Beyond Heaving Bosoms

by Sarah Wendell

  In the office, he closes the door. “Sit,” he says, voice curt. His black scowl and the way he moves with leashed fury back to his desk make you think of a very large, very angry panther, and your heart speeds up with fear and…something else. Something you can’t quite put your finger on. When he gets back to his desk, he doesn’t take a seat; instead, he leans his hip against the corner of his desk and looks at you, making you squirm just a little in your chair.

  “The office isn’t a dating service,” he finally growls out. “I expect impeccable behavior from all my employees, but especially from my personal assistant. Your behavior reflects directly on me, and I’d appreciate it if you’d tell your swarm of Lotharios to bother you after work hours. This is a professional setting, and I will not tolerate unprofessional behavior from anybody under my supervision. Do you understand me?”

  Do you:

  Quit, because nobody needs this shit? • Turn to Option 4 (below).

  Feel indignant and attempt to defend yourself? • Turn to Option 5.

  Option 4

  This is the last straw. You look your boss calmly in the eye and say “Consider my resignation tendered, sir.” As you pack up your desk, you feel both relief and terror. You double-majored in economics and math at the University of Chicago, and it’s kind of ridiculous that you’re stuck in a dead-end job as this short-fused schmuck’s personal assistant. The pay is good, and God knows he’s a hot piece of ass (which, to be honest, is part of the reason you’ve put up with so much), but the shouting and grabbing are really starting to get out of hand. Speaking of which: you realize you owe it to yourself to file sexual-harassment charges. Even if you don’t win, at least there will be something on record for the next poor sap who gets your job. Suck it, Trebek, you think.

  You go out for drinks afterward with Travis, your office friend, to celebrate getting out of the company. You’ve always assumed he was gay because he’s slim, wears fitted shirts in jewel tones, and talks with his hands. The two of you proceed to get thoroughly smashed, and you find out that Travis actually really, really, really likes girls. He has, in fact, harbored an intense tendre for you for the last couple of years. Later, he demonstrates this to you—and it turns out he can do a whole lot more with his hands than talk with them. The two of you fall madly in love, and with the settlement from the harassment suit, you decide to start a consulting business. It becomes a thriving concern, and you live Happily Ever After with Travis in a beautiful little condo in the heart of the city.

  Option 5

  You toss your head in defiance. How dare he? You and Travis have a perfectly innocent friendship! “I don’t understand why you’re so angry!” you finally shoot back at him during a pause in his tirade. “Travis is a good friend, and he’s also—” But before you can say the word “gay,” your boss interrupts you by grabbing your arms in a brutal grip and dragging you out of your chair.

  “You little fool!” he grinds out between clenched teeth. “If you are so desperate for attention, I suppose you should have some, then.” He claims your lips in a punishing kiss, his mouth moving over yours with ruthless skill.

  Do you:

  Struggle briefly, escape from his grasp and then quit, because really, nobody needs this shit? Turn to Option 4.

  Struggle briefly, and then melt into the wonder of his firm lips caressing yours? Turn to Option 6 (below).

  Option 6

  You struggle briefly in his grasp, hating him with every fiber of your being. But just as you gasp in pain, his lips magically gentle and start caressing yours with infinite skill, and his tongue traces the seam of your lips. You gasp in surprised pleasure.

  As the kiss continues and becomes even more passionate, filling your innocent body with wild urges you barely understand, you are dimly aware of the door opening behind you, but you are so lost in the wonder of his kiss that the significance doesn’t register until you hear the voice of his mistress, her clipped French accent rending your sensual fog asunder: “Sorry to interrupt such a tender tryst. I’ll come back when you’re done with your whore, Demetrios. You know where to find me.”

  Your boss releases your lips, but does not let you go; instead, he cradles you protectively against his chest. “It’s over, Amandine,” he said. “I told you this morning I’m in love with someone else.”

  Her gray eyes sweep over him with contempt. “You are stupid, indeed, if you think she can satisfy a man like you, mon chèr.” She shrugs her shoulders and turns to go. As she leaves the office, she turns around and says, her voice dripping with disdain, “You will want me back soon enough, and I will take great pleasure in denying you.”

