Sophie sniveled miserably, her whole body shaking and rattling with sobs, and Liz went over to finish her coffee and a croissant that she found in the little pastry display. She was in a cool-down mode, apparently, because she looked a little more on edge and no-nonsense than she usually did.
Charlie didn’t care; when she sat next to him, he searched for her hand, squeezed it, then moved it to the bulge growing in his pants, giving her a seductive look.
At first, Liz pulled her hand away, giving him a ‘now’s not a good time; what’s the matter with you?’ look. After a moment, she returned her hand to that bulge, running her hand over it and raising her eyebrows with surprise. “Wow,” she mouthed to him, then she gave him a seductive grin and a squeeze, to which his whole body jerked in tense response. He even grabbed the edge of the table, but then she patted his inner thigh and returned her hand to her coffee, which was good for his plan of not creaming the front of his pants, despite that part of his brain that wished she would keep squeezing.
Josh pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and thumbed something on the keyboard before putting it away, trying to look very casual, and then he went back to reading his paper.
Charlie felt his cellphone in his pocket buzz to alert him of a message. He tried to give Josh a look that said, ‘What are we? Passing notes like we’re in the second grade?’ but Josh continued to look at his hockey section. He was, indeed, just looking at it, because his eyes were not moving like someone who was reading.
Charlie sighed, pulled out his phone, and glanced at the message on the screen.
HOTTEST THING I EVER SAW.
SHOTGUN. SRSLY. SHOTGUN.
He rolled his eyes and put the cellphone away before pretending to read his newspaper when he was really glancing at Sophie’s quivering little bottom every two seconds until Liz walked to the corner with a box of tissues in her hand.
She knelt in front of Sophie, put a tissue over Sophie’s nose, and commanded her to blow.
Sophie hesitated, but did what she was asked to. Liz hugged her tightly, and Sophie wrapped her arms around Liz like she was a life-preserver, still crying.
Liz pulled Sophie’s panties up and her skirt down, then rubbed her back and shushed in her ear. “It’s all right, honey. You’re okay. You’re forgiven.”
Sophie took a deep breath to collect herself and stepped away from Liz, trying to dry her cheeks off with the palms of her hands. She turned to Charlie and looked straight at him.
Charlie was certain, judging by the angry, embarrassed, and tired look on her flushed face, that she was going to say something particularly nasty to him, blaming him for her current red-bottomed state and for the ruining of her day.
Instead, she moved toward him, her whole body looking very tense and rigid. When she reached him, she suddenly threw her arms around him in an explosive movement.
“Whoa!” he said, surprised and trying to move his chair out from the table a bit so he could slip his arms around her waist. She was crying all over again, sobbing.
“Okay…” he said, concerned, and corralling her onto his lap. Maybe she still had some after-effects of the drugs she was given for the pain yesterday? Or possibly it was a hangover from the drugs—because that could make some people emotional too.
“I’m sorry,” she rasped, squeezing his neck tighter. “I shouldn’t have been a jerk to you all week…” She sniffled. “I’ll pay you back for the loan,” she assured in his ear.
He and Liz glanced at each other and simultaneously rolled their eyes. “Sweetheart, listen,” he began, pulling her away from him to look in her eyes. “I’m never going to let you pay me back for that, okay? If you won’t let me spoil you a little bit, then I’m gonna start getting pretty grouchy.”
He tried to coax her into smiling, but it wasn’t working, so he added, “I’m serious! There’re only two things I’m interested in—football and family. And you’re family. Just because you don’t want me to be your daddy doesn’t mean you’re not my little girl—I’m gonna give you everything you need whether you want it or not. So you’ll just have to put up with me.”
The corners of her mouth twitched, and he repressed heaving a sigh of relief. She let him wipe some of the new tears off her cheeks with his big hands and then he kissed her forehead. “Still plan to go to work today?” he asked her when he could see, in his peripheral vision, Liz checking her watch for the time.
