by Kira Blakely
“Jesus Christ,” someone whispered. “A no-fraternization rule? You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Suddenly, Maggie beckoned toward the team of interns, mouthing the words, “Lunch! Go to lunch!”
They hadn’t been at work for more than twenty minutes, making them confused—yet eager to feel comfortable again.
“She must not have time for us right now,” someone joked as they churned from the intern office, bounding back toward the elevator. One by one, they passed both Maggie and Quentin, who were bent over the spread of a future print of the magazine.
Charlotte hung back, allowing herself to be one of the last to pass by Maggie and Quentin. Her eyes turned toward Quentin. Her hips shimmied from left to right, articulating her curves, her femininity. She knew what she was doing; it had become automatic. Quentin looked up from his spread, making intense, immediate eye contact with Charlotte.
The tension around them grew immensely, causing Charlotte to panic and drop her notebook onto the ground. The notebook smacked, bringing heads back toward the scene, as if they were watching a car crash. Her face burning, she knelt quickly, retrieving it, and feeling the stern eyes of the rock-star-turned-editor on her ass.
He’d noticed her.
She lifted the notebook quickly, spinning back and hiding her ass, blinking wildly into his dark eyes. Her tongue searched for words of apology, words that would tell him that she was sorry for interrupting his meeting. But seconds ticked along, with both of them holding the intense eye contact. Neither formed words.
Perturbed, Maggie took a dramatic step back, dropping her hands to her sides. “Didn’t I say interns go to lunch now?” she asked, obviously forgetting Charlotte’s name. She was still new, nameless, and unimportant. But she still held court for the editor. At least in that moment, he only had eyes for her.
“Wait a moment,” Quentin said firmly. His voice was provocative, dominant, powerful. Maggie pressed her lips together, clearly frightened. He continued to stare at Charlotte, his eyes glossing over her frame.
In this moment, Charlotte felt like one of his groupies from ten years before, when he’d ransacked the bodies of teenage and twenty-something beauties all over the country. His penetrating gaze made her feel suddenly sexually charged.
Charlotte still didn’t speak. The tension mounted, with Maggie and Charlotte sitting in wait, holding their tongues.
Finally, Quentin removed his horn-rimmed glasses, shaking his ear-length, salt and pepper hair. “Who on earth are you?” he finally asked, as if she should have told him already. As if, all along, he’d been waiting for her.
“Charlotte,” she answered, her voice a whisper. Why did his gaze make her cower? Why did she feel exactly five inches tall? “Charlotte Barracks. I’m an intern. First day.”
Silence hung between them, then, with Quentin towering over her, making her feel weaker by the second. One of the other interns, a man, piped up from behind them. “We’re all new interns,” he said, his voice taking on false confidence. He’d probably read somewhere that he was meant to make an impression on the first day.
But Quentin’s eyes didn’t waver from Charlotte’s face. Nobody else in the room existed. Not when Maggie began to introduce some of the interns whose names she remembered, trying to act excited, attempting to yank Quentin’s attention back to her. Not when the rock stars he’d been interviewing poked their heads from the side office, asking if they might grab a cup of coffee.
Instead, Quentin found words. “Where do you come from? You’re clearly not from around here.”
“New York, you mean?” Charlotte asked, wondering if he was poking fun at her. Was it so obvious that she wasn’t from the East Coast? Did her cheeks shine with Midwestern sun? “No. I’m from Ohio.”
“Oh-HI-oh,” he whispered, his voice gruff. “I have a few good stories from there. And some I even remember.”
The band, now stationed behind him, began to titter with laughter. Charlotte swallowed harshly, remembering reading about the many orgies Quentin had had as a rock star. She’d read that article in the very magazine they were both now working for, something like a million years before. God, how times had changed. And, God, how she wanted him to splay her over a table and make love to her—or just fuck her, in the way of his ten-years-ago rock star self.
“My experience was a bit more wholesome than that,” Charlotte finally answered, her voice catching in her throat.
