by R. S. Elliot
“Your family must be very proud of you,” Emily said. Guilt nibbled at the back of my brain, but I tried to put it out of my mind.
“Oh, they are. They wish they saw me more, but they are.”
“A bit of a workaholic?”
“I think you already know the answer to that question.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever gotten into the office before you,” she mused. “And you’re always there when I leave at night. I know it must take a lot of hours to keep SkyBlue up and running at capacity, but I’m sure it gets draining sometimes.”
“Sometimes,” I admitted and realized just how tired I was. The last few weeks weighed on my shoulders like a barbell, threatening to pull me down into total burnout. But burnout was never an option. I had to keep it together for my company and my employees.
“That woman I saw with the little boy in your office the day I brought you your coffee, was that the sister you mentioned?”
“Yes, Sarah. The little boy is her son, Ryan.”
“She seemed pretty upset. Is everything alright between the two of you?”
The corners of my mouth tightened.
“It’s fine. We sometimes squabble but... it’s fine. I lose track of why we argue as soon as the argument is over. I don’t have a lot of time for trivial things.”
Emily glanced over at me sidelong, and even while driving, I could tell she had a thoughtful gleam in her eye.
“Does that mean I’m not meaningless to you? You’ve gone out of your way to spend an awful lot of time on me in the last month or so.”
I swallowed hard. I wasn’t going to be able to keep up the charade of not letting on how preoccupied I had been with her for long.
No words came easily for me to say, but I reached out and took her hand instead. The warm weight of it felt right in my own.
Chapter Fourteen
Emily
Pulling up to an elite hotel with my hand in Luke Thorpe’s was a surreal experience. He didn’t pull away when we saw the valet. Instead, he took his time parking and then gave me a gentle squeeze before he disappeared out the driver’s side door. I clung close to his side as we strolled into the gilded foyer of the hotel and checked into our rooms. The concierge smiled at both of us like we were a beautiful young couple on vacation. For one fleeting moment, I felt what it must be like to be Luke Thorpe’s girlfriend, to be doted on and adored and envied by everyone who walked by. It was an intoxicating fantasy, one that felt like a powerful dream I never wanted to wake up from, and I struggled to remind myself that this wasn’t real. Luke hadn’t said anything about our kiss in the car, and for all I knew he might just be indulging me because he didn’t want to hurt my feelings. He opened up to me about his past, sure, but there was no guarantee of affection in those words, no promise that we would see each other romantically or that we wouldn’t see other people. I had to keep my head on straight. Otherwise, I would lose myself in how good this ocean of luxury and attention felt, and I might drown.
Luke’s room was along the same hall as mine, a dozen or so doors down. He gave me a warm smile when he stopped by his own door but didn’t reach out to touch me or invite me in. Instead, he just slotted his keycard into the door and wheeled his bags inside.
“Get some rest,” he said. “You’ve had a trying day. The three of us will meet up later before the banquet, and then we can compare notes.”
The three of us. I had almost convinced myself that Sonia wasn’t here, that this was some sort of lover’s retreat just for Luke and I. But I knew Sonia was nearby, sleeping off her flight anxiety in one of the luxurious rooms, and I knew that she would have questions when she woke up.
So I gave Luke my best upbeat smile and located my room, then threw myself down onto the fluffy white duvet as the door swung shut behind me.
What a morning. It wasn’t even noon yet, and I felt like my heart had been through a steamroller. I needed to talk to someone. Someone who would listen without judging me, someone who was too far away to decide they needed to march over to my apartment as soon as I got home to tell me what bad choices I was making. I needed to process.
As usual, my little sister let the call ring through almost to voicemail before she picked up.
“Oh, hey, what’s up?” She asked, as though I had just wandered into her bedroom and it startled her to see me there. It was something I had seen many times before, Darlene glancing up from her art tablet seated on the ground in that room with the walls plastered with magazine cutouts and band posters. It made me smile to imagine it.
“Oh, not a lot,” I lied, hoping I sounded breezy. “You free right now?”
“Sure.” I heard the distant wooden clattering of colored pencils being discarded. I must have caught her in the middle of one of her mammoth drawing projects. She probably had her hair pulled back in one of those ridiculous scrunchies she had rescued from the bottom of our mom’s accessory box. She was very into the nineties now and thought mom jeans and technicolor windbreakers were all the rage.
“School going alright?”
“Alright as always. I got in trouble again last week for smoking out by my friend’s car, even though we were technically off school grounds, so the charge was bogus. But my chemistry grade is back up, so that’s good, I guess. It got mom off my case, anyway. How’s work?”
“Oh... alright.” I was fiddling with a long strand of my hair, winding it tightly around my finger before letting it spring loose. “Everything’s good.”
“Good.”
Darlene wasn’t stupid, and she knew I didn’t just call to say hello. She was waiting me out, hoping to see what sort of gossip I had brought her.
“Actually...” I began warily. Was I really going to tell my little sister about this? But if not her, then who? “I’m actually in a bit of a weird situation at work right now.”
“Oh yeah? What sort of situation?”
“Well, I’ve been sort of seeing this guy—”
“Oooooooh!”
