by A. J. Wynter
“What do you mean, ‘figures’?” Samantha laughed.
“I mean, you have the opportunity to blackmail some pervert who you probably could have gotten a couple hundred bucks out of, and you ask for an internship? And not even for yourself?” I exclaimed.
“She was probably going to get it anyway, I just wanted to secure her spot,” Samantha said matter-of-factly.
“Never mind,” I joked. “You’re just as lame as you were before.”
“Haha.”
“I’m kidding,” I said. “You’re a good friend, and clearly a badass.”
Samantha smiled, clicked her pen, and kept writing.
The work went faster than I would have expected it to. We had spent so much time earlier that day doing nearly the exact same thing, just with the aid of computers and a different set of numbers. Samantha and I talked as we worked to suppress our anxiety and boredom, and I liked listening to her stories and seeing her eyes light up with interest as I told mine. The exhaustion and chaos of the day had loosened Samantha up—her stories had a different quality to them now. They ranged from silly to self-deprecating, and I loved every word of them. She talked about her elementary school T-ball team and the cartoons she never missed as a kid, or all the times she had to pick up her drunk sister from parties. She told me her favorite crayon color and the cocktail she liked to order only when she was sad. I worked along, happy to see her opening up so beautifully, and I shared my stories in return. After the hell we had been through that day, we had silently both agreed that there was no going back: we were friends now, whether either of us liked it or not.
The clock ticked along as we worked, the metronome that kept our stories in rhythm, and we worked until our hands cramped up and our brains fogged. But as the minutes passed, a thought kept sneaking through my mind, unannounced:
You know, this really isn’t half bad…
***
“There!” Samantha said, shrieking with joyful laughter. “That’s about all we can do without power.”
I grinned, filled with the kind of joy you only feel after such a condensed period of stress. “I cannot believe we pulled that off.”
“Eh, not quite yet,” Samantha said. “Hopefully if the power’s back tomorrow we can get all the reports typed up and get the graphs all digitized and nice looking…” she kicked her heels across the room triumphantly. “We can just use the format of the one we messed up earlier. It shouldn’t take more than an hour, and then we’re gold.”
“Oh, thank god,” I groaned, and spun my chair around in circles in a way the CEO is probably never supposed to do. “Hold on,” I said, getting up and running into my office. I rummaged through my desk drawers until I found it: my emergency stash.
I returned with a sneaky grin on my face and walked up to Samantha in her chair, who was already looking at me with suspicion. “Whiskey?” I said, smirking at her with delight.
“Jesus, I should have known,” Samantha said, grabbing the bottle from me and taking a swig. “You were definitely the handsome guy in high school who talked everyone into all their bad ideas.”
I smiled. “Maybe.”
Samantha handed me the bottle back and I took a large drink myself. The office was another world tonight, a different place. It was dark and glowing with a different energy that followed different laws. It would have been a strange sight to our employees to see their bosses so friendly and so relaxed. The two of us spun in office chairs in the middle of the room, laughing. Laughing because the grand scheme of our negotiations didn’t matter today. We were both thrown onto the same sinking ship, so for now staying afloat was all that mattered.
There was a lingering question in the air that neither of us dared to speak aloud just yet…what now? Last time I checked, the snow had piled up as much as had been predicted, and the whole city had gone dark. Samantha and I both lived in hill-covered suburbs outside the city, so getting home would be a dangerous affair for either of us. We could be stuck here for days…and I took another sip of whiskey each time the reality dawned on me again.
Samantha was deep into a story about a time one of her friends walked into the wrong apartment, and I felt bad about it, but under the haze of the whiskey I could barely concentrate. I just stared at her talking. I liked the way her eyes lit up and how she laughed melodiously at all the funny parts. I didn’t even realize until the whiskey started to run through my veins just how much I had tried to resist this…how much I had taken any hint of a feeling I had started to develop and crushed it under my foot before I could recognize it.
