by Mia Madison
“You think they’re hooking up?” I ask and yank my arm out of Pixie’s grasp. “Slow down, I’m wearing heels.”
“Oh, sorry. And I shouldn’t really be talking about Tania’s private life.”
“No of course not. I don’t care anyways.”
“So you have to put this on,” she holds up the mask she picked up off my desk.
“I’ll take care of it,” I snatch it out of her hand and pull open the door to the projection room, before she has the chance to insist. The space is decked out with velvet recliners like an old time movie house. I stand at the back, looking for an empty seat. The place is packed and there’s only one available, a double pair at the back. I scour across the backs of heads, looking for Milo. I don’t want to be anywhere near him for some reason. But I can’t tell who’s who, aside from Van Millison who’s six feet eight and has curly bright orange hair, unmissable even in the darkness.
“This way,” the annoying high-pitched voice beside me says. Pixie’s popped up again, clutching a sleeve of popcorn and wielding a flashlight that she points at the carpet to guide me to the only available seat. I could have easily found it myself. I plonk down on the aisle side of the chair, leaving a spare seat between me and Brad Fanks on the other side. He doesn’t even react to my arrival, too engrossed in the cheesy Christmas movie on the widescreen. I think it’s Scrooged. But I can’t be sure. Comedies aren’t really my thing, not Christmas ones at least.
“Hot dog?”
My heart leaps and I grab at my chest as a bulky figure slips into the seat beside me. I look down at the hand holding a sausage slathered in mustard and ketchup in front of me. A hand I’d recognize anywhere. A hand that infiltrates my dreams when I’m least aware, wondering how it would be to feel both on me. Those broad palms sliding down my shoulders over my chest, cupping around my rear. Oh god.
“Where did you come from?” I snap, my hands still clutching at my cleavage, as though trying to push back on my pounding heart.
“My office,” Milo Locksley says, without a trace of irony.
He nudges the dog at me, urging me to take it. I can’t do it. There’s no way to wrap my fingers around it without them brushing against his. I’m mesmerized by them, the hard round tips, both smooth and rough at the same time. Without my permission, my mind conjures images of those fingers pushing inside me.
“Are you enjoying the movie?” Milo asks, “Bill Murray, such a genius.”
He flattens out his palm to shelve the hot dog, as though he read my thoughts, not letting his eyes move from the screen. Then he leaves his hand sitting right in front of me, his elbow resting on the armrest between us, his upper body curving in toward me. He could leave it there all day. I have no choice but to take his offering. I carefully lift it at each end, using all my fingers and thumbs like tongs, careful not to graze a single pore of my boss’s thick skin.
“It’s an oldie but a good one don’t you think?” he says, waving his now empty hand at nothing in particular.
“Cheesy,” I hiss.
My comment is drowned out by a roar let out in unison from all the guys in the packed cinema. As one they lift their glasses and throw back their heads, downing a shot of who knows what.
“Dang we missed it,” Milo grins. He waves his hand more urgently and another pixie, this one Mexican, appears in the aisle beside us.
“Sorry, sir,” she whimpers as she fills two shot glasses from her tequila dispenser.
“It’s barely noon,” I hiss.
“You don’t like drinking games either?” My boss asks. “You have to shoot every time someone says ‘Merry Christmas’ onscreen.”
I roll my eyes, then realize he’s looking at me and noticed. I really am pushing his patience.
“Cheesy,” I repeat.
“Okay, Alexa, take note, no Christmas comedies, no drinking games either.”
I look around, then realize he’s being ironic and there isn’t actually the advanced order-taking virtual assistant unit his firm developed anywhere close by.
“With respect Sir, if we weren’t going to do any work today, I’d just as soon have had the day off.”
“Then we wouldn’t have this chance to get to know each other,” he says with a confident smirk I’d like to slap off his arrogant but decidedly gorgeous face. Is he just toying with me while his current squeeze sets up the party? Such a manwhore.