“And now you think you’re going to make it in the big, wide world, do you? First, this magazine, then eternity?” he asked, crossing his arms firmly across his chest. His eyes danced. He no longer appeared like the fatherly, nice-guy-editor. He was now all hard edges and bright eyes and bad boy arrogance.
“It’s been my dream to work here my entire life,” she answered softly.
“Well,” he said, scoffing slightly, raising the tension. “We’ll see how you do here, then.”
He said it as if he expected her to fail. Sensing the mounting tension, Maggie burst between them, raising her magazine spreads like a curtain. “Quentin, we really need your approval on this spread before we go to print. Can you just let the girl go to lunch with the others?”
She said it in a half-laugh, poking fun of his sexual nature. Charlotte took the opportunity to spin around, joining the pack of other interns in the corner. Her cheeks heated with embarrassment and panic. Randy’s eyebrows went high with pity. He wrapped his arm around her quivering shoulders and led her into the elevator.
“He made an example out of you,” he whispered in her ear. “Don’t worry about it. And don’t think about it a minute longer. You were hired because you’re a good writer. You were hired because you’re worthy. And he’s an arrogant bad boy. Everyone knows that, from way back in his early days. And just because I said that thing about wanting to wake up in his bed, doesn’t mean I don’t know it wouldn’t be a horrible thing for my self-esteem. As it would be for you.” He winked.
The elevator began to close, creating a firm barrier between Charlotte and Quentin, who still stood talking to Maggie. Just before the elevator door closed, his eyes snapped back up toward Charlotte, causing a chill to jolt up and down her spine.
“Jesus. That was intense,” Charlotte murmured, swiping light beads of sweat from her hairline. She couldn’t snap the image of the sexy editor from her mind.
“Let’s get you something to eat,” Randy said, laughing. “You’ll shake this in no time, flat.” The rest of the interns began to titter with light laughter and chit-chat, leaving Charlotte to her reverie.
She couldn’t have imagined such an explosive first encounter. She now understood the life of a groupie—a life she craved.
“Ah, girl. I see what you’re thinking about,” Randy said, laughing now as they scampered out on to the sidewalk. “But remember. There’s a no-fraternization rule. Not with your boss. You don’t want to fuck up your first internship.”
“Ha,” Charlotte said, kicking her head back. “I would never screw up this opportunity. It’s not like he even remembers me, anyway.”
Randy flipped on his sunglasses, cackling wildly. “That’s the spirit, my girl. I think you might just be grown up enough for New York, yet.”
Chapter 2
Quentin entered his office once more, splaying the magazine spread atop the mahogany desk. The Morning Stars were still there, with two of them rolling cigarettes and seated in expensive office chairs. Their jeans stunk of alcohol and marijuana, the two most essential things from Quentin’s old, rock star life.
“Great,” Quentin said, his eyes snapping past each of their faces. “I think we have a good interview here.”
“We really need good sales for this new record,” Mark, the lead singer, began. “People don’t buy CDs like they used to, when you were in the business. It’s fucking tough to get by.”
“I’ve seen the sales,” Quentin said, his voice booming. “But you’re making it up in concert tickets, aren’t you? That Brooklyn crowd is
probably as hot as ever, these days.”
“These fucking girls, man,” Connor, the guitarist, said. “Dude, you remember, what was it, ten years ago? When we were playing that show in Queens and you were on MDMA? You grabbed that girl in the front row, lifted her onto the stage, and just started making out with her in the middle of the song. You missed the second and third verses, and the chorus. But the band had your back, just improvising until you let her go.”
A mad smile stretched over Quentin’s face in memory. He remembered the stink of that girl, how she’d pressed her lips onto his and lifted her legs around his waist. That had been before so many things had changed in his life. That had been before he’d gotten “serious.”
“That was around when you got that tat. Of your girlfriend at the time, that model from Paris,” Connor said, leaning closer. As he did, Quentin could see how rough the years on the road had been to him, aging him horribly, and causing tight lines to form between his eyebrows. The Morning Stars hadn’t had to give up on the party. They hadn’t had to go home. And they were destroying themselves, becoming assholes in their mid-thirties who still did lines of coke before shows and hooked up with girls in their late teens.