Sophie nodded, and Charlie patted her off of his lap, shifting her so she didn’t accidentally knee him in the groin, which was still very swollen and very angry with the idea that he had a girl’s heat, covered only by panties, pushing up against his bulge and he hadn’t done anything with it.
He gave her a playful swat on the back of her skirt. “Now wash your face and get going before you girls have to speed the whole way there just to make it on time.”
As both women hurried into the powder room to correct their appearances, he picked up his newspaper and shook it out, as if he was quite used to random acts of affection from sensitive, barely legal teenagers.
The two women spent a few minutes composing themselves; Liz changed into another business suit, one that wasn’t quite so tear-stained, and Sophie washed her face before having to assure Liz, in a very quiet and non-whining manner, that she wasn’t hungry for breakfast at all.
Liz didn’t stop fussing until Sophie eventually admitted that if they were to get a smoothie on the way there, and that any smoothie would do, then it would be drunk before they reached the office.
“All right, then,” Liz said, though she was obviously unhappy that she wasn’t successful in forcing a muffin down the girl’s throat. She walked over to Josh, gave him a kiss that was surely much longer than she had planned, and then Charlie, who was happy for a peck on the cheek. Sophie only twiddled her small fingers at them as a goodbye from the doorframe.
When they left the house, Josh rushed to his feet and bounded up to the kitchen window, where, if he leaned a certain way, he could watch the girls getting into the car. “Shit-fuck!” Josh said, making up a new crudity. “I’m going to be jerking off to what I just saw for the rest of my life. We got to start shooting videos of Sophie getting spanked. That’s how I can get to be a millionaire…”
“Don’t even joke, Josh,” Charlie warned with a threatening growl as he climbed out of his chair, intent on waddling into his bedroom and beating off. “If you forget your morals, try to remember that she should be going to high school right now, not to work.”
“Urgh!” Josh groaned as he pulled away from the window. “That’ll just make it worse! My cock hears shit like that, Charlie!” He paused, then groaned, “See? It’s too late. Now I have an image of her in one of those Catholic schoolgirl ensembles… I can’t take it anymore. I’m going home.” With that, he stomped outside toward the pool house.
Charlie groaned and stomped in the opposite direction now that he, too, had that same image.
Chapter Seven
“So what’s the deal with you and the Devil Woman?” Sophie’s boss grunted as she was making photocopies someone ordered on the top floor.
Sophie’s head jerked up. “What do you mean?” she asked with a sideways glance.
“I saw you drive up with her this morning. Getting quite friendly with upper management, are we?” He didn’t sound happy about it. In fact, there was a lot of implication behind his words.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’re in a carpool together,” she snapped defensively, although she had a desire to brush her hands up against her bottom again. Damn it all, it wouldn’t stop burning!
“She lives way out in Duxbury!” he snorted with disbelief.
“And I am on the way to and from,” she replied firmly.
“Last I checked, you lived around Southie,” he surprised her by saying. He didn’t even know her name, but he could remember an address? He must have just looked that up.
“Well, check again. I moved out a couple weeks ago.
”
“To where?” When she gave him the queer look his inquiry deserved, he said, “Need it for your paperwork.”
“I don’t know the address off the top of my head,” she mumbled. “I’ll get it for you later.”
He walked away. “You’d better not be fuckin’ her, that’s all I can say. Everything’s dandy when you’re fucking senior partners while you’re doing it, but as soon as you take the tongue out of her snatch, you’ll be cut loose so fast it’ll make your head spin.”
She tried to keep her face from paling and raised her chin up. She was offended, but showing it was just going to give weight to the rumor of her dating Liz. “Thanks for the tip. When was the last time you were mouth-fucking one of the bosses?” Normally she wouldn’t be so brave, but she was dating upper management, and it was funny since Liz was the only woman lawyer in the building, hence if he was mouth-fucking one of the bosses, it wasn’t in the same way.
He narrowed his eyes at her. “Nice mouth,” he hissed, then turned to go into his office, repeating in a grumble that she had to update her contact information before he closed the door.