“Come on, we’re in the same room together, in the dark, that’s progress.” He insists.
“That’s performance art,” I snap right back and elicit a deep raspy laugh.
God he’s even more gorgeous when he’s laughing, throwing his entire soul into the mirth. Like some decadent Santa Claus.
“What do you have against me, Aura? Have I ever mistreated you, taken advantage of you?”
“Only in your patriarchal attitude to women sir. But it’s to be expected from men of your generation.”
“Ouch. Are these dudes here all so much better then? Because I don’t see you cozying up with any of them for the movie.”
“Why do I have to cozy up with any man?” I snark, although the idea sounds so nice that tingles warm my skin.
“Maybe because it’s winter and it feels good.”
I treat my boss to another eye roll and lean to the aisle side of my luxury chair. Problem is he’s right and I’d like nothing more than to climb into one of these wide lazyboy style recliners beside some man who would wrap me under his wing and into his chest. I know all these guys think I’m uptight and I don’t care because they’re all too young for me, by way more than the two or three years that separate us. I don’t feel any kinship of ideas with them – they all think they’re gods gift to the tech world. Doing something that only they and their cronies could ever understand.
The only man that sets my tummy tingling is Milo. But he’s a devil in a dark suit and I know not to stray too close. I’d be playing way out of my pay grade and I don’t fancy joining the legions of multicultural beauties that only get to grace his personal display unit once before being consigned to cold storage.
“Milo, can I have a word?” Tania leans across me in a heady swarm of exotic perfume. Too close, as though I’m part of the chair and she doesn’t see me sitting here.
Something is definitely going on. Her entire stance implies possession. And I can tell, sense it in her pores, that she doesn’t want me sitting beside Milo.
“What is it?” he gruffs. “Love, Actually is about to begin.”
Seriously? Love Actually. I unsuccessfully stifle a spurt of laughter and Tania suddenly notices me.
“Oh that’s my favorite,” she purrs. “They all get a happy ending at Christmas. I know Santa will slip that in my stockings too. Maybe later?”
I’m waiting for Milo to come back with equal flirting, telling her only if she’s a good girl or some shit. But he pulls out his phone and takes an imaginary phone call as the credits roll up on Scrooged and Love Actually begins. I’d never have thought my boss was one for happy endings.
Theo from development jumps up in the front row, turns to the rest of the staff with his arms raised like a savior and shouts “Merry Christmas’. A cheer goes up and everyone drinks.
Everyone except me.
“You aren’t going to get me drunk,” I hiss at Milo, seeing him gazing at me questioningly with his intense stare.
“Okay.”
6
Milo
I could be so way off here as to be a python in a duck pond but I don’t think so. My primitive male urge to stand up and walk away is kicked to the curb and I lean back in the chair, letting Aura know she won’t scare me off. She gapes at me in outrage and throws herself back into her chair, resigned to the fact that she has nowhere to escape to. The office is on lockdown as Tania’s crew work their makeover for the party. She’s on my time so she can’t leave.
In truth I don’t know why she’d want to.
I don’t know why she dislikes me so much. A few word
s about the role of women in the workplace hardly makes me a Weinstein. She has a job, she’s paid on parity with the guys. If she’s heard about my past on the office Snapchat, which travels faster than the real one, that could make her wary. But I’m pretty sure she’s pushing me away for a test. To see whether I like her enough to stick around.
That’s strange because Aura didn’t test as a woman prone to headgames. The psych profiling I have carried out on prospective employees is designed to ensure that there’s as little drama as possible in the office. And yeah that means especially from the soft and sweet members of the team – because they tend to become the most virulent. If that makes me a macho pig, my bad.
Aura shakes her head in disgust at almost every scene in the movie. The ones where the guy is cheating on his wife with a girl in the office seem to irk her the most. Especially when the wife thinks she’s getting the jewelry and instead unwraps a Joni Mitchell CD.
“Ever had that happen?” I ask, meaning about the gift disappointment.
