Chapter 6: The LinkedIn Gambit
Luisa had promised herself she'd only check the forum once before bed.
It was Wednesday evening, and the office had emptied hours ago. Late sun came through the floor-to-ceiling glass and laid warm amber bars across her desk, across the cold cup of coffee she'd been ignoring since four, across the glowing monitor where the forum's black background sat open behind a half-drafted client letter. Down the corridor the cleaning crew's vacuum droned. The building hummed with the particular stillness of a place built for hundreds and currently holding one.
She hadn't touched herself to the video since Saturday's instructions arrived. That was discipline. But she still opened the thread most nights, scrolling through the replies with the particular pleasure of a woman reading her own reviews.
Tonight there was a new one, and it was pinned.
She saw the username first. WIDOWMAKER_88. Then the three attachments, and her stomach performed a slow, deliberate drop.
The first image was a screengrab from Barrie's video. Minute twelve, before anything had happened, when she'd been nothing but a naked woman kneeling between two men. Her wrist was in frame. The bracelet was in frame. Thin gold, a delicate chain with a single charm, the one her sister had given her for her thirtieth birthday with the year engraved on the back.
The second image was her LinkedIn profile.
Luisa Farmer. Solicitor. Commercial Contracts. 12 years' experience. The headshot was three years old and heavily retouched, all corporate teeth and corporate lighting, but it was her face, and her name was spelled correctly, and underneath the photo the forum member had typed a single line: interesting bracelet, interesting face, interesting coincidence.
The third image was the charm, enlarged and circled in red. The year 1993 sat beneath his cursor like a signature on a confession.
Below the images the replies were already stacking up. Some of the men were telling him to drop it, that names got threads locked. Others were doing the arithmetic out loud. Others were just posting the sunglasses-on-the-beach photo from her profile page, the one where she was laughing at something out of frame, and adding variations on the same message.
No wonder she's a solicitor.
I'd let her argue my contract.
Luisa's fingers rested on the keyboard without typing anything. Her pulse was in her throat. Three years of carefulness, of a face kept out of frame and a name spelled wrong on purpose, and some insomniac with a magnifying tool had undone it in an afternoon with a bracelet her sister had talked her into wearing.
The office door clicked.
She closed the browser tab on pure reflex, hand jerking the mouse, the forum vanishing behind a spreadsheet she hadn't opened in a week. Her heart slammed twice against her ribs before the door opened properly and Priya's head appeared around it, sympathy cards and a takeaway bag in her hands.
"There you are. I knocked." Priya came in properly, dropping into the chair across the desk, dark curls escaping a bun that had given up around lunchtime. She pushed the bag across. "Samosas. The good ones from the place that closes at six. You've been living on coffee and adrenaline since Friday, so I did the maths."
"Since Friday," Luisa said. Her voice came out level. She was almost impressed with herself.
"You went quiet all weekend." Priya leaned back and crossed her ankles on the edge of the desk. "I texted twice. Nothing. Then Monday you walk in looking like you've been slept on by wolves, in the nicest skirt I've ever seen on you, and now you're still here at seven on a Wednesday. So." She nodded at the takeaway bag. "What did you actually get up to this weekend? Because Rachel in residential says she saw your car parked on Cornmill Street Saturday night, and Cornmill Street is nowhere near anything."
Luisa opened the bag. Steam and cumin. Her hands were steady enough to manage it.
"Dinner," she said. "A friend of a friend's place. It went late."
"A friend of a friend." Priya's eyebrows rose toward her hairline. "That's a lot of hedging for a woman who once told me she doesn't hedge."
"I'm a solicitor. Hedging is the job."
"Uh huh." Priya was watching her with the particular attention of someone who had shared a flat with her through law school and knew every version of her lying face. "You've got your courtroom voice on. I'm not cross-examining you, I'm asking about your weekend. Which, for the record, you clearly had. Whatever it was." She stood, collecting her keys from the desk edge. "Eat the samosas. Go home at some point. And if the friend of a friend has a friend, I'd like to hear about it eventually, since apparently I only find out things about your life from Rachel's parking reports."
