Authors: Astrid Lee Donovan
“Obviously,” he said with a smirk. “Well, as we’ll be working together quite a bit, I hope you’re prepared.”
“Prepared for…what?” Reese asked. She’d been under the impression she’d mostly be working with Mandy, and that the job was very entry-level.
“To not fuck up,” Mr. Callion said, his words biting against her ears. Reese flinched, then scolded herself for flinching. She was no stranger to curse words, but coming from this impressive man in his tailored suit in his magnificent office…well, she hadn’t been “prepared” for
that.
To cover her initial reaction, she merely shrugged, trying to force her eyes to take on a disdainful boredom. She got the picture. She was the employee, he was the boss, and he would probably treat her like crap. Well, whatever; let him fire her if she didn’t take that crap the way he wanted her to.
“Okay,” she said. “Anything else I can do for you this morning?”
“No,” he said, finally taking the coffee and sipping it, turning back to his computer and resuming work as though she wasn’t there at all. Reese slipped out, back into the grotesquely normal outer office, where Mandy awaited with a stack of papers, a binder full of rules and regulations, and that pursed-lip smile Reese knew she would come to hate.
Now why would they hire someone like that,
Robert Callion wondered as he watched his new second-tier assistant walk out of the room. He’d hired Mandy himself, liking the fact that she was eager to please, but liking even
more
the fact that he felt no attraction to her whatsoever. That had gotten him in trouble once before, when a saucy secretary had nearly cost him his reputation.
So the fact that this new employee was…well, to say she was just his type would put it mildly, made him worried. He could control himself in almost every aspect of his life, and did. In fact, control was something Robert Callion had in abundance. He had so much control that he liked to use his excess on other people. But there was one thing to which he would always be something of a slave. The women who had that effect on him were few and far between, but when he encountered one…
It didn’t matter that this Reese girl couldn’t have been more than 18 (though she had to be, in order to work at his company). It didn’t matter that her last name was the same as one of his highest performing managers. It didn’t matter that she was his employee. None of that mattered to his heart, which had immediately struck a match to itself when she walked in, all wide-eyed and luscious, with curves to kill. But it was that something underneath her eyes - that was what he saw, what he liked, what he couldn’t force himself not to want.
There was something there, hiding.
And he wanted to rip it out into the open.
Reese cracked her back. It was her second week as Mandy’s assistant, but she’d realized soon enough that she wasn’t really Mandy’s assistant at all. She was Mandy’s scapegoat. The one Mandy pawned her least desirable jobs off on. When there was bad news to be delivered, or boring filing work to be done, or an unpleasant interaction with Mr. Callion to attend to, it was Reese – not Mandy – who had to do it.
Which didn’t seem fair, but she had yet to realize her dream of being fired, and she certainly couldn’t quit.
Reese felt like she’d worked a year in those past two weeks. Mr. Callion was a demanding man. When he wasn’t ordering her to get someone on the phone, find a lost file, round up old accounting papers, or bring him a three-year-old invoice, he was demanding coffee or lunch or his dry cleaning to be sent out. She felt more like a gopher than anything else, and it was wearing her thin.
It didn’t help that every time she saw him – whether it was bringing him the morning coffee or watching him grumble over some paperwork she was delivering – she felt an undeniable tingling in that area her mother would call the “nether regions”, but which she knew, far more casually, as her pussy.
She’d had a crush on her art teacher. This was different. What she felt towards her boss wasn’t some romantic idyll - it was full-blown lust. And it frustrated her, because why should she feel that way towards someone who’d never said a kind word to her? Who was nothing but a jerk? Maybe it was the way those eyes of his captured her in their gaze, the way he sometimes scrutinized her from head to toe, enigmatic and visceral in his stare. Just the thought of it drove a shiver up her spine.
Now, as the day groaned on towards seven p.m., far later than Reese ever wanted to be in the office, she was still laboring over a massive box of lease agreements that needed to be sorted, cross-referenced, and filed.
