CHAPTER EIGHT
(Charlotte)
It was bananas how fast I got the hang of working at Matt’s office.
Maybe I’d watched enough episodes of Suits to fake it, but I loved the rhythm and flow of my days.
I had an assistant, a short, pudgy guy named Marshall who was adopted from the Philippines by missionaries when he was two years old, a fact that he told me within five minutes of first meeting me.
Technically, I’d been giving him a try out, but by the end of the day, I’d known way too much about his personal life and family history not to keep him on.
And he was great at explaining things to me when I didn’t know them but doing it in a way that didn’t make me feel totally unprepared.
There were tons of acronyms, different types of reports, and the intra-office messaging system?
Forget it. I’d needed a lot of help during that first week, but by week two, I felt like I was completely in my element.
My frequent visits from the boss helped.
“Fuck! Fuck!” I screamed into the wadded-up panties stuffed in my mouth. I had one foot up on my desk, the other thrown over Matt’s shoulder as he knelt on the floor in front of me, feasting on my cunt.
He lifted his head and grinned. “Shhh. We’re having a meeting. People will think you’re quitting.”
I whimpered and tipped my head back as he dove in again.
There was a knock.
I nearly kicked Matt in the face as he tried to get up.
“Ms. Holmes,” Marshall said through the door. “Sorry, I know you’re meeting with Mr. Ashe, but your mother has been calling for you pretty persistently and I’m concerned that it might be an emergency.”
Matt struggled to his feet and jerked the panties from my mouth. I hastily stuffed them into my bottom desk drawer, cursing myself for not thinking ahead. I was wearing a skirt and would have to be hyper-vigilant for the rest of the day.
“Did she say it was an emergency?” I asked, handing Matt his cane. We straightened our clothes in record time, and he gave me a quick kiss before heading to the door.
“She didn’t say anything. She hangs up when I answer.”
Matt exited, giving my assistant a nod and said, “I was leaving, anyway.”
“I’ll send you those... things,” I called after him, thoroughly unconvincing in my attempt at cover.
Marshall blinked at me behind his designer frames.
“I’ll call my mom back,” I said, turning to go to my desk.
Marshall whipped something out of his jacket. To my utter horror, it was a pair of my panties.
“I had them laundered, along with the pair you stuffed behind the potted plant.” He said it with a complete lack of judgement.
A different kind of lack of judgment than the one I’d displayed by hiding my panties everywhere.
“Come on,” he said, tipping his head to one side. “Nobody here is stupid. You’re Mr. Ashe’s girlfriend. Nobody holds that against you, but they’re not pretending they don’t know.”
“Yeah but... you shouldn’t have to wash my panties. That seems like grounds for a lawsuit.” Maybe I shouldn’t have said that; I didn’t want to inspire anyone to take legal action against me before my health insurance even kicked in.
“I’ve done worse things for employers, believe me.” He tossed me the panties with a flick of his wrist. “And you’re not the only person in this company doing the nasty during office hours.”
My eyes widened. “Really?”
“Ma’am, you know those nifty little sex resorts this company owns? Who do you think designed them?” He held up his hands and pretended to look around. “This place is crawling with horndogs. But don’t make it too obvious.”
Noted. “Are Matt—Mr. Ashe—and I being too obvious.”
“Only if you keep leaving your unmentionables lying around.” Marshall turned on his heel and headed for the door, tossing off, “Call your mother.”
I waited for him to leave, then wriggled into the fresh panties, sat down, checked out my appearance in my laptop camera, and pulled up a video call. It took a while for Mom to answer.
“Hi, honey!” she exclaimed over the dark screen.
“Mom, turn your camera on,” I said.
“Your dad is here with me,” she said before the screen illuminated and gave me a view of the interior of her car. I got a weird pang of homesickness at the sight of the palm trees through the sunroof above my truncated view of Mom’s head.
She was holding her phone flat in one hand; all I could see of her was from the nose up.
“You have to angle the...” I gave up. “Hi, Dad.”
“Hey, Sport!” He gave a two fingered wave off the top of the steering wheel. Somehow, Mom could manage to get a whole person in the frame, as long as that person was not herself.
“We wanted to check up on you at your new job. I called your office, but I kept getting some man.”
“That’s my assistant, Marshall. You can leave messages with him. Or speak, even.”
Mom made a noise of frustration. “I was thrown. I panicked and hung up. I was having a moment.”
“You were having an elderly moment,” I joked.
