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No, 1-800-asshole. I’m not into that. But of course the problem is I don’t know what I am into. It was just easy to do the things Woods wanted me to do. It was calming and pleasurable and a distraction, from Anderson in sales being a doucheknuckle. From Patterson in marketing smacking my ass as I pass by his department – then acting like I’m the sourpuss when I tell him he’ll lose a finger the next time he pulls that shit with me.
It meant I didn’t have to go home and stare at the walls of my pathetic apartment, with my pathetically neat little dinner for one in front of me, and know that this is my life. I am the managing director of a mid-sized but well thought of publishing house, operating out of the tiny city of York.
And that is the most of it.
Even if it’s not, exactly. After all, I am here in this plush little office, in my prim little suit with the perfect cuffs, looking at images of women who’ve been doing some very dirty things. And though that’s not quite on the level of what my predecessor was getting up to between these classy-painting covered walls, there’s a certain frisson to it, I have to say.
I can understand its allure exactly, and not just because I want something to replace whatever Woods was providing. It’s the look of things, I think. It’s the smell in here, of varnish and too-thick carpets, as I bring up a picture of a woman facing away from camera.
Though I confess: it’s not her face I’m interested in. It’s her back, her naked back, and the pattern of stripes working its way down over that flesh. Red on white, red on white, from the slim span of her shoulders to the curve of her ass, everything so perfectly uniform that it’s almost not a line of cane marks at all. It’s like a dress she’s wearing, made of a million crimson stripes. And if I could just find the right person, if I could meet someone who understood the insides of me, he could give me a garment just like it.
Or I could give the garment to him.
Of course I try to shake it off the moment the idea occurs to me, but the trouble is, it doesn’t want to go. It’s there right behind my eyes, along with the image of Benjamin’s ever-shifting gaze, and his strange mouth, and his big hands. What would hands such as those look like dressed in red? Do people even do that – do they crack something down on their palms, in the same way someone has done it to her back?
I’ve got to imagine they do, because the thought holds a sweetness for me that the idea of being caned across my back doesn’t. When I think of the palms of my hands, I think about holding a pen and suddenly getting an echo of that sting. I think about sitting in a meeting, and just squeezing my hands into fists until the pain blazes out and reminds me of who I really am.
I am a person who thinks about being bent over a desk, so that someone faceless and nameless can cover my ass with a million red lines. In fact I’m thinking about it right now, while I’m supposed to be composing an email to one of the senior editors about a promotion he’s suddenly going to have.
And it feels like a long, cool relief after everything that’s happened today. I can see it so clearly in my head – knickers around my ankles, legs just ever so slightly spread. The glistening slickness of my cunt in between, so like the girl I’m looking at right now. The one called Veronica, who likes to expose herself in public.
I know how Veronica feels. I’m in that same mind-set currently, as I almost but don’t quite press the heel of my palm over my suddenly tender mound. It’s close enough to my clit that I get a little jolt of pleasure, but not so close that anyone could stroll in and know what I was doing, and that’s the line I want to walk right now.
I want to be on the edge again, so close to being caught doing something very bad indeed. I’m not the prim and proper correct choice for this job. I’m a dirty girl who likes looking at filthy websites during office hours, nipples stiff beneath my immaculate shirt and jacket. Clit suddenly swollen, and just begging to be stroked.
Though of course I don’t do it. I just flick through the images on the screen, restlessly, stopping when I find something that sparks my interest. A woman with a cock in her mouth and another in her pussy, struggling against intricate bonds that I follow eagerly with my gaze. More red stripes on flesh, some so bright and brilliant they hurt my eyes.
But I go in close just the same. In fact, I’m leaning so close to the screen that it’s almost like I’ve got my nose pressed to the glass – like I’m a child craving sweets that I’m not allowed to have – and that’s how I’m poised when someone knocks on the door. Hunched over my desk as though I’ve turned into some sort of lust-crazed animal, hand almost over the sensitive swell of my pussy through my skirt. My arousal so sharp and keen, suddenly, it’s like slicing myself open on a knife’s edge when said someone doesn’t wait for me to invite them in. They just barge right on through as I jerk back in my chair, hand fumbling for the mouse, everything about me so red and raw. I know it must look obvious. Woods would have seen it immediately, and demanded I pay the price. Show me how wet you’ve gotten yourself, Ms Harding, he would have said, whereas Benjamin just seems trapped somehow in my doorway. It’s that thing again, I think, of blundering and yet knowing he’s made the blunder a moment later.
