Operations.

The letters were etched in that minimalist sans-serif font the company used for everything. Even her name looked expensive.

Her secretary was a young woman called Madeleine.

Madeleine was perhaps my age, maybe a year or two younger — twenty-three, I thought, though she had the quality of seeming both younger and older than herself depending on the moment. She had a dark pixie cut, wide brown eyes fringed with the kind of lashes that make other women quietly resentful, and a particular brand of nervous, attentive energy — the manner of someone who has learned by careful experience that it is far less costly to anticipate what people want than to risk the friction of getting it wrong. She was organised to the point of artistry. She managed Anais Voss’s schedule with a focused, almost devotional precision, and she sat at a curved desk just outside the frosted glass door of the corner office like a very elegant sentry.

I liked Madeleine. We’d had coffee together three times in the small kitchen on fourteen, standing by the window watching the City go about its business twenty floors below. She didn’t talk much about herself — deflected personal questions with a practised lightness that I’d noticed but hadn’t pushed on — but she was warm in a careful way, and she had genuinely good taste in biscuits, which I’ve always considered an underrated marker of character.

She seemed, I thought, slightly on edge in a way that had become so habitual she no longer noticed it herself.

The evening it happened was a Thursday.

Late October. One of those London autumn evenings where the sky outside goes from pewter grey to deep navy blue in what feels like about forty minutes, the city lights coming up all at once below you, and if you happen to be on the fourteenth floor of a glass building in the City you get the full theatrical effect of it. It was past seven. It had been past seven for quite some time. The floor had steadily emptied over the previous hour — there was a leaving do at a pub on Leadenhall Street, someone from the acquisitions team marking their tenth anniversary with the company — and I’d fully intended to go. I’d even redone my lip gloss in the bathroom mirror at half six in anticipation.

But I’d lost the thread of time inside a particularly uncooperative spreadsheet, the kind that keeps revealing new problems every time you solve one, and by seven-fifteen I looked up to find the overhead lights had dimmed themselves to their motion-sensor minimum and I was, as far as I could tell, entirely alone on the floor.

I saved the file, stretched my arms above my head until my back made a sound I chose not to think about, and reached for my coat.

That was when I noticed the light.

Most of the offices along the far wall were dark — their glass fronts just reflecting the distant glow of the city outside. But the corner office, Anais Voss’s office, had its light on. Not the full overhead lighting — something lower, warmer. The desk lamp, I thought. And the frosted glass partition that separated her office from the main floor wasn’t fully frosted all the way across; there was a clear strip along one side, perhaps thirty centimetres wide, where the glass was plain and transparent. A design choice, presumably. Or an oversight. Either way, it meant that if you were standing in exactly the right spot on the main floor — which I was, because my desk was in exactly the wrong place — you had a narrow but entirely unobstructed view into the corner office.

I should have put my coat on and left.

I want to be very clear that I know that.

I stood completely still instead.

Anais Voss was standing with her back to the window, the London skyline glittering behind her like something staged. She was still in her work clothes — the black blazer, the silk blouse — but the blazer was open now, hands clasped behind her back. Her expression was unreadable from this distance, but her posture was exactly as I had always seen it. Perfectly straight. Entirely composed.

Madeleine was standing in front of her.

They were talking. I couldn’t hear anything through the glass — the offices were well soundproofed, another expensive detail — but I could see them clearly enough. Madeleine had her hands folded in front of her, her head slightly bowed. Even from where I was standing I could read the body language fluently. Madeleine was nervous. Not anxious in the way of someone expecting to be sacked — something else. Something I couldn’t immediately name.

Then Anais said something.

And Madeleine reached up and began to unbutton her blouse.

I stopped breathing.

I’m not sure for how long. Long enough that I had to take a deliberate, quiet breath afterwards and remind myself that was a thing I needed to keep doing. My hand was still on the back of my chair. I hadn’t moved a centimetre.

