Chapter 5
Kate’s hands were shaking. Beneath her desk, her patent leather shoes were tap-tap-tapping on the floor. Breathe, she told herself. Just breathe. You’re ready, you can do this.
It was a quarter to six. She’d deliberately stayed back an hour working on her monthly status reports because hell, why not try to look like a champion employee before you tried to convince your boss to have sex with you?
The entire floor was quieter than Kate had ever heard it. There was no music, no laughter, no vacuum cleaners humming. All the staff, down to the cleaners, had punched out. Not Mr Henderson, though. Ty was notoriously one of the last people out of the building at night, the one who set the alarms. Kate wasn’t sure why, but working late meant he was allowed to take alternate Fridays off. She’d heard he rode his motorbike down to the Mornington Peninsula to spend the long weekend soaking in hot springs and having sex with a load of glossy MILFs. She wasn’t sure if she believed that, though. The guys she worked with tended to talk about Ty as though he were James Bond, a larger than life character living a sexy narrative that they, with their paunches and bald spots, could only imagine.
Sure, judge your colleagues for eroticizing the life of Tyler Henderson, that’s fair.
Kate’s palms had begun to sweat. She groaned and rubbed them along her skirt. It was an old one, calf-length and covered in a pattern of bananas and monkeys. She’d paired it with one of her new water-silk blouses in the hopes of looking whimsically sexy.
Despite her promise to Maria she hadn’t fully reverted back to her old style of dressing. It wasn’t to flirt—the consensus among her colleagues was still ‘your clothes have changed and so have you, man’—she wore the new things because she felt different when she had silk against her skin. Sexier. More confident.
Her phone buzzed on her desk. She picked it up and saw a text from Maria.
Good luck Katie, try to be brief and call me as soon as you’re done xx
Kate sighed. If she screwed this up, the last thing she’d want to do was discuss it. Maybe she could switch her phone off and pretend it died. Although, knowing her luck, tonight would be the night someone stabbed her at the 307 tram stop and she wouldn’t be able to call for help.
Worry about getting murdered later. You need to pump yourself up to tell your hot boss he should ignore all good sense and workplace ethics and sleep with you.
Her pep talk did nothing to improve her mood. Her palms were still sweating and white spots kept bursting behind her eyes. As she closed down her computer, she became sure she was going to faint. She had a harder time staying conscious than most people. Alcohol blackouts aside, she’d spent her childhood passing out from plain old fear: at scary movies, the baboon enclosure at the zoo, during her school performance of The Wiz. Doctors told her parents it was something she’d grow out of, but she’d still collapsed when her neighbour jumped out at her from behind a bin last year. She’d woken up to find herself in a puddle, surrounded by hot paramedics who thought she’d wet herself. That had been bad enough. If she collapsed in front of Ty, she was officially joining a nunnery. In Gstaad.
Of course thinking about collapsing in front of Ty only made her breathing shallow and turned her tongue into a piece of dry toast at the bottom of her mouth.
I can’t do this. I’m like one of those fainting goats, only less cute. Ty’s going to laugh in my face.
She’d taken her mid-morning Ritalin a little later than usual, hoping to extend its effects into the evening. It didn’t seem to be working and taking another one wouldn’t help. Ritalin wasn’t the equivalent of a line of speed the way most people seemed to think it was. It didn’t get her stoned, and it didn’t pep her up, it just cleared away the static-y fuzz that blustered through her head, and made her motivated enough to see most tasks through to completion. Valium might have helped, but she didn’t have any Valium.
She racked her mind for something, anything that could help snap her out of her panic. Her brain handed her bits of generic self-help advice and affirmations, blue light and calm visualizations. And then it landed on something new: Rapunzel.
Rapunzel was the Barbie Trolls’ prize blocker and mushroom picker, a six-foot-three lesbian with a partially shaved head and three tongue piercings. She had a white-gold braid even longer than Kate’s and was incredibly, almost unnaturally, self-assured. She also slapped herself in the face before derby bouts and advised the other players to do the same. “Not hard, mind,” she said. “Just quick repetitive taps, like a boxer.”
