POWER PLAY
Charlotte Stein

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

More from Mischief

About Mischief

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

When he tells me to lift my skirt and bend over his desk, there’s a moment where I hesitate. There’s always a moment. It’s like the feeling just before the lock springs under the pressure of the correct key you’ve somehow chosen. My body goes completely still and the word no makes a fist in my throat, and then I just do it.

I wriggle my tight skirt up over my thighs and expose my backside to his waiting gaze.

In fact, I do much more than that. Mainly because I’ve started anticipating these little trips up to the thirtieth floor, and this morning I went without knickers. Plus, when I bend over my legs somehow automatically spread, so he doesn’t just get a view of the dark seam between the lush curves of my ass cheeks.

He gets to see the slippery pink flesh between, as flushed and swollen as ever I’ve felt it. Of course I like to pretend I hate these little excursions up to the thirtieth floor, and that what Mr Woods does to me is degrading and disgusting and oh, isn’t it awful. But the fact remains that the moment he tells me to bend over in that silvery voice of his, my clit swells. My sex plumps. Wetness trickles from the clenching hole between my legs, down over my quite possibly quivering thighs.

I quiver, for Mr Woods. I bend over, for Mr Woods. I forget that I was ever Ms Harding, Executive Editor of Barrett and Bates, and I become this other creature.

I don’t even know her name, to be honest. She looks like me and talks like me and even acts like me in some respects – I still lay my hands on the desk so that they’re apart but parallel to each other – but she can never have that little buzz of respect before her name the way I so often do: Ms.

And she could never let herself be used the way I’m going to let Mr Woods use me right now. I turn over in my mind each way he could possibly debase me as he stands behind me in his crisp grey suit with his crisp grey face and his mouth in that mean line it so often falls into.

He could push something into my cunt. He’s never done it before, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t do it now if he wanted to. I’m as slick as I’ve ever been, but more than that I feel greedy down there, as though I could take anything he wanted to offer. That award he got, for excellence in business or something like it? That big, thick, curved one, with the little nubs all around its length like a thing just made for stirring the nerves inside someone’s body?

Yeah, he could fill me with that, if he so chose. In my normal life, the life outside the strange, still unspoken relationship we’ve struck up, I would never let someone choose something like that for me.

But here it’s different. Here he doesn’t have to say a word, and my mind floods with a million options, each more disgusting than the last. In fact, I suspect that my mind is actually far more disgusting than his. After all, he’s never actually fucked me. Most of the time he doesn’t touch me between my legs, and he hardly ever pushes me into touching him.

It’s just this, it’s just him behind me with the thought of what he could do buzzing through my body. He could order me to oil my own ass and let him slip his cock inside. He could cane me until my flesh sang red-hot songs, until I bled and wept and begged him not to.

And though I’m sure I’ve never wanted any of those things, there’s something about him that makes me give in anyway. Something about his eyes, as calm and colourless as a midwinter day. And his tone, his perfect, metallic tone.

No order is ever barked; his voice is never raised. His orders don’t seem like orders, to be honest. One day he just said to me, quite matter-of-factly: I’d like to see your cunt now, Ms Harding. In the same way one might ask to see the quarterly reports or the latest projections or something of that nature.

And then a sort of haze had descended over me, as though his words had thrown a veil over my head. The veil is with me right now as he murmurs that I should spread my legs wider, wider. He wants to see just how wet I am, just how bad I’ve been, before he progresses to anything further.

And oh God, how I’m longing for anything further. Use the award, I think at him frantically, while my cheeks turn crimson and my body shudders over the idea. Force me to take your cock, I think at him, though somehow I know he never will.

I’m not allowed.

‘I see you’re very wet, Ms Harding,’ he says, then follows it with more disapproving words that I don’t want to hear. ‘Yes, very wet indeed. Would you care to explain to me how you got into such a disgusting state?’

No, I would not care to explain. My entire body sizzles with embarrassment and I have to force my hands to remain flat. And yet I find my mouth opening and words that aren’t my own come out, as though I have a talk-string on my back and he just pulled it.

‘I’ve been thinking about fucking,’ I say, which at least has the virtue of being honest, if not the virtue of being what I actually wanted to say.

‘Fucking who?’ he asks, just as I knew he would. Only this time I find the wherewithal to lie. I have to find the wherewithal to lie. He always asks me this and I always answer the same way – with something that affirms him as the one who controls me – but this time, it’s not true.

And I can’t possibly explain to him why it isn’t. I can’t. It’s more embarrassing than the long, slow throb between my legs.

‘You,’ I say, and then I think of the new guy in the hallway, spilling his armful of papers everywhere. The way his shirt had been untucked at the back. The look on his face, like someone lost inside a maze created by a superior race that hates him.

‘You thought about my cock inside you?’ he asks, and oh that delicious deliberation in his voice still gets me. I have to rub my stiff and aching nipples against the desk just to take the edge off – though I know he will punish me for it soon.

Any transgression, he punishes me for it. Once, I rubbed the toe of my shoe over the back of my opposite ankle to scratch an itch there. And in return for this minor slip he had made me bend double and grasp that said same place while he paddled my ass with a ping-pong bat.

To this day I have no idea where the ping-pong bat came from.

‘Yes.’

‘You think about it often?’

‘All the time.’

‘Describe how you imagine it would feel, sliding in.’

God, why does he always have to make me describe? I’m terrible at it. I’m the worst.

‘Mmmm, so good,’ I say, limply, and for my crimes I get a hard slap to the ass. Of course I do. I should have said solid or satisfying or what I’m really thinking: not as good as that new guy’s cock.

The one I could practically see through his pathetic trousers, as he bent and stretched and reached for all his fallen papers, face red, everything about him so awkward and appalling. He should be taken out of his misery, he really should. He should be planted over a desk and made to see the error of his ways, just as I am now.

And then maybe he’d beg like me too.

‘Oh please, please just fill me with something. Please,’ I blurt out, but it’s the strangest thing. I don’t know if I’m saying it for Mr Woods, or for the other thoughts that are pushing their way through my addled mind.

Thoughts such as: if it was the new guy behind me, would he fill me now? I don’t think I’d have to beg with him, but somehow that doesn’t seem like a negative. Instead, my body flushes with the thought of how eager he’d probably be – cock so stiff and swollen it’s almost touching his belly, pre-come welling at the tip like a promise of all the copious slickness he’s about to spill.

And he’d spill it inside me. Of course he would. Two thrusts and he’d be done, cock spurting thickly in my waiting cunt, hands all sweaty on my hips and oh God maybe he’d moan too. He wouldn’t be like Mr Woods – silent, implacable, unmoveable. He’d actually say something as he touches me, and if he didn’t want to, if he couldn’t …

I’d make him.

The realisation shoves its way through me, as hard as those first words from Mr Woods did. I’d like to see your cunt now, Ms Harding, I think, and then hot on its heels:

I’d like to see your cock now, new guy.

Benjamin, I think his name is. Benjamin, I think, as Mr Woods rubs something too cold and unyielding against the slippery lips of my cunt. And then when I moan to feel it, and squirm against it, he eases it down, down until the smooth tip is rubbing against my swollen clit.

I don’t mind admitting that I forget about Benjamin then. Hell, I forget my own name. Pleasure whites out all of my higher thought processes and leaves behind this: this shame-riddled, wriggling mess. This thing, that can only plead:

‘Uhhhh, yes – more. More.’

I try to angle my hips to catch whatever he’s using – the award, my mind screams, the award, even though I know it’s not – and get it inside me, but naturally he’s too good for that. He just pulls back further, until the thing is barely touching me at all. In fact, I’m sure I can only feel it because my clit is so sensitive, so ready for any little touch that stirring the air over its surface makes me liquid between my legs.