“I still have it, of course,” Quentin said gruffly, lifting his bicep. He swept his suit jacket from his shoulders and rolled up his white button-up, revealing several black inks on his forearm, all the way up to the big-titted woman on his upper bicep. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t remember her name, now.”
“She probably doesn’t have those tits anymore, that’s for sure,” Mark said, laughing. “Good thing you got them inked to you forever. For the memories.”
“For the memories. That’s all I live for now, boys,” Quentin said, tipping back in his chair.
“Right. You’ve got that kid, now,” their drummer, Will, scoffed. “Cute little thing.”
“Yeah. Yeah, she definitely changed my life more than the others. That’s for sure,” Quentin said, snapping out of his reverie. He rolled his sleeve back down and slid his arms into his suit jacket, ready to send the boys home. “Well, thanks for this interview. Sure is nice to see you guys.”
He didn’t sound the least bit sincere, and he knew it. He swept his hand out and shook theirs, making momentary eye contact with each of the men before him. The men of his past; the men who’d picked him up from bathroom floors, coated in cocaine and other, unknown drugs, and plugged him up with alcohol and watched him make drunken mistake after drunken mistake.
“And that little intern we saw out in the main office—“ Connor said then, making deep eye contact with Quentin before snapping his eye in a wink. “Don’t suppose you have big plans for her?”
“Oh. Charlotte?” Quentin said, sounding blasé. “She’s a kid. You saw her.”
“I did,” Connor said, his words filled with meaning. “And I know exactly what the old Quentin would have done with her.”
The Morning Stars left, then, leaving Quentin to brood, with the blinds closing him off from the rest of the office. He sat back in his chair, knocking his feet up onto the desk and pressing the back of a pen against his lips. His mind raced back to an image of Charlotte, bending down to retrieve her notebook. His member pressed against his pant leg, becoming insistent.
God, that ass. The curvature of it, dipping out from beneath her little business dress. Her thin, stick-like legs had been reminiscent of any groupie from his former band days, ones that had wrapped around his waist countless times as he’d fucked them from above—almost never remembering their faces, nor their names. Seeing Charlotte out there had forced him through countless memories, gorgeous ones.
But no. God, no. He wasn’t that person anymore. He’d stopped with the drugs. He’d stopped with the sex addiction. He’d gotten married, briefly, and they’d had his daughter, Morgan, seven years before—when he’d been twenty-nine years old. Sure, he hadn’t been ready to have a kid back then. Half-drugged, out of his mind, he’d blasted into the hospital room to find his large-breasted model wife stretched out on the bed, holding onto that tiny infant. Her eyes had bled red with anger. “You missed the birth of your daughter,” she’d hissed, no longer seeing him as the amazing rock star on stage, the lead singer of Orpheus Arise. In that moment, he was just a small, bruised little man who wasn’t there when his wife and daughter needed him most.
When he’d first held Morgan, he’d decided to change. For good.
But, Jesus, seeing someone like Charlotte forced him to reconsider.
He turned to the office roster on his computer, then, and found her name: Charlotte Barracks, interning in music writing. From western Ohio, near the Indiana border. Majored in writing and music in college, listed her top favorite bands in her résumé, and didn’t include his.
Digging a bit, Quentin typed her name into a search engine, discovering a photograph of her easily on a social media page. That stunning, angelic face peered back at him. She was an absolute knock-out and, best of all, didn’t even know it. She looked as if she’d been born and bred in the very shadows of Ohio cornfields, hidden from the world for over two decades. Naïve. Young. Fresh. Easily destroyed.
Insistent, his cock pulsed up against his pants once more. Slowly, methodically, he reached for his belt and undid it, unzipping his pants and wrapping his hand around his veiny, rock-hard member. He remembered getting naked on stage, over ten years before, and penetrating some raucous groupie in front of the drum kit, as fans watched nearby.
