by Abby Angel
“I was being sarcastic. I’d never seen it before today, and it was the ugliest thing I’d ever laid eyes on.”
She bites her lip and moves her hip ever so slightly against mine. If my entire body didn't feel like it was on fire, I probably would’ve missed it.
“So you’re not going to spank me as a punishment?” she asks breathlessly and rubs her hip just a little harder against me.
My nostrils flare as I suck in my breath and stare down at her. I shouldn’t be doing this, I shouldn’t even be thinking about doing this, but having her right here…
My hips begin grinding harder against her, almost against my will, but I can’t fucking stop. Not now.
“Oh, I’m going to spank you,” I rumble, my cock so hard I could sledgehammer through walls with it if I wanted to. “I’m going to tie you up,” I pull at my tie, whipping it out of my collar, “and turn you over my knee and fuck you so hard, you’re going to beg me to stop. And then you’re going to beg me to cont—”
“Mr. Kane,” the intercom blares, an old, crotchety voice coming through it, sounding eerily reminiscent of my third grader teacher. “You have a meeting in 15 minutes with the board, to decide which departments to cut. If you need me to walk you to the meeting, I—”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” I grind out as Ashley backs up, her eyes huge, her shock palpable. “I can find it on my own.” The damn building is only four stories tall. It isn't like I can get lost in it.
“As you wish, sir,” the cigarette-roughened voice says and then she's gone.
“You asshole,” Ashley breathes out. “How could you? How could you decide who to fire, just like that?” She snaps her fingers in the air, glaring daggers at me as she does. “Fuck you. I hope you step on a Lego in the dark.” And then Ashley's gone too, the door slamming behind her as she goes, but I can’t help the smile curling the corner of my mouth at her curse. I’d been told many nasty things in my lifetime, but I had never been told to step on a Lego in the dark. That was a new one, even to me, and I would've sworn I’d heard it all.
I fall into the nasty-ass leatherette chair behind the nasty-ass cheap oak desk, my cock begging for release, and my mind whirling.
I pull out my red, swollen cock, pre-cum already leaking from the tip. I have to stroke one out before the meeting or I’ll never be able to focus on a damn thing anyone says.
And I have to forget Ashley Miller, starting now.
71
Ashley
Yeah, I’m supposed to be working, I know. Don’t get all Mr. Henningford on my ass. If you’d just had Apollo—Mr. Kane—feeling you up like he’d just been doing to me, you wouldn’t be working either. Just sayin’.
I’m pacing in circles around my desk, like this lion I once saw stuck in an enclosure at the zoo. He just walked the same path over and over again, wearing it down to dirt, ignoring the rest of his enclosure as he went. At the time, I felt sorry for him.
Right now, I feel too…I don’t know what I feel. But something. Something very mixed up and twisted and worried and horny as fuck and—
“Ashley, are you okay?”
Oh thank god, Natalie is coming to my rescue.
“Yes! No! Yes? I don’t know.”
She’s staring at me like I’ve lost my mind. Which, to be fair, I kinda feel like I have.
“What’s going on?” she asks slowly, as if talking to a small child, or a deranged adult.
Okay, I deserved that. I mean, I don’t like it, but I deserve it.
“Apollo—” I hiss a little too loudly and everyone in a ten-foot radius turns to hear, no doubt because he’s, like, the only topic of conversation this morning. I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up doing a ten-page spread on him in the magazine this month, if only because no reporter is going to want to focus on anything else.
Natalie tilts her head and stares at me for a moment, and then nods knowingly. “We need to have a little chat,” she says, grabbing my arm and dragging me toward the smaller conference room on the main floor. A handful of men are streaming out—the hoity-toity upper management guys who rarely deign to mix with us lowly reporters—so we stand off to the side until they all leave, and then dart into the darkened room and close the door.
“What is going on between you and Mr. Kane?” Natalie demands, propping her hip against the boardroom table, crossing her arms and glaring at me. “Have you been holding out? Do you know him? Is he as good in bed as he is hot?”