“I said sort of, sort of! I don’t know if it’s serious or not yet, but we’ve had some... intense moments. And I see him fairly regularly. He’s just so hard to read, and it’s weird because, well... God, this will sound so crazy.”
“I guarantee you it won’t sound crazy,” Darlene said with a snicker. “You should hear the stories my friends tell me. Seriously. I’m sorry for teasing. What’s going on?”
“It’s just that... this guy is my boss.”
“Oh. Shit. Like your boss, boss? Like the guy directly over you? Because if he just works where you work, that’s not so bad.”
“No, he’s definitely my boss. He’s kind of... everyone’s boss.” I bit my lip and winced, bracing for impact. “He’s actually the CEO.”
“Holy shit!” Darlene crowed. “The CEO, are you serious? Like the big guy in charge for reals?”
“Keep your voice down!” I hissed. “Is mom there? I don’t want her to—”
“Darlene?” I heard my mother’s voice on the other end, muffled as though through a wall, and my heart dropped into my stomach. I had been so stupid to call home. I should have known better. I loved my mother, but she could never keep her nose in her own business, and as much as I liked talking to my sister, she was messy about secrets. “Is that your sister on the line with you?”
“It’s nothing, Mom!” Darlene shouted back. “We’re just chatting! Go away!”
“Ask her if she’s thought more about that new car.”
“No, I’m talking to Emily! You can talk to her later!”
“Alright, alright....”
There was the crackle of silence for a moment as Darlene waited for my mother’s footsteps to disappear down the hallway. Then she returned to our call; voice pitched lower.
“Okay, sorry about that. CEO, Em? Are you kidding me?”
“No,” I said miserably.
“How did it happen?”
“I don’t know. Well, actually, I do, but it’s a long and insane story. We
met once outside of work before I got the job, but I didn’t recognize him when I first started at SkyBlue. We just got thrown in together a couple of times, and one thing led to another and the next thing I knew—”
“Wait, a minute. SkyBlue?” I heard the insistent clicking of keys as Darlene looked up something on her laptop. Then she inhaled sharply. “Holy hell, I know this guy! He’s that Elon Musk type dude with the smart cars. Isn’t he like, ancient?”
“He’s thirty-two,” I shot back hotly. “Which is a very good age.”
“Okay according to Wikipedia he’s absolutely loaded. Look at you, turning into a sugar baby! Are you gonna get him to pay off your loans? You should get him to pay off your loans.”
“Ugh, Darlene it’s not like that. We’re not an item and he’s not my sugar daddy, we’re just...”
“Boinking?”
“Ew, don’t call it that! And no! Not currently and not in the future, I don’t think. I don’t know. There’s just a lot going on and did you miss the part where I told you he was my boss? I’m hung up on my actual boss, Darlene, that’s not good!”
I could practically hear her shrug on the other end.
“Maybe not, but you can’t help the way you feel, can you? You can either ignore this guy and nurse your broken heart until it gets better or you can go after him, simple as that. Either can work, but you need to choose the one you can live with.”
I pulled the fingernail out of my mouth that I had been gnawing on nervously.
“You give pretty good advice for a kid, did you know that?”
“I’m an old soul. Mom! What?”
By the sound of things, my mother had come back and was poking her head into Darlene’s room.
“Will you let me talk to my daughter, please? You can’t hog the phone all day.”
“You have your own phone!”
“Two minutes, Darlene, and then I’ll give it back! You’ve already got her on the phone.”
“Uggggh, you’re the worst! Here.”
I started babbling protestations, not wanting to be passed off to my mother right now for love or money, but it was too late. I heard the awkward fumbling of a cell phone through hands, and then my mother’s voice was on the other side, bright and uninvited.
“Hi, Bunny! How are you?”
“I’m fine Mom,” I sighed. “Just trying to talk to Darlene.”
“I know, I’ll let you girls get back to it in a minute. Listen, have you thought any more about that new car? There’s a Honda Civic one of our neighbors is selling cheap, if you want to come down and have a look at it.”
I felt like tearing my hair out. I was appreciative for my mother’s generosity, but now was not the time to discuss it, especially not after the incident in the rental car.
“A Civic sounds fine mom, really. I trust your judgment. Anything works for me. Can you give me back to Darlene, please?”
“It sounds like you’ve been seeing a guy,” she said lightly, entirely ignoring my request. “He works in your same office, did I hear that right?”
“Mom. I told that to Darlene in confidence.”
“I know, I know, I’ll let you girls talk! You just know I have to put my two cents in, I’m just being a mom. But listen to me Emily, workplace romances are tricky. I don’t know if this guy is in your department or what or if he’s above or below you, but please, please be careful. This internship is too valuable to get thrown away for some guy.”
“Of course I know that! I would never! That was actually what I was just telling Darlene if you would please give the phone back to my sister. I’m being smart about this Mom. I promise.”
“Alright, alright. Just remember to think before you act. But you’re a smart girl. You know I trust you. I love you, honey!”
“I love you too,” I sighed. A moment later, I was returned to Darlene, who had probably gone red in the face with fury. I had been a very talkative and open daughter, often spending hours crying to my mother about crushes and friends. Darlene was much more private and preferred to express her emotions through art. She had a strict do-not-enter policy with my mother when it came to her bedroom.