Makes me moan, too loud and too long. Outside his doors, hundreds of people are working away, oblivious – but they won’t be oblivious if I carry on like this. If I buck and pant and tell him to just fuck me with it, fuck my cunt with it.

‘Such a filthy mouth, Ms Harding,’ he says, and then he does something worse than all the rest of this nonsense combined.

He slides the tip of whatever this is up, up, past my ready and waiting pussy to a place I’m completely not prepared for. I’m so not prepared for it that I lurch forward against the desk, and actually almost say something weak and pathetic, like:

Please don’t. I’ve never had anything there before.

Luckily, my perfectly perpendicular hands save me. The thought of that Ms at the start of my name saves me. The idea of Benjamin stumbling and fumbling and just being such a mess saves me.

And I don’t break. I don’t say anything at all as he offers me one tiny, amused sort of sound. He never laughs, Mr Woods – of course he doesn’t – but sometimes I’m sure my struggles and my boundaries entertain him.

And this is such a petty boundary to have. Who hasn’t had something in their ass? Yet the fact remains that I haven’t, and the more he pushes and twists and makes that amused sound, the harder I clench and flame red with mortification.

I don’t know what’s worse, either – the fact that he’s doing this with something impossibly thick and still achingly cold, or that I can feel how slick its surface is. As though he didn’t just coat it in my liquid before he decided to rub it over my arse.

He oiled it in advance, for this specific purpose. He knew he was going to penetrate me there before I even walked into this office, and no amount of my squirming and whimpering is going to change that.

I just have to squeeze my eyes tight shut and let him ease it slowly in.

And oh God he does, he does. He braces one hand on my tense ass cheek, and then twists this thick and slippery thing until my body starts to yield to it. The tight ring of muscle there clenches and tries to deny the intrusion, but then everything just seems to give and I feel it slide all the way in to the hilt.

Worse than the hilt, in fact, because once the thing is lodged firmly inside me I can make out the press of his fingers where he’s gripping it at the base. Somehow it’s the most intimate touch he’s offered me since this whole thing began.

‘I think I would like you to rub your clit as I fuck you. What do you think, Ms Harding?’

I think nothing. I’m made of nothing. All I can feel or respond to is the slow slide of this fake cock as he pushes it in and out of my ass. As it stirs all of these little nerve-endings that I didn’t know existed, everything so glossy and slick that the feeling is almost unbearable.

‘I think you’d like that. Now reach between your legs and find your clit.’

I flop around for a moment, trying my best to do as I’m told. My arms feel rubbery and unresponsive, and with this fake cock working back and forth inside me it’s hard to lift my body to get at what he’s asking for.

And it doesn’t get any easier when I finally reach my stiff little bud. Just skimming the pad of one finger over its tense surface is like a punch to the gut. It feels immense, and every touch of it burns too hotly, and then he actually makes a sound as he forces the thing into me and oh God I can’t take it, I can’t.

I can accept something fucking my ass. I can take being bent over his desk. I can’t endure him grunting like that, as though maybe this whole thing affects him a little more than he usually lets on. Him grunting makes me imagine torrid, glorious things, like his cock all stiff and solid against the material of his impeccable trousers.

And though I daren’t look to check, I can almost picture him stroking himself as he does this to me. One hand on his hard cock, one hand on the fake one he’s pumping in and out of my willing body, until finally he gives in and lets himself spurt all over –

‘Oh fuck, Mr Woods,’ I moan, because everything is just too much. The heated pulse between my finger and my clit, the feel of the fake cock fucking into me, raggedly, the idea of him coming on my upturned ass … I can’t take it.

Instead, I press down hard on my clit and let the first trembling waves ebb through me, pushing back against the pounding he’s now doling out until said waves become a great wash of pleasure.

‘Yes, keep doing that, keep doing it, I’m coming – ohhhhh,’ I tell him, because by this point I’m beyond all good sense. I don’t know who I am or where I might be, and all I care about is the orgasm that’s shoving rudely through my body.

And God, it goes on and on and on. By the time it’s finished I’m a wet, trembling mess on the desk. Perpendicular hands forgotten. Perfect clothes sweated through. Ass so sore I’ll barely be able to walk for the rest of the day.

Though that’s not unusual, for our cold little relationship. At the very least I’m usually sitting on some red handprints in any afternoon meetings I then have – meetings that are actually going to start very soon.

In fact, they’re going to start so soon that my real self comes back to me far quicker than usual, and I go to straighten before he’s given me permission. I try to stand, but before I can get anywhere near said position that tented hand is back on my ass. His metallic voice is back in my ear.

‘Stay still, Ms Harding,’ he says, only he sounds different for just a second. That metallic tone peels away and reveals something rusted and old beneath, and then I actually feel it on my skin, just as I had imagined.

A searing stripe of something slick. And then another. And another.

Though that’s not the shocking thing. I mean, I’ve often imagined him losing some of his control. Sometimes I’ve hungered for it, with my hand between my legs and orgasm just one wretched inch away.

But in all of these fantasies of him breaking, I’ll confess: I never imagined him moaning something heated. The Benjamins of this world moan heated things. They let themselves go and can’t control themselves – not people like Mr Woods.

So why does he tell me: ‘Oh yes that’s so good’ just as he’s coming? Why?

And more than that: why does it make me feel so low?

Chapter Two

Of course I know something’s wrong the minute I look up and see Benjamin stood there, framed in the meeting-room doorway. He never, ever, on pain of death interrupts the Monday morning break-downs. Never. I suspect he’d rather die than let every grey face in here see him up so close, with his shirt perpetually untucked on one side and his expression always so naked, so naked.

But he’s here, and he’s obviously waiting for me to say something. Speak, boy, I think, like some sort of ridiculous internal sneeze. Like a reflex I don’t really want to have, but which comes anyway, unbidden.

Then I get a hold of myself, and straighten, and greet him more normally.

‘Yes?’ I ask, but it’s the strangest thing. Somehow it comes out sounding like speak, boy, anyway. And even worse, I think he might know it. The faintest flush spreads over his face after I’ve spoken, and when he finally manages to explain he’s all expansive and blunder-y about it.

‘Ms Harding,’ he says, and this time I really get a flash of something unwanted. That buzz, I think, that buzz at the start of my name, only different to the way I usually hear it. Usually I don’t know what to do with it.

But I know right now.

I tell everyone to take five, and walk briskly to the door. All of these strange and new parts of me very aware of how fumbly Benjamin suddenly appears. How like he’d seemed in my head when I hadn’t meant to think of him.

‘Uh, yeah,’ he says, the minute I’ve closed us into the narrow hallway.

I resist the urge to tell him that those words are decidedly not the ones to use. A man of his size and stature should be clear and precise; he should tell me directly what he means. He shouldn’t be like this, all awkward and half-crouching down – though I don’t know why it suddenly bothers me so.

It never bothered me before my last meeting with Mr Woods. Before that sense of strange lowness, of a sudden shift in the way things are between us.

‘Go ahead, Benjamin,’ I say, though again those aren’t the words I want to use. The real ones are in the back of my mind somewhere, being ignored until I can think about all of this more clearly.

‘I’m supposed to take you up to your office, Ms Harding,’ he says, and that’s when I know it. I’m not going to get the chance to think about this strange little buzz in the back of my mind at all.

And it’s mainly because of this sudden and creeping sense of unease.

Of course, I felt that way the moment I walked in this morning. But it’s far more obvious now, as I take in every little nervy tic of the strange man in front of me. He’s not uptight exactly – it’s not like that. He’s not wound up inside himself, unable to escape. It’s more like his insides have escaped far too much, and are currently spilling themselves all over me. The urge to brush bits of him off my vintage Yves Saint Laurent suit is strong, very strong.