  The slam of the door echoes off the walls.

  Your heart sinks within as you begin to unravel all the implications of what she has just said. He’s in love with somebody. So intensely that he’s quite literally shown his mistress the door. Ordinary creature that you are, what chance do you have at winning his heart?

  For you have now realized that you do want to win his heart, for he has won yours. How could you have been so blind for all this time? The anger, the frustration, the intense jealousy you felt toward his mistress—all were indicators of your love. The realization burns through the core of your soul, and you burst into tears.

  Your boss seems startled and holds you close as you sob against him. As your tears show no sign of abating, he whispers in an aching voice, “What is the matter, dear heart?”

  “You…you shouldn’t hold me like this!”

  “Why ever not?” he asks, a note of amusement creeping into his voice.

  It’s unbearable! Your heart is breaking, and the brute is laughing at you. “You’re in love with another woman!” you cry out, and beat him in the chest with a futile fist. “I shouldn’t be here in your arms. She should be.”

  A look of puzzlement crosses his harsh, dark features, and then it suddenly clears. “Oh,” he says, voice suddenly husky. “But she already is.” And he bends down to kiss you again.

  Even as you drown in the sensation his lips evoke in you, your mind reels in confusion. It almost sounds as if he’s saying…but it cannot be! When he at last releases your lips, you gaze at him with disbelief. “I don’t understand,” you say faintly. “You can’t possibly be saying what I think you’re saying.”

  “Oh, but I am,” he assures you.

  “But your…that is, Amandine was so beautiful….”

  Your boss makes a dismissive sound. “She was cold, cold to the core. I need somebody to warm me up; that was when I realized the person I want most has been under my nose the whole time. Why do you think I call you in to work early all the time? When I saw you talking to Travis, I was so afraid I had waited too long that I lost control. And you, my darling, are infinitely more beautiful than she is.”

  “Really?” You look up at him in doubt, but the adoration in his eyes is clear enough even for you to see.

  “Yes, really,” he says, and his lips descend to claim yours once again, you surrender your heart fully into his keeping, for you have become…The Boss’s Virgin Boardroom Mistress.

  Option 7

  Hearing your boss’s voice over the phone gives you chills that you attempt to suppress. For weeks, you’ve dreamed about him almost nightly. In your dreams, his face is twisted with hate and glee, his hands darkly wet; when he’s done, he dumps the children’s bodies near a landfill outside the city.

  What fills you most with foreboding is the fact that you have a history of having Dreams That Come True, but this time, it’s patently obvious your dreams are ridiculous. There’s no way you can be working for a murderer; sure, your boss is fat, hunchbacked, obnoxious, and smells like sweaty feet, and sure, you’ve seen him kick at puppies when he thinks nobody is watching, but he’s not a killer. You’ve been working on a big feature piece about a recent rash of child disappearances, and looking at all those pictures and talking to all the grieving parents and teachers must be affecting you more than you think.

  You
arrive at the office and discover everybody in an uproar. Early this morning, the body of one of the children has been found by the big landfill just outside the city; no other details are available, and everybody is scrambling to find more information. You ignore the uneasy lurch of your stomach and decide to call Detective Nick Hawking, a renegade with a reputation for getting the job done by any means necessary, and infamous for the massive size of his…guns.

  “What the hell do you want?” Hawking drawls into the phone. His gravelly voice is a slap to your face. “The shit has hit the fan, and I have better things to do than talk.”

  You gulp down the fury you feel; Hawking is difficult to work with, but the history between the two of you can make it just about impossible. Being the hotshot homicide detective’s journalist ex-girlfriend can be a real bitch.

  “I just heard that you found the body of the Northrup child by the McFadden landfill,” you say, keeping the tone of your voice even, “and I wanted to see if you had anything you wanted to say, strictly off the record, before the press conference begins.”