The door closed behind her.
Luisa sat in the sudden silence with a samosa going cold in her hand and her pulse still refusing to settle. The spreadsheet glowed on the monitor. Behind it, one keystroke away, the thread was climbing toward four hundred replies, a bracelet circled in red, and her own smiling face from a beach she remembered being happy on.
She should have been terrified. She was, a little. The career she'd spent twelve years building was sitting on the same table as the video, connected by a single line of gold and a four-digit year. One colleague with too much curiosity. One junior associate who recognized her in a place she should never be recognized. That was all it would take.
But underneath the fear, exactly where it always was, something else was warm and rolling over.
She finished the samosa. Wiped her fingers. Opened the tab again.
The thread had grown. WIDOWMAKER_88 had posted a follow-up: contacted the gym in the background of her beach photo. awaiting reply. Other men were arguing about whether he'd gone too far. One of them, PAPABEAR_1955, had written simply: leave the lady alone, she'll tell us when she's ready. Which was flattering and absurd, given that she'd told them everything already, at minute forty-seven and minute sixty-three, in crisp audio.
Her phone lay face-up on the desk beside her keyboard. She looked at it for a long moment.
Then she picked it up and opened the camera.
She stood, walked around the desk, and checked the glass wall of the office. Empty corridor. Cleaning crew two floors down. The last light came through the windows and caught the dust in the air, and she stood in it, in her tailored blouse and her expensive skirt, and unbuttoned the top three buttons. The lace edge of nothing was visible, because there was nothing. Barrie's instruction still held. No underwear, all week, every day, in meetings and depositions and the lift, and the knowledge of it had made Tuesday's conference call genuinely difficult to concentrate through.
She'd taken the babydoll photo on Sunday night, before Saturday's instructions had arrived but after the video had gone up. It was the one Barrie had asked for and the forum had been promised: black silk and lace, delicate straps, her shoulders bare, the fabric cut low enough that the tops of her breasts were a promise rather than an announcement. Her hair down, her lips parted. Taken in her own bedroom mirror with the city lights behind her.
She scrolled to it. Looked at it properly for the first time since taking it.
It was a good photo. It was also a photo that, if it surfaced anywhere in the professional world, would end the careful fiction that the woman in the video was nobody. Because the face was unambiguous. And because there was exactly one person in her office and her professional network whose shoulders and collarbones and mouth looked like that.
Her thumb hovered.
Then she thought: if the bracelet had found her, everything else was going to follow. The gym. The beach. A colleague's memory of a skirt. It wasn't a question of whether her two lives merged, only of who did the merging, and on what terms, and how much fun she had on the way down.
She posted the babydoll photo to the thread.
The reply came fast, the way replies always did, a wall of appreciation and greed. But at the top of it, one message sat pinned by the thread's original poster, addressed directly to her.
Since you're reading this, and since we know who we're reading: your office headshot or this. Your call. One goes on the wiki page we're building. Choose which one the professional world gets to see of you.
She read it three times. Her chest felt tight and bright, like the moment before a verdict.
She typed, deleted, typed again. Then she opened a poll. Two options, uploaded side by side: the corporate headshot with its retouched teeth, and the babydoll with its slipping straps. She titled it, "You choose. I'll live with it," and pressed post.
The first vote landed within seconds. Babydoll. The second followed. Headshot, from a joker. Then a run of babydolls, and a string of messages that were less votes than lists of things they intended to do to the woman in the photo. Her body was warm, her thighs pressed together against the chair, and she watched the tallies climb on her own screen, in her own office, with the last of the sun on her face.
The poll stood at sixty-one votes to eleven when her phone buzzed.
A private message. BGOLD1949.
Clever girl. Making them choose means they own the result, and you get to act surprised. The babydoll's winning. Expect it to travel. Wear the grey sweatervest to work Friday and think about who else in that building might already be a member.