He shouldn’t have come in, and he understands that perfectly. I can see it on his face, but he still doesn’t move away. He doesn’t leave and close the door behind him, then knock again a moment later.
And there’s something about that fact that I can’t shake. I want to, I desperately want to, but I can’t. He’s saying something to me without words and, though I don’t want to hear, I’m listening anyway. Like I did with Woods.
‘Sorry, sir,’ he says, and my entire body melts and slides right off my chair. Whatever I was feeling before – a kind of weak and watery horniness over some paltry little pictures – folds in and doubles back on itself until I’m left like this. Stunned by arousal for something I barely understand.
‘You should probably go back to your cubicle, Benjamin,’ I say, and though it holds a hint of whatever frisson I’m feeling, it’s not what I want to say. Instead, once he’s left me to my own devices, I imagine telling him something very different.
I think you’d better come inside, I near-murmur, and in my head he does. He comes inside and sits down on the chair across from my desk, hands clutching the arms in exactly the way they had before. That little pink tongue of his peeking out, to wet his plump lower lip.
And then I tell him, just as Woods told me.
We’re going to have to do something about you, Benjamin.
Of course he asks what, in reply. He looks at me all wide-eyed and half-unsure, as I stand up and cross to where he’s sitting. I remember Woods leaning against the edge of his desk, one leg over the other, everything about his pose suggesting casual, but not quite reaching it.
And in my head I mimic that stance almost perfectly, the whole scene a carbon copy of the one that came before. Only instead of saying cunt I say cock, obviously. I tell him clear: I think I’d like to see your cock now, Benjamin, and though I know in reality he’d probably refuse, in my head he barely puts up a fight.
In my head he laughs at first, but then lets said laugh trail down to nothing. Realisation dawning all over his face, so bright and clear and sweet somehow, and when it happens something happens to me, too. I stop thinking about Woods, or the computer screen, or the stripes on her back.
And I think about making that expression happen all over his face instead.
I can’t do that, Ms Harding, he tells me, but that one word – can’t – just sizzles straight through me. It punches down hard on a button I didn’t know I had, and I give the person I am in my head permission to run with it. To say to him: Really? I would have thought a little slut like you couldn’t wait to get their clothes off,while my heart pounds hard and heavy in my chest. It’s the little slut, I think, that does it. Even though none of this is real and I’m sure I’d never say it to him, those two things together get to me. He’s a slut, I think, a greedy, lustful little trollop, and then I watch as my mind provides the visual for this.
He puts a sudden and shocking hand between his legs, and rubs at the stiff shape he finds there.
Of course I know why I’m doing this. It’s so I can be like Woods, and tell him off for being so inescapably horny. But the thing is, it’s different this way around. It’s crazier somehow, more perverse, and when the head-me gets a hold of him by the hair and slaps his too smooth, too perfect face, I actually have to dig my nails into my thighs.
The urge to masturbate is so strong it’s more a physical pain than that sensation is, but it’s still only five-fifteen. I can’t just slip my hand under the waistband of my skirt with the door unlocked. Though if I go ahead and lock it, what then?
Then I’m just going to fuck myself in my office, while my suddenly backwards mind imagines pinning Benjamin to my desk so that I can do something Woods never did to me. The furthest he got was masturbating on my ass, and even that made me feel as though he’d lost some of his allure. That he’d given up control for one second, and left me stranded.
And yet somehow in my head I’m grinding my slippery pussy all over this fumbly, awkward guy’s face, without a hint of that strange lowness going through me. I don’t feel low at all. I feel packed tight with unspilled pleasure, clit as stiff and swollen as the cock I’m imagining. Liquid soaking through my panties already.
The heel of my palm really pressing into the curve of my sex now.
I think of his hands, blindly searching over my body to make up for the things my thighs are blocking out. I think of rewinding the tape, to see him peel out of his clothes in fits and starts. And finally I think of him shoved down over my desk, cheek pressed to the wood. My hand somewhere very bad, like the back of his head. Fingers tight in all of that thick, messy hair, exerting just enough pressure to keep him there.
And then the thin metal ruler I have on my desk in my other hand, to make him wear the garment I only half-heartedly wanted to. Because that’s the thing, you see. All of these replacements I think of, for Woods … they’re half-hearted.
But the thought of striping Benjamin …
The thought …
It’s enough to make me come harder than I ever have in my life, with just a hand in my lap, over clothes. It’s enough to make me say those three over-emphasised syllables into my fist, as pleasure gushes direct to my clenching sex.