‘I see,’ I say, though of course what I really want to do is ask him what all of this is about. He has a lot of papers in his hands – which had seemed perfectly right in my head. It’s just that it doesn’t seem perfectly right now. ‘Lead the way, then.’

He does. He lollops on ahead of me, every stride so immense that after a moment I actually find myself almost trotting to keep up. Of course I don’t let it show – he’s so obvious in his movements that I anticipate his head turns, and always slow to a near halt – but even so. There’s an element to it that’s mildly disconcerting. Like something about him doesn’t quite match up or work, and it’s my job to figure it out. Though I’ll be honest, I’ve no idea when the task fell to me.

‘Here we are, Ms Harding,’ he says, and I notice several things at once. I notice his voice first, despite the fact that doing so is the wrong thing to be picking up on. I shouldn’t be thinking about his odd, slightly glassy and very American sort of accent, while stood outside Mr Woods’ office.

And I definitely should have taken in the new brass plate on the door, before anything about Benjamin occurs to me.

But the truth is, I don’t. For a long moment I simply stare at him, in a much meaner way than I intend. I watch him ruffle through his papers, most of them almost sliding out of his grasp as usual. That ridiculous, All-American-Boy hair of his falling into his eyes, as he attempts to function like a normal human being.

And then finally I ask, without letting any of my deep, deep concerns about this entire situation affect me. I don’t let them show in my expression, I don’t give them time in my tone. I already know what’s happened here, but I keep it cold and below the surface.

‘Perhaps you could tell me why my name is on the door, Benjamin.’

Of course, I half-know what his reaction is going to be. And I’m proved right when his mouth kind of flops open and his big eyes get bigger. The search for some unnamed thing amidst his pointless papers gets more frantic.

‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Oh, I thought you knew, Ms Harding. Did no one tell you?’

I think of the people above Woods, from the board of directors. Julian Wentworth, with the little pointed beard and the fidgety hands. Derek Carruthers, who so rarely visits that I don’t even have a few bullet points to pin to him. He could have three heads and one eye for all I know.

‘No,’ I say, and this time the expression on his face is so clear I could have read it from across a room. It’s you who were supposed to tell me, I think, and then I watch with the strangest sort of detachment as he searches in vain for something amidst his papers.

‘Ohh Geez, I’ve made such a mess,’ he says, under his breath. He needn’t have bothered. I can tell he’s made a mess, with or without his help. He has mess written all over him, in bold black marker. ‘I knew I’d forgotten something.’

‘Did you forget to give me a letter, Benjamin?’ I ask, because it’s torture watching him do this. My hands itch to do God only knows what. I can feel terrible, terrible words clawing at the back of my throat – words like we’re going to have to do something about you, Benjamin. Even though I know that’s one of the first things Woods said to me.

‘I think … yeah. Maybe … just hold on, Ms Harding.’

I don’t want to hold on. I want to say it: We’re going to have to do something about you, Benjamin.

‘Oh, man. Here it is. Here,’ he says, and I have to wonder if I looked like that when I first stumbled into Mr Woods’ office. Clothes barely fitting me, words all fumbling one after the other. Scorchingly sensible of a mistake I’ve just made.

Though when he speaks again, I’m almost relieved. There’s at least one glaring difference between the way I was and the way he is – and it comes to me as he tells me he’s always getting things wrong.

He’s not ashamed like I was. He’s almost bright and boyish about it instead, the expression on his face full of a kind of hope I don’t know how to process.

‘I’m so sorry, Ms Harding,’ he says, as some of the papers spill out of his hands. And then I simply have to stand there, frozen, as he tries in vain to gather them up. Everything about him so big and clumsy and sweet somehow, in a way I know I never was. ‘But I swear, it will never happen again. I swear to God.’

What a strange creature he is – though I confess, I’m grateful to him. For a long moment I’m so transfixed by his utter awkwardness and his ever-hovering grin that I can’t focus on the true matter at hand.

Woods is gone.

And I am his replacement.

* * *

I have three contact numbers for Gregory Woods. One is for his office, which would now mean I’m ringing myself. The other is his mobile phone, which always goes directly to his curt little voicemail message: Woods. Speak. And the last is his home number, which I have never on pain of extreme torture rung.

I will never ring it, not now. He’s done this thing, and that’s all there is to it. It’s the sort of person he is; it’s the way he operates. He makes a decision as brisk as a knife coming down, and if you get one of your limbs chopped off in the process, well.

So be it.

Though I swear I don’t feel that way. I feel calm and composed, all the way through the rest of the Monday morning break-down. I am like a summer breeze as I field questions from the head of the sales division about targets Woods has decidedly not set. I’m the very soul of inner peace, when I discover the other seventeen thousand problems no one ever thought to ask a man like Woods about, because Woods always looked like someone in control.

He treated me like someone in control.

But as I learn at one-thirty-five on Monday afternoon, his legend was definitely somewhat exaggerated. In fact, by the time Benjamin asks me if I’d like my midday Scotch, I’m convinced Gregory Woods was some sort of magician.

I knew him in so many appallingly intimate ways, but I didn’t realise his level of incompetence. And judging by what Benjamin is now telling me – in all innocence – it wasn’t sober incompetence.

I think I actually say to him: ‘Are you serious?’ though I swear I don’t mean to.

It’s Woods I’m angry at, of course it is – and yet I snap at Benjamin so hard his teeth practically rattle. His mouth comes open again, though this time it at least has the wherewithal to seem voluntary. He almost catches it before it’s reached the halfway mark, but I still glimpse those odd teeth he has – so perfectly straight and white and gleaming, apart from the hint of point on the incisors. It’s not a hint really. It’s strong and obvious and like he should have a lisp, though I’m not sure how I come to that conclusion.

And I can still feel the words he wants to get out, pushing at the back of his throat.

‘Uhhh … well …’ he starts, and that urge to correct him beats on me so hard I’ll be feeling it tomorrow. Don’t start your sentences like that. Don’t, don’t, don’t oh God don’t please I hardly know what’s happening to me. ‘Mr Woods tended to like his Scotch with –’

‘Benjamin, sit down,’ I say to him, while my insides scream at me: do not ask him to sit down.

I should never have sat down when Woods asked me to, that first time.

‘O – K,’ he says.

I’m grateful that he looks so bemused, I really am. Though I’m less grateful when he seems to have the most appallingly difficult time picking a chair. At first, he actually seems to think I want him to sit next to the antique sideboard, on a leather wingback that has no real purpose being there. I mean, he does realise that thing is about twenty paces away from my desk, right?

‘Sit here, Benjamin,’ I say, but when I do I realise something even more horrifying than all of the rest of the weird urges bubbling up inside of me. His name … the way it sounds …

It’s better than the way Woods used to say Ms Harding. The whole thing just rolls right off my tongue, with emphasis I don’t intend on syllables that shouldn’t have it. And when he takes the chair opposite my desk – all of his big body folding down into it as though he’s half the size he actually is – I’m almost certain he knows it.

He knows how I’m saying it. Those guileless blue eyes and that almost-smile on the faint imprint of his mouth … they tell me what I need to know.

‘Are you OK, Ms Harding?’ he asks, as I sit behind the vast safety of the desk that once belonged to him. Unfortunately, doing so just makes me wonder if he ever needed to hang on to it the way I’m doing right now.

I’m like the survivor of a shipwreck. Barrett and Bates is going down in flames, and I’m thinking about some awkward creature’s secret face signals.

‘I’m perfectly fine, Benja–’ I catch myself this time, though I’m sure he notices. Something flickers across his otherwise completely innocent gaze, something I recognise without even trying to. And then I get control of myself and start again. ‘I’m fine, Ben. I just want to get across a few things to you, before we go any further.’