  There’s a silence over the phone, and when he speaks, his trademark insolence is gone; his voice is now deadly serious. “We haven’t released the identity of the body. We had a positive identification only a couple of minutes ago. Right now, maybe five people know just who we’ve found, and I know for damn sure nobody has talked. Tell me: how did you know?”

  What do you say in response?

  Tell Hawking the truth: that you had a dream about the boy the night before. Turn to Option 8 (below).

  In your panic, experience a blackout. Turn to Option 9 (below).

  Option 8

  “Hawk, this is going to sound crazy, but—”

  “Oh, try me,” he says, the sardonic edge in his voice hard enough to cut glass.

  “I…I had a dream last night. About the body.”

  You pause. Dead silence.

  You forge on, your stomach a tight ball of dread. “I’ve been having dreams about the children for weeks. I’ve had these crazy kinds of dreams all my life; I see things, and there’s no way for me to know if they’re true, but they always turn out to be real. I know it sounds crazy, but I think…” You pause and stand up on tiptoe to peer over your cubicle. “I think I even know who the killer is.”

  More silence; when he finally speaks, his voice is clipped, businesslike. “I need to talk to you right now. In person. Don’t you fucking dare move. I’ll be right over.”

  What happens next?

  You attempt to talk some more with Hawking; for some reason, you really, really don’t want to see him at the moment. Turn to Option 9 (below).

  Hawking hangs up and you put the phone back in the cradle, feeling anxious about the daunting task of convincing him that you’re speaking the truth. Turn to Option 10.

  Option 9

  As you attempt to talk to Hawking in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a completely crazy person, you strangely find yourself growing dizzier and dizzier, and the last thing you see before things go black is the sight of the floor rushing up to meet you.

  When you wake up, your whole body is screaming with pain and a huge weight presses against your back. Your head, in particular, is pounding, as if your brain were a demon and your skull a portal to hell. You attempt to lift your hand to touch it, to check to see if it’s bleeding, but you find that you can’t. In fact, you can’t move at all; your hands appear to be tied or cuffed behind your back. Dark red smears mar the floor, and you have a horrible suspicion that it’s blood.

  The question is: Whose blood is it?

  “What…what happened?” you manage to croak out.

  You feel somebody lean down even harder against you, and you groan in pain. Hawking’s voice growls into your ear, and you wince reflexively. “So you’re awake. I always knew you were a crazy bitch back when I dated you, but I guess I didn’t know exactly how crazy. I should’ve killed you when I had a chance, you sick fuck, but I think I’ll enjoy seeing you fry for the murders of those children even more.”

  “What are you talking about?” you ask, a heavy ball of dread forming in your chest.

  “You really are nuts, aren’t you?” he says. “Maybe I hit you harder in the head than I thought. Don’t pretend you didn’t confess to the kidnappings and murders just now. Don’t pretend you didn’t try to run, and don’t pretend you don’t remember killing your boss when he tried to stop you.”

  As his words wash over you, you suddenly realize that the dreams of the murdered children weren’t really dreams after all. Your reality fractures and re-forms, and you are suddenly aware that the killer of the children, the repulsive man who kicks at puppies when he thinks nobody is watching, the brute who drives you too hard when you have a deadline to meet, is actually you.

  As it dawns upon you that your life is the embodiment of one of the oldest cop-out surprise endings, Hawking drags you up and starts walking you to the door. You hear somebody screaming, even as you once again feel the slow descent into numbing blackness. This time, instead of fighting it, you embrace it and its blissful oblivion.

  Option 10

  You attempt to get some work done while waiting for Hawking to turn up, but your concentration is hopelessly shot. Rumors swarm the air like flies flocking around a week-old corpse. Every time you catch sight of your boss, you cower a little. Is it your imagination, or is he giving you an especially evil look? Can he possibly guess that you know his secret? You lean your elbows on your desk and bury your head in your hands, a knot of stress forming in your stomach and another right between your eyes.

  “Hard at work, I see,” a voice rasps over your head. Your head snaps up. Hawking is leaning against one of the partition walls of your cubicle, muscular legs sheathed in sinfully tight denim. Your eye is immediate drawn to his hard, massive, gleaming…gun, just barely peeking out from the shoulder harness under his jacket. The thing looked like it could stop a speeding bus cold in its tracks. Small Asian nations probably paid him good money not to point that thing in their direction.

