34. Emmy
My mother is irritated with me when I get home, and not in the normal way she’s always irritated with me. Her shoulders are stiff; her jaw is locked. The sound of me quietly talking to Snowflake as I pour food into her bowl is enough to merit the swift jerk of her head and narrowed eyes. I wonder if she somehow knows I’ve been sleeping with Liam, and if the accusations about this will leap from her mouth later today or tomorrow, fully formed. Entire paragraphs about how terrible I am, all the evidence she’s pulled together to support it. She’d have been a good lawyer if she’d chosen to go that route. She’s able to gather seemingly unrelated facts about me into a cohesive indictment with just a little thought, so convincingly that even I will believe her.
I drive her to physical therapy, and she yells at me for hitting the brakes too hard and accuses me of driving recklessly when I’m only five miles over the speed limit. After we park, I put my hand on the door to walk in with her and she stops me. “You’ll wait in the car if you know what’s good for you,” she says as she climbs out.
It says everything about her that I’m now an adult, and she can barely hobble down a hallway, yet she still thinks she can physically threaten me and get away with it. How many times did I hear that phrase as a kid? She hit me in the face so often—simply for the crime of looking at her—that I still have to force myself to look strangers in the eye.
Or maybe I’m the one it says something about even more, because she treated me the way she did and I’m still here taking it, aren’t I?
I text Jeff after I’ve dropped her off. He and I speak infrequently—my phone history with him is a long record of one of us saying “happy birthday” and the other saying “thanks,” year after year. He’ll always be the person who took my mother’s side against me. Who’d say, “Look how the car rises when Emmy climbs out” when we went somewhere, seeking Mommy’s approval when he was twenty-two fucking years old.
Tell Sandra to rein it in. I’m not staying here if she continues to behave like this.
Jeff
She said you have a bad attitude.
I roll my eyes. That was a favorite theme of hers back when I lived at home. She’d make fun of my weight over dinner until I was weeping and tell me to leave the table if I couldn’t take a joke. She’d say, “What the hell is your problem?” when I walked in from school and then tell anyone who’d listen that I had a bad attitude, that I was a chore to be around. As if a healthier person wouldn’t mind being ridiculed, wouldn’t mind being lashed out at as soon as she walked in the door.
Who wouldn’t have a bad attitude under those circumstances? I know this intellectually and yet I can’t stop believing that if I was so uniformly hated—at home, at school—there must have been something wrong with me too.
I will never grow into a person she and my brother respect or care about.They’re all the family I have, but when do you finally accept that, as Liam said, sometimes you’re best with zero of a thing?
Writing them off would feel like a failure.
But it might also feel very much like a fresh start.
* * *
After I’ve droppedmy mother at home, I return to town where I meet with a rep from the company we’ve hired to manage the theater. They are kicking off with a James Bond retrospective—the older movies will cost us almost nothing and it adheres to our retro theme—and while I, personally, find the misogyny in the older movies infuriating, I’m also wondering if Liam might want to go see one with me.
Weak, on my part. I’m certain I’ll regret it.
As I walk to the grocery store in the meeting’s wake, I’m annoyed at myself for thinking ahead with Liam, annoyed at Liam for making me do it though he’s got no idea he did.
He’s close to the door when I walk in, and I want to remain annoyed, but I just sort of can’t. He didn’t shave this morning, and there’s not a man in the fucking world who looks as good as Liam when he skips the razor.
“You had lunch yet?” he asks.
“I don’t eat lunch. And besides,” I say, smirking as I lean close so only he can hear me, “it makes me wet seeing you so hard at work. I couldn’t possibly eat in my current state.”
I walk back into my office and am taking my stuff out of my bag when he walks in and takes a seat…in my desk chair.
“Come here, Emerson,” he demands, patting his lap.
I cross my arms. “You don’t actually expect me to sit on your lap behind my desk. Anyone could walk in and see that.”
“So, it’s okay for you to make me hard as hell talking about how wet something made you, but God forbid anyone should see you in my lap.”
“It’s about respect.”
His lips tip up. “I think it’s about someone not putting their money where their mouth is.”
“I’m happy to put my mouth anywhere you want,” I reply, and he groans audibly. “Just not publicly.”
“No one’s coming back here,” he says, patting his lap again as if I haven’t spoken.
I glance over my shoulder at the open door and sigh heavily as I cross the room and perch gingerly on his knees. “Fine. And why, exactly, are you insisting on this somewhat demeaning display?”
He tugs me backward, fast and without warning, so that I’m no longer perched on his knees but pressed right against his very hard cock with my skirt riding up. “I figured you deserved to see what that smart little mouth of yours produced, firsthand.”