He nods, eagerly. I wish to God I didn’t have to add that ‘eagerly’ onto that description.

‘Of course, Ms Harding. I mean – I guess I’m your assistant now. And to be honest, that suits me a lot better. You’re so direct, you know? So –’

‘Stop!’

I don’t mean to shout it, I swear. It just happens. A lot of things seem to be just happening, and I don’t know if I can cope with them all.

‘Sorry. You go ahead, Ms Harding. I’m listening. I’m really doing my best to be all ears.’

Lord, he punches the air a little, after that last statement, the way a cartoon character from the fifties might have done. Gee willikers, Ms Harding! I sure am glad I’m working for you, gosh yes!

‘You’re doing fine, Ben. But what I really wanted to stress to you is this: you’re not my assistant. You weren’t really Mr Woods’ assistant. You –’

‘Oh my God, am I fired? Oh man, I –’

‘Benjamin,’ I say, and am deeply disheartened to find that his full name has the exact effect on him I expect. It freezes him in place, big hands clutching the chair arms. Those soft eyes caught somewhere between wounded and a promise that he can do better. I wish he wouldn’t want to do better for me quite so badly.

‘You’re not fired. I’m simply trying to tell you that you’re a clerical assistant. That’s what you were hired for – to help with general office paperwork, mail and filing. You’re not here to bring me a Scotch.’

He isn’t really anything of the sort – he was always Woods’ PA. It’s just that I can’t have him being something like that right now. I need him to be away, writing letters for other people who don’t need a letter writer at all.

‘Oh,’ he says, but he doesn’t look as embarrassed as I’d feared he would. There’s a hint of sheepishness there, true, but then I imagine that’s his default state. Whereas the other emotion on his face – disappointment – probably isn’t.

He looks like the kind of guy who takes most things in his stride. Unless it’s his brand-new boss telling him she can’t possibly spend her time ordering him to do humiliating menial tasks on her behalf. Then he just seems as though his entire world is falling apart, right before his eyes.

And oh, I don’t like what that completely naked expression on his face is making me want to do.

‘I don’t need you to caddy for me at the golf course.’

I really, really don’t like what it’s making me want to do.

‘I don’t require you to dry my hands for me after I’ve been to the ladies’ room.’

God, I know it’s going to make me do it.

‘But if you want, you can … compose letters for me. And compile some reports.’

Damn it.

‘Really?’ he says, and oh Jesus he just looks so hopeful. No one should ever look that hopeful over the prospect of writing to the head of the board to ask what the fuck is going on. I mean, a phone call might have been nice, you know? Promotion would have gone down a lot easier if it hadn’t been phrased thusly, in a letter:

You’re now the managing director of Barrett and Bates, effective immediately. If you have any concerns, contact several people who don’t give a shit.

‘I hardly see why not,’ I say, though I know it’s a mistake. And I know it more strongly when I ask Benjamin to leave, and on his way out of the door he says:

‘Thank you, sir.’

Of course, he realises his error almost immediately. He’s that sort of person, I think – the kind that makes many goofy blunders, but is intelligent enough to know he’s made them only a second later.

Though it doesn’t make it any easier, I know. It still makes his mouth open and close, that sweetly curving upper lip of his compressing as he searches for a way to rectify what he’s done. He called me sir, even though I’m a woman. He called me sir, and for reasons we won’t go into it’s making him all flustered.

‘Sorry – I meant –’ he starts off, but I cut him down dead.

‘Sir is fine,’ I say, as I wave him out the door.

* * *

Of course, sir is not fine. And after he’s gone I sit at my new desk and consider all the ways in which it isn’t fine at all. It’s what I used to call Woods, for a start. It’s meant for a man, for afters. And then there’s the fact that it makes my body flush from the tips of my toes to the roots of my hair.

Yeah, there’s that.

I close my eyes and try to think of something else. There are a million things for me to think about, after all. Woods had apparently allowed a whole department to keep operating unnecessarily, for reasons left unclear in the paperwork he never actually did. Tomorrow I’m going to have to fire every one of them, while he most likely suns himself in Barbados.

And yet my mind returns to that one word over and over, so casually said. Sir, I think. I am somebody’s sir, and then I have to count all the things about him that aren’t right, just to keep myself on an even keel.

His mouth is strange. It’s like it has no corners or definition around it, no real shape to keep it in place. Of course, occasionally when he talks it’s given a proper outline, but then, it’s not really the outline I want it to have. Movement just makes those lips plumper, more obviously sensuous, and then when he stops talking all I can see is how smooth and soft that mouth is. If he didn’t have that heavy jaw and all of that overflowing size, he’d look like a cute cartoon character, and nobody wants that. They want men with intense, cold, manly gazes. Not that warm, soft-focus eagerness. Not those sooty lashes that probably look beautiful spread over his cheeks – when he closes his eyes in ecstasy, maybe.

God. God. How did the word ‘beautiful’ get into that sentence? How did ‘ecstasy’? I have absolutely no clue, and yet for a long moment it’s all I can think about. All of the things that are exactly right about him crowd out the things that probably aren’t wrong at all, and I’m left helpless on the burning ship again.

Though I don’t clutch at my desk this time. I turn to my computer – the ridiculous wood-backed thing my former paramour ordered from Japan, and that I’ve already searched for any evidence of his impenetrable motivations – and do what I’d wanted to the moment I knew he was gone.

Hell, I wanted to do it the moment I knew he was different, on Friday afternoon.

I go online, and start looking for someone who can give me the things he no longer knew how to. The things I’m no longer getting, and apparently need so desperately that I’m willing to actually venture onto Craigslist and read insane ads like:

I want to piss on your head. Call 1-800-asshole, if you’re into that.

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.’

He can’t possibly be saying what I think he’s saying. He can’t be. It’s all just my sex-fevered imagination; it’s my body missing Woods and wanting something to fill the void. There’s no heat in his gaze, no slow sensuality in his otherwise breezy voice. And by totally your man, he means: I love writing letters for you, Ms Harding.

Not anything sexual or suggestive at all. In truth I think he’s too boyish for those sorts of kinky games, too gauche. He doesn’t realise the double meaning of the words he’s saying.

Or at least I think so, until I open the letters.

* * *

I try to be calm about it at first. Any normal person would be calm and rational about the whole thing, I’m certain. Aidan, for example, would most likely give him a gentle dressing-down before offering him a biscuit.

And that’s what I need to do. I need to find some biscuits to offer him, after I’ve tried to strangle him with two bits of paper.

Because that’s what I want to do, of course.

I don’t know what he thinks he’s playing at by writing the letters in this way. But he’s playing just the same, and I know it. I can’t deny it. No one could write this way for their boss and fail to understand that they’ve made a complete mess out of it.

Most of what’s in the two letters isn’t identifiable as something a human being would do. There are sentences without endings, words misspelled so badly they’re not really words any more. Blotches on parts of the paper, as though maybe he drank a gallon of strawberry-flavoured liquor while writing them and some of it spilled out of his mouth – and the truth is, I can really imagine him doing just that. He’s so excessive somehow, so full of extra gestures and obvious greed. It’s like he’s just finished cramming a box of cakes into his mouth a second before you see him.

And the only thing he could find to clean his hands and his mouth were these letters, apparently.

I mean, they’re just an unmitigated disaster. But worse than that: he’s clearly done it on purpose. He wants me to tell him off, he actually wants me to – though if he thinks it’s going to be that easy he’s mistaken.