“Natalie!” I hiss indignantly. “I have not slept with Apo—Mr. Kane.”
I can feel my fucking ears turning red, a sure sign that I’m lying, and Natalie, being Best Friend Extraordinaire that she is, definitely doesn’t overlook this fact.
“Wanna try that again?” she asks, cocking one eyebrow expectantly.
“Well, I haven’t,” I insist, crossing my arms stubbornly across my chest. But I can’t just stand there; I have too much energy in me to just stand and talk to her. I start pacing the room, the image of the trapped lion in the zoo crossing my mind, but I shove it away.
“I stole his cab this morning—”
“You what?”
“I didn’t know it was him!” I say plaintively. “I was late and I stole his cab and—”
“What was Apollo Kane doing riding in a fucking cab?” Natalie explodes, cutting me off.
I stop.
I stare at Natalie, confusion writ large all over my face.
“I have no idea,” I say slowly. “That’s weird.”
“Yeah, that’s like fucking weird,” Natalie says sarcastically. “The man could afford to be flown to work every morning in a private helicopter. He’s not exactly the kind of guy to slum it in a yellow cab.”
“Well, that part doesn’t matter,” I say, waving my hand in the air dismissively, although I’ll be honest, my brain is going a hundred miles an hour. I really have no explanation for why I was fighting Mr. Apollo Kane, the richest man in New York City—the richest man on the East Coast—for a fucking cab. I file it away under Shit I’ll Never Know And It’ll Drive Me Crazy Until The Day I Die file, along with Why The Hell Is Kanye West Popular and Who Thought Crimped Hair Was Sexy.
1982, I’m looking at you.
“Well, so anyway, I jump in his cab and I might have waved out the window at him and sort of made fun of him and…” I can feel myself withering under Natalie’s glare. “He didn’t exactly have a name tag on!” I say defensively, my cheeks a brilliant red. Perfect, now they can match my brilliant red ears.
“So I felt bad and I went to his office after the big announcement and I told him I was sorry and I knocked over his vase, well, a vase, and broke it and then he carried me in his arms—”
“He what?”
“Will you let me finish? I haven’t even gotten to the good part yet!”
Natalie’s eyes open wide and I can almost see her thoughts as they flash through her mind, and I can tell they're getting dirtier by the second.
“His cock…Natalie, I didn’t see it, but holy fuck, it’s huge, like 12 inches huge,” I breathe, finally getting to the important part. “He was telling me that he was going to tie me up and spank me and he was pulling off his tie—”
Natalie squeaks like a dog toy, making me feel better about my sudden impersonation of the annoying aisle of the Petco store, but I plow forward, wanting to get this off my chest.
“But his secretary, Mrs. Sanders, remember her? Real cranky old biddy?” At Natalie’s nod, I continue, “She beeped in over the intercom and said that he had to go to a meeting to talk to board members about which departments to cut. Whole departments! Natalie, we may not have—”
“It’s probably here that I should cut you off,” a voice says from the speaker on the phone.
The phone in the middle of the room, on the table.
The phone with the red blinking light on it, indicating that it’s live and broadcasting and fucking picking up everything I’m saying, oh god, oh god, oh god.
&nbs
p; “I would hate for you to say something that you might regret later,” a voice says drolly.
Not a voice.
Apollo Kane’s voice.
Natalie’s staring at me, and me at her, and I can’t breathe and I’m hyperventilating and as Natalie dives for the phone to turn it off, I’m running and I can hear my skirt tearing, my strides are so long but I don’t care, I fucking don’t care, I have to hide, I have to go into the bathroom and hide and never, ever come out and they’re going to find me, dead, just a pile of bones and cute clothes and say sadly, “There lies Ashley the Associate Editor who literally died of embarrassment,” and my ghost’s cheeks are going to turn red when it hears those words.
