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
