Chapter Eight
Jason sent the link on a Thursday night.
She saw it Friday morning while she was making coffee, his text sitting on her phone screen with the cover image loading beneath it. She looked at it long enough to understand what she was looking at and then set the phone face down on the counter and finished making her coffee.
Disciplined By My Black Boss.
The cover was erotic with a woman bent over a desk, a man in a suit standing behind her, and an expression on her face that no professional context could have produced. She put the phone in her bag and drove to work and told herself she was not thinking about it.
She downloaded it that evening while Jason was watching television in the next room. She was curious and pretending otherwise was becoming its own kind of effort. She synced it to her kindle and put the kindle in her bag and did not open it.
That was Friday.
Saturday she carried it to the farmers market and did not open it.
Sunday she took the kindle to the back porch with her coffee and instead read three chapters of the novel she had actually been meaning to finish and did not open it.
The week moved quickly and the work was good.
A client briefing Tuesday that ran exactly as it should.
Deck revisions Wednesday that Xavier approved without a single note.
A new business call Thursday where she held the room in a way that felt natural now, the nerves of her first weeks on the team burned off entirely.
She had grown comfortable in the mid-thigh skirts and wore them every day that week without thinking twice about it.
The fitted tops and low cut blouses had become equally automatic, the wardrobe she had bought at the boutique now simply the wardrobe she wore, her body on display in a way that had stopped feeling like a battle and started feeling like who she was.
Xavier's praise had shifted in the weeks since the good girl Friday.
Not dramatically. Nothing she could have pointed to professionally.
But his attention, when he gave it, had changed in some way she felt more than observed.
He held eye contact a beat longer than he needed to.
He appeared in her office doorway without a meeting scheduled and asked questions and listened to her answers and stayed a moment longer than the conversation required before he left.
The good girl moments had become their own private rhythm.
Always in private, always the same exchange, his two words and her thank you sir coming back before she decided to say it, the words arriving certain and complete in a way that told her they had been waiting there for a while.
He said it twice that week. Once Tuesday after the briefing when the room had emptied and it was just the two of them, and once Wednesday in her office doorway after she walked him through a client deck.
She had never called him sir in any other context. Not once. Something about him calling her a good girl just pulled the word out of her. The word belonged only to these moments and both of them knew it and neither of them needed to mention it.
Jason had dinner with a colleague from his firm and Claire had the house to herself.
She ran a bath.
She brought the kindle and a glass of wine into the bathroom and set both on the edge of the tub and got in and sank into the water. She picked up the kindle. She had been carrying it in her bag for a week and she was done waiting.
She was not detached by the end of the first page.
The book moved fast. The woman was a secretary, a new boss, the nature of his authority and what it did to her over weeks without her permission.
Claire read in the warm water with her wine going untouched and felt the accumulated weight of the week sitting in her body in a way she had not let herself feel fully until now.
The character's boss had traits the writing kept returning to. Controlled. Patient. Powerful. Claire couldn’t help but imagine his voice.
The spanking scene arrived in chapter four.
She had made a mistake. He had called her in. The door closed behind her and he came around the desk and said very quietly bend over and lift up your skirt and Claire’s legs slid apart in the warm water before she had finished processing the sentence.
She was already touching herself. Had been, she realized, for some time before she noticed, her fingers moving between her legs in the warm water with no memory of having decided to put them there.
She kept reading. Kept touching.
The scene did not describe pain. It described alternation.
His hand on her ass and then his hand between her thighs, the two things woven together with a patience that was clearly intentional, the message her body was receiving from the page encoded not in any single sentence but in the rhythm of them.
Punishment and pleasure. Delivered together, inseparable, until the body stopped being able to want punishment without pleasure.
Every time his hand came down she was already desperate for the next time he touched her between her thighs, her body having learned the rhythm of it, the punishment and the pleasure so tangled together now that she could not tell where one ended and the other began.
He leaned down close to her ear and told her she had been a very naughty girl and that he was going to make sure she understood that, and she pushed back against his hand and said yes sir.
"Oh, yes sir," Claire breathed to the empty bathroom.
Her fingers worked faster.
She was not reading anymore. The kindle was on the edge of the tub where she had set it without noticing and she did not reach for it.
She was somewhere else entirely. Xavier's office.
His desk. His hands. She let herself go there completely for the first time, no deflection, no unnamed pair of hands, just Xavier Morrow and what those hands would feel like and what his voice would sound like close to her ear telling her she had been a very naughty girl, and her fingers worked faster and the water moved around her and she did not try to think about anything else at all.
She came hard. Her back arching away from the tub, a sound leaving her that bounced off the tile walls, her hips pushing up against her own fingers as the orgasm hit her in long full waves. She rode it until her thighs stopped shaking and the water settled and the bathroom went quiet again.
She closed her eyes and let out a long slow breath.
She reached for her wine.
She did not get out of the bath for a long time.
* * *
The working lunch was Monday.
Xavier, Jeff, herself, the Velour preliminary numbers across the boardroom table.
It ran over because Xavier had questions and she gathered her things when they finally wrapped and her phone was already ringing as she stood and she answered it walking out the door and did not notice the kindle sitting on the table near her chair.
Xavier was the last one out of the boardroom.
She did not see him pause. Did not see him pick up the kindle with the intention of returning it and then go still in the way he went still when something had his full attention.
Did not see his face when the library loaded and Disciplined By My Black Boss sat there in the list beside her respectable thriller.
She did not see him open it.
Did not see him find her place and read, his thumb not moving, the boardroom quiet around him as he read the last page she was on. Then he closed it and put it in his jacket pocket and went back to work.
* * *
Tuesday she was at her desk at half past two when the email came in.
She had been expecting a routine acknowledgment.
The Whitmore account, a regional insurance brand, a large conservative client on the agency's roster, clean professional work, nothing edgy, nothing that pushed anything anywhere.
She had meant to send them the updated Q2 campaign overview.
She had sent it without opening the attachment to verify.
She opened the client's reply and read the first sentence and her face went hot so fast she felt it in her ears.
We are writing to express our significant concern regarding the materials received this afternoon, which appear to have been sent in error.
She clicked the sent folder.
The Velour deck. Thirty-four pages. The Agent Provocateur reference images and short films. The campaign concept photographs.
The model bent over the desk with the man's hand raised.
The full creative brief for a lingerie brand positioning itself around explicit desire and the limits of what platforms would allow along with a ‘shock strategy’ specifically meant to be too hot for platforms.
Sent to the Whitmore account at 2:17 PM.
She sat very still for a moment.
Her face was still hot. Her hands had gone cold.
There was a physical response to this kind of mistake that had nothing to do with professional calculation, a drop in the stomach, the heat climbing her neck before she could think, the full-body horror of understanding that something had already happened and could not be undone.
She was still sitting there when her phone buzzed.
An email notification. Xavier. The subject line was empty and the body contained four words.
Come to my office.
She set the phone down and looked back at the email from Whitmore. Xavier had been copied on it.
Her heart was pounding and she felt sick to her stomach.
Her kindle was not in her bag and she did not know it yet. She was not thinking about anything except the Velour deck sitting in the Whitmore account lead's inbox and what was waiting for her behind Xavier's closed door.
She gathered herself. Adjusted her skirt once with her shaking hands and walked toward his office on legs that felt uncertain beneath her.
She knocked. Feeling more timid than she could ever remember.
"Come in," he said. "And put the sign on the door."