“Mom’s being the worst,” she grumbled into the phone. “I’m gonna go before she eavesdrops more. But good luck out there! Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Sure, Darlene. Thanks for listening.”
“Anytime. Later.”
I sighed heavily as I tossed the phone aside, breathing out hard through my lips. I felt like I had been awake and wired for twenty-four hours, but it was barely afternoon. In a few hours, I knew I would have to go downstairs for professional networking and photo-snapping, looking my best and absolutely not looking at Luke for too long. I decided a shower would help me get there and treated myself to a long soak in the luxurious fountain shower provided by the hotel. Then I changed back into jeans and threw a thin T-shirt over my bare breasts, squeezing the water out of my hair with a towel.
It was at that moment I heard a crisp knock at my door.
I padded over to the door, my eyebrows drawn together in confusion. I hadn’t ordered up room service, but I wasn’t sure how these fancy hotels operated. For all I knew it was a bellboy come to bring hot towels or cucumber water or any of the other amenities that Luke’s magical black card afforded us.
I opened the door. Luke Thorpe was leaning against my door frame, looking arrestingly attractive in slacks and shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows. He had a dark, vulnerable look in his eyes that was at once hungry and pleading, and I could hardly breathe for how close he was to me, how unguarded he was being.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said, never taking his eyes off my mouth. “Will you let me in, Emily?”
I knew what he was really asking me, what he was requesting permission to do. Every nerve in my body was on fire, singing a song of desire, and I shuddered in my thin, sheer t-shirt as his eyes fell from my mouth to my breasts to my bare feet. I was sure he had never looked better than he did now, looming over me with want written all over him, his jacket discarded, one of his beautiful long-fingered hands pressed against my door frame. There was no one else in the hallway. Sonia was nowhere to be seen. There was just us, just two people who no one knew worked together 3,000 miles away in New York.
“Yes,” I whispered.
Luke’s fingers slid through my hair and spread across the back of my head before I even closed the door behind him, pulling me in for a kiss I could drown in. I mumbled an incoherent protestation about the door, all I could manage with my head swimming from the taste of him, and he pushed the door shut behind us with one hand while circling my waist with the other.
He pulled me tightly against his body, so we were flush together, my painfully hard nipples brushed against his chest, my stomach pushing against his hardness. My body was already screaming out for him, my skin hypersensitive, my panties wet between my legs. I whimpered as he deepened our kiss, filling my mouth with his tongue, and I pulled him further into my room, towards my bed. I was going to have him, right here, right now. I was going to make that choice and deal with the consequences because this was too much of a good thing to pass up, and I didn’t know if we would ever get a chance like this ever again.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about you,” Luke said, his lips chasing mine and trailing little kisses along my jaw. My head fell back, exposing my throat for his heated explorations.
“Tell me again,” I pled, pulling his hands up, so they covered my breasts. Luke took his hands off me for one agonizing moment while he slipped them under my shirt, then he fondled me with enthusiasm as he kissed me.
“I can’t stop thinking about you. I was sitting in that room, and all I could think of was how bad I wanted you, that’s all I’ve been thinking about for weeks. I want to be inside you, Emily. I want to feel you writhe underneath me, and I want to make you come this time.”
“Oh God,” I groaned, clawing his shirt up over his head. His exposed chest offered itself to my
searching mouth, and I kissed along every inch of exposed skin, committing the geography of his body to memory with my lips. I couldn’t be close enough to him, couldn’t kiss him thoroughly enough, even as I felt his breathing quicken in his chest. He groaned as I pressed my lips to his throat, the rumble of it traveling right through my body, and the next thing I knew I was being pushed back against the bed.
Luke tugged my shirt up over my head in one definitive yank, then leaned down to kiss me so softly. I thought I might cry as he laid me down on the thick hotel duvet. His broad palms spread over my stomach and my breasts, squeezing me gently as I whined and bucked my hips up towards him. I was soaking wet in my jeans and couldn’t find any friction to help me towards the release I desperately needed. I felt like I could finish in seconds if I put my mind to it, I was so aroused, but I wanted to take this slow. I wanted to make it last, and I wanted to remember it.
I tugged Luke down over me and hooked my arms around his neck, slotting myself between his legs so I could grind against his hips slowly and intently.
“Fuck,” he breathed into my mouth as I pressed our heat together, pressing up against his cock. He was already rock hard, and as huge as I remembered. I was desperate to feel him filling me up.
“Please,” I begged as he slid his hands under my ass and pressed me up against him harder. I could feel him through my jeans now, rubbing against my most sensitive spot. I felt like a teenager rubbing out a quick, desperate orgasm with her boyfriend in the backseat of her parent’s car, and the thought excited me even more. “Undress me. Please.”
Luke didn’t have to be told twice. He flicked my jeans open and pulled them off my legs with a few determined tugs, then slid his palm between my legs and circled my clit with a slow, firm pressure through my lace panties. I cried out so sharply the neighbors probably thought I was in pain, devolving into an incoherent, begging babble at the end.