Friday, she wore the grey sweatervest.
The ribbed knit had gone into the wash after the first night and come back exactly as clingy as before, and Luisa stood in front of her bedroom mirror that morning and pulled it down over her bare breasts the way she'd pulled it down in Barrie's workshop room, and felt the same slow warmth spread through her. No underwear, as instructed. She added a blazer for the walk in, then took it off again at the office door. Where was the fun in armour?
The day gave her plenty to catalogue.
Martin from compliance, fifty-eight, who'd held the lift door for her and let his eyes drop once, quickly, to the ribbing across her chest before apologising with his ears going red. The senior partner on four who'd called her into a meeting about the Halloway file and spent forty minutes talking while his gaze kept sliding to the collar of it. The man from the coffee shop in the lobby who'd started giving her the flat white without asking which she wanted, who remembered, who looked at her like she was something he'd already tasted.
Any of them could have a username. Any of them could have watched minute forty-seven. The thought sat under her skin all morning like a current, and by lunchtime she'd resolved it into something more useful than paranoia: a game. Somewhere in this building was a man who had seen her begging on his phone, and he was looking at her today and thinking he might be imagining it. She smiled at Martin in the lift on the way back up, slower than she needed to. He dropped his lanyard.
By six the floor had emptied again and she was alone with the amber light and the forum, which had, as Barrie predicted, done its work. The poll had closed Wednesday night at two hundred and fourteen votes to thirty-one. The babydoll had gone up on their wiki page beneath her name, spelled correctly now, and it had already been screenshotted somewhere, seeded somewhere, travelling. There was no professional headshot waiting in the wings to save her. She'd let them burn that bridge and she'd watched it burn with her thighs pressed together.
What she hadn't decided was what went on LinkedIn next. The old retouched headshot now sat next to a growing digital trail that made it look like a decoy. Leaving it was its own message. Changing it was a confession.
She unlocked her phone. The office was quiet enough to hear the lift shaft humming three floors down.
Barrie's message from Wednesday was still unarchived. She reread it, then typed a reply: Vest today. Building has suspects. Send me proof requests and I'll comply from my desk.
The answer came in under two minutes. Take three. Face in at least one. Post them raw, no edits. Let the thread see where you work.
Her pulse jumped at that last line. She looked around the office, at the glass and the steel and the skyline behind it. It wasn't identifiable, exactly. Not to anyone. But the forum didn't need identifying details; it needed her, sitting where she sat, being what she was in the middle of the day, in the place that paid her hourly rate.
She set the phone against the monitor stand, propped on a stapler, and framed herself in the chair. The vest did most of the talking. She pulled the neckline down an inch, felt the air on the tops of her breasts, and took the first shot: face out of frame, jaw cropped at the chin, the knit stretched across her nipples, which were already standing up against the ribbing.
The second was wider. Her whole torso, the skirt riding up her thighs, her legs crossed, one heel hooked on the drawer handle. In the reflection of the window behind her, the skyline floated upside down. She looked at the image and thought of every man on four who'd looked at this exact silhouette through a conference table and told himself he was imagining it.
The third was the one that made her hands hesitate. She leaned forward, filled the frame from collarbone to lips, part of her jaw, the corner of her mouth. No face, but mouth enough to be claimed. She typed beneath it before she could lose her nerve: From my office. Guess which floor. Guess which desk. I'll wait.
She posted all three and watched the thread ignite.
The replies came in the familiar flood, crude and greedy and precise. Men zooming in on the window reflection trying to place the buildings. Men asking if the skirt was the one from the video. Men just typing her name back at her, spelled correctly, like a password. She sat there reading them with her heel still hooked on the drawer and her breathing gone shallow, the afternoon sun warm on her bare arms.
One reply sat at the top when she refreshed. BGOLD1949.
Now the profile. Pick one and post it. Not tomorrow. Tonight. And Luisa, proof of arousal before you leave the building. You know what that means.