Overhead, a blinking red light taunted her in her periphery. There were cameras all over the office. Mandy had told Reese that they all streamed, live, to Mr. Callion’s computer, so he could keep tabs on his employees at all times. She abhorred the very idea of it, feeling everyday like she was working in a prison instead of an office.
Besides, she felt that they were just there to inspire fear. There was no way he was actually watching those cameras. He was too busy, wasn’t he? Now, as she took a brief break, musing on the camera and its watchful eye, a devious idea crept into her head. Turning towards it, eyes narrowed, she decided that a little act of defiance never hurt anyone, and in the end it would make the rest of the night’s work go by much quicker.
With a wicked smile on her face, Reese leaned back in her chair, pulled open the button of her blazer, and drew her shirt up to her neck, giving the camera a full view of her tits. Sticking her tongue out, she shook them slightly in their bra before turning around once more, giggling as she re-clothed her torso.
It’s the little things,
she thought, strangely satisfied by the tiny act of rebellion. But, with a sigh, she resumed her work, checking the names and dates of a lease against the computer’s database, now arching her back, which was already sore again from hunching over the keyboard.
“Excuse me.”
The short, sharp bark made Reese jump in her seat. Closing her eyes, her cheeks blushed bright red.
Oh…fuck…why is he still here?! Oh my God, he saw…he
saw!
He actually
saw me!
I’m so…
Fired. The thought brought a smile to her face. Maybe this would be the thing that actually got her pink slipped, at last; then, she’d never have to return to this crappy office with its sad workers and sadder decorations.
Still, she couldn’t help but be a bit embarrassed; she really
hadn’t
expected Mr. Callion to still be around, and now she knew for certain he’d seen her breasts. Some part of her deep down wondered what he’d thought of them, if they had, perhaps, made him see her as something other than a young girl whose father worked for the company. Maybe…
As she turned, cheeks bright and eyes low, she tried to explain.
“I didn’t know anyone was still around,” she said in a rush. “I just…I was getting so bored and I…”
“Come with me, please,” Mr. Callion said, interrupting her. She looked up at him; he was in one of his trademark form-fitting suits, dark black with a grey tie, every inch of it tailored to his muscular body. His green eyes sparked over her, hiding his emotions, his lips in a tight line that gave no evidence of his mental state. That strong, clean-shaven jaw was set hard, as usual.
He looked just the same now, about to reproach his nearly underage employee for flashing the camera, as he did receiving his morning coffee. Reese slunk behind him into the office, wondering where all that renegade fire and rebellious spirit that had caused her to expose herself in the first place had gone to now. She could certainly use some of it at that moment.
As they stepped into his lavish office, Reese admired, if only for a moment, the view of the sunset over Manhattan through the wide glass windows. She wondered how someone could be so surly when they got to spend all day with a view like that.
“Please, sit,” Mr. Callion said, taking his own seat behind the desk. Reese crept up and eased herself into the chair, feeling very self-conscious as his eyes roamed up and down her body; she felt like a bug in a jar. Or a stripper on a pole, more likely. He’d always looked at her that way, and she really hadn’t minded, but this time she’d just about asked for it.
“I get the feeling, Ms. Sherman, that you aren’t very happy here,” Mr. Callion said, breaking the tension. He leaned forward slightly, folding his hands together on his desk.
Here we go,
Reese thought.
Canned for showing my cans.
She shrugged.
“Why did you even take the position, then?” he asked, his voice strangely warm and soft – nothing like his normal growling, barking, animalistic anger. “Why, for example, did you decide to forgo college, as I’m sure so many of your peers had done?”
Reese squirmed in her seat. Couldn’t he just fire her and get it over with?
“Well, I got into SCAD, but my parents wouldn’t let me go. I want to study art and they don’t think it’s…uh…a pragmatic decision. My father got me the job here and…” she shrugged, blanching further as his gaze deepened.