Kate had never seen any merit in hitting yourself but nothing else seemed to be working. She raised her hands to her face and tapped her cheeks a little. It did nothing but make her feel silly. Then, she heard Rapunzel’s voice, deep and salted with the accent of her Manchurian childhood. “That’s pathetic. You really want to fuck this guy?”
“God, yes,” Kate said aloud.
“Then hit yourself harder. Your face isn’t made out of post-it notes, you’ll be fine.”
Grimacing, she slapped herself harder, once, twice, three times. When she pulled her hands away, she was surprised to discover she actually felt calm. Her tongue was wet again and the white spots weren’t popping behind her eyes anymore. Rapunzel’s technique had worked. Kate reminded herself to thank her, then realised that would make her look insane.
There was less than five minutes until she was due to see Ty. Needing something to do with her hands, she pulled out the folded piece of paper she intended to give him.
It was a bit high school, but she’d decided a note was the best way to proposition him. She would walk into Ty’s office, say hello, place the note on his desk and then leave. She would not linger saying things like ‘obsessed with you,’ ‘can’t stop thinking about you,’ and ‘would literally stab someone in a non-essential organ to hook up with you again, Mr Henderson. Please have sex with me, or I will die.’
The note was short, sweet and to the point; I know you told me to forget what happened in your hotel room, but I can’t. I want more. If you’re interested, look up my profile on Kinkworld. My user name is @LolaJones.
She felt silly even writing the word ‘Kinkworld’ to Ty, much less directing him to her profile, but it would explain everything so much better than she could. The alarm she’d set on her phone began to chime, soft bells increasing in volume. Kate turned it off and tucked her note into a tiny side pocket on her skirt. There it was perfectly positioned so she could pull it out and hand it smoothly to Ty, like a flight attendant giving a passenger a microwaved omelet.
“Now or never,” she told herself. “It’s now or never.”
Kate knew exactly how many strides it took to get to Ty’s office—two hundred and nine—but today there seemed to be half that. A quarter of that. She was near him in record time, hearing strains of what she knew was blues music came through his open doorway. Ty loved the blues. It was one of the many arbitrary, stalkerish things she knew about him. She felt the sickening lurch of dizziness and slapped herself as quietly as she could. Her vision immediately sharpened. Though she was sure Rapunzel never intended her pre-derby routine to be used this way, it was quite a discovery. Maybe Kate could make her some muffins and act like it wasn’t a gift for teaching her how to control her wayward brain.
Kate straightened her lace headband and forced her legs to carry her into Ty’s office. For a panicky moment she wondered why he wasn’t there, then realised he was hidden by his huge computer monitor. The top of his blond head was visible, so was a big hand drumming the top of his cordless mouse. He gave no indication he’d heard her come in.
Kate opened her mouth then closed it, her heart fluttering against her ribs like a panicky hummingbird.
I can’t do this, she thought and took a huge step backward.
“Middleton,” Ty’s computer said. “What are you doing?”
He didn’t sound angry, just mildly inconvenienced, as though she were a door-to-door salesperson trying to sell him cleaning products. Kate swallowed. “I just…”
Her voice was a thing of ridicule, so girly and crackly it was embarrassing. She swallowed again, trying to wet her throat and sound more like a grown up and less like a Disney mouse. “I wanted to ask you something?”
“And that is?”
“I was wondering…I was thinking…”
“Yes?”
She let out a soft wheezy breath. Maria hadn’t prepared her for this. Nothing had prepared her for this. The top of Ty’s head was more intimidating than a gang of youths loitering around a train station at night. She couldn’t just hand him a folded up note like they were in primary school. Why had she ever thought that was a good idea? As of now, her mission was over. She stared around Ty’s office for something she could talk about instead. Desks? Lamps? A big swirly painting by some abstract artist Ty had probably had sex with? Then her gaze fell on the only thing in the room more disturbing than a sex-painting, a fancy crystal tumbler full of brown liquid. Jackpot. “I just wanted to say, you shouldn’t be drinking at work. It’s really unprofessional.”
