Chapter 5 #2
He leans closer, bracing one hand on the door beside my head, and now he's caging me in, deliberate and controlled and completely overwhelming.
"You stopped me," he says quietly. "You put yourself between me and Chad. You were not afraid."
"I'm your supervisor. It's literally my job to manage personnel conflicts."
"No." His eyes search mine. "You were protecting me. From myself. From consequences. You care."
"I don't."
"Liar."
"Thraka."
"You smell different when you lie," he says, and my entire nervous system short-circuits. "Sharper. Like burnt coffee and panic. But right now, you smell like... want."
Oh God.
Oh no.
This is catastrophically, monumentally bad.
This is an HR nightmare wrapped in a lawsuit waiting to happen, tied up with a bow made of policy violations and terrible decision-making.
This is the kind of situation that ends with mandatory sensitivity training and me updating my LinkedIn profile at three in the morning while stress-eating an entire sleeve of Oreos.
This is me, backed against a supply closet door, staring up at an orc who looks at me like I'm the most fascinating puzzle he's ever encountered, and my brain is screaming INAPPROPRIATE while my body is whispering what if.
"I don't want anything," I manage, but my voice sounds breathless and unconvincing even to my own ears.
"Another lie." He tilts his head, studying me. "Then how do I punish him?"
"You don't. You let it go. You move on. You focus on doing excellent work that makes his commentary irrelevant."
"That is boring," he says, and I can hear the genuine disappointment in his voice, like I've just told him there are no more battles to fight, no more glory to be won.
"That's adulting," I reply, trying to inject some levity into this increasingly dangerous conversation, this closet that keeps getting smaller and warmer with every passing second.
"I do not like adulting." He says it with such profound conviction, such sincere distaste, that despite everything, despite the policy violations and the complete abandonment of professional boundaries and the fact that my career is probably circling the drain, I almost laugh.
"Join the club," I whisper, less Ice Queen and more actual human being. "We meet never because we're all too busy responding to emails and pretending we have our lives together."
His smile widens.
Stop being charmed by the orc who ate Steve's sandwich and tried to duel the IT department.
Stop noticing the way his eyes crinkle at the corners when he's amused.
Stop thinking about what it would feel like if he closed that last six inches of distance between us.
"Or," Thraka says, his voice dropping into that low register that seems to vibrate straight through me. "How do I reward you for stopping me?"
The air in the closet goes completely, utterly still, as if the universe itself has paused to watch what happens next, holding its breath in anticipation.
My pulse pounds as a frantic rhythm that I'm absolutely certain he can hear, because we're so close now that I can count every fleck of amber in his dark eyes, can feel the heat radiating off him like a furnace, can smell something distinctly him, earthy and warm and entirely too appealing for someone who violated three separate HR policies before lunch today.
"You don't need to reward me," I say, but the words come out too quiet, too uncertain.
"I disagree." He shifts, and his other hand comes up to brace on the door, fully caging me now, his body a wall of heat and muscle and barely restrained energy. "You saved Chad. You saved me. You are always saving things, Little Manager. But who saves you?"
"I don't need saving," I manage, though my voice wavers traitorously on the last word, undermining the professional detachment I'm desperately trying to maintain.
"Everyone needs saving sometimes," he counters, his tone maddeningly gentle, almost tender, a stark contrast to the barely leashed power radiating from his frame.
"Not me." If I admit weakness, if I acknowledge the hairline fractures spiderwebbing through my facade, the whole structure might collapse entirely.
"Especially you," Thraka says, and there's such quiet certainty in those two words, such absolute conviction, that it steals the breath from my lungs.
And the way he says it, gentle and certain, like he sees straight through all my armor to the exhausted, anxious, perpetually caffeinated person underneath.
I should push him away.
I should remind him about professional boundaries and workplace ethics and the seventeen-page sexual harassment policy I helped draft.
I should be the responsible one here, the voice of reason, the adult in the room who puts a stop to this madness before it spirals into a full-blown HR incident that would require its own dedicated filing system.
I'm always the responsible one, the person who remembers to submit expense reports on time, who actually reads the terms and conditions, who carries backup phone chargers and emergency granola bars and a laminated copy of the building's evacuation procedures.
The one who stays late to finish everyone else's work, who takes the fall when projects go sideways, who sends the difficult emails and makes the uncomfortable decisions and maintains professional boundaries even when every fiber of my being is screaming otherwise.
But Thraka is looking at me like I'm not a problem to solve or a resource to manage or a competitor to undermine. He's looking at me like I'm valuable. Worthy. Like my stress and my rules and my three-ring binders full of contingency plans are not weaknesses but strengths.