I don’t know when it happened. I don’t know why. But it’s there now, inside me, no matter how hard I try to deny it.
Chapter Three
I decide it, before I’ve walked into the building and said hello to Kelly on reception. Today, I am going to be normal. Perfectly, respectably normal. I’m not going to practically masturbate at my desk to fill the void Woods has left. I’m not going to think mad thoughts about the people under me in an illegal and inappropriate way.
No. Today, I’m going to do ordinary things. Like speak to Aidan Harcroft about his promotion, for example. And then maybe speak to Anderson the doucheknuckle about his lack of one.
All of which will go something like this, I believe:
Anderson, I know it’s a terrible tragedy that I got the managing director position ahead of you. But if you just remember what an absolute toilet of a person you are, I’m sure you’ll understand why.
And as for my conversation with Aidan Harcroft … well. That can’t possibly be predicted. Nothing about Aidan can be predicted, because he’s the human equivalent of quicksilver. Fantastic eye, of course, but the problem comes when you’re trying to imagine what’s behind said eye.
Mercurial thoughts, I believe. Mercurial thoughts about not taking the bullshit job I had. I mean, in all fairness, no one wants to babysit people like Derek Hannerty. He’s tried to get that book about the guy who likes enemas past me so many times … and he’s going to ride Aidan just as hard.
‘You’ve got to be kidding, Harding.’
Or maybe he’s not going to get the chance to ride him at all.
‘You think there’s someone better for the job?’ I ask, as he presses the phone to his chest. He’s talking to some author, I believe – though the author isn’t going to mind in the slightest that he or she has been put on hold. I’ve known newbies faint during a conversation with Aidan.
Not that I blame them. He talks so fast and so smoothly, it’s like having a discussion with the magical emperor of a world that doesn’t exist.
‘Janet,’ he says, but I can tell he’s just throwing it out there. He doesn’t really mean it at all, because Janet Everly regularly falls asleep at her desk in the middle of the day. I could pretend to overlook it, back when I was just the gatekeeper.
But now I’m the actual fucking gate.
‘You may as well have pulled a name out of your ass. Come on, Aidan. Even you can do better than that.’
He sighs, and swivels his chair around – but him doing so only gives the game away. He’s not annoyed at all. That shark’s grin is cutting its way across his sharp-boned face, and when he answers there isn’t a hint of weariness anywhere in his words.
‘I’m not going to have long discussions with Derek about Endless Enemas,’ he tells me, while doing something that seems to have an ever so slight hint of lewd – like maybe rocking in his chair a little until I can’t help flicking my gaze down to his groin.
It doesn’t disconcert me, however. It’s just the way Aidan is – louche, I would call it, and the rather unsubtle hints he gives about his sex life only back this one word up. There are rumours he fucked James Wentworth in the men’s room, rumours that he had a threesome with the two girls from marketing, rumours that he banged our receptionist in the underpass down by Collingham Street.
And I know at least one of them is true, because last Christmas said receptionist poured an entire bowl of punch right over his head.
‘Fine. He bothers you, send him to me. I’ll fire him.’
That grin gets broader, as does the faint lilt of his half-Irish accent.
‘So that’s the kind of boss you’re going to be, huh?’ he says, and for just the briefest moment I go cold, before he quite suddenly follows his question up with: ‘Knew you were on the cusp of some epic ball-breaking. Don’t go easy, OK? I won’t respect you if you go easy.’
Of course he uses the jolting pause I then descend into to return to his phone conversation. But unfortunately, I can’t do the same. I don’t have a phone conversation to return to, and if I did I’m not sure I’d make it. Instead I go hot and cold thinking of how close he’s just come to a slightly more personal issue I seem to be going through.
I’m on the cusp, I think, and then I walk over to his desk on new feet, and push the hold button on his phone.
‘I’m not asking,’ I say, and that shark on his face tries to eat me, I swear.
‘Good,’ he tells me, as I stride back out of his office.
* * *
My second conversation of the day goes even better than the first one. I tell Anderson that I really do not give a shit if my promotion has bent him out of shape, and he doesn’t lose it. He doesn’t threaten to murder me, or the board of directors, or all of us in one big clock tower massacre.
No – he just has a nervous breakdown instead. He actually cries in front of me, which is so completely the opposite of what I was expecting that I leave his office wondering if I’ve stepped into an alternate universe. One where Woods is gone and I’m in charge, and Anderson the doucheknuckle is actually a guy who’s just had someone he’s never been respectful to promoted over him.