As I sit on top of the toilet, snuffling pathetically, my arms wrapped around my knees, I have to wonder what I’d ever done to deserve this. If they ever invent a time machine, the first thing I’m doing is going back to this morning. I’m going to fucking hold the damn door open to the taxi cab and wish Apollo Kane a good day while he’s climbing into it. Because then I wouldn’t have had to apologize to him and he wouldn’t have promised to spank me and I wouldn’t have…
I wouldn’t have heard the plans to fire my fellow co-workers. To fire me.
I drop my head to my knees and stare dully down, eyes unseeing.
No, even a time machine couldn’t help me now. Me and my friends and even my co-workers that I’d secretly give decaf coffee to, just to fuck with their heads…we’re all fucked.
And I don’t have the slightest clue of what to do about it.
72
Apollo
I stretch and roll my head from side to side across my shoulders. Fuck, what a day. It's only 6pm, but it feels like so much later. Usually, I have endless stamina and can work 20 hours a day without missing a beat, but today…
Today has been frustratingly draining and it isn’t hard to know why. You asshole keeps rolling around in my head, reverberating, echoing, but never dying out. Never growing quiet and disappearing like any normal echo would.
Well, Ashley Miller is no normal person. I even caught of glimpse of that while listening to, what she thought was, a private conversation between her and Natalie. She is infuriating and opinionated and not in the least impressed or intimidated by me and…
And sexy as fuck.
I push away from the piece of shit desk and grab my briefcase. It's time to go home, drink a glass of wine, call over Tiffani and four of her naughtiest friends, and fuck my frustrations away. I’d heard about a new BDSM club downtown, maybe I’ll take them all there and—
The elevator door opens with a ding, and there’s Ashley. She looks up at the ding of the door opening and the look on her face when she sees me says that she can’t decide if she wants to fuck me or strangle me.
Welcome to the club, lady.
I step inside and ask, “Ground floor?” She nods once, jerkily, and I punch the button for the ground floor, the descent to the next floor punctuated by Ashley’s heavy breathing. Is she…? I look at her out of the corner of my eye. She’s got her eyes closed and she’s breathing in deeply through her nose and out of her mouth.
It is…
It is the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Who is this Lego cursing, deep breathing, cab-stealing woman? She’s this puzzle that I want to solve, a Gordian knot that I want to untangle, but before I can ask her out, she says simply, “I’m sorry for today.” She opens her eyes and she’s looking right at me, as if she can see through my soul. “I’m sorry for what I said to you, about being an asshole, and I’m sorry for stealing your cab.”
The doors open for the next floor down, but no one is standing there. I push the button to continue our descent, and Ashley keeps talking. “But it’s true, Apollo. You’re being an asshole. I refuse to believe—”
Maddeningly, the door dings open for another floor, but again, no one is there. I make a mental note to have my secretary call the elevator repair company and find out what the fuck is wrong with this elevator.
“I refuse to believe,” she starts again, “that you could’ve met everyone and looked over all of the numbers and really figured out what we do here and who’s important to keep around, after two hours of working here. I know they call you the Wolf of New York, but even you’re not that good.”
The doors, thank god, finally open on the ground floor.
“Stop being the Wolf of New York for a moment, and start feeling some compassion,” she says quietly, with dignity. “All of those numbers you’re chopping out? They’re people. They have bills to pay and mouths to feed. Start acting like it.”
She walks away, her heels clicking on the tile. I notice a small rip up the back side of her skirt and I can’t help but wonder where it came from because it wasn’t there this morning, and then she's gone, out the front doors, the doors swinging shut behind her.
And I step out in the lobby, the quiet of the building echoing loudly in my brain, staring after her.
Fuck it. I need a drink, and it can’t be at home. I need to go to the Soho. Fuck Tiffani and her friends. I can’t do that, not right now. I need to get my head on straight.
I need to figure out what I want.
73
Ashley
Natalie and I meet up at Agave in the Lower East Side for dinner. 8 pm on a Monday night—I know, I know, we’re stupid. The Agave is going to be packed to the gills with every margarita-loving woman out there, and every man who loves women who are drunk on said margaritas.
