"Has anyone claimed the cock ring yet?" Carl asked the next Monday when he went to get an adaptor.
"I don't know," Sam said. "I haven't passed by 42W lately. But if no one has claimed it by now, I doubt anyone will."
Carl nodded. He rummaged through the adaptor box, still hoping to find his own adaptor.
Several adaptors now had stickers on them. Carl had assumed that the stickers were being used to mark adaptors, so that they could be found if they were lost, but if that had been the case, there wouldn't be more and more of these adaptors every week.
"Hey do you know why all these adaptors have stickers on them?" He asked, taking an unstickered adaptor from the box.
"No idea," Sam said. "At first I thought it was so people could identify their own adaptors, but now I think someone is trying to be cute."
"Does anyone besides Alison ever take one?"
"On Mondays? No. On the other days of the week? Yeah. They run out on Wednesdays sometimes. Sometimes I think I'm being left out of some inside joke."
"Yeah, you and me both," Carl said.
***
Carl decided to take a detour to 42W on his way to his desk.
Just as Sam had said, there was no one seated in the 40-West sector.
Carl went to 42W, opened the drawer, and there was the cock ring in a little ziplock bag.
Carl picked up the bag and stared at the cock ring. It was adjustable, but it wasn't the kind that vibrated or had any features for extra play. It was fairly boring.
Carl was disappointed. He had expected something more exciting.
"A boring cock ring for a boring place," he said as he put the cock ring back into the drawer.
On his way back to his desk, he stopped by the desk with the post-it notes. There was no one around, so he opened the drawer.
There was a reply to his message: "How can I be having a good day when I'm at the office?"
Carl smiled. He wondered if it was the same person who had answered both times. He hadn't bothered checking the handwriting.
He took the reply off the top of the notepad.
"Are you the same person who answered my first 'hi there' message?" he wrote back.
YOU ARE READING
Missing Things - FIRST DRAFT
General FictionA first draft of a mess about a guy, a pandemic, and an empty office. It's about missing things. One of the things that's missing is a plot. As I said, this is a first draft and it's here for funsies. At some point it'll be taken down because I'll w...
