Broken Enagement

by Gage Grayson

  Feeling fearless, I tap John Barrister on the arm as he passes me, trying to get his attention.

  Barrister stops, looks down at his arm, then looks at me with shock and bewilderment.

  “Say, you wouldn’t know where I could find some paper towels, would ya?”

  Barrister’s brow furrows in slow motion.

  “What do I look like, a goddamn building custodian?”

  I barely hold in a laugh. Barrister sees right through me. His jowls are turning cherry red.

  “What’s so goddamn funny, Barrett?” he barks.

  “I’ve never heard anyone say the word custodian so angrily before. To be frank, I thought it was fantastic. But seriously, do you any idea where...”

  Barrister’s already hobbling away, muttering. I can’t make out most of what he’s saying, but I’m pretty sure he calls me a beatnik at one point.

  “Just get a receptionist to call a janitor.”

  I actually jump at the sound of Rosen’s voice behind me, but I play it cool and nonchalantly swivel around to respond.

  “A janitor for what?”

  “For the cheap, dime-store coffee splattered all over your office floor.”

  Rosen’s arms are crossed grumpily as he looks up at me. He’s clutching his Homburg hat in one hand.

  “You were in—”

  “That’s right. I graced your office with my very own presence, if you can believe such a thing. Only I didn’t find you there. I found only the evidence of your rubbishy taste and your carelessness.”

  “I think it’s good coff—”

  “But not to worry. I sent an intern to clean it. I need to drill in your head that you are not to waste your talents, nor part of a costly business day, on janitorial work. It’s absurd.”

  “Uh-huh. Why were you in my office?”

  Rosen’s arms uncross, but he keeps his hat up by his chest, close to his heart.

  “Did someone die?”

  “Is that your attempt at humor, Barrett?”

  “No.”

  “Everyone at the firm is still very much alive, but so is this blasted investigation.”

  My accumulated fatigue rams into me with the weight of a truck. Luckily, it doesn’t last long, and I’m back in lucid work mode before I can conk out on the floor.

  “Right. I guess we just need to let them do their jobs, right? If we’ve got nothing to hide...”

  “What are you on about, Barrett?” Rosen crosses his arms again. “We need you in the meeting at five. But until then, please don’t say a word about it!”

  I swear that Rosen makes a literal huff noise when he spins around and strides away from me.

  The unfortunate intern tasked with cleaning the coffee from my office did a fine job. When I walk back in, the carpet is pristine and the cup is gone.

  My manic enthusiasm for working is also gone.

  There’s another meeting with the SEC in just a few hours. I sit down on the small burgundy love seat by the window.

  I feel charged with excitement, but not the kind of excitement that’ll help me focus. I lie down to rest my eyes for a few more seconds.

  I open my eyes to see my office awash in auburn sunlight. That’s better; all I need is a few seconds at a time, or a few...

  What fucking time is it?

  I leap off my love seat and make it all the way to my desk in one bound. I grab my phone and fuck, of course it’s fucking five-twenty already.

  Is Madeline even still here?

  I’ve been doing such a good job of not thinking about when Maddie will show up next, of letting things happen in their own time, that I may just fucking miss her entirely.

  I use the front camera on my phone to quickly check my hair, then I tear out of my office like Usain Bolt rushing to make a tight connection at LaGuardia.

  It takes about twenty seconds to walk from my office to the boardroom at a leisurely pace. Fortunately, I’m traveling much faster than that.

  I see a quick blur of the gothic hallway and hear a split second of what sounds like somebody laughing, and I’m already opening the door to the boardroom and seeing Kallie giving a presentation.

  Wait.

  What?

  The fuck?

  Kallie’s wearing her bright-blue hair down today, and it’s falling almost to her shoulders. She’s wearing a very similar dress to the one she had yesterday, only this one is dark gray instead of black.

  She’s pointing to something on the wall, and just as I walk in, a gale of laughter bursts from the conference table.