That got Ty to move out from behind his monitor. “What?”
Dear lord, what was wrong with her?
“Erm, nothing,” Kate stammered. “Except…except you’re not supposed to drink at work. It’s a violation of our HR policy, you know, like why we can’t have beer at the Friday barbecue?”
Ty stared at her as though he’d never seen something quite so ridiculous in all his life and now that he had he needed time to process it. Despite her terror, Kate couldn’t help noticing he’d had a haircut. The shorter style brought out the hard planes of his face to perfection and emphasised his eyes. For someone who could glare better than Clint Eastwood, they were a surprisingly warm shade of blue, like a favourite pair of jeans, faded and so comfy she could sleep in them.
“You came here,” he said slowly. “To tell me off about drinking at work?”
“Erm, yeah,” Kate said, figuring it was too late to back down now.
“I see.” Ty raised his tumbler to his mouth and took a slow, deliberate swig.
That’s just mean, Kate thought. “Okay, now that we’ve talked I should probably head home. See you tomorrow!”
Ty bared his teeth in something that definitely wasn’t a smile. “Before you go, Middleton, I want you to tell me something.”
“Yes?” she asked nervously.
“If you’re so concerned with workplace practices, why is it every time I turn around, I’m looking at you bent over in a skirt so tight you couldn’t slide a piece of paper between the fabric and your ass?”
Kate’s legs got that watery I’m-going-to-collapse-underneath-you feeling. God, what was happening? She was supposed to slink in, drop the note on Ty’s desk and slink away, leaving him with nothing but a great view of her butt and the uncontrollable urge to check out her Kinkworld profile. How in the hell had it come to this? “I don’t…this isn’t about me doing that to you. Not that I’m doing that to you, I’m not doing anything to you. Or anyone.”
Ty sighed, picked up his tumbler and drained the whole thing before putting it down with a clunk. “Shut my door.”
Kate stared at him. “Do you mean…with me on the other side of it?”
Another, even more cumbersome, sigh. “I mean, shut that door so that you and I are alone in the same fucking room and hurry up about it because I’m getting impatient.”
Without thinking, Kate turned and shut the door. The latch clicked neatly into place, sealing her in a confined area with Tyler Henderson.
“Middleton.” His voice was rough and smooth, smoke and raw honey. “Walk your ass over here.”
Kate’s body prickled all over and again she obeyed his words before her brain could even process them, taking small, neat steps towards him the way she had when she was the flower girl at her sister’s wedding. The air between her and Ty seemed to surge with an energy that grew stronger with each forward pace. Music poured from his computer, mingling with the electric air, a woman with a throaty voice singing about the devil in a way that felt both prophetic and highly appropriate.
“So…” Tyler Henderson said, tugging his black silk tie so that the knot loosened around his neck. “Here we are again.”
“And that’s…where, exactly?”
“You know exactly where. Look at me.”
She looked at him, or rather his chin, which was as far up as her line of vision could go.
“You came waltzing in here to ask me to turn you out,” Ty said quietly. “The least you can do is look me in the eyes.”
Kate inhaled, and with all her remaining strength, managed to meet his gaze.
Ty’s irises weren’t the colour of lived-in denim anymore, they were the bright blue of an electrical fire. As their eyes locked she felt a surge arc through her body, excitement so all-encompassing she could barely breathe. He was giving her a look no boss would give their employee unless they wanted a one-way ticket to sexual-harrassmentville. It said she’d been a bad girl and he wanted to punish her for it. Kate’s nipples went stiff against her bra, dampness saturated the cotton between her legs. Ever since Bendigo she hadn’t been able to get herself off and yet now, without Ty doing or saying anything, Kate knew she could have shoved her hands into her panties and been there inside a couple of strokes. It was black magic. Evil magic. “W-What now?” she asked.
“Now, we discuss why you’re here.” Ty reached beneath his desk and pulled out a bottle with red wax around the rim. He filled his tumbler slowly, as though he had all the time in the world. The thin trickle of liquid sounded as loud as a waterfall. A white spot burst in front of her eyes and if she could have gotten away with slapping herself, she would have.