“No,” she hisses. “I would not date a man at the office. Ever.
“I meant the thoughtless Christmas gift.”
“Yes. Thanks for bringing that up.”
Shit. I forgot about the sex toy in her hand yesterday. But now she’s brought it up, my wood starts stiffening, from the recall of her stroking the pink plastic cock in her palm.
“That was a joke. I’m sure they didn’t intend to humiliate you,” I say.
“You’re sure?”
“My team of geeks are geniuses, they’re also infantile.”
“Oh well that makes it okay then,” she snips. “Except if they were murderous geniuses, they’d still be tried as adults.”
“Aura, would you like me to discipline the perp?” I ask in all seriousness.
If she feels victimized, I’ll take up her cause. Not only because she has claimed a special place in my -my affection - but because I care about all the people that work for me.
“No can we please forget it?” she hiss-whispers. “If there were a more equal spread of gender in the office, I wouldn’t be subjected to this constant teasing.”
“Do you think that’s the reason or could you be setting yourself up for the jokes?”
“Great, make it my problem so you don’t have to deal with it.”
“No man will abuse you unless you allow it,” I tell her.
“Oh is that the same as asking for it?”
She pulls back the instant she’s blurted out her statement. As though she suddenly recalls she’s sitting here with her boss, not the janitor. Her expression reads; “Damn’ and she grabs the untouched hot dog from the armrest to shove it in her mouth.
“No, I’m saying if a woman has a healthy head of self-esteem she won’t accept abuse or shame.”
We sit in silence, staring straight ahead at the screen as she stuffs the snack hungrily. It would be amusing, the ferocious way she attacks the dog, if I didn’t have to fight the image of her taking my length in the same manner. I’m not afraid to admit that having on her knees in the dark would be my one and only Christmas wish. There’s something about this girl that makes me burn with desire. I’d love to rip the clothes from her body, stripping her of all her barely repressed anger.
I feel the same hunger simmering inside her as we sit here in loungers casually staring at a screen, taking nothing in. To anyone observing us, we’d appear to be boss and employee kicking back for a Holiday movie. But if they were to insert themselves between us, they’d be hit with the wall of heat sitting there like jungle humidity.
The tension lying on the armrest is tight with the need of unfulfilled desire. Mine for a woman that views me as a real man, not a money pot, hers, I assume, for a man that won’t let her down by proving to be a douche only interested in her honey pot.
“I have a problem with women,” I say, before I realize I’ve spoken.
Disarming her with my own story is maybe not the best idea.
She looks at me and her mouth opens to speak. Her expression says, ‘No kidding’ so I lift a finger for silence.
She snaps her lips shut again and I reach out my finger to wipe a smear of bright yellow mustard from the fleshy bottom one. She turtles her head back as an instinctive response then freezes, wide-eyed as I swipe my thumb pad across the stain. Her doe-stunned eyes are a revelation. Aura’s always so tough and in command of herself, seeing her vulnerable and afraid is a surprise. I pad across the mustard but it’s dried and doesn’t shift.
I power up all my reserves to stop myself from automatically leaning in to kiss her mouth, to suck her lower lip between mine and lick her clean. Instead I dip a finger into her tequila shot glass and wipe it over the mark again, the liquid releasing the hold. Her tongue pokes out to lick compulsively at the stain, her eyes never leaving mine. She holds me trapped there. Whether to intimate something more or to prevent me from watching her tongue lap so seductively across her flesh is anyone’s guess.
We gaze at each other and the movie seems to slow to half speed, the words of the actors slurring like drunks. The need to cup Aura’s head and pull her mouth onto mine is overbearing, as though a stampede has picked up in my chest and thunders on despite my attempts to hold it back. I notice Aura undulate slightly in her seat. The tiniest movement that indicates she’s desperate to release the lust rising in her, threatening to overwhelm her.
