“No pressure, son, but we’re all counting on you.”

Roy looks at me with that serious expression of his, and I smile back at him. “No pressure at all,” I say, grinning at him.

He laughs softly. “I know, it’s a bitch, right?”

“Right,” I say.

Roy’s a small guy, well, I guess everyone’s small compared to me. He’s over six foot and a bear of a guy, but he’s in his fifties and getting soft with every passing year. I’m twenty-eight, and could possibly be his son, and yet for all intents and purposes, I’m his boss.

Not exactly, of course. The coal mining company is his real boss, they’re all our fucking boss. The head of the company, this crazy guy named Tommy Evans, died in a freak skydiving accident. Apparently his chute didn’t deploy properly, and he hadn’t packed a backup. He smashed down into the Appalachian Mountains, and they scraped what was left of him off the side of a boulder.

He wasn’t such a bad guy, all things considered. He treated us fairly, more or less. We were paid on time, got decent benefits, though bonuses were cut years back, and there are more and more layoffs these days. I guess that can’t be helped, considering the state of this damn country these days. We all know we’re in a dying, backward industry, but we can’t do much about it. We’re a coal-mining town, and will be until it all falls apart.

I take a breath and Roy smacks me on the back. “Come on, son,” he says. “Get it together. We’ll go make a good impression, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I say, steeling myself.

We head into the offices of Evans Energy, the company that owns the Wheeler mine. A young, smiling girl with brown eyes leads the way through the offices, and I can’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. I wish I could work in a damn office like this, but I know I stand out. I know I’d never fit in here.

For starters, I’m a big man. I’m six-foot-five and more muscular than all the men here combined. I’ve been working with my hands all my life, and I’m more at home underground than I am above it. I know the mine better than anything else in the world, since my daddy brought me up to mine it. He’s gone now, died years ago in a collapse. My mom follow a couple years after, cancer from smoking all her life, leaving me the house and not much else.

I’m a miner through and through. Maybe there’s no dust to breathe up here in the offices, no worries about collapses or gas pockets, nobody dying just to make a dollar. But down there, I feel more alive, and I suspect I wouldn’t last long up here.

We follow the girl back to a conference room. It’s empty and she gestures for us to sit. “They’ll be in shortly,” she says, and leaves a moment later.

I look around the room without sitting. Roy glances at me and slowly sits with a grunt. “Come on, get comfortable,” he says. “You’re the union head now, you gotta act like it.”

I glance at him. I never asked to be made head, but nobody else wanted the job. I’m the youngest union head in the miner’s union history, and I’m not sure how I feel about the distinction. We have contract negotiations coming up, and the old head conveniently retired, leaving that shit-show for his successor. Nobody else stepped up, so I fucking did, and here I am. Roy’s my second, mainly I think because he feels bad for me, since I have no clue what the fuck I’m getting myself into.

I haven’t negotiated anything in my life. Subtlety isn’t exactly my strength. I’d rather bash some skulls open or break a nice vein with an axe, but that’s not my role anymore. Well, I’ll still mine, but mostly I’m running the union, negotiating with the mine bosses, doing all that crap. Roy takes care of a lot of it, and it still all comes down on me if the shit gets blowing.

I sigh and finally sit. We’re here to meet the new head of Evans Energy, apparently crazy Tommy’s daughter. I don’t know anything about her. She hasn’t lived in Wheelville for years, and nobody I talked to knows a damn thing. As far as I can tell, she’s just some rich guy’s daughter, way too young to run a company, but that’s crazy Tommy for you. The guy made sure she’d take over if he ever died.

“Here they come,” Roy says, looking over my shoulder. “Smile and be nice.”

“Always am,” I grumble, standing and turning and stopping in my fucking tracks.

Three people walk into the room. I recognize the guy in the front. That’s Ingram Jones, crazy Tommy’s close friend and the second most powerful guy at Evans Energy. The next person is Laura Shane, an older brunette with too many wrinkles and too much eye makeup. She’s the head of PR, and I’ve never spoken to her in my life.

And the third person is the girl I fucked a couple weeks back, the one that left in the middle of the night and I never heard from again.

I stare at her, shocked. I’m not the kind of guy to be rendered suddenly speechless, but here I am, wearing khaki fucking pants with my shirt tucked in, feeling like a fucking fool.

Ingram steps up to me. “Mr. Carter?” he asks. “I’m Ingram Jones, Vice President of Evans Energy.”