  I have no idea what Kallie said, but she got a huge laugh from the firm’s upper management, and now she’s smiling at me as if she expected me to walk in.

  I take a few more steps in, trying not to look too fucking tentative. Maddie is sitting at my usual spot at the far end of the table. She’s wearing a pleasant expression, but she doesn’t have the same amused, shit-eating grin the partners and execs are all displaying.

  “Thank you, Ms. Fern.” Barrister is standing up, slowly, and he’s using his kindliest voice. “That’s a wonderful demonstration of modern securities practices, and I’m sure an illuminating view of how we do things for Ms...”

  “Madeline,” Maddie says, also standing up. “I appreciate all your effort, Ms. Fern, but I’m quite familiar with industry machinations.”

  That word instantly sucks the air from the room.

  “Machinations?” Rosen’s voice asks accusingly.

  “Excuse me, I mean your methods, your procedures, your way of functioning...”

  “That’s not what it sounded like to me.” Rosen spins in his seat to face me. “What did it sound like to you, Mr. Barrett, now that we’re almost half an hour into this important meeting?”

  “It sounded like an innocent mistake,” I answer. “An imprecise word choice.”

  There are crumpled plastic bags from the office supply store at Kallie’s feet. It looks like she’s mounted a whiteboard to the wall and left a pile of various colored markers on the floor beneath it.

  “That’s very interesting.” Rosen’s voice is becoming his infamous snarl. “I’m so glad our time is valuable enough for you to show up at all!”

  Holy fucking shit. I don’t usually hear him yell that intensely.

  “Alright, Leroy. I know this is tense for all of us.” Barrister’s using his best soothing tone as he glares at Rosen and sits back down.

  “Please, proceed,” Rosen says hoarsely.

  Madeline walks around the side of the table, getting closer to the whiteboard, and to me.

  She’s wearing a black-and-white pleated dress, and her hair is done up in sort of a loose bun.

  I forgot how Maddie looks fucking amazing with her hair up, letting her features stand out on their own.

  She’s walking in my direction, and I stay where I am. Kallie sidles toward me to make room for Madeline.

  “Not to harp on this, although that’s what I’m sort of here to do.”

  A grumbling rises from the men at the conference table. They’re all visibly uncomfortable right now, so I look back at Maddie.

  Maddie ponders the colorful mess on the whiteboard, and I can see the laughter in her eyes. She lets out the start of a laugh, but she stops it and clears her throat.

  Madeline turns to face the table directly and continues.

  “Gentlemen—and I’m sorry to exclude you, Ms. Fern, you weren’t here yet, but you’re welcome to stay now—anyway, if any of you gentlemen would please indulge the issues I’d like to bring up with your timing last July...”

  The grumbling restarts, louder than before.

  “That’s just the start,” Maddie continues. “There are a few irregularities going back—”

  “Please, Madeline,” Barrister interrupts. “Save your breath. None of us are going to discuss these matters in this setting.”

  The conference table grumble evolves, becoming self-righteous.

  “I guess we’ll have to pursue this some other
way, then,” she responds quietly.

  “I guess so.” Barrister stands up smugly with his smug statement, and the rest of the table follows.

  I remain in my spot, watching the suddenly very quiet executives leave swiftly. I sense an air of uneasy victory as they walk by.

  Kallie gives Madeline a weird, seemingly meaningless look before walking out behind the executives, leaving her shit all over the floor.

  They do clear the room very efficiently.

  “What do you think?” Maddie asks once the room is empty.

  I think I enjoy the sound of her voice echoing lightly through the vacant boardroom, but that’s not the answer she’s looking for.

  “I don’t know.”

  I feel the heat of Maddie’s gorgeous eyes as she reads me for a long moment.

  “You really don’t know, Ethan. I believe it.”

  “What don’t I know?”

  “You don’t know how to get to a meeting on fucking time. I know that now.”

  “Oh? And what else?”

