I remember the first time we made love - on a pile of grant applications for contaminated land remediation. They were previously stacked in neat piles on my desk, alongside DEFRA guidance notes for the same and a hefty - alas, not stapled - heritage property management plan which I had meant to spend that evening annotating. Post coitus, the pages were creased and bent, and translucent with our sweat, so much of it that month-dry ink bled in tiny rivulets.
I remember my animalistic cries of exertion and the most base, intense pleasure I had known. I remember her breasts, magnificent white domes of flesh - heaving and circling, wobbling like my mother's jelly puddings en route to the church cake sale. (To be clear, the simile occurred to me only in retrospect; my mother, and to a lesser degree her puddings and the St Mildred's new roof fund, were as far from my mind in those turbulent minutes as would be fitting for a sexually mature, albeit family- and community-oriented, young man in the throes of physical love.)
Vitals documents were shunted aside hapharzardly in our feverish, frantic passion; the desk beneath exposed as a dark, shining hourglass - the imprint of her figure, a "snow angel", but of medium-density-fibreboard and several hundred pages of planning regulations.
Afterwards we reclined in adjacent office chairs, bathing in the gentle glow of my screensaver, a simple phrase scrolling left to right: "note to self: time-sheet must be submitted by Friday 6pm!!!!!". The office clock showed 6.02pm - I had left the workplace procedures code in tatters, not unlike the DEFRA guidance notes.
Ten minutes passed in silence, except for our heavy breathing. She then asked me for a drink. I knew the water-cooler was empty (Rachel from procurement was on maternity leave, and her handover notes had been abysmal, riven with omissions), and so I took some coins from my drawer and walked across the office to the vending machine to buy some Fanta, relishing the feel of the air conditioning on my flushed, naked skin. I felt positively primal; a hulking, swollen sexual force, albeit in a quite sterile, non-descript office environment. I bent over and retrieved from the floor an errant bottle cap, placing it into the nearby recycling box, wondering as I did so whether this office had ever played host to such a scene (the sex, that is, not the recycling).
We drank our Fanta, placed the empty aluminium cans you-know-where, and left the building together hand in hand. On the ground floor, Mikhail, the night porter, was sitting behind the reception desk with a steaming coffee in hand. I bade him good night, and he returned the sentiment with a sly wink, which I took to be on account of my attractive lady companion. It was only later that evening, when I exited the Tube at Archway Station, that I recalled the entire office was monitored by CCTV, and that screens alternating between camera feeds were on display behind the reception desk.