Corey Allen

Corey Allen is an attractive, eccentric temporary office manager whose workplace behavior eventually draws reports from several women. His arrival gives Ellie, a socially isolated colleague with a long-suppressed impulse to bite, a focus for her fantasies; his harassment of her and others then turns that imagined act into a consequential confrontation. Corey’s departure ends the immediate conflict, but the episode also shapes Ellie’s understanding of how a familiar kind of misconduct can recur across workplaces.

Arrival and Office Persona

Corey enters the story after the office manager dies of a heart attack during the lunch break and a temporary agency sends him to replace the manager. Ellie’s colleagues find him strikingly out of place in a corporate setting: he has green eyes, blond hair, and rosy cheeks, and is described as having the quality of a woodland creature. Michelle from Accounting compares him to someone who might abandon office life to live in a tree. His appearance and manner make him an object of low-voiced conversation among the office’s women, who are assumed to find him attractive.

Ellie, who is something of an outsider at work, overhears those conversations. Her response differs from the desire attributed to her colleagues: she does not want to have sex with Corey; she wants to bite him. The distinction establishes the gap between his apparent appeal to others and the unsettling, physical form her attention takes. At a Monday meeting, while Corey arranges glazed doughnuts on a tray, he catches her looking at him and makes a suggestive remark about her seeming hungry. Ellie is not thinking about the food or monitoring him in the way he implies. Instead, his remark feeds a fantasy in which she bites him. The narrative presents this as her imagined scenario, not an assault that has already occurred.

Ellie’s Fantasies and Restraint

Ellie’s childhood biting has ended, but adulthood has not erased the pleasure she associates with the impulse. She understands that an adult who wants to keep a job and health insurance cannot simply bite colleagues. Corey becomes the first person in a long time to make her seriously contemplate breaking that rule. Her private reflections connect the impulse to a broader dissatisfaction with a life organized around avoiding pain rather than pursuing pleasure; they do not establish that she has a plan to attack him at this stage.

One evening, Ellie imagines a private encounter in the photocopy room: in this hypothetical, she bites Corey, leaves him shocked, and walks away without offering an explanation. She then imagines that he would keep the incident secret, cover the mark beneath a long-sleeved shirt, watch where she was in the office, and avoid her at gatherings. In her fantasy, the fear would bind them together even after he stopped speaking to her. These possibilities remain imagined, including the prospect that he would be too embarrassed or disbelieving to report what happened.

To keep the distinction between fantasy and action in view, Ellie writes a list in her notebook and brings it to work, storing it in her desk. She invents a game called Occasioni: whenever she encounters a chance to bite Corey but refrains, she awards herself a point and records the place and time. Passing him on empty stairs, noticing he has gone into the bathroom, or seeing him alone in the photocopy room all become occasions to practice restraint. At ten points, she treats herself to ice cream and permits herself to imagine biting him. The game gives her a method for recognizing and containing the impulse, but its records also reveal how closely she tracks the circumstances in which an assault could go unseen.

After a couple of weeks, Ellie notices a change in the pattern. The opportunities increase as she learns Corey’s schedule and identifies secluded places in the office; by mid-December, they decline because his hours have become unpredictable and those locations are less often empty. Michelle is frequently present instead. Ellie tells herself not to turn one person’s wrongdoing into permission for another’s, and recognizes that Corey is responsible for his behavior while she is responsible for hers. At a work party, she watches him socialize and exchange looks with Rachel Derwin-Finkel from Human Resources. Ellie suspects he is flirting with Rachel to make Michelle jealous, though this is her interpretation, not a motive the narrative independently confirms.

Harassment and Confrontation

At the party, Ellie encounters Corey alone in an empty corridor after going to the bathroom. She recognizes the moment as one of the private opportunities she has been counting, and understands that leaving would be the way to avoid doing something she might regret. Corey greets her cheerfully and says he thought she was leaving and did not want her to go without a goodbye. When she tries to pass him, he asks her to look at something on the ceiling. As she looks up, he grabs her, kisses her without consent, and restrains her when she tries to push him away. The scene makes clear that the threat in this encounter comes from Corey, not from Ellie’s earlier fantasies.

After he lets her go, Ellie is shocked and repulsed. She then decides to act on the impulse she has been keeping under control and bites him on the cheek. The narrative presents the action as a sudden reversal: Corey, who has just used his strength to control the encounter, becomes the person who falls and calls for help. Ellie does not explain herself in the immediate aftermath. Her response is not shown as a carefully planned intervention, but as a violent reaction to his assault and the culmination of her recurring fixation.

Reports, Departure, and Narrative Role

Michelle identifies Corey’s behavior as harassment and tells Ellie that he has also followed her on the stairs and touched her inappropriately more than once. She says she had been coming to warn Ellie, and affirms that Ellie defended herself. The account broadens the conflict beyond Ellie’s experience: Corey has behaved similarly toward Michelle and several other women. The Human Resources response is immediate and severe. Corey leaves the workplace, there is no mention of Ellie’s conduct in her personnel file, and Ellie finds herself with more friends in the office than before.

Corey’s departure resolves the immediate workplace conflict, but does not restore Ellie’s faith in the workplace as a safe or stable setting. Six months later, she leaves in search of a fresh start and subsequently changes jobs about once a year. She comes to understand that every office has a man about whom colleagues quietly warn one another. In this recurring pattern, Corey is not an isolated aberration but Ellie’s first encounter with a type of workplace predator whose conduct becomes legible through other women’s experiences. His attractive, whimsical presentation and flirtatious social ease contrast with the behavior that prompts their warnings. The contrast is central to his narrative function: the office’s initial fascination with his charm gives way to a collective recognition of harm, while Ellie’s private preoccupation becomes entangled with a real act of coercion and its institutional consequences.