She puffed with annoyance and then tapped the bottom of her photocopies to line them up before going upstairs to deliver them.
She was happy to finally see the day over. All she wanted to do was snuggle up with Liz for a bit, go up to her room, watch some television, and pass out. She felt nearly too tired to breathe as it was. She stopped by Elizabeth’s office before she headed downstairs to clock out her timecard, but Elizabeth took one look at her, sighed, and Sophie felt bad news coming her way.
“I’m sorry, sweetie. Something just came up a little while ago. Charlie’s going to have to stop by and pick you up after work. I already called him.” When Sophie wilted, she added, “I have another business dinner, baby. This is a busy time of year; everybody’s trying to scramble to get their year-end work done before the holidays…”
Sophie wanted to tell her that it wasn’t okay; that she was tired, and she just wanted to snuggle up with her for a while tonight while desperately trying to forget the spanking she got earlier. She wanted to stomp her feet and scream and pout and throw something.
Instead, she just nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s okay. I mean, what can you do, right?”
Elizabeth groaned and rubbed her temples. “And I promised a date with Charlie tonight, too. I’m just screwing everything up.”
A date with Charlie? Sophie felt like she literally had to swallow down her anger. Why not?
“Nah,” Sophie waved it off. “I’m sure he understands. He’s used to it, right?”
Elizabeth smirked. “Well, I’m getting him back. He used to stand me up in college half the time… not meaning to or anything. Things came up…” Her eyes rounded, seeming to detect Sophie’s sadness. “Tomorrow we’ll do something together, okay? Remember it’s the weekend.”
“Right. It’s okay. I’ll be fine tonight.” She waved her hand. “Don’t think about it for another moment.”
Liz frowned. “I love you, sweetie,” Liz told her before Sophie opened the door.
Sophie gave a forced smile, then opened the door and shuffled to the elevator. Luckily, she had a moment alone in there enough to pull at the bottom of her sweater in frustration, grating, “Gawd! My life got so weird!” And unfortunately, that included having the perfect girlfriend with the caveat that she had to be spanked, get treated like a little girl, and then neglected like one.
It figured. History does, after all, repeat itself.
And history was waiting in the lobby, where a guard was trying to tell a man wearing dingy, grimy jeans and a puffy flannel jacket that he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the building. She tried to sneak by without being seen by him, knowing what he wanted—money.
“Hey, String Bean Jean!” her grandfather, Roy, called out when he turned and caught her trying to tiptoe into the back offices.
She took a deep breath and let it out before slowly turning around. “Roy, you… you can’t come and see me here. I’m at work,” she reminded patiently and slowly, anticipating that he was probably drunk. Statistically it was much more unlikely that he was sober.
“Well, how else would I see you? Heard you finally got your skinny ass kicked out.” He heel-toed a step closer to her.
She grimaced. Yep, he was definitely drunk.
The security guard glared at her. “If this is a personal meeting, take it outside or to your office,” the guard told her, enunciating his consonants bitterly.
She sighed, knowing that there wasn’t any shooing Roy away. “Come on,” she said, escorting Roy into the copy room where her coat hung, and then she walked out the back door into the alley between the parking lot and the building. “You’re gonna get me in trouble!” she hissed.
“Whewee!” Roy, once he was unbothered by the guard, put his cigarette to his lips. “Look at you, girl! All grown up! Who’s the guy you’re wearing skirts for?” He leaned over and added, “One of the reasons we had your mama so young is because of your grandmother wearing skirts like that.”
She grimaced and shifted her shoulders uncomfortably. “Roy, why are you here?”
“I was on the number 42 bus,” he began, “when I looked over at this cute little red Porsche next to me. And guess who I saw riding in it? Now, I couldn’t see the driver, but I’m guessing that motherfucker’s loaded, especially with those fancy new clothes you got. Are you giving him some of your sugar pot or what?” He winked and then waved his hand. “Nah, don’t answer. Better me not knowing. What you do is what you do, but you wouldn’t happen to have a Benjamin for your grandfather, would ya?”