She looked at the corridor. Empty. The cleaning crew started on three around seven; she had twenty minutes, maybe less. Her heart was going hard and bright in her throat, the same rhythm it found in front of the chaise, and beneath the fear of the door opening, of Priya's head appearing around it, was the vast warm pull of being told what to do and doing it.
She stood, reached under the skirt, and pushed it up over her hips. The chair leather was cool against her bare skin as she sat back down, legs apart, feet on the desk's edge. One hand dropped between her thighs. She was already slick; she had been since the lift, since Martin's dropped lanyard, since the morning she'd pulled the vest on for a building full of men who didn't know what they were looking at.
The phone camera caught it from above, between her spread knees: her fingers, her folds, the shine of her, the ribbed knit bunched above her navel. She took the photo in two seconds, checked it once, the office behind her blurred beyond recognition, and posted it with no caption at all.
Then she sat there, skirt still up, and opened LinkedIn.
Two photos side by side on her screen. The corporate headshot, three years old, teeth and lighting and nothing true. And the babydoll, straps slipping off her bare shoulders, lips parted, the city lights behind her.
She thought about the forum's vote, two hundred and fourteen to thirty-one. She thought about the wiki page, and the travelling screenshot, and how the choice had already been made for her by everyone except her. She thought about a junior associate scrolling LinkedIn at their desk and stopping mid-scroll, and what they'd do with it.
The cursor hovered. Her fingers were still wet.
She uploaded the babydoll as her new profile photo and hit save, then checked the forum one last time. The poll thread's final message, pinned by WIDOWMAKER_88, read: she chose the babydoll. told you she would.
The LinkedIn update took four minutes to process. Luisa watched the little spinner circle beside her new profile photo, skirt still bunched around her hips, chair leather cold against her bare thighs, and felt like a woman waiting for a scan result.
Then the spinner stopped, and the photo went live to her entire professional network.
She'd cropped it carefully. The frame started at her lips and ended just above her knees. Shoulders bare, straps visible but slack, the black silk and lace unmistakable to anyone who knew what a babydoll was. To anyone who didn't, it was a woman in a slip, maybe loungewear, soft-lit, slightly sultry. Nothing illegal. Nothing sackable. Just a solicitor who'd chosen an unusually intimate photo for a professional platform and left the rest to the imagination.
Only the forum knew what the imagination was for.
The first notification arrived within ninety seconds. A connection from her cohort at law school, someone she hadn't spoken to since 2019. Then a like. Then another. Then a message from a barrister she'd opposed in an arbitration last spring: Bold choice. It suits you.
Her fingers were still damp against the keyboard. She watched the counter tick. Twelve likes. Nineteen. The comment feed began to populate with the careful, corporate-polite language of people who wanted to say something and couldn't.
Great to see you updating your profile, Luisa.
Lovely photo.
That last one was from a paralegal in the Leeds office, a single question mark, and it made her clench around nothing. She could feel the question mark doing its work across the whole network, a small bright itch in three hundred feeds.
She refreshed the forum. The thread had already found it. WIDOWMAKER_88 had posted a screengrab of her LinkedIn page with the timestamp circled: under forty minutes from upload to live. watch her connections climb. The replies underneath were a tally of men recognizing her name and realizing they'd been arguing motions with her, or opposing her in deals, or sitting four floors above her all along.
One of them works with her. I can feel it.
Her phone buzzed on the desk. Priya.
Saw your new LinkedIn photo. Bold?? Is this a midlife thing, should I be worried, also it has 40 likes in an hour which is more than the firm's own page gets.
Luisa typed back with one hand, the other still resting on her bare thigh under the skirt.
Rebranding. Long story.
It's a very cropped long story.
She smiled and put the phone face-down. Above her, the window reflection caught her: blouse open three buttons, vest bunched at her ribs, skirt around her hips, sitting in a leather chair in an empty office with her network applauding a photo that was, technically, nothing at all.
