Chapter 13 After Hours #2
So I gave her the consequence she’d been lobbying for since the first day she mouthed off at me, which was the only language that ever properly reached her.
I pulled her down off the counter and into her own desk chair and over my knee, the swivel chair she ruled the front hall from, her skirt up, her soft round cheeks bared and already flushing, and the first spank rattled the key hooks on the wall as it had in the key room and she made a sound I’d remember.
“Count them,” I said.
“You count them, you’re the one…” The second landed. “Two, fine, two, you brute…”
“That’s one. You skipped one to be difficult. Start over.”
“That’s not, you can’t just reset the…” The third.
She was laughing and gasping and furious and flushed to her chest, the blush gone everywhere the freckles went, and she renegotiated every single number, one higher, two off, disputing the count like a labor contract, and I held her down with one hand flat between her shoulders and gave her each one slow enough that she felt the wait between them, which was the part she actually wanted, the held interval, the proof someone would bother to make her wait.
By the time her count and mine agreed, by accident, somewhere around six, she’d stopped being able to do the math.
I bent her over the guest book.
“Right here,” she said, breathless, both hands flat on the open ledger, on the slashing signatures of CEOs and heiresses, the brass bell an inch from her fingers. “Right here where I watch everyone else’s life happen through this desk. Five years. Do it right here, Keller, or I’ll dock you.”
I worked her open first with my fingers, bent over her own guest book, two of them buried deep and curling while my thumb rubbed her clit, until she was soaked and dripping down her thighs and swearing and grinding her ass back into my hand, and then I dragged her ruined panties down to her knees, lined myself up against her slick swollen folds, and took her from behind, across her own counter, hard, sinking into her in one long stroke that lodged me deep and knocked the air out of her mid-sentence, which was what she’d been asking for in every needle and heckle since the day I walked in.
And the brat act held right up until it didn’t.
She mouthed off through the first dozen strokes, breathless and game, her freckled tits swinging against the cold counter with every thrust, narrating the experience like a customer review, grading my technique, threatening to charge me overtime and bill me for wear on the counter, and I answered the mouth the only way that ever worked on her, with pace and depth, fucking her harder, my hips slapping against her soft round ass, a fist gathered in the red hair pulling her head back just enough, and I watched the defiance go out of her one heckle at a time, the back talk thinning into the most gloriously insincere stream of yes-sirs I have ever heard, each one dragged out of her and immediately disowned, each one a small surrender she’d deny under oath in any court in the land.
“That’s not, that’s not me agreeing,” she gasped, even as she said it again, “that’s just a, that’s a verbal tic, it doesn’t, oh, oh, it doesn’t count, harder, that’s a service request not a…”
“Say it again.”
“Yes sir,” she breathed, furious and melting, “yes, sir, you smug, yes,” and gave up the last of the fight, her hands white-knuckled on her own counter, her hips working back to meet me.
Her hand hit the bell. It dinged, bright and absurd in the dark hall, the sound that meant service, and we both lost it completely, laughing, joined, her forehead down on the guest book, and I did not stop, and the laugh turned into a moan turned into a curse in two dialects.
“If one guest,” she gasped, “if one single guest comes down those stairs right now I am charging them a viewing fee, it’s in the, oh, it’s in the schedule of, of fees, I wrote it…”
“You wrote a viewing fee.”
“I write everything, I’m the desk, harder, that’s not a request that’s a, that’s a service standard…”
When it took her she reached for the move that was hers alone, her own choice, her own hand, she grabbed the loose end of her cardigan and stuffed it into her own mouth and screamed into the wool, her soft body shaking across the signatures of the richest women in Europe, everything in her clenching down around me in hard greedy spasms, her freckled back flushed and gleaming under the lamp, and the grip of her milking me dragged me over a few strokes after, and I buried myself deep and held there, flooding her with thick hot spurts, emptying into her while she clenched and shuddered and made the muffled wreck of a sound that the cardigan barely contained.
She sprawled, after, half across the desk, boneless, the cardigan falling out of her mouth, grinning up at the dark rafters like she’d won something. She had.
I fished the laminated card out of her cardigan pocket, the one she’d never gotten to make me sign, and I found the stamp she kept in the drawer, the one for confirmed bookings, and I stamped it.
FULFILLED. And under it, because I’d seen her smile go thin and dutiful the way it did when nobody credited her work, I wrote, Repeat custom welcome.
She read it. She held it to her chest.
“Hey,” I said, and I sat back down on the counter beside her sprawl and made her look at me.
“The thing I said earlier. The ninety seconds. I meant it. You’re the most competent person in this building and the only one nobody’s ever bothered to tell.
So here’s the list.” And I gave it to her in specifics, in the form I’d learned she needed, not you’re great but the actual things, the NDA she’d invented that was now house law, the betting pool she ran cleaner than the books, how she clocked every face that came up that cable car before they reached the desk.
Three concrete things. I watched her believe at least three.
She put the card in her cardigan pocket. She kept it there for the rest of the season, patting the spot sometimes without seeming to know she was doing it, like a woman checking a thing was still real.
“Right,” she said, scrubbing her face, getting up, smoothing her skirt, the desk-girl reassembling around the wreck like she did.
“Out. I have to put my kingdom back together before the early shift, you’ve got signatures all over the place.
” She shooed me toward the stairs, then called after me, mouth fully back online, “And don’t think I won’t be revising those SLAs.
I want defined turnaround times. I want a schedule. ”
“There’s a board for that.”
“I’m putting myself on the board.”
I left her there, in the lamplight, restoring her counter, and I was halfway up the stairs when the chatter behind me cut out. Poppy never went quiet. I came back down two steps.
She’d stopped mid-tidy, a single form held flat on the counter, the new bookings she straightened every night before bed. Her head was tilted at it, the way she tilted at a puzzle, that quick green attention finding an edge that didn’t sit right.
“Huh,” she said, to herself.
“What?”
“New booking. Paid in full, three weeks out.” She turned it under the light.
“No referral source. Nobody sent her, she just, appeared, with a wire. And the deposit took an extra day to clear, which the bank doesn’t do unless.
” She shrugged, and yawned, hugely, the late hour winning.
“Probably nothing. Probably a shy widow with a slow bank.”
She flagged it, a small amber tab from the strip she kept, and tucked it into the pile, and pushed her chair back from the desk.
“Name’s Maier,” she said, around the yawn, already halfway to forgetting it. “E. Maier.”