I’m a professional person, for fuck’s sake. I can’t be goaded into the kind of thing Woods did, by a misspelling of the word ‘potato’. Even if there’s no godly reason why the word ‘potato’ is there in the first place. Even if I can see his face behind my eyes when I close them, all heavy-jawed and somehow much more perfect than I’d ever allowed myself to think he was.

It’s the hair, I think; that thick maze of toffee-coloured hair, as though someone dipped him in something sticky and delicious only a moment before. Or maybe it’s the tender shape of his mouth, caught between the heaviness of the rest of his face – that near sullen jawline, that broad, clear brow.

Those eyes of his, all hazy with longing as though he’s been left out too long on a summer’s day. They say things he doesn’t want to or can’t quite make himself, those eyes, and they’re the first thing I think of when I picture myself going to tell him off.

Even though I’m absolutely not going to do that. I’m not. I’m just going to spend the rest of the day as I had planned – calm and collected. If he wants to do things like this, he’s entitled to. But he’s not getting a rise out of me in return.

He’s just going to get me walking to the cubicle he occupies at five p.m. Everything about me glacial somehow, in a way that should be comforting. It should, but it’s the strangest thing. By the time I turn the corner into his little nook – almost an office, if it were not for the lack of a door on one end – I’m not comforted by the coolness I’ve descended into at all.

It’s too cool. It’s almost as though I’ve coated myself in a pane of glass, and I can watch all of the things I’m doing and understand them. But I can’t control them. When I try to, my fingers butt up against that sheet of something see-through.

And this feeling gets a hundred times worse when I see him.

‘Hey, Ms Harding,’ he says, all innocence. That big body of his folded into his tiny little swivel chair, one side of his collar sticking up ridiculously. A hint of bemusement touching those soft, entirely fuckable lips.

Which is never a good thought to start things off with.

And then there’s the fact that he licks a stamp the moment I’m focused on him, in a very deliberate sort of way. His tongue curls out to cover the little scrap of nothing completely. Those completely innocent eyes intent on me the whole way through it.

Everything slow, so slow, and so … slick, somehow. Does he know how slick that looks, how lewd? He has to know, and yet sometimes when I look into his eyes I can’t be sure. It’s like there’s a veil over his gaze, and the second something dirty happens he just draws it all the way down, over that sweet boyishness.

Then waits, to see what I will do. He’s struck the match. Do I want to put the fuse to that little flickering flame?

‘Can I help you with something?’ he asks, and then he licks the damned thing again.

Would it be so bad if I just got a fistful of his hair and shoved his face into the carpet? He doesn’t look as though it would be a bad thing. He looks as though he wants me to grab a fistful of hair and shove his face between my legs.

‘I really hope I don’t have to tell you these letters are unacceptable,’ I start. It comes out much better than I thought it would. More like a boss and less like a sex maniac.

‘Really?’ he asks, and it’s then that I start to hate him. It’s not even a start, in truth. I loathe him already. I despise his fake innocence and his stupid handsome face and these letters, covered in stuff that most likely fell out of his gorgeous mouth. And unfortunately, all of these things make me ball them up and throw them at him before I speak.

‘I’m not sure how you could fail to realise. You’ve misspelled the word and.’

He blurts out a little oops, which seems to send me into some sort of tailspin of indecision. On the one hand, the word sounds genuine. The breath he puffs out sounds real, and his big eyes go bigger. In fact, by this point they’re so big that they’re starting to swallow me whole.

But on the other hand … he misspelled the word and. Twice. I’m not sure how that’s possible.

‘Do you have some sort of issue I’m not aware of, Benjamin?’

He shrugs. He actually shrugs.

‘Nope,’ he says, and I don’t know what I despise most. His sloppy, ridiculous approach to things, or his utter American-ness. Both just sing out of that nope, so blatant and too much for me to handle. ‘I guess I just made a mess of things, huh?’

‘You made a mess of things?’

‘Yeah. I probably wasn’t thinking.’

‘You weren’t thinking?’

I have no idea why I keep repeating what he’s saying back to him. But I at least know this: if I don’t get a handle on myself soon, I’m going to do worse than getting a fistful of his hair. I’m going to put the heel of my shoe into his back, and dig in hard enough to make him scream.

‘But I swear to God, I’ll do better next time.’

‘You keep swearing to God. Is he likely to make you better at your job?’

‘Oh, well –’

‘The job that you failed to do on Monday morning, when you gave me a vital letter of great importance about four days too late. The job that a chimpanzee could do, if you gave him enough paper and his own desk.’

His face actually flushes red at that. It’s satisfying, in a way I don’t want to acknowledge.

‘I’m so –’ he starts again, but I cut him off. I’m on some sort of roll now, and the longer I let it go on the worse it gets.

‘Perhaps the responsibility of a desk is a little too much for you. If so I could hire this theoretical primate to take your place, and you could come and work in my office. I have an absolutely wonderful spot on my floor somewhere for you to play with some coloured blocks.’

I notice, absently, that his mouth is hanging open. It looks like the expression someone would make if they’d just recently been stabbed in the gut. Sound seems to want to come out of him, but all he can manage is a strangled gasp.

‘Are those words you’re trying to form, Benjamin? Because if they are, allow me to fill in the only ones you should be using: yes and sir.’

I pretend I don’t see his eyes drift closed, briefly.

‘Rewrite these letters, without a mistake in them. Do so, and I might let you keep your job. Fail, and … well. I don’t think you want to know what will happen if you fail.’

‘Yes, sir,’ he says, and my mind immediately goes back to the last time I heard two words spoken like that. When Tim Lockley was underneath me, body almost completely out of control. Hips jerking upwards, cock fucking into me hard.

Voice breathless, as he told me yes, now.

That’s how Benjamin sounds, I think. Like he’s shaky with lust and ready to come at any moment – though naturally I try to evade the obvious. I turn around and stride right out of his cubicle, the second the thought occurs to me. And if my legs feel like water as I do so, well, what am I supposed to do about it?

I can’t keep reprimanding him like that, I can’t. I went harder than I’d ever intended to, but it hadn’t seemed to put him off. He’d still looked heavy-eyed and weird once I’d done it and even now, as I stand shaking in the sanctity of my office, I can recall the softness of his parted lips. His breathlessness.

The way he’d seemed to tremble minutely the second I left that little suggestion in the air. If you fail, I think, and then can’t ignore the pulse of pleasure that goes through my sex. I’m aroused because I told someone beneath me off. I’m aroused because I abused my power, and probably upset someone who only maybe sort of deserved it.

And for a moment I’m so ashamed of that fact I can’t speak. I can’t do anything. I just stand there, thinking about that incredulous look on his face as I suggested a monkey would do a better job than him.

It’s just unforgivable. Woods might have done more to me and worse, but that doesn’t give me the right to do the same to someone else. I liked what Woods did to me. How do I know for sure that Benjamin does – because he sounded aroused?

That’s crazy. It’s insane. I have to go back and apologise, I have to.

Though by God I wish I hadn’t, the minute I get to that partition around his little non-office and take in the long, lovely slope of his body.

Of course, there are many, many things he could be doing. He could be crying. He’s leaning against the wall of his cubicle, back to the entrance. Shoulders shaking as though with emotion, everything about his gait somehow sloppy and like he’s lost control of himself.

And yet I know without a shadow of a doubt that he isn’t upset. It’s like the strange understanding I have of his facial expressions. I can tell just from looking at his hunched shoulders and the way his arm is twisted around his body …

He’s masturbating. He is absolutely, one-hundred-per-cent masturbating.

I can see his hips rocking forward into what is almost certainly the press of his hand, and when I make myself as quiet as I can, the sounds he’s making become obvious. Little breathless sighs and moans that would probably escape anyone else – they’d just think he was distressed in some way, and get his attention, at which he could turn and straighten himself and pretend to have been blubbering into a hanky.