“Are you a good artist?” he asked, throwing Reese off further.
“Um, well, I mean, I got into that school. It’s one of the best. And, well, yeah. I’m a really good artist. Really…good,” she said, feeling awkward about having to sell herself.
“You ought to have more confidence, if that’s the case,” Mr. Callion said, leaning back and turning slightly in his chair. He crossed his legs and seemed to stare at the wall, pondering. When he turned back to her, his eyes were bright. “Are you still working on your art? Now that you’re out of school?”
Reese shook her head.
Where the hell is this going,
she wondered, confused. Why hadn’t he even mentioned her little strip show out in the office? Surely, he’d seen it; why else would they be having this conversation?
“I can’t afford a studio space yet, or a lot of materials, you know. And my parents don’t want to help me out with it, and I have to save everything I make here so that I can pay for my education in a few years,” she said.
A long pause punctuated their conversation. Mr. Callion broke his stare, pulling a fresh sheet of paper from a pile and scribbling something onto it. Reese leaned forward, trying to get a peek at what he was writing. When he looked back up at her, she shot backwards in her chair fast as a bullet. He smirked, and then pushed the paper across the desk at her.
“That’s the address to a studio space I lease in Brooklyn,” he said. “It’s not occupied right now. I’ll take it off the list of rentable spaces. Go there this weekend. I’ll have it stocked with supplies. What do you work in? Oils? Watercolors? Pastels? Clay?”
Reese’s jaw dropped. Her mind pulsed with sudden excitement, and confusion, and panic. Was this a trick? What was his end game in this? Why on earth would he be so generous when she clearly had no interest in being the ideal employee?
“Well?” he asked, impatient, drumming his fingers on the table.
“Oils,” she squeaked out. “And clay.”
“Fine,” he said, and turning to his computer, seemed to forget all about her. Reese could only sit and stare as he clicked at the screen. After a minute, he looked at her out of the corner of his eye.
“That’s all, Ms. Sherman,” he said, waving at her dismissively. Shell shocked, Reese got to her feet and began to cross the room.
“Ms. Sherman,” she heard him bark from behind her, and she turned, sure that he was about to laugh in her face and tell her she was fired, after all. Instead, she saw that he was holding out the paper with the address. “Forgetting something?”
She returned on tiptoe, and taking the paper from him, their fingers grazed slightly. She felt the hair on her arm stand up at the electric reaction in her body, his eyes trapping hers in their deep wells, her throat dry and hands suddenly clammy.
“I’m quite the patron of the arts, you’ll find,” he said.
“Thank you,” Reese squeaked, unable to even recognize that strained voice as her own. “Thank you…so much.”
When she closed the door to Mr. Callion’s office behind her, she was breathless and ecstatic. It was too good to be true! She couldn’t believe it!
It
is
too good to be true,
some voice deep down inside of her said, and her mood dimmed slightly.
What is he going to ask of you in return? You know there’s no such thing as a free lunch.
Her stomach dropped slightly. She thought of how Mr. Callion’s eyes roamed over her body, how he looked at her like a wild animal might look at their prey, how the slight brushing of their fingers against each other shot shocks up her arm, how his voice made her stomach do cartwheels…
She looked down at the address, written in tight script. She recognized the street, it wasn’t far from her home. She wondered if she might arrive there only to find it wasn’t a studio at all, but some sort of dungeon, where he would perform unspeakable acts on her young, ripe flesh…
Oh,
she thought, when that idea raised a flush to her cheeks and – surprisingly – a tingling excitement to her sex. Looking up and around, as though there were someone else there who might be able to pick up on her reaction, she folded the paper quickly, slipping it into the pocket of her pencil skirt and hurrying back to her desk.
All that work could wait until tomorrow. It couldn’t, really, but there was no way she was staying in that office, knowing he was so close, and that they were alone, and that the thought of being alone with him was having a rather unladylike effect on her.