Madeleine’s blouse came off. She folded it — actually folded it, with a careful, practised neatness — and set it on the chair beside her. She was wearing a plain white bra. She reached back and unclasped it without being told to, which told me, very clearly, that she’d done this before. She folded that too. Set it on top of the blouse.

Anais had not moved. She was simply watching, with that same composed, slightly dissatisfied expression, as though Madeleine were a presentation she was evaluating for technical accuracy.

The skirt came next. Then plain white cotton knickers — the kind of underwear you’d wear on an ordinary Thursday when you weren’t planning for anything in particular, which struck me, absurdly, as somehow more intimate than anything deliberately seductive could have been. Madeleine’s shoes came off. Her tights were peeled down and folded with the same meticulous care.

And then she was standing completely naked in the corner office of a glass building in the City of London at seven-twenty on a Thursday evening, with the whole skyline behind her boss and her arms hanging at her sides, and she was not trying to cover herself. Her chin was slightly lifted. Her cheeks were flushed a deep pink that I could see even from where I was standing.

She was embarrassed. Genuinely, thoroughly embarrassed.

And she was not moving to leave.

Anais said something. Her head tilted slightly to one side — that evaluating look, patient and unhurried. Madeleine’s flush deepened. She said something back. I watched her lips move and caught nothing. Then, slowly, with the careful deliberateness of someone making themselves do something, Madeleine lowered herself to her knees on the office carpet.

The sound I made was very small. Barely a sound at all. Just air.

Anais walked around her. One slow circuit, hands still clasped behind her back, heels making no sound I could hear. She stopped in front of Madeleine and said something, and her expression shifted for just a moment into something that wasn’t quite a smile but was in the same family — something sharper, more private. Satisfied, perhaps. Or something beyond satisfied that I didn’t yet have the right word for.

Then she said something else, and Madeleine’s hand moved between her own thighs.

Oh, I thought. Just that. A single, quiet, entirely inadequate syllable.

I should go, I told myself. I should absolutely go right now. I should pick up my coat and my bag and walk to the lift and go and get a glass of wine somewhere and absolutely not be doing this.

My feet did not move.

Madeleine was touching herself, kneeling on the office carpet, completely naked, while her fully-clothed boss stood over her and spoke in that low, steady voice I couldn’t hear a single word of. I could see Madeleine’s mouth moving — responses, I thought. Answers to questions, or something else entirely. Her free hand was pressed flat against her own thigh, fingers splayed, like she was grounding herself.

Anais reached down and put two fingers under Madeleine’s chin, tipping her face up. She said something very clearly and deliberately, and whatever it was made Madeleine close her eyes for a moment as though she’d been stung. When she opened them again her expression had changed — something stripped back about it, something younger and more exposed.

She was being called names. I was certain of it, though I couldn’t hear the words. Something about the rhythm of Anais’s speech, the way her mouth shaped each word with that same cool precision she brought to everything else. Short words. Direct words.

Dirty words.

Madeleine’s movements became less controlled. I watched her chest rise and fall with quickening breath. Her hand moved faster and then — suddenly, sharply — Anais said something and Madeleine went utterly still. Both hands dropped to her thighs. Her breathing was visible from where I was standing, the rapid movement of her ribcage, and her expression was a specific and exquisite kind of torment.

She’d been told to stop.

Anais paced slowly behind her. Came back around. Said something conversational, almost casual, and Madeleine’s hands curled into fists on her thighs. There was a brief exchange — Madeleine’s lips moving quickly now, something pleading in the set of her shoulders — and Anais’s expression shifted again into that private, almost-smile.

She was enjoying this. Not cruelly, not sadistically in any dramatic sense — but with the settled, uncomplicated pleasure of someone doing something they were exceptionally good at and knew it.

She said something, and Madeleine’s hand went back between her thighs.

This cycle repeated itself twice more. Each time Anais stopped her, Madeleine looked more wrecked — more pink, more breathless, more undone in a way that had nothing to do with shame and everything to do with desperate, barely-contained need. I watched her mouth words I couldn’t hear, her lips shaping what I was almost certain were requests. Pleas. The particular vocabulary of someone who has been reduced to begging and has stopped being embarrassed about it.

