by Carter Blake
“I don’t, but I want to so fucking bad.”
“Then fuck me in front of this fucking whiteboard right fucking now.”
Time stops yet again.
Or it somehow starts bending, because I could not tell you what happens first: my cock slipping into Maddie’s wonderfully wet pussy, or my own hands falling onto the wall on either side of Maddie’s.
That part is a blur, but I’m back in the present again, and thankfully lucid as those immense pleasure waves run through me.
Maddie has a preternatural sense for moving in harmony. As my pace increases, gradually, hers does at the exact same time.
I don’t even notice how much we’re both grunting until we really going at it in earnest thrusting with a bottomless passion and yelling much too loudly for any noise machine to even think about competing with us.
“Ugh!”
“Ah!”
“Ugh!”
“Ah!”
We’re taking turns, at least.
Now that we’ve found our groove, which is intense and loud today, we stay at the same pace.
It’s perfect.
I move one hand off the wall and onto Maddie’s side, feeling around her waist then lightly teasing around her tits.
Maddie lets out a throaty, raspy screech that makes our grunting sound like sprightly little whispers in comparison. I can tell she’s coming as she thrashes her hands against the whiteboard, sending it crashing to the floor with a deafening racket.
I hear myself grunting again.
“Yeah, keep fucking going. I need to come one more time,” Maddie snarls with a fierceness that almost makes me come.
We go back to grunting, simultaneously, hastening the pace as we both start to reach the top of the mountain together.
When I sense that the summit is in sight, and I can feel it looming, Maddie’s grunts turn to soft sighs. My grunts also transform to quieter moans as we draw near the point of no return.
With another raspy screech, Maddie flips her head back up, tossing her golden hair down her back.
Maddie directs a shrill moan up at the ceiling, and I pull out as she moans again.
I come all over my suit jacket on the floor as Maddie orgasms with a final shriek.
We stay in that weird position for a few seconds, with Maddie leaning against the wall and me standing a few inches behind her.
We catch our breaths as the glow of a perfect sunset fills the entire room.
Maddie stands up and starts retrieving her underwear and her dress.
With our intense appetites sated—at least for the time being—we both start chuckling as we get redressed.
“Shit,” Maddie declares, holding her panties out in front of her. “I hope this place is clean.”
“It’s disinfected at least once a day.”
“It needs to be,” Maddie responds cryptically.
I’m about to offer to run down to Dior get some undergarments and Anthropologie for a new dress and whatever else Maddie wants, but she’s already putting her bra back on, well on her way to getting dressed entirely.
“What did you tell work?” I ask her.
“I told them I’m not feeling well, but I finished the meeting. Zip, please?”
I zip up the back of Maddie’s dress, and she drops onto a chair and smiles. Her shoes are still on the floor, and my heart soars at the thought of Maddie staying at least a little while.
Ethan
“So, are you ready to go take a look now?” I’m reclining as much as I can in the office chair, barely hearing my own voice ask the question.
“What?” Maddie’s busy throwing the markers and everything else into the two plastic shopping bags that Kallie left on the floor.
“To go see if anyone’s here.”
I put my feet back on the floor, ready to take a for-real walk. Maddie just looks at me like I’m the craziest bastard she’s seen all day, which would probably be saying something.
“Do we really need to go through all that again?”
I put the brakes on and try to remember what happened before our boardroom meeting.
“Fuck, that’s embarrassing. It’s not new to you anymore, and you certainly know there’s no one around at this point.”
“I certainly hope not, Mr. Barrett.”
Maddie’s got both bags, packed full of markers and packaging, with one of them holding the entire whiteboard, clenched in one hand. I see her eyes travel to the bags before traveling mischievously somewhere off toward the distance.
“Maddie, what are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.” The corners of Maddie’s lips turn up ever so slightly.
“You know I don’t like to leave a mess for the janitorial staff, right?”
Maddie shrugs, her smile now large and unstoppable.
“Just tell Kallie to clean it up.”
Maddie pitches both packed bags across the room, their contents tumbling out onto the conference table surface.
“Damn, Mad.”
The markers are fairly quiet, but when the whiteboard falls out, it clangs with a wicked racket. I actually fucking cringe when I hear it.
“You know how I feel about people calling me that, Eth.”
“I think the table just broke.”
“How could that table break?” Maddie puts her hands on her hips, trying to convey a sour, pissed-off expression, but I can see the smile already starting to play around her lips again.
“The tabletop, I mean. It may be cracked now.”
Maddie gestures in the direction of the table with the top of her head.
“Go check.”
She says it so casually. I want her so bad again.
But it’s not just like I want to fuck her. I want to be with her, to be beside her.
I want her there to be sassy, throw shit, and make me fucking laugh. All the fucking time.
But I know she’s just going to leave again soon. That’s the way it’s been and that’s the way it will continue to be.
I go to check. I walk to the middle of the table, reach over, and move the whiteboard.