There was a possibility I was falling for her.
Okay, okay. I think I was.
I knew I was.
“So, by then,” Samantha continued, and I jumped to a start as I woke up out of my haze. “Rosie had sat down on the couch and noticed that there was this really advanced math textbook on the table, and she knew that Jared was completely inept at that sort of thing, so she—”
“Samantha.”
She looked up, her cheeks warm and flush from the whiskey, and stared at me, waiting for me to say something. I hadn’t planned on saying anything, I realized. I just had an urge to say her name aloud.
“Yes?” she asked, and I nearly lost my breath as she took the topaz clip out of her hair and I watched dark brown waves cascade over her shoulder.
“Let’s dance,” I said impulsively.
Samantha burst out laughing. “How drunk are you, Johnathan? Besides, there’s no music anyways.”
“Never fear!” I said, mocking the voice of a cartoon superhero, as I stumbled out of my chair and ran into Sabryna’s supply closet. “Battery radio,” I said grinning, holding up the clunky box like a trophy.
“Aren’t you clever,” Samantha said sarcastically, with a wry smile lighting up her face. Even as I fumbled with the controls and tried to find a radio station that wasn’t exclusively snow coverage or polka, she looked completely unconvinced that I would ever actually get around to taking her hand and getting her to join me. She simply spun around in lazy circles in the office chair, her head hanging back from the whiskey, the exhaustion, or perhaps pure amusement at my battle with the radio.
I finally found a station that came in clearly enough, and an old ballad played, filled with the sultry melancholy of trombones and the gentle, scratching softness of songs that have only survived through old records.
“Come on,” I said, swaggering up to her chair with a mischievous smile on my face. “I dare you.” I held out my hand to her, waiting with a nervous lump in my throat as she simply stared at it, contemplating.
Samantha smirked and put her hand in mine, and I pulled her out of the chair and suddenly into my arms.
“Scared?” I asked, giving her a teasing smile.
“Never,” she said, putting her arms around my neck.
“Good,” I said, looking down for a second and blushing. “Because I might be, just a bit.”
“That’s okay,” Samantha said, and when she smiled at me I lowered my hands to her waist, trying not to go insane with the feeling of her curves under my hands. Samantha caught her breath and stepped closer. “New things will do that to you,” she whispered.
We swayed back in forth in a slow rhythm, circling from the center of the room to the large window, where the streetlamps illuminated the snow-covered world outside. We maintained steady eye contact, but it was different from the times we had looked into each other’s eyes before…this time there was no search for weaknesses, no predatory wait for the perfect moment to strike an attack…we held each other’s gazes softly, sweetly, as if we were seeing each other for the first time.
“This feels like another world…” Samantha whispered to me as we danced next to the window, and I understood exactly what she meant. The city was completely deserted and the office was empty, as if we were the only two people left in Seattle. This place, this strange, snow-covered, lamplit paradise we had entered had different rules. I could dance with Samantha Doyle
on the edge of midnight next to the copy machine and somehow it felt like the most natural thing in the world.
The spell broke when Samantha let out an awkward yawn just as the third song started to play. “You know, Johnathan,” she said, yawning again. “This is nice, but it’s been such a long day. I’m kind of exhausted.”
“Me too,” I said, and bit my lip awkwardly when I remembered we were pretty much trapped here.
“Is there anywhere here I can sleep?” Samantha asked, and I thought carefully. Despite the office being state of the art in terms of technology, the minimalist, feng shui approved design didn’t leave many options for napping. At an office like ours, there wasn’t usually time.
“Oh!” I said, walking out towards the reception area to the huge white leather couch that sat in the corner. “It has a pull-out bed, if I remember correctly.”
Samantha and I removed the cushions, and sure enough, we were able to pull out a bed with a thin, bent-up mattress. We took a couple of blankets from a storage closet and the pillows from the chairs in the reception area and arranged them neatly. It would have to do.