She ignored me. “Are you all settled in, then? You’re staying with Matt?”
“I’m staying with Matt,” I confirmed. “Awesome apartment, awesome job, everything is awesome.”
“You know you don’t have to stay in New York if you don’t want to be there,” Dad said. He had a habit of trying to support me by encouraging me not to try. At least, that’s what my therapist said. I was seeing her twice a week.
“Thanks. But I’m happy. And I’m in love. I think Matt is the one.”
“I can’t believe you never told us.” Mom had said this several times over our calls, and she didn’t seem likely to let it go soon. “You were dating him that whole time, and you never told us.”
“You know now.” I desperately wished I had worked out some kind of signal to Marshall, so he could interrupt me when a phone conversation got uncomfortable. At the same time, I missed my parents so much that I didn’t want the call to end. I wanted to talk about something else.
“What are you doing for fun in the city?” Dad asked. “Seeing all the sights?”
“I’m always with actual New Yorkers and they don’t really see the sights.” Maybe that was something I could force Matt to do. We could go out and see things in the city neither of us had experienced before. Then, when my parents inevitably came to visit, I could show them around.
There was the homesickness again. But not for the guest house, or California in general. I wanted to see my parents in person.
“Don’t miss the museums.” Dad shook a finger at the screen. “You’re living on an island stacked with rich cultural treasures. It would be a shame to miss out on them because your friends are too cool.”
Mom flipped the camera back to herself but addressed him. “Honey, I’m sure her friends aren’t that cool. Matt is friends with Scott, for god’s sake.”
“Wow.” I rubbed my temples. “Look, I’m gonna go, but... think about coming out here.”
What? What the fuck was I saying?
“Oh?” Mom’s eyebrows rose above the rims of her sunglasses. “For a visit?”
“Sure. I bet Scott would like to see you. He can come up from Boston. And we can go to those museums together, Dad.” Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking right now! “You could stay with us. We have the room.”
Stay with us? Stay in Matt’s apartment with us? When we’ve had sex in practically every room.
“Or we could put you all up in a nice hotel. We have the money.” I laughed loudly and nervously. “And the hotels.”
“What a great idea.” Mom’s intonation was a judge’s gavel falling. I’d sentenced myself. “We’ll see what we can do. You think of some good dates for a visit, and we can coordinate with Scott. This will be fun!”
“We haven’t taken a family vacation since…” Dad’s voice went tight. “The cruise.”
“Ha ha, yeah. The cruise.” The less we reminisced about sexcapades at sea, the better. “Well, I have to go. Busy day and all.”
“We won’t keep you,” Mom said, blowing me a little kiss. “And I’ll call you on your cell phone next time. So I don’t bother your assistant.”
“That’s literally what he’s there for,” I said, but it was too late. Mom had already begun conferring with Dad as to how to end the call, and they blooped off my screen.
Fuuuuuuuck. What had I done?
* * * *
I figured the best way to break the news to Matt that I’d invited my parents to come visit us without consulting him first was to do so in something sexy.
When we got home from work, I went to my dressing room and found some lingerie that screamed “please don’t be mad at your princess.
” It was a lacy lilac shelf bralette that barely covered my nipples, matching thong panties, and a garter belt with sheer gray silk stockings.
Matt had gone into his media room to relax. He hadn’t even changed yet but sat on the couch with a remote in his hand, mindlessly flipping channels with his tie hanging undone around his open collar. When he saw me, he sat straight up.
“Hi there.” I wiggled my fingers at him.
“Wow, princess. You look...” He blew out a long breath and started to his feet.
“No, no. I’ll come to you.” I stepped carefully across the plush rug in my lilac satin-and-marabou stilettos. He tossed the remote aside and sat back, knees apart in the kind of man-spread that would be infuriating on public transport, but which made me ache to drop to me knees at the moment.
I knelt on the sofa beside him and crawled my way into position, ass up in his lap. “I think you need to spank me, my dragon.”
His big, hot hand cupped my ass. One finger traced the thong where it split my cheeks. “I do?”
“I did something very naughty, without your permission.”
His hand stilled. “Wait, did you come after I told you to wait until tonight? Because if you did... when? And how? In detail, before I dole out the punishment.”
I’d forgotten about the edict he’d sent me via text after our interrupted cunnilingus. “Not that, no. I still haven’t.”
Now that I remembered I hadn’t, my attention was diverted to more throbbing matters.
I forced myself back to the issue at hand. “What I did was... well... I invited my parents to come for a visit.”