Ty took a swig of what she assumed was whiskey, wincing slightly, as though it was a strong but necessary medicine. “So,” he said again. “I tell you it’s a bad idea for us to fuck each other and you decide a good way to respect that decision would be to wear fuck-me clothes to work and show me your ass at every given opportunity. Walk me through that reasoning, Middleton.”
Kate said nothing. Heat was prickling all over her, as though her blood was trying to force its way through her skin like sweat.
“Gone shy, have you?” Ty asked. “Weren’t so shy when you bent over the printer without any panties on.”
And she’d been silly enough to wonder if he’d noticed. She licked her upper lip. “I’m sorry.”
“Oh yeah?” Ty put his hands behind his head and reclined in his chair. “I don’t believe you. I think you enjoyed getting me all cranked up, knowing I couldn’t do anything about it.”
Kate could barely believe her ears. He’d given no indication, none, that he’d so much as noticed her new wardrobe, let alone that it had gotten him hot and bothered. “I promise I wasn’t—”
“Don’t play dumb.”
Kate remembered they were alone, that the entire floor—maybe the whole building—was empty. Her heartbeat thumped inside her ears. “I’m not playing dumb, I don’t know what you mean.”
“So you didn’t come here tonight to ask me to screw you? And you haven’t been wearing sexy clothes to work because you want me to change my mind about the two of us and plant my dick between your legs?”
Kate opened her mouth, then closed it again.
Ty gave another world-weary sigh. “What am I gonna do with you, girl?”
The words were uttered in the same dark tone men spoke in Kate’s mind when they announced she was going to be spanked. She extended a foot backward.
“Don’t move,” Ty said calmly and she froze. “I—”
“Don’t speak either.”
She pulled her lower lip into her mouth, everything inside her was suddenly very still.
Ty tossed back his drink, reached under his desk for the bottle and refilled his tumbler. Dimly, Kate tried to memorise the shape, the colours on the label. She didn’t like any hard liquor but rum, but she’d go to Dan Murphy’s and buy a bottle just to taste the way he tasted right now.
Ty took another swallow from his tumbler and swiped a hand over his mouth. “You came here tonight looking to get your little off-limits pussy played with, is that right?”
“No, I—”
“Don’t lie.” Ty’s blue eyes were hard as stone. “Don’t lie to me and don’t try and explain what I already know. Just answer the question.”
Kate licked her lips again. She’d done this so many times in the past hour, they were starting to grow puffy. The lips between her legs felt exactly the same way only wetter. Her fear of disobeying him was melding into the excitement of knowing this was all in his hands, that he could use her as he wished, command her to do anything he wanted.
“Yes,” she heard herself say. “I came here for that.”
“I know.” Ty tapped the rim of his tumbler in time with the music, clink, clink, clink. He was looking through her into nothingness, weighing something up in his mind. Kate wanted to argue her case but she just stood there, still and silent. Waiting.
Ty ran a hand through his hair, the gold strands falling like waves of wheat. “When you decided to experiment with clothes that get my dick hard, you know what you did, Middleton?”
Kate shook her head.
“You went from being the office sweetheart to the girl everyone pictures getting dressed in the morning. If I broke up one conversation about your legs, I did it a million times.”
Kate inhaled. Surely that wasn’t right? Not only had she not caught anyone perving but you’d think that response would have inspired some of the guys to be nice to her, not act like she was carrying blood-borne pathogens.
“Wasn’t enjoyable,” Ty said, unaware of her confusion. “Wasn’t fun watching every other fucker in this office pant after you. I didn’t appreciate it one bit. Don’t appreciate much of anything you’ve done since I told you you weren’t getting my cock. So here’s what I’m thinking…”
He rapped a knuckle on the desk, the sound sharp as a starter’s pistol. “Take off that ridiculous skirt, lie your ass across my lap and we’ll see what I can teach you about obeying orders.”