“Where are you going to sleep?” Samantha asked as she got under the covers. She was going to bed in her work clothes, but I guess she didn’t really have another option right now.
“There’s another couch like this in Cassidy’s office,” I lied. “I’m going to turn in myself.”
“Okay,” Samantha said, yawning. “Goodnight Johnathan. Thanks for the dance.”
“Anytime,” I said, and we smiled at each other in a way that made it hard to leave.
Shit. I didn’t have anywhere to sleep. But it’s not like I could just invite myself into bed with Samantha. I wandered through the different offices until I found my best option, a couch in Kirk’s office. It was too short for me to lie down all the way, so I laid down with my feet out on a chair. I figured I was so tired that I could sleep on the floor and be out in an instant.
I was wrong.
It turned out that even after a horrific day of stress and hard work, no one is immune to the effects of really powerful energy drinks. Including me. Despite my exhaustion earlier, I kept tossing and turning on the hard, creaky springs of the couch, obsessively going over everything that had happened with Samantha. The whiskey had worn off, and now things were starting to come into perspective. We had danced. We had flirted. And it was good too.
I flipped the too-firm pillow from the reception area over and sighed. I wondered how long I would have to sleep on this stupid couch and live off of people’s leftovers from the break room fridge.
“Liar,” came a voice from behind me.
“Ah, hello,” I said, rolling over to see Samantha, her skirt wrinkled and her hair in slightly frizzled, tousled waves, standing over me with a grin.
“This doesn’t look like a pull-out bed in Kirk’s office to me.”
“Yeah, well,” I coughed. “He must have moved it out.”
Samantha smiled at me knowingly. “Come share with me.”
My eyes widened and my heart began to race the second the words left her mouth.
“Oh, calm down,” Samantha said. “It’s nothing scandalous. That bed is probably queen sized, and we can put some pillows between us.”
“Um,” was all I managed to get out when Samantha grabbed my arm to pull me off the couch and into the other room.
“Here,” she said, creating a border down the center of the bed with some of the smaller pillows and grabbing some extra blankets. “You’re all set.”
Samantha smiled up at me and I’m smiled back at her as innocuously as I could muster. Oh, shit, I was going to have to share a bed with Samantha, and oh god, there were about a million ways this could go terribly wrong.
“Hopefully we can both get some rest after drinking those weird energy drinks Cassidy got from Norway, or wherever,” Samantha said, as we both cautiously got under the covers on our respective sides of the bed. “I can still feel it in my system, you know?”
“Yup,” I said. “Goodnight, Samantha.”
“Night.”
Oh, God. Here we go.
With the exception of the emergency security lights, that were now dimming, we were in total darkness. However, I could still see Samantha’s outline under the covers. Even across the barrier of pillows, I could feel the heat radiating from her and smell the jasmine and vanilla scent of her shampoo. Up close, and with nothing else to think about but her in the dark, I was starting to go crazy.
Samantha possibly had started to drift off, and occasionally made a sort of light, breathy, yawn that bordered on erotic, and I had to focus to keep myself from getting too aroused. I rolled away from her and sighed. I hated this feeling, this anxiety that someone could be around me and all of a sudden, I could lose control of myself…my feelings, my body, my power. Samantha was the first person I had met in a long time who had challenged my authority, and I realized maybe that’s why I couldn’t stand her so much when I first met her.
I sat up on the side of the bed and held my head in my hands and groaned. Shit, how was I going to sleep in this bed for the rest of the night without losing my mind? I was about to go back to the other couch when…
“Are you awake, Johnathan?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, lying back down next to her. “Just those energy drinks, I guess.”
“Me too,” Samantha complained. “It’s like your body is exhausted but your mind is awake. It’s a weird feeling.”
“Weird indeed,” I added, and a long silence followed.
“Johnathan,” Samantha said, bringing her face up close to mine. “It’s important to me that you know that I don’t hate you. I could never hate you, okay?”