My own pulse was doing something irregular and emphatic at the base of my throat.

When Anais finally — finally — gave whatever instruction she gave, Madeleine’s response was immediate. Her whole body seemed to release something it had been clenching around for the entire duration of this, and the scream — because it was a scream, clearly, even through the soundproofed glass I registered the shape of it in Madeleine’s open mouth and thrown-back head — lasted a long moment before it softened into something quieter and more private.

Her forehead dropped forward against Anais’s thigh.

Anais looked down at her with an expression of complete calm. She reached down and touched Madeleine’s hair — once, briefly, with a sort of practised absence, the way you might stroke something familiar — and then stepped back. She said something short. Madeleine looked up, nodded, said something that shaped itself in her mouth like an apology. A proper one — multiple sentences, head slightly bowed again, the particular quality of someone confessing something rather than simply explaining it.

Apologising, I realised. For not being able to control herself.

Anais received this with a small nod. She turned away towards her desk, already reaching for a document, already moving on with the absolute composure of someone who had simply completed one task before returning to another.

Madeleine gathered nothing. She left her clothes folded on the chair. And then she got down onto all fours on the carpet of Anais Voss’s corner office and she crawled — slowly, with a kind of careful, deliberate dignity that I still cannot fully explain — towards the door. She nudged it open with her shoulder. She crawled out through it into the empty, dimly-lit main floor of the fourteenth floor.

She did not look around. She did not appear to consider that anyone might be there.

I was standing behind my desk with my coat half on and my hand pressed flat over my mouth.

Madeleine crawled towards the small side room where I knew staff kept personal belongings — I’d used it myself that morning — and the door swung shut behind her. The main floor was silent again. Through the glass panel, I could see Anais already seated at her desk, reading the document she’d picked up, lamp casting a warm pool of light over her hands.

As though nothing at all had occurred.

I took the lift down alone.

Outside, Bishopsgate was doing what London always does at that hour — the particular Thursday evening energy of people finally released from offices, the buses grinding past, someone eating a Pret sandwich while walking very fast, the distant bass thump of a bar already warming up somewhere nearby. Entirely ordinary. Entirely indifferent.

I stood on the pavement for a moment with my coat properly on now and my bag on my shoulder and the cold October air doing something clarifying to my face.

I was turned on. There was absolutely no honest way to describe it as anything other than that, and I was twenty-six years old and well past the age of pretending otherwise to myself. Something about the whole of it — the strip of clear glass, the fluorescent halo of expensive lamplight, the folded white cotton knickers, the particular expression on Madeleine’s face when she’d been told to stop — had landed somewhere low and specific in my body and was sitting there with no intention of moving quietly along.

But what occupied me more, walking towards the Tube with the city noise rising around me, was the question that had formed itself somewhere in the middle of watching it all.

Because I had looked at Madeleine — naked and kneeling and thoroughly, willingly undone — and I had felt the pull of something I understood. An identification. Something in me that knew exactly what it looked like to want to let go of something, to hand the weight of yourself over to someone who knew exactly what to do with it.

And I had looked at Anais Voss — composed and clothed and entirely in command — and I had felt something else. Something that was less like recognition and more like appetite.

I was twenty-six years old. I had never done anything like either of those things. I had never been in a room with the particular charged quality of that room, had never witnessed anything that so comprehensively rearranged my sense of what I thought I wanted.

I still wasn’t sure which side of that glass I belonged on.

But I was, I realised, walking faster now, thinking about it with an intensity that suggested I was going to keep on thinking about it for quite some time.

The Tube swallowed me up at Liverpool Street. The doors closed. The city disappeared.

I stared at my own reflection in the dark window opposite and thought about a woman in a black blazer and her particular almost-smile, and the way she’d turned back to her desk, and the way the lamp had lit her hands.

That’s interesting, I thought.

That is genuinely very interesting.