  Maddie takes a deliberate step in my direction, then another.

  “I don’t think I could tell right now.”

  “If it helps, we’ve got the place to ourselves.”

  “This room?”

  “This whole fucking suite of offices. It’s after five, and everyone’s on their way to the elevator at the very least.”

  “No one stays past five?”

  “Only me.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Come on. I’ll show you.”

  “Okay, let’s see this.”

  Despite my offer to show her, Maddie is first out the boardroom door, and I follow.

  Ethan

  I follow Madeline as closely as I can as she shoots out into the hallway.

  Five or six hours of unplanned sleep in the middle of the day is not something I typically enjoy, and it would usually leave me feeling pissed at myself and thrown off from my workday flow.

  Seeing Maddie wander out into the hallway, on her way to possibly leaving the building, is leaving me feeling nothing but remorse at possibly letting the chance to spend time with her just slip away.

  Okay, on top of that feeling, there’s also the feeling of wanting her so fucking bad—and now knowing consciously how much I’ve been missing her all week.

  “Holy shit, dude, you weren’t joking. It’s a fucking ghost town out here. Do y’all have teleporters or something us proles don’t know about?”

  “You’re a prole now?” I gallop up to Maddie’s side as she walks toward the reception area.

  “Compared to you?”

  Maddie stops walking, and so do I. Before I can think about what’s happening or what I should do next, we’re facing each other.

  I get a few visual flashes—Maddie’s jade-green eyes, her full lips parting just slightly, as if she’s about to say something—but time slows down as we embrace and she pulls me into a long, slow kiss.

  “I swear everyone’s gone—I told you.” Our lips are still nearly touching, and I’m barely speaking above a whisper.

  “I don’t even fucking care.”

  Maddie smirks coquettishly as she moves back slowly, her hand pulling lightly on my tie before releasing it.

  “Where are you going?” I ask.

  “I don’t know. Where should we go?”

  I point to the small dark green sofa by the reception area. As Maddie looks at it, I hurry over, ready to take a seat—and maybe lie down if that’s the way things go.

  As I’m getting ready to plop my ass down on the sofa, I feel Madeline grip my left shoulder tightly from behind. She keeps her grip as I turn around.

  “Catch me.”

  Maddie pushes down on my shoulder and launches herself in my direction.

  This is definitely not the type of office that’s seen to many team building exercises or anything like that, but this seems like a trust fall for the ages.

  For a beautiful moment, I picture falling onto the sofa under Maddie’s weight, the two of us collapsing into a blissful shape on the cushions.

  Maddie doesn’t quite leap like that, however. Her legs travel up toward my right side, and I wind up catching them in my arm, holding her upper half in my other arm so I’m carrying her like a bride on our wedding night.

  “Take me somewhere better than that couch,” she demands.

  Maddie has a point. I know that everybody’s gone, but there is a chance that an assistant or an intern forgot something, and they may decide to swing back to the office.

  We need a locked door—and my office doesn’t have a fucking lock.

  “I know just the place, Mrs. Barrett,” I announce.

  “Hey, you can carry me like this, but don’t get carried the fuck away yourself.”

  I start transporting Maddie in the direction of the boardroom.

  “Jeez, Eth, do you lift weights or something?”

  “That’s one of the few things I do in life—down at the Equinox. Why?”

  “I know you’ve got muscles, but I’ve never felt them like this through your suit jacket before...are we going into that big conference room?”

  I swing open the door with my foot and carry Maddie over the threshold.

  “This is the boardroom, baby. It’s not just a conference room.”

  “Nice. Let me down and lock the damn door.”

  I squat down slightly, and Maddie slides gracefully out of my arms.

  The jade color of Madeline’s eyes catches me the moment she’s standing up again. I rush over to lock the door before my mind turns completely into horny mush.

  While I’m in preparation mode, I glide, almost doing ballet leaps, over to the end table on the other side of the room to switch on the sound machine. A staticky, calming noise fills the room.