Like I'm not too much or too rigid or too cold, not the Ice Queen everyone whispers about in the break room, not the taskmaster who sends emails at 2 AM with subject lines written in all caps.
Like I'm exactly right, exactly enough, exactly what he wants without modification or optimization or a single goddamn revision.
"Thraka," I start, his name rough and unfamiliar on my tongue, catching somewhere between my teeth and my better judgment, but I don't know how to finish the sentence because my brain, my beautiful, efficient, spreadsheet-loving brain, has apparently short-circuited entirely.
Stop?
Don't stop?
Please continue but also I need you to sign this liability waiver first?
This is wildly inappropriate and also I haven't stopped thinking about you since you cracked the boardroom table?
His gaze drops to my mouth.
My breathing stutters.
The closet feels impossibly small, impossibly hot, and I'm hyperaware of every point where we're almost touching. His chest six inches from mine. His arms bracketing my shoulders. His breath warm against my forehead.
"Tell me to leave," he says quietly. "Tell me this is against protocol. Tell me to go back to my desk and never speak of this again."
I should tell him to leave.
I absolutely should tell him to leave.
I should invoke Section 4.7 of the employee handbook, cite precedent from the 2019 HR summit, and remind him that this closet has security camera coverage (it doesn't, but he doesn't know that). I should be professional. Appropriate. The model of corporate decorum.
I should do a lot of things.
"Orla."
My name in his voice sounds different. Not clipped or professional or dismissive. It sounds like a question. Like a promise. Like something I didn't know I wanted to hear until this exact moment.
"We're in a supply closet," I say weakly, and even to my own ears it sounds less like a protest and more like I'm just... narrating our current situation. Stating facts. Establishing context.
His mouth curves. "Yes."
"This is inappropriate." I’m undermining the professional objection I'm trying to raise. "Wildly inappropriate. We have a fraternization policy. I helped draft the fraternization policy."
"Very," he agrees, completely unbothered by corporate governance or the three-page addendum I wrote about workplace relationships creating conflicts of interest.
My brain scrambles for another objection, something concrete and logical that will break whatever spell this is.
"Someone could need printer paper," I manage, gesturing vaguely at the shelves behind me stacked with office supplies.
"Or toner cartridges. Or sticky notes. This is a high-traffic area during business hours. "
His grin widens, showing teeth. "Let them suffer."
A laugh bubbles up, half hysteria and half something that feels dangerously close to joy.
This is insane. Completely, utterly, categorically insane.
I'm losing my mind. That's the only rational explanation for why my heart is racing like I've had six espressos instead of my usual four, why my professional persona is crumbling like a poorly formatted spreadsheet, why I'm seriously considering—actually genuinely considering—doing something that violates not just company policy but every personal code of conduct I've lived by for the past twenty-eight years.
I've finally cracked under the pressure of quarterly reports and passive-aggressive email chains and Chad's smug face in meetings.
Or.
Or maybe I'm just tired.
Tired of being controlled. Tired of being perfect. Tired of rules that protect everyone except me.
Thraka's eyes search mine with an intensity that strips away every corporate defense mechanism I've ever constructed.
Waiting.
Patient in a way that feels entirely at odds with his reputation as someone who solves problems by charging through them with an axe. He's giving me space to breathe, to think, to calculate the cost-benefit analysis of what happens next.
Giving me the choice.
The option to step back, smooth down my blazer, and pretend this moment of temporary insanity never happened.
To return to my desk and my color-coded calendar and my five-year plan that definitely does not include supply closet encounters with orcs who think HR stands for "Human Resources" in the cannibalistic sense.
The out.
The escape hatch. The emergency exit. The safe, sensible, professionally appropriate retreat that any reasonable person in my position would take without hesitation.
And God help me, I don't take it.
"If we're going to do this," I hear myself say, "we're doing it correctly. With clear boundaries and expectations and a mutual understanding of discretion."
His smile unfurls slowly across his face, absolutely devastating in its effect on my carefully maintained composure.
"Little Manager," he rumbles, voice dropping to a register that does unfortunate things to my internal temperature regulation.
The nickname that should irritate me—that does irritate me in meetings when he uses it in front of the quarterly review committee—sounds entirely different in this context.
Dangerous. Promising. "Are you actually negotiating terms and conditions for a reward? "
The question hangs in the air between us, heavy with implication. He sounds genuinely delighted by the prospect, as if the idea of contractual parameters around what we're about to do is somehow foreplay rather than simple risk management.
Which it absolutely is. Risk management. Nothing more.
"I'm establishing parameters for a mutually beneficial arrangement that maintains professional decorum in public settings."
"You are delicious when you talk like a contract."
Heat floods my face. "I'm serious."
"So am I." He leans in, as his breath tickles my ear. "Tell me your terms."