Or in this case: the piece of paper he’s got crumpled in his hand.

I can see it the second he lets himself get completely out of control – the letter I balled up and threw at him. But he hasn’t just got it crushed in his fist, as he pushes all of those sounds against the back of his hand. No no no.

He’s got the paper pressed against his mouth. He’s got the paper in his mouth practically, as he shudders and bucks into his own grip. And now I can hear it too – the slick slide of a hand over a very slippery cock. All of it just a little muted, because of course he’s doing this under the cover of his trousers. He’s just kind of slipped one hand inside, to work himself all quick and frantic like this.

And though I wouldn’t admit it before, I’ll admit it now: the idea is thrilling. The whole of it – him purposefully making a mess of those letters, the things I said and his reaction, and now this – it’s just horrendously exciting. My cunt clenches around nothing, in some kind of bizarre sympathy for his predicament. My clit swells, ready to be touched or rubbed or … God …, if he would only lick it the way he’d licked that scrap of paper. If I could just make my legs move and go to him right now, he’d do it, I know he would.

But knowing is somehow worse than not. Now it’s real. Now it’s true. Being belittled and told off excites him, in the same way it excited me – more so, in fact. I never masturbated at my desk, thinking of Mr Woods telling me to be better, do more, stop making a mess.

But God, Ben is. He’s really going at it now, as though he’s barely aware of the people who could be in the office at this time. Aidan usually stays late, for example. I always do, and he had to know that it was possible I’d return to apologise.

Though somehow, I don’t think he does. I don’t think he cares about anything but the feeling of his fingers wrapped around his cock and that paper crushed into his mouth, everything about his body language so intent on the task at hand. From where I’m standing I can make out a million arousing little details – like the clench of his ass cheeks beneath those thin trousers, and the shuddering he does every time he hits it just right – but even then I’m not prepared for his orgasm.

It seems to lurch through him, and when it does he makes a sound. More than a sound really – even with the paper in his mouth I can tell he says my name. He just blurts it out, full of a kind of reaching desire that I’ve never heard from another person. Voice shaky and torn, hips bucking towards the circle of his own grip, body shuddering under the stress of such impossible pleasure.

He just gives himself over to it, and I realise something in that moment. I realise it amongst the ruins of my own arousal, clit still pulsing slow and steady. Wetness now making its way down my inner thigh, the whole of my lower body so thick and heavy with sensation.

Even with Woods, I was never like that. I never gave my all the way he is doing.

I’m not sure if I know how.

Chapter Four

He knocks this time. And after I’ve taken a deep breath and told him to come in, I notice something different about him. Something I probably shouldn’t notice, as a person who’s definitely not obsessed.

I’m not. I’m not.

In fact, I almost let him leave the second he’s put the letters on my desk – tentatively, but in that same almost clumsy way he has. Eyes on me, as he just kind of nudges them over the wood.

But then he turns to go and that different thing impresses itself on me immediately. His shirt is tucked in at the back. He’s tucked it in, and pulled the ridiculous stripy cardigan he has on over it right down, so that it covers the waistband of his trousers.

I suppose it’s the small details that mean the most.

‘Benjamin,’ I say, though I’ve no idea what’s going to follow it. I just want him to stop for a second, and be easy in my presence. Hell, I want to be easy in his.

Though that seems unlikely to happen when he turns back to me and I have to take in a million things about him. His face, those eyes, how broad his shoulders are. How big his hands look, even though he’s kind of clasping them one over the other. It looks for all the world like he wants to crack his knuckles, desperately, but is resisting.

And I guess I’m resisting too, because Lord the sight is arresting. I don’t know what’s arresting about it. The length of his fingers? The way they kind of jab out at me like that, all awkward and not like fingers at all?

I don’t know. I don’t know what to say next. What did Woods do, after our first encounter? After he first knew I was raring to go? Because it’s inescapable now – I know Ben is. There’s not a small series of clues, like the flush I got whenever I was around Woods, or how eager I was to do his every bidding.

He masturbated while stuffing a remnant of my reprimand into his mouth. A blind buffoon would know what that meant.

‘Yes?’ he asks, so full of hope it’s unbearable.

‘Thank you,’ I try, but I know before I’ve said it that it’s wrong. It leaves an opening, and he takes it effortlessly.

‘Oh, no problem. I think you’ll find them more to your liking this time.’

Why? Is his cock in there somewhere?

‘I’m sure I will.’

I turn away then, and look at my computer screen. Of course there’s nothing on it – but he can’t see that. Hopefully I look like I’m all business, and not poised on the edge of insanity.

‘Well, if there’s anything else I can do for you, Ms Harding …’ he says, and so I can’t be blamed. It’s the fault of that little ellipsis he leaves on the end of his sentence, that little trail off into nothing.

Anyone would want to fill that nothing up, immediately. Anyone.

But still I wait, until he’s backing towards the door. Until he’s waving at me, casually, in lieu of a goodbye he doesn’t know how to give. See you later sounds too informal, I suppose. Until next time is almost a threat.

Like the thing I then give him.

‘You could possibly not masturbate in your cubicle.’

I see him freeze in position without turning my head, those soft-focus eyes of his bright and wide, on the periphery of my vision. Everything about him clearly stunned, even without the benefit of the sound he then produces.

It’s almost a croak, I think, and it makes me snap my gaze to him. I want to see, I realise. I want to see how open and soft his mouth looks, how wide his eyes are, how rigid his body has gone. And once I’ve taken in all of these things undercover of a steely stare, my sex clenches, just once.

‘That is what you did, isn’t it?’ I ask, though of course we both know I’m not really asking. Or at least, I know. Because after a second, he answers.

‘I have literally no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘Don’t lie.’

‘I’m not – I –’

‘I would certainly advise that you not continue lying.’

He spreads his hands out, as though they’re going to find the correct answers for him.

‘Just let me explain –’

‘Stop talking.’

‘Please, I –’

‘Just stop talking. Stop talking.’

He’s breathing very hard, I notice – but he does what I’ve told him to. He even compresses his mouth into that oddly mean line, as though he needs a little extra barrier to hold his frantic words in. And when I just keep right on eyeing him, he actually wipes his clearly sweaty hands on the front of his trousers.

I’ll confess: the gesture tweaks something inside me that I don’t want it to tweak.

‘Now. Answer honestly. Did you masturbate in your cubicle, Benjamin?’

He doesn’t hesitate this time, despite the perspiring and the wide-eyed terror.

‘It’s … a possibility.’

‘Just a possibility?’

‘Well, yeah. OK. I kind of did it.’

He laughs nervously, and that same thing inside me twangs. It makes me wonder if this would be easier if he weren’t so adorable … or would it be harder? If he was sure of himself, confident – a real Aidan Harcroft – would I be able to do this?

And more to the point: does he know that I keep asking myself that question?

‘And what might it be?’

Ohhh, this time he hesitates. I see his tongue touch the roof of his mouth, and those hands toy with the bottom of his cardigan. Of course I notice then that the thing isn’t buttoned there – in truth, I’m not sure if it really fits him, because it seems to splay out over his hips like a half-forgotten striptease – but that’s all right.

What fun would it be if he improved all at once, in a single shot?

‘Come on,’ he laughs. ‘You know what it is. You just said it to me half a second ago.’

God, he makes it so easy. I don’t have to try for the irritated look that comes to my face.

‘Remind me,’ I say, while his eyes search my room for inspiration. He looks cornered, I think, and for a second the idea makes me hesitate. It makes me want to back out, quickly – give him an exit sign, if he so sorely wants one.

But then he says: ‘What exactly do you want me to do?’ And he puts far too much emphasis on all the wrong things. His want is hoarse and husky, his question mark like a hook curling around my waist. I’m tugged into this before I’m sure I want to be, and that’s prior to his gaze jerking its way back to my face.