SEX-CRAZED ROCKER had been the headline. He remembered reading it, from this very magazine, before he’d known he’d be any kind of “suit” in an office. Before he knew he’d ever grow up. He’d loved the title, slicing the magazine pages out and hanging them in his shitty, studio apartment in Brooklyn.
As he thought back to these glory days, all the women in his memories transformed into the little Ohioan intern. He yanked his cock from his pants fully, now, and began to ease his palm up and down gruffly, imagining her lips wrapped around the tip. He imagined those bright red lips bobbing up and down, her eyes gazing up at him from between his legs. He would shove his cock deeper between her teeth, watching as she deep-throated him.
Shivering with lust, his eyes turned toward the clock. It was nearly three-fifteen in the afternoon. His phone began to blare with the alarm he set, always certain he’d be too caught up in writing to remember. Shocked, he dropped his cock, slipping it back into his pants and re-zipping, re-buttoning, re-clasping.
He had to pick up Morgan from piano lessons. It was his day. It was his turn.
Shaking his head gruffly, he stood, tapping his muscled ass to ensure he had his wallet and keys. He sent a brief email to Maggie, that poor, rough-looking thing, who—yes—he’d fucked ten years ago. She was a stunning writer, a real asset to his team at MMM. But she always brought up the issue of them once copulating, never considering that he’d been too addled on mushrooms at the time to know if she was an actual woman or just a figment of his unending imagination.
Had to pick up Morgan, he typed furiously for Maggie, already running a bit late. I’ll be back tomorrow morning, early, to approve the rest of the magazine spreads. Good luck with the interns. I know they drive you wild. He tapped send swiftly and forced his laptop closed, bolting for the door. He avoided Maggie’s glance before escaping to the elevator. He couldn’t afford the time she required, half-casually flirting with him.
The tension and jealousy she created was sometimes an assault to his office frame of mind. He certainly didn’t want to give her any cues that it could happen again, although he knew she wanted that. He could feel the simmer in her glances, sense the way she shoved her breasts upward when they spoke.
By the time he reached the sidewalk in front of the Manhattan office building, his brain was diluting itself from the hard day at the office, even allowing him a slight reprieve from thoughts of that hot intern, Charlotte. He was transitioning, now. For the next few hours, he would be a father. And damn, he’d be a good one.
> Chapter 3
Morgan’s school was close to Quentin’s penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side, a place he’d been able to afford after he’d stopped cashing all his checks for drugs, cleaned up his act, and begun writing at MMM officially, at the age of thirty-one. The royalties for the music continued to roll in, graciously, like echoes from a near-forgotten time. And suddenly, at the age of thirty-six, he was a very rich man, with a Music Editor title and acclaim from several journalistic award groups.
He and Morgan’s mother, a once-model named Kate, had decided upon the school because of its commitment to music. Nearly every day, the kids had a music lesson, with piano, guitar, voice, and even some of the brass or woodwind instruments on offer. Morgan had decided upon piano, since Quentin had a large grand piano in his penthouse, and she’d grown up with him tinkering on it, writing songs and crooning.
“She’ll grow up to be just like her daddy,” Kate had said once, giggling as Morgan had practiced in the other room.
“You apparently don’t remember that isn’t a very promising thing to become,” Quentin had said, his words brimming with meaning.
Kate had rolled her eyes, her moods on a constant cycle. “Quentin, of course I remember what an asshole you were to me. And to her, too, before she could form memories. I was trying to say that she’s going to be a good musician, like you. That’s all.”
Quentin hadn’t responded. He’d maneuvered into the main room, watching as his tiny blonde daughter had banged away on the keys, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration. He’d clapped when she’d finished. She’d whirled from the keys into a dramatic bow, her bright blue dress swinging around her knees. Jesus Christ, he loved that girl.
When he reached the school, he waited, his hands flickering at his pocket, searching for a cigarette that was no longer there. He’d given up the habit when Morgan had been an infant, knowing that the fumes and the preservatives and the smoke would ruin her tiny pink lungs. He’d wanted to give her a chance.