That was the genius of it, and she'd only understood it after she hit save. The crop did all the work. Shoulders and lace read as soft; bare skin below the collarbone read as tasteful. A colleague seeing it at a desk saw a woman in a nightgown-adjacent slip and had to decide, privately, whether that was strange, and most of them decided it wasn't, because liking it was easier. Only the men on the forum saw the straps and knew exactly what garment they belonged to, and what she'd been wearing underneath it at her desk all day, which was nothing.
Thirty-eight likes. A comment from the senior partner on four, the one who'd spent forty minutes on the Halloway file with his eyes on her collarbone: Striking photo, Luisa. Confidence suits you.
She read it twice. Her breath went shallow. He'd been looking at that collarbone all week, at the ribbed grey knit today, and now his own feed was presenting her in silk and lace and he'd called it confidence. She wondered if he was one of the thirty-eight. She wondered if he was a username she'd already read.
The notification count crossed fifty and kept going. Someone had shared the photo. Then two someones. The comments shifted from praise to curiosity to a handful of messages that were clearly doing their best: Interesting look for the practice area! and Hope this is intentional and lands the way you want! One client she'd done work for last year left a row of exclamation marks and nothing else.
Her skin hummed. She was aware of herself in a way she hadn't been since the chaise: exposed and entirely deniable, praised and photographed, wet on an office chair while her professional world sent her thumbs-up. Every like was a man or woman looking at her bare shoulders during working hours. Every careful comment was someone deciding not to ask. She spread her legs a little wider against the leather and let the heat build.
She opened the forum again. The thread was stitching the two things together in real time. Her LinkedIn likes count, posted and circled. Her commenters, named and speculated over. PAPABEAR_1955 had written: she's getting congratulated for it by her own bosses. this woman is playing a different sport.
And beneath that, BGOLD1949.
Note the timestamps, gentlemen. Photo goes live at 7:41. First connection request, 7:42. She did this from her desk, after hours, in the outfit you voted for. Luisa, tell them what you're wearing under the slip.
She looked at the empty corridor. At the dark windows and her own doubled reflection. Then she typed it into the thread, one line, and posted it.
Nothing. Nothing at all. And the slip is on my bed at home. The straps in the photo are the only thing between the forum and the truth.
The reply came back in seconds, a wall of it, and she read the first few with her hand sliding back between her thighs, skirt high, chair cold, the city going gold to grey outside the glass. Her body tightened fast, too fast, the whole week's restraint arriving at once. She bit her lip and kept her eyes on the screen, on the likes still ticking upward on LinkedIn in her peripheral feed, fifty-eight, sixty-one, and came with her teeth pressed into the knuckle of her other hand, silent, shaking, in a building where the cleaning crew was two floors down and the senior partner on four had just liked her photo a second time.
She sat there afterwards, breathing, watching the counter climb. Sixty-four likes. A new comment, from someone in her own firm's London office whose name she knew and whose username she was now going to spend all of Thursday trying to guess.
The comment said: See you at the Friday drinks, Luisa. Great photo.
She was still catching her breath when the vacuum started again, closer this time. It climbed the floors in slow passes, then died altogether somewhere on four. She heard the lift ding.
The cart's wheels came squeaking along the corridor and stopped outside her glass wall.
The janitor was past seventy, the same as Barrie by the look of him.Lean, bent at the shoulders, wisps of white hair under a company cap. He rapped a knuckle on the glass and held up a set of keys.
"Six thirty, I do this floor," he said through the door. "You been in here since lunch, love. I seen you on the way up."
Luisa tugged her skirt down and stood on legs that didn't entirely belong to her. She'd come twice on that chair in the last ten minutes and her whole body was still ringing, one long held note that wouldn't fade. She let him in.
He wheeled the cart past her, small and quick for his age, and stopped in the middle of the office. He looked at her desk, the scattered files, the cold coffee, the phone face-down. Then he looked at her, and the look wasn't polite at all. It travelled from her open collar down to the hem of the skirt, taking its time, and it ended in a sneer.