His eyelids are heavy, now, I notice. His mouth looks … tender. Though really I’m only using the word ‘tender’ there because my mind wants me to say like the spread split of a woman’s sex instead.

‘Say the words,’ I tell him, softly, so softly. And though he tells me: ‘I can’t,’ I can hear something else below the refusal. Something that’s not quite as unsure as he claims he is. For example, I’m not certain an unsure person would go from toying with the edge of their cardigan to kind of … sliding his hand underneath it. You know … just to maybe rub over his own belly through his shirt, with the softly stroking tips of his fingers. … ‘If you can do it in your cubicle, you can say it,’ I say, but now my voice is hoarse. And I’ve crossed my legs beneath my desk, though not because I want to. Because I have to. It’s the same thing as his pressed-together lips.

I need something to keep the feelings in.

‘I was masturbating,’ he replies, and then unfortunately said feelings just gush their way out. Not even the leg-crossing can stop them. In fact, I think the leg-crossing makes it worse. A low pulse has started up right at the heart of my sex, and it gets stronger the longer I let this go on.

‘I see. And why exactly were you doing a filthy thing like that in such plain view?’

Filthy thing, I think, and that pulse becomes a throb. I can feel the exact shape of my clit, without so much as a finger on myself.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think you do know.’

He swallows thickly. Tosses that thick hank of glossy hair out of his eyes even though it’s too buoyant to ever actually get close, then has to stroke through it nervously when it won’t stay exactly where he wants it to. The gesture is incredibly boyish and should be incredibly annoying, I know.

But somehow it’s something else instead. It’s not childish or silly. It’s just him, it’s the way he is. He can’t help being this open and ready and kind of like he wants his face fucking.

‘I guess …’ he starts, and I can hardly believe I actually hold my breath, waiting. But by God, I do. Which of course makes it a hideous disappointment when he just finishes with: ‘I guess I just did it because I wanted to.’

In fact, it’s so much of a disappointment that I actually almost do turn back to my work for real. I finger some of the contracts waiting for approval on my desk. I think about calling Anderson in here, to go over some of his slightly skewed projections.

There’s a full day ahead of me, and I don’t have to be like this.

Until he rolls his eyes at himself.

After which, I don’t know how I need to be. I mean, I actually see him do it. I know that’s what it is. All of his expressions are so big he could star in a silent movie about himself: Benjamin Tate Can’t Control His Cock.

But somehow, the way he looks doesn’t quite compute in the manner it should. Instead, it just makes me realise something: I’ve never met a man as handsome as him who behaves the way he does. Who wears all of his expressions on his sleeve and puts a hand up his own cardigan and doesn’t seem aware that he’s utterly, utterly lovely.

Because he is. I don’t see how I could reasonably deny or push that fact away now. He hides it well beneath the goofiness and the too-big grins, but the lust haze he’s descended into makes it almost unbearably clear. His lower lip almost sulks all on its own. His eyes are like an early-morning mist over something heated and heavy.

God. God. What’s happening to me?

‘I mean … it’s more than wanting to.’ He pauses, considering. ‘It’s more like … I need to. Man, I always need to soooo badly.’

I know what’s happening to me. He says all the things I most want to hear in a tone like melting butter, and then I turn into a sexual psychopath. Observe:

‘So you masturbate often?’

I mean, why am I asking him this? Why? And why is it that the shakier I get, the more confident he becomes? When he answers his voice seems almost … dry. Just hinting at a bank of sardonicism under the clean-cut exterior.

‘Not in public places, no.’

‘But generally speaking.’

He straightens.

‘Yes,’ he tells me, and I can’t help it then. I have to hear the rest.

‘How often would you say you need to do it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re going to wear those words out, Benjamin.’

He takes a breath, but it’s different to the ones he needed earlier. More restless, I think, as though he’s just as frustrated as I am at his sudden inability to express himself properly. I mean, usually he’s almost crazy with words – he’s a goddamn word volcano. I’ve seen him terrify Kelly with his need to share a hundred details about his childhood in Hawaii, and all at a thousand words a minute.

But now he’s stuttery. He doubles back on himself, as though he’s on trial and has to get everything just right.

‘Sorry. Sorry. OK – I guess maybe once or twice a day.’

And when he does finally get words out, they’re not the correct ones.

‘You know it’s very easy to tell when you’re lying. You get this little awkward crinkle above your nose,’ I say, though I’ve no idea that I’d figured out such a thing until the words emerge. It’s like what Woods used to say about the subconscious clues, I suppose – that people do things without knowing it.

I can’t be sure, however, if this applies to him, or to me.

‘I do?’

‘Yes. And you look sort of … stunned by your own capacity for falsehoods.’

He squirms for that one. But shamefully, this only seems to create further problems between my legs. When I shift, I can feel the slickness coating my slit. Can feel it easing over things both delightful and torturous.

‘OK. OK,’ he says, and then he does something that makes me want to do more than cross my legs. It makes me want to shove my skirt up and fuck myself right there in front of him, though I’ve no idea why.

He just counts on his fingers. That’s all. And if he’s counting how many times he masturbated yesterday on said fingers, well … what does that matter? How is that an arousing thing to witness?

‘I’d say I maybe do it … three times a day.’ He checks his fingers and nods, then seems to change his mind when he finally looks up at me. Like he knows. Like he can feel me unravelling the lie before I’ve said a word. ‘Sometimes more, depending on what’s happened.’

I can’t describe the heady rush that goes through me, to know that my expression alone forced him to make that correction. All I understand clearly is that it puts a quiver in my voice, when I finally get words out.

‘And what has to happen to make you so desperate to come?’

Not that it matters. He has his own quiver to deal with, and oh Lord it’s big. It seems to affect his entire body, from sudden slump of his shoulders to the slow drift of his eyelids over those foggy eyes.

It’s like all his self-control slides right out of him. And I know it does for sure, when he quite abruptly pants out: ‘Oh, that sounds so dirty when you say that word. I think I felt it go right through me.’

But the words aren’t the worst part about it. No – the worst part is when he just kind of rubs his hand all over his chest and then up to his neck, after he’s spoken. And though I try to deny it, what I’m left thinking of is a stripper, doing her best to be as blatant and sexual as she can.

You know. To lure people in.

‘Say it again,’ he says, and then I have to cut him off. Have to. Of course I do it with words that have absolutely nothing to do with how I feel, but in truth I’m just glad I manage to speak at all.

‘I think you have the wrong idea, Benjamin,’ I say, while molten lava makes its way down my body to settle in the pit of my stomach. Strange, really, that my voice comes out quite steely. ‘You don’t tell me what to do, I tell you. Of course, you can decide not to do it. But here’s the thing: I rather think you won’t.’

His eyes flash in a way I can’t quite reach with the outer edges of my imagination.

‘You’re right,’ he tells me, all low and steady. ‘I won’t.’

I don’t know what happens inside my body after that. If I tried to stand, I’m fairly certain I wouldn’t make it. My sex is so swollen, so full of that sweet ache, that the idea of moving so much just makes me want to pass out at my desk.

And he’s definitely starting to know it now. He takes a step forward without my say-so, that wicked tongue of his just ever so slightly flickering out to wet his bottom lip. Gaze now as bright as it is heavy, eager and mischievous in a way I don’t want to quite face.

So instead, I say the first put him off kind of thing I can think of.

‘So if, for example, I told you to lick my arsehole – you would?’

It’s like I’m suddenly playing chicken, I think, and this is my first daring play. The lewdest thing I can think of on such short notice, and one that’s bound to put a man off. Bound to.