“It’s still pristine—the whiteboard didn’t do shit.”
“Well, yippee for that hedge fund tabletop. May it live to see many more years of pointless meetings.”
I start sweeping the markers and the whiteboard into a big pile at the edge of the table.
“Pointless, you say?”
“Yeah,” Maddie answers quickly, her hands still on her hips. “Every single one.”
“Even today? Even your meetings?”
I can’t help myself. I’m already sweeping the mess back into the bags. There’s no way Kallie is cleaning this up; it’s going to end up being some poor janitor working a sixteen-hour day.
I hear a heavy sigh coming from Maddie’s side of the room.
It’s definitely from Madeline, but there’s a world-weariness I wouldn’t expect to hear from her.
“I’ve been trying, Ethan.” Madeline’s tone is so hefty that I’m afraid to even look up from what I’m doing. “I wanted...I still want to do this the easy way.”
“The easy way?” It’s like I’m following a script at this point. I need her to fess up, even if she needs me to lead her on a bit.
“Interviews, Ethan. That’s what I told my higher-ups. Not formal interviews—I thought I could keep it casual. A new approach.”
Now I’m holding both plastic bags, one in each hand. They’re both bursting with Kallie’s garbage.
“Do you have an old approach?” I’m staring at my hands holding the bags like a shy child. I know where this is going.
“No. I mean new for this branch office.”
I walk in Madeline’s direction, looking at her. She’s not trying to hide a frown of disappointment with a mounting, resigned anxiety in her eyes.
“Investigations never start this way in New York?”
“They start this way, but they don’t continue this way for this long. I’m not going b
y the book, and I was hoping to avoid that.”
I deposit the bags on a chair a few spots from the end of the table in case Maddie starts to feel like Maddie again.
“Why?”
“Because now, it’s only going to get worse.”
“Why?”
I arrive at my spot just in front of Madeline, getting close enough that she has to look up at me.
I lightly rub her back with one hand, and her frown and troubled eyes start to take on a maudlin, playful tone.
“Can we speak in your office?”
I look around the room as if I’m checking for a giant reel-to-reel recording our entire conversation.
“Madeline, we’re safe here. I’m sure of it.”
“I’m sure of it too. I’d just like to see your office. Please?”
Shit, if Maddie didn’t worry about being recorded up until now, with everything we just did in this room, she must mean business.
“Okay, let’s check it out.”
Madeline nods, and she’s halfway out the door by the time I take my first step.
“I appreciate you giving me your time after hours,” Madeline calls out to me as I follow her down the corridor. “I hope we can get some of these questions answered.”
Now that Madeline’s got me in a sort of paranoid state, I try to act natural and pull my business phone out from my pocket to check my messages.
There’s an email notification on the lock screen. I don’t usually get notifications for emails, except for one account—the account that the partners set up for me when I first joined.
The email is from John Barrister’s Gmail account.
Why would he be using his Gmail account?
We need to talk re:Basel. Remind me when you see me next.
“Not this shit again,” I say out loud as Maddie opens my office door.
“What shit?” she asks, walking around my desk to sit in my chair.
After walking into my office, I close the door behind me and pull up a chair to my desk.
“I keep forgetting, even though it’s a big fucking deal. The firm is in talks, internally, to move to Switzerland.”
“Switzerland?” Maddie lets out an odd, vaguely horrified laugh after saying the word.
“Yeah, weird, right? It’s not going to happen, or at least I doubt it.”
“When have you heard about an entire firm making a move like that?”
“Exactly. I think it’s just a negotiating tactic because our lease in the building is almost up. They’re trying to make it look as realistic as possible.”
Maddie spins around in my chair, making a complete rotation to the window behind the desk and back. Her expression’s still dead serious.
“That is one nice view you’ve got here.”
“Tell me about it. That’s why it doesn’t make any sense—this is a historic building, we’re on an upper floor, and I don’t think there’s room to negotiate.”
“You don’t say...” Maddie gingerly brings her hand to the open laptop on my desk then swiftly slams it shut.
“Hey,” I complain weakly.
“Not what this is, I’m afraid.”
“Not what what is?”
Maddie watches my laptop and waits for the light indicating it’s in sleep mode before she continues.
“Are you really thinking about moving to Basel?”
“How did you know the city? Did they tell you, or did you uncover that detail somehow?”
Maddie pushes back with her foot, sending the chair a few feet backwards.
“No, just a lucky guess.” Maddie brings the chair back up to the desk. “Why do you think they chose Basel?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know much about the town. I’m picturing some whimsical village in the Alps with hot chocolate and cuckoo clocks.”
“Hate to break it to you, Eth, but Basel’s a city, and it’s not close to any mountains.”
I feel disappointed after hearing that description, which means I must be thinking about it more than I realized.
“It’s not whimsical, then?
“I don’t know about whimsical. They did invent LSD there, but that’s because Basel has a ton of pharma company headquarters.”