Silence. Except for the guitar music swelling from Ty’s computer, Kate couldn’t hear a thing. Not her own breathing, not her heartbeat, nothing. “Wouldn’t we get in trouble?”
He shrugged. “If we got caught, but seeing as you’ve done everything but hire a skywriter to spell ‘fuck me, Tyler Henderson’ in the clouds, I assume you’re willing to take that risk. Now lose the skirt and come lie on Daddy’s lap.”
The word was like an electric shock, a vibration zapping her cheeks to nipples to clit. Before she knew what was happening Kate’s hands were moving, her fingers fumbling with the catch, her zipper unknitting itself. Ty’s smile when he saw what lay beneath her monkeys and bananas skirt was almost gentle. “You little prick-tease.”
Kate looked down at her frilly white panties, her knee length black socks and Mary Janes. It was a bit evocative. She was half proud of herself for anticipating that this might happen, half terrified of what was coming next.
“Middleton,” Ty said. “Come and get spanked before I decide I’m better off tying you to my desk and doing things to you that’ll make you wish you never had the guts to come here.”
Kate flinched. It was as though he was reaching into her mind and pulling out one of her prized fantasies, the one where he fastened thick manacles around her wrists and chained her to his office chair. She would lay by his feet like a pet, naked and content, and when he needed sexual gratification, he’d yank down his fly and urge her mouth onto him. She would happily suck even if he was on the phone or dealing with a client, she would do it as though it was her only purpose because it was.
For a moment, the possibility of doing in it real life hung before her like a beautiful moon, then fear burned up her insides. The good-bad dichotomy of such fantasies couldn’t be erased. It was aching desire with self-loathing forever snapping at its tail. It was hard having such dark wants, it would be even trickier to share them. Having a depraved sexual encounter with Ty was all she ever wanted, but she couldn’t help thinking this wasn’t the right time. He might be drunk or confused and there was no way of knowing if someone from work would find them…
Ty stood up, reacquainting her with how tall he was, how handsome and insanely intimidating. He pointed as his desk. “I’m done watching you quiver on my carpet like a scared rabbit. Bend over the desk right now.”
Kate’s ass cheeks tingled. “What are you going to do?”
“What I wanted to do the minute I met you. Get over here.”
It was strange, that moment. As though after hours and hours of sensory panic, her body had to plunge for new responses. Kate looked at him, beautiful and terrifying and felt the calm of knowing exactly what to do. She took a deep breath. “Mr Henderson, I really want to play with you, but I can’t right now. I came here because I wanted to give you something and until I do, I don’t think we should, um, get down to business.”
Ty didn’t look angry, but his face changed. Something previously opened, closed. “What did you want to give me?”
Kate bent over and pulled the little wad of paper from her discarded skirt. “This.”
“You wrote me a note?”
“Er, yes.”
Ty shook his head, a faint smile tugging at his lips. “Hand it over, then.”
She strode toward him painfully aware of her bare thighs, the saturated material between her legs and placed the note on the edge of the desk.
“I should go,” she said, wondering if it would look silly if she backed away while facing him so he wouldn’t see her butt .
“Middleton,” Ty’s voice was slightly strained. “What the hell is going on?”
Kate licked her puffy lips for what felt like the millionth time. They were cracked now, she’d have to slather them with pawpaw cream once she was back at her desk. “I want you and I think you want me, but if we’re going to do this we should do it properly, with rules and a safe word and a room that isn’t where we work. That’s why I wrote you the note.”
Ty closed his eyes. “Go, then. I’ll read your note and I’ll tell you what I think.”
Kate dutifully backed away. When she turned so her ass was exposed to him, Ty made a noise that might have come from a riled-up bull. “Are you trying to drive me out of my goddamn mind, Middleton?”
Something in his choice of words sparked a fire in her. She looked at him over her shoulder. “You know my name isn’t Middleton.”
“Then what am I supposed to call you?”
“That would depend on what we were doing, Daddy.”
Knowing she would never in a million years think of a better exit line, she scooped up her skirt and slunk—actually goddamn slunk—her ass out of Tyler Henderson’s office.