‘Do you want me to do that? I could, if you wanted me to.’

Or you know. Maybe it only puts men who aren’t Benjamin Tate off. Because Lord, I swear, I’ve never heard anyone sound so eager to do anything. I’ve told children they can have ice cream, and not had them respond with such breathless anticipation.

He starts unbuttoning that grotesque cardigan, as though a prerequisite for an ass-licking is nakedness from both parties – though naturally I stop him. I mean, I can’t actually have him lick between the cheeks of my arse, in my open office in the middle of the day. That would be ridiculous.

Even if he doesn’t seem to think so in the slightest.

‘I mean, I’ve thought about doing it,’ he says, before I’ve got past the hand I’ve held up to halt him in his immense, ridiculous tracks.

And then said hand is the thing that feels ridiculous, in all honesty. He’s actually thinking about ass-licking while I’m the goddamn lollipop lady stood in the middle of our road.

‘I see,’ I say, because it’s just noncommittal enough. It’s just enough without going all the way into yes, go ahead, do whatever the fuck you like. Instead it hovers on the edges of explain yourself to me, as cool and detached as my face nearly feels.

‘Though obviously, you know. Not in a lot of detail.’

‘You haven’t thought about licking my ass in a lot of detail? Well, how comforting.’

‘No – I mean … I mean I try not to think about you that way. Most of the time.’

‘And the rest of the time you’re spreading my arse cheeks and going to town, in your head?’

One of his hands pauses, mid-gesture. Finger half-uncurled from the loose fist he’s made, as though he was just about to make an absolutely fascinating point, and now has no idea what it was. Even his mouth seems caught in this feedback loop, that soft shape suddenly tense around words he’s now failing to get out.

‘You need to answer me, Benjamin – and quickly. I really don’t have a lot of time to watch you standing in front of me unable to speak.’

He wets his lips. Closes his eyes, briefly, before continuing.

‘Pretty much.’

‘Describe it to me, then.’

‘Wait – what? What do you want me –’

‘Describe what you do to me, in all of these fevered imaginings,’ I say, though I don’t do it because I really want to. I do it because I can’t not.

And apparently, he feels exactly the same. It’s like he wants to stop, really he does. He wants to have control over himself, and maybe laugh all of this off. But instead he just takes a big breath, and goes right ahead with it all.

‘Sometimes … sometimes you tell me to do it. Like this – only fiercer. But other times I’m in the hallway or your office and I drop something, the way I always do when you pass by. And while I’m down there, on my knees, I just kind of … get my face between your legs.’

He doesn’t look away as he tells me this, which I think is to his credit. After all, I have to look away the second he’s said it. I simply can’t keep staring at him, with all of these newly framed thoughts about his clumsiness rattling around inside my head.

He doesn’t drop everything because he’s just like that. He drops everything because of me. I mean, that’s what he’s saying, right? And if I ask, will that startling and too foggy fact become clearer? Will I be able to look at it head on?

‘So you drop the papers on purpose?’

He shakes his head, wrinkles his brow. Glances sideways, as though he’s trying to map out his fantasy exactly for me but is struggling to do so.

‘No, no. I just do it because I can’t help myself. And then I can’t help pushing my face between your legs.’

‘And after that …?’

‘After that I lick you until you let me do it. Until you’re all wet there and turned on, you know, and I guess sometimes other stuff happens – like you rub your clit while I lick between your ass cheeks. Or maybe the other way around.’

I’m loath to interrupt him, because I can see he’s getting to that place. The one where he’ll say just about anything and doesn’t really seem sensible of it – though of course this is somewhat more revealing than ‘and one time a shark almost ate me while I was surfing’.

And if he doesn’t seem to see the difference, well. That’s fine. He can carry on not seeing the difference all the way into the most arousing tale I’ve ever heard anybody tell.

‘The other way around?’ I ask, and sure enough, he just slides on into the rest of it.

‘With me licking your clit and you …’ he says, and for a second I’m sure he’s just going to leave that last part trailing. I mean, it’s obvious what he’s suggesting. He’s already labelled the two body parts, and it’s not as though we’re talking about hands and feet here. He doesn’t need to go into detail.

Even if he just takes a second to wind himself up to it – one hand actually twirling in front of him, like a goad to his confidence – and then absolutely says the real live words.

‘… fingering your ass. Or maybe just rubbing over it, I don’t know. I guess I just understand that you’re doing something there, while I lick your clit and stroke your pussy.’

‘And that’s all you do?’ I ask, as though none of that’s enough on its own. He has fantasies about eating my cunt in office hallways, for God’s sake. How did I ever think I would shame him by bringing up a little light masturbation? ‘You just stroke me?’

He lets out a little flustered breath.

‘Well, no. Obviously not.’

‘Do I actually have to prompt you, Benjamin?’

He spreads his hands again, but this time it’s like he’s trying to hit a reset button. It’s like he’s trying to rewind everything and go back and be better.

‘No, no – I … I fuck you. With my fingers.’

‘I see.’

‘And … uh … sometimes you’re so wet, and so turned on, that I don’t just use one or two. I get three of my fingers into your pussy, and when I do you twist your hands in my hair. You make me do it harder, faster, until I can just about feel you coming.’

I’d call his fantasy very unrealistic, if I didn’t suspect that he could feel me coming from all the way over there, if he so chose. In fact, I think he’s going to do just that really soon. The pulse in my clit feels immense, all-consuming, and whenever I let my eyes wander down over his solid body, said pulse gets worse.

He’s hard, and very obviously so. It looks like a great thick fist beneath the material of those crappy trousers, so swollen that I can just about make out things I probably shouldn’t be able to. Like the fact that he isn’t circumcised, despite being as American as an over-sweet slice of apple pie.

‘I see. And if I said to you that your babbling mouth really needs a ball gag … would you wear one around the office for me?’ I ask, because really I’m going to need a lot more than a bit of mild ass-licking to jolt him. Or at least, I think so until he actually replies.

And then I’m just not sure where his boundaries lie at all.

‘Oh my God. You wouldn’t really ask me to do that, would you?’

‘Whether I would or not is hardly the question. Read it back to me, Benjamin – what was I asking, exactly?’

He strains, briefly, to remember – then seems almost overjoyed when it finally occurs to him. He snaps his fingers at me, which only suggests how much trouble I’m in. Even so silly a gesture gets me going.

‘You asked whether I’d do it.’

‘And would you?’

His eyes drift closed again, but that’s not what I notice. It’s his hand I see, as it slides down over the jutting shape in the front of his trousers. And I don’t mind admitting the sight jolts me, like a little electric shock applied to the base of my spine.

He’s touching himself. He’s touching his obviously hard cock right in front of me, without a hint of shame or restraint. In truth, I’m not sure if he knows what shame or restraint are. His prick is stiff, and he wants to touch it.

So he just does.

‘Yes,’ he says, almost too faint for me to hear. It’s like he’s lost inside himself, suddenly – but that’s fine. I’m more than willing to drag him back out again.

‘And just me looking at you a certain way makes you this … sluttish?’

He squeezes himself through his trousers on that last word, in a way that exposes most of the shape to my greedy gaze. And it is greedy by this point. My mouth practically floods with saliva to see that solid, lengthy outline through his crappy trousers.

‘Is that how I seem?’ he asks, breathless and just ever so slightly incredulous. I don’t know why the latter’s there, however. He’s playing with himself in my office, for God’s sake. He’s got a hand under his shirt now, and I can actually see the pale, flat expanse of his belly.

He’s the epitome of a slut, and I tell him so.

‘I don’t see how you could fail to realise,’ I say, but here’s the thing – he doesn’t then get a hold of himself. He doesn’t stop groping his cock or the skin underneath his shirt.

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