She slides one leg over the other, pressing her thighs together. If she was mine, if she belonged to me, I’d slide my hand between that sweet flesh and feel the heat of compression claim me. I’d pull her up onto my lap, to straddle me as I pulled her panties to one side and…
Her huge eyes lure me forward. They flutter each time her glance trails lower to my lips, like she’s begging me to take her with them.
The desire for her on me, her lips pressed against my mouth has me teetering at the edge of the precipice. I don’t give a shit about the danger. I need her now. Right here. In front of everyone. Her breasts lift up and down a little faster as though she reads my thoughts. The nipples press hard through the fabric, pleading, begging. I’m willing to go over the edge to have her.
I’d do anything.
A roar fills the cinema and the heads of the crowd all tip back in unison. Someone on the movie said ‘Merry Christmas’. Aura unlocks the hold between us and grabs at the tequila glass I’d doused my finger in. She tips her head back and swallows the liquid down hard.
“Excuse me, Sir,” she splutters, then rises from the chair and stumbles up the aisle, zig-zagging like a zombie until she shoves her way through the door and disappears.
7
Aura
I blunder into the ladies washrooms and find my way into a stall, slam it shut and lean back on the glass door. Yes, glass.
It’s yet another of Milo Locksley’s mind fucks. He claims it’s opaque glass, a special kind that although you can see right through to the washbasins on the other side, from the outside you can’t see into the stall. Like a two way mirror. Except you can’t really be sure. There aren’t’ any other women working in my department so I haven’t had the chance to check it.
But what kind of freakish boss even thinks to install that in the employee bathroom?
That was just another of our many, let’s call them heated discussions, on employee gender relations. I went storming into his office, my first day, bypassing whatever secretary he had working for him that week. He never keeps a girl around more than a week and prefers to hire a male secretary when possible, which he thinks makes him some kind of forward-thinking liberal.
“What the fu – hell – is with the glass doors in the washroom?”
“I’m sorry Mr Locksley,” the secretary came running in behind me, her high heels making her teeter. I couldn’t miss the color flushing her face as she tried not to look at her hot boss. I was sure that’s why he only keeps them around a week. That’s how long it takes for him to seduce, spank and get bored of them.
He lifted
his hand to let her know it was all good and examined me with a hint of amusement around the corners of his delectable mouth. I was almost gob-smacked by how lushly kissable his lips were - are. He was far more handsome in person. His hair rippling back in waves tinged with the tiniest edging of grey, like surf on a calm day. Running my fingers through that mop as he rode me went flashing through my head and I’m certain my cheeks also bloomed hotly. At least I managed to cover them up with my indignation.
Which he shrugged off with an inquiry; “And you are?”
“Aura Johanssen,” I said, holding his gaze without breaking.
“Danish,” he nodded. I was momentarily impressed because men always went for Swedish. Then I recalled he’d have seen my personal file. “Interesting first day.”
“I have every right to question sexism in the workplace, even if it makes my first day my last.”
Jesus, I’m embarrassed even now thinking about how self-righteous I was, can be. My boss was just too disarming. His perfection made me weak and jittery, which was a position I couldn’t afford to be in if I wanted to make any kind of name for myself in the all-male environment.
“It’s just a little game we play, Ms Johanssen,” he husked, his voice like sand in his throat. “Nothing out of order, I promise. I like to keep the workplace – stimulating.”
Oh christ, the way his lips curled around that word had me trembling. Although that had nothing on the way I’m shaking right now, my head tipped back on the offensive thick glass door with my breath coming in rapid pants. For one totally insane moment back there in the movie house, I thought my boss was going to kiss me.
And for one even more lunatic second, I actually wanted him to.
Every cell of my body had craned toward him, beguiling him into taking me. One kiss was all it would take to make him mine. That luscious mouth moving across my skin. His large hands filled with my flesh, squeezing until it spilled through his fingers. It’s absolutely insane how much I long to feel him touch me and press his hard body against mine until we mold together like lycra to limb.