  “So that’s what that thing is,” I hear Maddie exclaim from down the table. “Why is there a white noise machine in the boardroom?”

  “Brown noise,” I respond while strutting back to her. Maddie snickers.

  “It’s nicer than white noise,” I go on. “Rounder.”

  Maddie drops onto the chair at the head of the table and starts rotating it slowly to her left then right.

  “That doesn’t answer my question, Mr. Barrett.”

  “Now who’s getting carried away?”

  I stop in front of the chair, looking down at Maddie. She pretends to ignore me.

  “I said carried the fuck away, Ethan.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  “You should be. Now, beg my forgiveness.”

  “On my knees?”

  Maddie’s emerald eyes are still not looking at me, but the smile spreading across her face is more than enough motivation.

  “Now that’s using your head.”

  I collapse into a kneel. The pain of my knees hitting the floor is offset by the sight of Maddie’s legs just in front of me, starting to part, slowly revealing the dark passage of wonders between her thighs.

  “Oh, fucking shit!” Maddie stands straight up with her exclamation, nearly knocking me over. “Don’t get up...actually, could you get up and help with this, please?”

  Maddie rotates as I rise from the floor so her back is facing me by the time I’m standing. She’s pointing to the zipper in the back of her dress.

  “Thanks,” she mutters as I gingerly pull down the zipper. “It’s not like I’d think to bring my zipper helper with me to work.”

  “Am I forgiven yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  I get back down on my knees, lowering myself carefully this time. Maddie stays standing as her dress falls to the floor around her. Seeing her plain beige panties drop next ensures that my cock is at full mast.

  Even after five years and countless hookups, no one else gets my cock ready to tear through my pants the way Maddie does.

  “Okay,” Maddie breathes softly as she gently falls back into the chair.

  I stay in line of her like we’re magnetized. Her legs are open enough to get a t
easing glimpse of her pussy from the waning sunlight through the window.

  I begin leaning forward, moving toward my destination gradually…until Maddie grabs the back of my head to hasten things.

  Feeling Maddie’s fingertips dig into me, I take in the wondrously sweet aroma of her pussy and sense her decisive arousal as I get closer.

  I start moving my tongue lightly around her lips. With Maddie’s hand holding me in place, I don’t think she wants to wait for me to take my time getting right to it.

  I still stay at a molasses pace, but I make sure she gets full coverage with my tongue wide and licking painstakingly from the bottom to the top of her lips.

  As Maddie’s fingertips press in deeper, I alter my pattern slightly, licking from one side to the other.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” Maddie states, sounding matter of fact in her inability to deny the pleasure any longer.

  Maddie loosens her grip on the back of my head, letting her hand stay limply where it is.

  I simplify my pattern, softly stimulating her clit but keeping my focus wide. I move my tongue up, then down, then repeat.

  Maddie grabs as much of my hair as she can get in her hand, and she starts moving in her chair in time with my movements.

  “Oh, oh.” Maddie’s quiet enough that she’d be drowned out by the noise machine if anyone were outside, but her uncontrollable bliss is obvious.

  Maddie stops moving, but she holds me firmly in place.

  I close my lips in around her clit gently. I begin a slow, subtle circle with the softened tip of my tongue.

  “Oh. Ah-ha.”

  I could stay like this all night, or the rest of the week, or forever. There’s a lock on the door, and they can have their goddamn meetings somewhere goddamn else.

  I’m staying like this until Maddie comes. Although I don’t think that’s going to be too far off.

  “Ooh. Oh.”

  Maddie moves her hand down to the back of my neck, running her fingers up and down gently before giving that up and just fucking scratching.

  Her scratching is much quicker and more frantic than my deliberate tongue circling, but I stay with it.

  The same pace, the same spot, no matter how long it takes.

  When Madeline stops scratching and I hear her hand slap the arm of the chair, I know that the time is almost nigh.