I look out the window behind Maddie. It feels like she’s going off on a long tangent away from what she’s supposed to be investigating and making assumptions that are way off the mark.
“I do not get your logic, Madeline.”
“There’s none to get yet. I’m just saying it’s a coincidence. In fact, it probably is just a coincidence.”
I audibly sigh with relief.
“There has to be some more obvious reason...”
“Yeah, like the fact that Switzerland’s basically a giant hedge fund.” Maddie pokes the top of my laptop with her finger, looking almost as sad as I’ve ever seen her. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out in good time.”
“Couldn’t you extradite from Switzerland?”
Maddie stands up and brushes the shoulders of her dress with her hands. I laugh loudly yet briefly; Madeline ignores that.
“If they move enough of their assets, we’ll probably let the case go cold.”
“Meaning they’ll get away with it.”
Maddie starts toward the door, about to leave me alone in my office. As usual, I don’t know where, when, or even if I’ll be seeing her again.
“Meaning you’ll get away with it, if you stay on. Probably.”
I listen to Maddie leave and stare out the office window, seeing nothing but the darkening sky from my perspective.
Ethan
“Happy Friday, Sleeping Beauty!”
Greg’s getting gutsy these days. And does everybody know about the one fucking time I slept in the office?
I know it was just yesterday, but...
But, whatever. I grunt in response to Greg and continue down the corridor to my office.
I don’t give a shit that it’s Friday anyway.
When you’re as much of a workaholic as I am, Fridays don’t mean much anyway.
I might be here tomorrow, when the office is nice and empty.
Saturdays—when it’s only me here, if anyone.
“No disgusting deli paper cup coffee today?”
Barrister’s gone before I can reply to his little jab. He’s well on his way in the other direction.
Fuck. Not only am I looking forward to a quiet, empty office tomorrow, I’m starting to regret coming in today.
I feel instant relief after walking through my office door. That annoying fucking walk through the corridor aside, I’m looking forward to putting my nose to the grindstone and keeping it there.
I even enjoy the mindless routine of getting my laptop, tablet, and business phone ready for a long day of work.
That’s what I need right now—a long day of being carried away by numbers and by market trends and hard analysis that has nothing to fucking do with intraoffice gossip, circus-like board meetings, weird, needless competitiveness or any of the other shit that’s been inundating the firm.
The second I get everything, it suddenly starts raining like fucking crazy outside, with raindrops falling fast and loud on the window.
Good—that should block out the noise of the rest of the fucking office, at least..
As my finger hovers over my laptop trackpad, ready to inaugurate another marathon work session, my fucking desk phone rings.
Of course, it’s the intraoffice ring. What the fuck could it be now?
I pick up the fucking phone, mostly to get it to stop ringing.
“What is it, Greg?” I growl into the receiver.
“Who?” The female voice on the other end sounds majorly confused.
“Greg. You know, the only person who’s ever called this phone—until now. Who is this?”
“This is Kallie!”
I rummage through my mind for a moment before placing the name. I just watched Kallie give a presentation yesterday, but I’m trying to not think about to
o much of the bullshit happening these days.
She doesn’t sound too offended, though. She sounds almost bubbly.
“What can I do for you, Kallie?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Not much.”
Really? Really? What the fuck is going on?
“Kallie, I know you’re new around here, and forgive me if I sound gruff, but...”
I’m ready to tell her that this is a work line, meant for work-related purposes, so if she doesn’t have something important to say, then I need to hang up.
But I seriously don’t know what the fuck she’s doing, so I’ll try not to be too much of a jerk.
“Is there something you needed to tell me, Kallie? Or ask? Something about work?”
“Hmm. Yes, actually…”
Kallie pauses. For crying out fucking loud.
Fuck, I don’t know. Maybe she’s nervous, maybe she forgot.
“Are you okay, Kallie? If you need some time to remember, you can call me back…”
“What happened to my presentation?”
The fate of Kallie’s magic marker whiteboard presentation is not the first thing on my mind right now. I think back to yesterday afternoon, which is a very enjoyable thing to think about.
Suddenly, I’m lost in a daydream.
I’m no longer in my office on Friday morning, but I’m back in the boardroom on Thursday afternoon.
And Maddie and I are enjoying the best damn business meeting imaginable. Things got a little heated—or a lot heated—during that meeting, but it was a lively and productive exchange.
“Helllooooo?” Kallie’s voice on the phone brings me right the fuck back to the present. “What happened to my presentation, Ethan? Or have you gone deaf?”
Jesus.
I don’t know what the fuck is up with Kallie, but her presentation was a casualty of my meeting with Maddie.
But seriously, what the hell is going on with Kallie?
Fuck it, I don’t even fucking care anymore. If Kallie wants to know what happened, I’ll do for her what I’d do for anybody:
Tell her the truth.
There’ll surely be consequences for me, but…
Fuck, there’d be consequences for Maddie too.
Dammit.
The click of Kallie hanging up interrupts my train of thought.