But when I show up, Natalie is already there (she's annoyingly on time all the time; I guess not everyone is perfect, right?) and has talked the waiter into squeezing us in right away. He takes us back to a far table, a tiny thing that just barely fits the two of us, and disappears with our drink order for two lime margaritas.
“Tell me. Tell me all. You said on the phone that you ran into him again in the elevator. What happened? Did he shove his tongue down your throat? I want all the deets.”
Another waiter, in the Agave uniform of black from head to toe, slips in between us for just a moment to deliver their world-famous chips and salsa and our margaritas, and then disappears again. They’re nothing if not discreet around here.
I take a big sip of my margarita and then try to figure out what to say, what to do. Earlier, in the panic of hearing Apollo’s voice come through the speakerphone, I’m not entirely sure Natalie heard the words coming out of my mouth. How do I tell her that she may not have a job tomorrow? I may not have a job tomorrow.
“Mrs. Sanders interrupted our little—” I wave my hand in the air dismissively, “discussion—” Natalie snorts and I ignore her, “—to remind Mr. Kane that he has to decide which departments to fire before his meeting in 15 minutes."
I continue, “Natalie, we may not have a job tomorrow. How can you fire whole departments at a magazine? Which department are you going to cut? Editorial? Marketing? Or!” My voice is getting a little louder now but I can’t help myself, “Production?”
I dropped my voice and lean forward to whisper, “I think he’s going to take the company apart and try to sell the pieces for a profit.”
She sits back and eyeballs me speculatively, nibbling on her lip as she does. I’m the emotional one out of the two, while she’s the analytical one. She never panics until she has to, and there’s a small—okay, very large—part of me that wants to hear it from her that there’s no reason to panic.
“What else did Mrs. Sanders say?” she asks.
“Nothing.” I take a sip of my drink, enjoying the warmth flowing through me from the liberal amount of alcohol. Something to calm my nerves.
“Is this what you talked about with Apollo after work?”
“Yeah, we both ended up on the same elevator, and I…took the opportunity to chew him out.” I laugh quietly while staring down at my hands. Thinking back on it that was a really stupid thing to do, really. I mean, he is my new boss, however long the job lasts, and certainly chewing his ass wouldn’t prol
ong my career at Blush.
“His response?” Her voice is just a touch exasperated.
I shrug. “I didn’t exactly give him the chance to give me one. I chewed him out and stormed off.” I’m squirming in my seat now. How is it that Natalie knows me so well? Can’t she just pretend that I’m always right and fuck the rest of the world?
“Well, I say we don’t panic just yet,” Natalie pronounces with an air of authority that, I’ll admit, I love hearing. “It could be that he was simply supposed to look at the departments before the meeting, and Mrs. Sanders misspoke. It could be that he looks at the departments and decides to only cut one or two people. I mean, we really don’t know, right?”
I nod my head miserably, realizing that if Natalie is right, the magazine as a whole will survive, but no matter what, I’m pretty fucked.
Fuck.
“So, let’s just hope that you overreacted, he’s not going to fire anyone, or if he does fire someone, it’s Janice in Accounting—that bitch has had it coming for years—and that he has selective amnesia and will forget that you yelled at him. Twice.”
“Perfect,” I laugh, and we clink our margarita glasses together. “That’s an outcome I can get behind.”
We enjoy our dinner of seafood soup and lots more chips and salsa, and then decide to head over to the SoHo to really get our drink on. I mean, yeah, I spent way too much on the cab this morning and I’m spending way too much on food and drink tonight, but fuck it. My job is going down in flames. If there is ever a time to say, “Fuck you, world, I hate you!” and get blitzed, this is it.
Not that I usually need much of a reason, let’s be honest, but today is giving them to me in spades anyway.
After taking a cab over that Natalie mercifully paid for, we wander into a swanky dimly-lit bar that looks like it attracts the power-suits kind of men that I always find my panties getting wet over. Drinks will be way too expensive, but I don’t care. I’m on a mission—to get buzzed, or to get fucked, and preferably both. Anything to end my six-months-and-one-day losing streak but barring that, at least get fucked until my eyes cross.