I can’t stop looking at her. Amelia, that girl I haven’t stopped fucking thinking about, not for a second. She’s staring right back at me, equally surprised. She looks gorgeous, her full figure tucked into a nice, slim-fitting business outfit, that tight skirt accentuating her gorgeous firm little ass so perfectly. I can still picture my big cock slamming into her pussy from behind, making her scream. For a second, I want to pull her thick, blonde hair, but I quickly get a hold of myself.

“Uh, yes, good to meet you, Mr. Jones,” I say to him, taking his hand and shaking.

“Please, call me Ingram. We’ll be working closely in the coming weeks.”

“Of course. And you can all call me Samuel.” I glance at Amelia, but she quickly looks away.

“Samuel, this is Laura Shane, head of Public Relations.”

“Hello,” she says, shaking my hand.

Ingram smiles tightly. He’s an older guy, about crazy Tommy’s age, with a balding head and a skinny frame. He turns to Amelia and gestures at her as she steps toward me, eyes locked on mine. “And this is the new President of Evans Energy, Amelia Evans.”

I can tell she’s holding her breath as she reaches her hand out to shake mine. I stare at her for a second, maybe a beat too long, before I smile. “It’s nice to meet you, Ms. Evans,” I say.

“Amelia,” she says softly. “Nice to meet you too, Samuel.”

I shake her hand, smiling, looking into her eyes. I let it go and step aside, introducing Roy to everyone.

Introductions out of the way, we all sit down at the table and start talking. Ingram’s droning on and on about the upcoming contract, how he wants things to go smoothly, wants everyone to be happy, but the economy, blah blah blah. Laura Shane takes over when he’s done with his bullshit and talks about how important the coal industry is right now, how all eyes are on us, but I’m just not listening.

I’m staring at Amelia. I can’t help myself. She keeps glancing at me, and each time she catches me looking, she blushes a little bit deeper. I know what she’s thinking. She’s picturing the way I made her feel just a couple weeks ago.

I bet she’s been touching herself all week, closed up in that big house her daddy bought, touching that tight, delicious little pussy, thinking about the coal miner she fucked. I gave her a nice rough fuck too, probably made her feel better than any of her douche boyfriends ever did before. I won’t pretend like my cock hasn’t gotten hard every night just thinking about her sweet, tight body, how eager she was for my cock, how good it felt to come deep between her creamy thighs.

“Samuel?” Roy’s voice pulls me from my reverie. “What do you think?”

I hesitate a second. I didn’t hear what they were talking about, although everyone’s staring. I put on a serious face and nod. “Good,” I say, taking a shot in the dark.

Roy cringes and Amelia smiles. “They asked if you’d like to begin preliminary discussions.”

I frown a little. Damn, I should have just said yes. “Okay,” I say. “That would be good.” I think that might help cover it up a little bit, although the look on Ingram’s face isn’t exactly welcoming.

Well, fuck him. These people are my enemies. I pay attention to the rest of the discussion now, and I don’t let myself get distracted by the memory of Amelia writhing up and down on my thick cock.

I can’t fuck this up. Sure, this job got passed along until it landed in my lap, a big fat fucking steamy turd, but it’s my job to do. And all the guys are going to depend on me. I know I can’t make everyone happy, and they’ll inevitably hate me no matter what I do, unless I manage to get some absurdly perfect contracts. That’s why nobody wants to do this shit job. I’ll be the bad guy, even if I manage to get a decent deal. It’ll never make everyone happy.

Still, they’re depending on me, and I have to take this seriously. I can’t let my one-track mind fuck shit up. So I’ve got the boss’s pussy still on my lips, so what? I can negotiate with her, and I will. Or at least I’ll do my best, because that’s my fucking job, and I care about these people.

I wasn’t lying about what I said to her back at the bar. I was just elected that night, and we were out celebrating. And when I told Amelia that I wanted to help people, I wasn’t kidding.

This town is shit. People’s lives here are hard, short, and often brutal. They depend on this mine, and the mine takes everything from them without question or hesitation. I’m the only thing standing in between them and an even worse, even more fucked up life. I want to help them, ease some of their suffering.

I’m fucked in all this. I know I can’t win, but I’ll do my best. And maybe in the process, I’ll get another taste of the boss’s tight cunt, and maybe that, plus the potential good I can do, maybe that’ll be enough.