“I’m glad,” I said, and my words tumbled on out before I could think. “Because I really like you, Sam, you know that?”
Samantha smiled at me, her eyes still bright and lovely even in the near dark of the office, and she raised her hand to my cheek, stroking my face slowly as she looked into my eyes.
“I thought you liked Amy,” she said, laughing a bit.
“Amy?” I said, laughing. “Your assistant, that Amy? I mean, she’s certainly not bad looking, but…” I swept one of my hands through Samantha’s hair and cradled the back of her head. “But no one quite infuriates me like you, Samantha.”
“And,” Samantha said with a breathy gasp. “I assume infuriates is a good thing.”
I suddenly pinned Samantha down on the mattress and looked in her eyes. “Oh, darling, you have no idea.”
I kissed her ravenously, sighing at the feel of her plush lips moving against mine, and only then did I really understand how much I wanted her, how much I wanted this. Samantha responded enthusiastically, running her long fingers through my hair and tugging me closer to her. With that one kiss all of our walls came crumbling down, the dam that we had built with our fights and petty arguments could no longer sustain the desire we had both denied for so long, the frantic need we had for each other that had always slowly bubbled underneath the surface. I ran my hands across her body, I couldn’t get enough of her, I would never be able to pull her close enough. Samantha got to work on the buttons of my white work shirt, discarding it on the office floor with a flick of her hand.
Samantha sighed as I ran a hand up her leg. “I can’t believe we’re…” she traced her fingers across the golden expanse of my chest. “I can’t believe I’m…after everything.”
“Do you still want to?” I asked.
“Oh god, Johnathan,” she said, pushing herself back up and crawling into my lap. “Yes.”
As we kissed, I reached up under Samantha’s skirt and tore her pantyhose off, ripping them on the way down.
“Oops,” I said with a smirk, holding the ripped pair up for her to see and then tossing them behind me. Samantha barely seemed to notice and pulled me down to her again.
We kissed each other with the kind of aggressive enthusiasm only two people who had once been bitter rivals could
conjure up. I found the zipper on the back of Samantha’s black pencil skirt and slid it off her legs to find a practical, but still ridiculously sexy, pair of dark red lace panties underneath. We continued to slowly strip each other down until Samantha was left in her mismatched lingerie, her red panties and black bra, and I was left with just my gray silk boxers. We kept kissing each other madly, and neither of us could resist flipping each other over from time to time in our endless war for dominance, the war that had covertly followed us into the bedroom.
Suddenly Samantha pulled me up, and I smiled eagerly as she dragged me out of bed and into the conference room where we had labored the early part of the day away.
“What are you doing?” I laughed, still shaky with breath from her kisses.
Samantha ran one of her neatly manicured hands over the tent in my boxers and backed herself onto the mahogany conference room table. She laid herself down slowly, spreading herself across the middle of the table, and I knew what she wanted.
“It’s…always been a fantasy of mine…” Samantha explained, the dark wood highlighting all the curves of her porcelain skin.
“The doing it on a table, or the me doing you on a table?”
Samantha shook her head and giggled. “This always comes back to your ego, Torver, I swear.”
I crawled onto the table and leaned over her, looking into her eyes with a cocky smirk. “Tell me.”
She pulled me down to kiss me. “Fine, yes.”
I shook my head in disbelief, still laughing. “You loathed me, Sam, and you fantasized about this? The whole time you hated me you’d spend hours fantasizing about me fucking you on the conference room table?”
“Hours? Please, Johnathan, don’t flatter yourself,” Samantha scoffed.
“You sure?” I whispered, raising an eyebrow.
Samantha ran a hand down my chest. “If you’re so confident about this, why don’t you just get on with it then?”
I slipped her panties off and flung them away. “Fine,” I said, smirking at her and kissing the inside of her neck. “We’ll see how long you fantasize about this when I’m finished.”