  “Hawk,” you say, trying to keep your voice cool. It’s difficult, though. Hawking, more than any other man you’ve met, makes it impossible for you to keep calm. It’s one of the reasons why you broke up—the volatile cycles became too much for you to take. “Let’s go into one of the conference rooms.”

  “Yes, let’s,” he says, voice dark and sardonic—as dark and sardonic as his eyes. You’re practically sweating under that hot, unforgiving gaze.

  Do you:

  Gaze into his dark eyes and start feeling dizzy? Turn to Option 9.

  Proceed to the conference room? Turn to Option 11.

  Option 11

  You open the door to the conference room and flick on the light. Hawking closes the door behind him, and you perch on the edge of the table nervously and lick your lips. His eyes flicker at the motion and his expression tightens.

  You draw a deep breath. Explaining this isn’t going to be easy. Hawking is surprisingly calm, though. He doesn’t interrupt you as you tell him about your dreams, giving him details about the dreams of the missing children, even the ones whose bodies haven’t been found yet. Your stomach churns at the recall.

  When you’re done talking, the silence is heavy, Hawking’s face impassive. Finally, he asks, voice hard: “Do you expect me to believe this?”

  “No, not really,” you say. “Nobody has before, so why should you?”

  He explodes out of his chair, and you flinch. His face hardens, and he grabs your arms in a punishing grip. You bite back a cry of pain.

  “This kind woo-woo bullshit is what killed my mother,” he spits out, “And I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a charlatan like you get away with it.”

  He lets go of you in disgust and starts pacing. “Slime like you don’t understand, do you? You sell us all a line we want to believe in, build trust, rake in the cash, and then run. And when a woman has breast cancer and believes some snake oil salesman when he cl
aims putting a special kind of magnet next to the tumor will make it go away, well, hey, you have just the right kind of magnet, don’t you? For a price, of course. And when the woman has so much faith in the magnet that she refuses chemotherapy and dies, well, then, that’s just too bad, isn’t it? You didn’t guarantee a cure, you just said it might help.”

  He stops his tirade and turns to you, eyes alight with loathing. “You people make me sick.”

  You feel shaken. The pain in his voice is real, and you figure there’s no way for him to believe you now. “I’m sorry,” you whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

  He stalks his way to you. “You better be,” he snarls. “Now tell me the truth before I stop treating you with kid gloves. How did you know about the kids?”

  As you seethe with misery, an idea strikes you. It might just be crazy enough to work. “I know how to make you believe me.”

  He snorts. “How?”

  “I’ve had dreams every night about the missing kids,” you say. “Why don’t you come over tonight and watch over me? When I wake up, I’ll tell you what I’ve dreamed, and you can check the details. You can do this for as many nights as you want.”

  He stares at you, and a smirk eventually twists his lips. “Is this your way of inviting me over for a bit of fuck-the-ex-boyfriend, kitten? Because really, all you had to do was ask.” He runs his eyes over you appraisingly.

  You turn beet red, even as your body heats up in response. “Look,” you say, “I have no way of proving I’m not some kind of psycho killer, except for this. I’ll still be proven right if you put me in jail and continue to find new bodies even with me locked up. This way, I don’t have to be put behind bars.”

  He glares at you, but he doesn’t argue.

  “Come on,” you say, desperate. “Hawk, you know me. I’m not a liar. We didn’t work out, but it wasn’t because I was less than honest with you.”

  He still doesn’t say anything. Instead, he strides to you and grabs your arms again, the pressure painful on the bruises he left there last time. You wince, but you’re soon past noticing because he’s kissing you with brutal expertise. You gasp with indignation and slap a palm to his chest in an attempt to push him off, but you’re reminded of how very good he is at this. He is rough and forceful at first, but he gentles when you stop struggling; his tongue darts into your mouth and flirts with yours, then runs lightly over your lips. You moan a little in pleasure.