"Filthy in here tonight," he said. "Filthy little office." He ran a gloved finger along the top of her monitor and showed her the dust. "Seen it all day on the cameras in the lift lobby. People in and out. Mess everywhere."
His eyes were still on her chest. The vest. She hadn't put the blouse back on properly after the photos and the ribbed grey knit was doing exactly what it always did.
"You want me to clean up in here properly?" he said. "It'll take a while. I do a thorough job."
Luisa's pulse climbed back into her throat. She could hear the thread still refreshing on the monitor behind her, sixty-four likes, a whole forum watching. And here was this bent old man with his cleaning cart, reading her in one glance like he'd been reading women for fifty years.
"Lock the door first," she said.
He turned the latch with a slow click and came back to her without hurrying. Up close he smelled of bleach and something older, sweat under polyester. He took the glove off one hand, finger by finger, never taking his eyes off hers.
"Been sat in that chair all evening, haven't you," he said. "I could hear the chair squeaking from the corridor. Twice."
Her face went hot and she didn't deny it. "Then you know how I am."
"I know exactly how you are." He reached out with the bare hand and cupped her breast through the knit, rough, no pretence, thumb dragging across the nipple until it hardened further against the ribbing. "No bra either. Filthy girl in a filthy office. Should report this mess."
His other hand went up under the vest, found her other breast, and squeezed hard enough to make her gasp. His fingers were coarse, cold from the cleaning products, kneading the soft weight of her, pinching and rolling the nipple while the ribbing stretched and snapped back around his wrist. She pushed into his hands, shameless, her head falling back.
"Please," she said.
"Please what?"
"Your mouth. I've been told you're the thorough one."
That made him grin, a gap-toothed grin, and he walked her back against the desk and pushed her down onto it, files and all, and shoved the skirt up around her hips. The air on her bare skin. He hooked her legs over his shoulders, knelt on the office carpet with a grunt in his old knees, and put his mouth on her.
He was good. Unhurried, filthy-mouthed even while his mouth was occupied, humming against her so she felt the vibration of his laughter through her whole pelvis. His tongue worked in slow flat strokes and then concentrated, circling her clit, and his hand stayed up under the vest the whole time, mauling her breasts, pinching one nipple and then the other in rhythm with his mouth until she was arching off the desk with a fist in her own hair.
He made her come like that, loud and fast, and didn't stop, just kept the pressure on until the second one crested on top of the first and she was shaking, her heel drumming against his bent back.
"Thorough," she managed.
"Told you." He stood, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and unzipped. "Now the proper cleaning."
He fucked her on the desk. She felt the old-paperwork smell and the cool polish under her cheek and his hips snapping against her, his hands under the vest the entire time, dragging the ribbed knit up past her breasts so he could grip them bare, one in each fist, using her like handholds while he drove into her. She wrapped her legs around him and pulled him deeper and told him to do it harder, and he did, grunting, his cap slipping down over his eyes, the cart's bottles rattling with each thrust against the desk.
When he finished he stayed inside her until the last of it pulsed out, then stepped back and tucked himself away with an efficiency she recognised from older men, the absolute absence of ceremony.
"You want the bins done too?" he said, straightening his cap.
Luisa laughed, breathless, skirt still around her hips, a third man's mess joining the week's collection. "Yes. Everything. You've earned a key to this office."
"Already got one." He tapped his ring of keys, grinned his gap-toothed grin, and started the vacuum.
She slid off the desk on legs like wet paper, straightened the skirt, pulled the vest down over the marks his hands had left, and sat back in the chair while the noise filled the room. Her phone buzzed against the desk.
BGOLD1949.
I heard the chair squeaking through the forum's newest fan in your lobby. That's the third camera angle tonight we didn't plan. Wear the bruises to Saturday. Gerald likes a woman who's already been looked after.
She looked across the office at the old janitor pushing his cart, humming, and then back at the message, and understood that she had never once been unobserved in this building. She smiled and typed back: Understood. Friday drinks tomorrow. Want a full report on the names.