I can see why he’d think it doesn’t bode well for his future.
Though naturally, I reassure him. Sales are up by two per cent since we went digital, and a lot of that is his work. Despite his bullish attitude and his hideous two-tone shirts, he’s a reliable member of the team.
And I’m going to need reliable, if I’ve got a prayer of getting through this month. This week.
Today.
Aidan might have faith in me, but I don’t. I feel suddenly small inside the grey pinstripe I picked out this morning, these dagger heels making me less sure instead of how they usually make me feel. Strong, I think, strong, as I stride down the hall between sales and marketing, back to where I’m safest.
The mess that is editing.
It’s not an open-plan office really. It’s just a big jumble of egg-carton cubicles, most of which have been knocked through into three or four massive spaces as the editing staff declined and the mad grab for power rose.
You get a couple of egg cartons knocked together and you’re practically a junior no longer. You’re a senior, just waiting for Aidan or Janet to die so you can take their place and publish eight hundred undiscovered masterpieces.
All written by you, most likely.
‘Harding!’ somebody hollers as I pass by – though they quickly seem to gather themselves. ‘I mean, uh …’ Sir, I think, but of course silly little Terry Samson doesn’t go with that. He goes with something more normal, like this is high school and I’m now his teacher. ‘Miss Harding, is there any word on whether we’re getting a little extra to the autumn budget?’
I answer without looking. I have to, because Benjamin is coming from the opposite direction and by God I need to build up a head of steam. His trousers are too short for his massive legs today, and when he sees someone he knows in editing he waves at them. He actually waves.
I can’t let him get his mad, awkward hooks into me.
‘No chance,’ I say, as I barrel on by.
Or at least, I try to barrel on by. I really do. I get as far as my office door, breathless and flushed with victory.
Only to find that Benjamin has actually followed me, as though my single-minded expression said yes, come right up and bother me. I cannot wait to relive every moment of the fantasy I had about you directly to your face.
‘Um, Ms Harding?’ he starts, which is promising. At least he doesn’t lead off with sir, though the question he packs in there is a bit much. It’s so tentative, I think. So lacking in confidence. And then of course there’s the um at the front of it all, like a big red sign:
This is the way I am. You know what way I mean, don’t you? It starts with a sub and ends with a missive.
God, I wish I hadn’t spent all that time looking at those websites.
‘Yes, Benjamin?’ I say, without turning fully. It’s best not to, all things considered. Showing him my front might inadvertently be a sign, of things I know almost nothing about. Like some sort of D/S mating signal, maybe.
‘I have those letters you wanted drafting.’
Is that all? And if so, what more was I expecting, exactly?
‘Good,’ I say, then think of a way of putting even more distance between us. Why, by the end of the week I might never have to see him at all. ‘But in the future, you can just leave things of that nature on my desk.’
‘Oh,’ he says, and nods. Though I swear, a hint of disappointment flickers across his always obvious face when he does so. ‘Well, OK. Sure thing. Hope you like them.’
He hands me two slim, perfectly folded pieces of paper. Fingers almost brushing mine as he does so. Eyes fixed on that near-meeting, before drifting ever so slowly back up to my face.
Of course, it’s then that I realise something appalling. Something I’ve been veering away from, with lots of talk of pointed teeth and lineless mouths – though I swear, I’m not going to let myself think it until I’m safely inside my office. I can’t, because it’s not like Aidan’s handsomeness, that just exists.
This is something else altogether. It’s heated and too intense and it squeezes a little fist somewhere, deep down inside me. It pushes a very particular sort of thought on me, before I can scramble and urge it away again.
He’s lovely, I think, and then hate myself.
‘Did you know that you’re kind of staring at me, sir?’ he asks, and I’m not sure what’s worse. That he’s noticed; that he’s almost sort of smiling around his own incredulity; or that he uses that dreaded word on the end of it.
All three make me want to do something very bad indeed.
‘I think you need to go back to your desk, Benjamin,’ I say, in my lowest and most deadly voice. However, instead of sending the fear of God through him – as I’m hoping – it does something I did not intend.
Something that doesn’t so much as sock me in the gut as punch a hole right through my body.
A flash of heat blazes across his gaze, so obvious that for a moment I’m trapped between two versions of myself. One who’s still the blundering girl I was, shocked by the things Woods wanted her to do. And the other who sees with Woods’ eyes, and knows a million intimate things about a person before they know it themselves.
‘Of course,’ he says, once he’s reined that little response back in. ‘All you have to do is say the word, and I’m totally your man.’
