Give Me A Knife and I'll Gouge Your Fucking Eyes Out

She steps out of the office at half past two, phone in one hand and keys jangling in the other. It's a daily routine - she has to get the mail for the office after all, and it's a good breather from sitting at her desk all day, a chance to stretch her legs and all that.

But something's different today.

After retrieving the mail (there are quite a few cheques today) she waits for the lift, standing by the security counter as she always does. It takes her a while, but she eventually realises that the usual chatter from people waiting for the lift has been replaced by utter silence. Even the cleaners standing nearby have ceased talking, and everyone is staring at her.

Puzzled and more than slightly self-conscious, she glances at the huge mirrors placed beside the lift doors. She looks normal, decently dressed as always in a black shirt and her black skinny jeans.

So why are they staring? 

One of the people waiting for the lift moves to stand closer to the lift, and she instinctively steps aside to make way for him before realising that he wasn't moving to stand closer to the lift but closer to her instead - in fact, he's literally inching closer and closer with every second.

What the fuck--

She steps far away from him, and he just leers at her, openly staring at her chest. It's at this moment that the lift doors open and the entire crowd that has been waiting for the lift sweeps into the lift, carrying her along even though she's suddenly decided that she'd much rather wait for the next one, thank you very much.

It's worse in the lift. He can't try to move closer to her without arousing anyone's suspicion, but his eyes linger on her body, making her feel vulnerable, exposed, dirty. She glares at him when he so much as looks at her, letting him know that she's fully aware of him staring at her, and he looks away each time, but it's not long before his eyes are trained on her chest again.

It's not even as though she has nice breasts, fucking damn it.

She wants to scream, to shout out her fear and rage and the fact that it's not fair why do they think they have the right to look at her body in that way. It's no use feeling threatened or even scared by his actions, so she allows herself to get angry, feeling her rage build and build until all she wants to do is punch him bloody despite the fact that since she barely reaches five feet he is very obviously bigger than her.

It's not much better when she reaches the office and her colleague, a middle-aged lady, remarks that the workers are so much faster with helping a young, pretty girl instead of an old hag like her, jumping to perform maintenance tasks when she calls them (it's her job to call the cleaners and maintenance men and let them know when something needs to be cleaned or fixed) and not dragging it on as they would if someone else were to call them.

Any other time she would have merely smiled and chalked it up to being polite to the older men (most of them had been working in the building since operations first started, so she talked to them with the respect she felt their experience deserved and kept things polite and friendly), but this time it feels wrong.

Everything feels wrong.