From Sophie’s past experiences with her drunken grandfather, she recognized the only answer to that question was “yes.” Before her mother met her stepfather, she and her mother had to live with the asshole. He was the one person on the planet who could actually make her stepdad seem like a pretty swell guy. Roy was barely in his mid-forties, but he looked thin and world-weary and pale. He’d never been able to hold down a job and spent most of his time drinking himself into his hat at a dingy strip-bar that never seemed to close.
Today, Sophie peered at him with hatred. “It was a Lexus, actually.”
SMACK.
Sophie teetered back on her feet, completely taken aback from the backhanded blow across her cheek. Her grandfather merely pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and said, “Don’t give me none of that fucking lip of yours.” He grabbed her face with one of his skinny-fingered hands. It was cold from being outside, and his thumb was pressing up against the most tender part of her mouth.
She whimpered slightly, unwilling to move lest he put pressure on a place that was already screaming with pain. “You think you’re so high and mighty because you haven’t squeezed out a brat yet, don’t you? You think you’re better than us, yet it was your tramp-ass even a slut like your mother threw out to the street. What does that say? Hm?” He shifted her face left and right. “Well, you wait. You’re gonna get yourself knocked up real soon by this hot-shot you’re fucking, and then you’ll be back out on your ass, make no mistake. Before then, though—I want you to give me some cash before I get mad.”
He let her face go with a rough push, propelling her body to the right, causing her to stumble back. She decided to just give him what he wanted. since his next move would be to punch her and steal her jacket. He’d done that before to take her first paycheck two years ago.
He smoked casually and leaned up against the door, with a cruel, thin-lipped smirk on his stubbly face, watching her open her jacket and fish for the wallet she hid within the inside pocket. She pulled out all of her cash, knowing that if he saw green inside the flap, he was just going to take it anyway.
She shoved the wad of money toward him. “That’s it,” she spat, her jaw throbbing unbearably. “Enjoy the next few drinks, asshole, because I’m tapped dry. I’ve got enough to worry about without you waltzing in to take my hard-earned money while you
piss all yours away.”
He raised his eyebrows at her as if amused, and took the cash out of her hand and stuck it slowly into his pocket.
She was sure that he was going to try to slap her again, but then it seemed like he was actually about to walk off. Halfway through his turn, however, he turned back and backhanded her again, spinning her body toward the wall behind her. “Bitch,” her grandfather grumbled.
Suddenly there was a loud smashing noise. Sophie whipped her head toward her grandfather in time enough to see Charlie Hobbes—all 6′6″ of him, choke-holding Roy up against the wall high enough that his legs were kicking.
Charlie was a daddy, all the way through—he was grumpy at home, but he always had control of himself. This, however, was not the Charlie she knew. This was a Charlie that must have seen the second smack and then lost his mind.
“Charlie! No.” She realized how a bear-tamer would feel if the bear had suddenly gone on a tourist-killing rampage. She grabbed his large forearm quickly. “No!”
“He hit you,” he growled, his eyes not leaving Roy’s.
She shrugged, like she always did in highly tense situations. “He’s my grandpa! It’s not a big deal, Charlie! Put him down!”
God, she could just see it on the news—Charlie going to prison for killing a drunk who was currently pissing the front of his pants. All because of her.
Charlie blinked, suddenly confused. “This piss-ant’s your grandpa?” he repeated, sounding dazed.
She nodded.
Charlie dropped Roy to his feet, where Roy took a loud, wheezing breath. Charlie grabbed the front of Roy’s jacket, then threw him up against the wall again. “Get in the car, baby girl,” Charlie told her, his eyes still narrowed on Roy. With his other hand, he pointed behind him toward the office’s lot where his black Lexus sat, the motor still humming.
She shook her head. “No, Charlie. Just let him go.”
Being Their Baby Page 11