It’s like a bolt of lightning, served right between my legs. I can’t help but rub against him. Maybe I’m torturing myself, but that’s okay if I’m torturing him too. And based on the way he groans again, I definitely am. “It would be so easy for you to slide inside me like this,” I whisper, pulling his hand between my thighs and under the seam of my panties. I’m absolutely soaked already, just from the idea of it. “I could pull down your zipper and rise up just enough for you to slide inside me, right here, with that door wide open.”
“Christ,” he whispers, and he no longer needs my guidance. His fingers are moving on their own now, circling my clit and pushing inside me. “Let me.”
I gasp. “Why should I? I can come just like this.”
He withdraws his fingers entirely. “Then I’d better make sure I get mine first,” he whispers. “Get on your knees, Emmy.”
I look behind us at the door, still open wide. Even if I’m hidden under the desk, it’ll be pretty fucking obvious what’s going on if Liam’s groaning with his head thrown backward.
“I wasn’t asking, Emerson,” he growls. “Get on your fucking knees.”
I can’t get to the floor fast enough. He’s already yanking his jeans open, reaching into his boxers.
“Suck, princess,” he commands.
I glare up at him. “I think I can figure it out from here, yard boy.”
He starts to laugh, but it’s cut off as I pull him into my mouth. As much as I don’t want one of his guys to come back here and witness this, I can’t help but play with him a little bit. Fisting him but keeping the pressure light. Sucking hard then backing off entirely.
I’m a woman of few talents—really just two talents: ruining my enemies and this—and I’m going to make sure he doesn’t forget today.
“Goddammit,” he groans. “Stop torturing me.”
“Say please, yard boy,” I demand, and find myself in the air, lifted with his hands beneath my arms and deposited in his lap again, straddling him this time. He pushes my soaked panties to the side and thrusts, sliding into me in a way that leaves us both gasping.
It’s so rude. So thoughtless. And so unbelievably hot, the way he didn’t ask, the way he just took. With his hands beneath my ass, he lifts me again and thrusts upward.
“You know, you’re supposed to ask me first.” It’s a struggle to sound annoyed when it feels this good. I’m so wet, and he’s so hard, and I’m irritatingly close to coming already. He should have had to work harder at it.
“You like it better when I don’t ask, I’m clean and I saw the pills in your purse,” he says, his fingers inside my thong, sliding along the crack of my ass. A single finger presses inside and the discomfort of it makes me clench around him, makes the wet slide of his cock a thousand times better. “I bet you’d let me do just about anything I wanted, wouldn’t you?” he asks, pressing in farther. He no longer has to lift me. I’m riding him like I’ll die if I don’t come. “I bet you’d let me fuck this tight little ass, too. I bet you’d beg me to do it.”
He thrusts hard then, unexpectedly. His finger goes deeper, and I come apart, gasping his name.
“Oh fuck,” he inhales, and then his head falls back as he explodes inside me.
I slump against him. “Holy shit,” I breathe. I just let him fuck me and finger me and say the dirtiest shit imaginable with his employees right around the corner. “I can’t believe I went along with this.”
I start to pull away and he yanks me back, holding me tight against him.
“I texted JP the second you started running your mouth and told them all to go to lunch because we were about to have a fight,” he says with a laugh.
I smile against his chest. “Pretty sure of yourself, huh?”
“No, I figured there was a fifty percent chance we actually would end up fighting. And, anyway, I’d never let the guys see you the way you just were.”
I pull away from him. “Why’s that?”
He pushes a lock of hair behind my ear—his fingertips grazing my cheek, his eyes searching mine. “Because I don’t want anyone but me to know what you look like when you come.”
He’s not my boyfriend. I don’t know why we can’t just fuck without him saying all this relationship-type stuff. “You—”
He cuts me off with his mouth on mine. “I know,” he says. “I don’t need to hear you say it. Now let’s go to lunch.”
“Are we going someplace where it’s okay to have cum leaking down your inner thighs? Because that’s the current situation.”
He laughs. “Clean up. I’ll wait. And I got hard again hearing you say that, so I’m going to need a little time myself.”
I’d started to lift myself up, but at that, I settle against him once more. And indeed, that lovely bulge of his is growing.
“I don’t eat lunch anyway,” I tell him as I rock my hips, and with a groan, he pulls my mouth to his.
“I’m going to fuck you one more time,” he says, “and after that, the shop is closed until we’ve been on a date.”
I grind against him with a smirk. “Yeah, we’ll see about that.”