Stuck in the Office

The clock on the wall said nine forty. Everyone else had badged out hours ago, and I was still here, in the glass office on the top floor, because Cole had asked me to stay back for the review.

I had wanted this. I had spent fourteen months wanting it. The promotion, the corner desk, the title under my name on the door. I sat across from him with my folder open on my knees and my whole pitch ready, and my hands would not stop sweating.

“You can close that,” he said.

He nodded at the folder. His voice stayed level, the way it always did, the way that made people in meetings go quiet without being asked. I closed the folder.

“I read your numbers, Jenna. They’re good.” He leaned back. The chair did not creak. Nothing in his office ever made a sound it was not allowed to make. “That’s not why you’re still sitting there.”

My stomach dropped, and lower than my stomach, somewhere I did not give it permission to go, something pulled tight. I crossed my legs. The pull got worse.

Stop that, I told the part of me that had already woken up. He is your boss. He is talking about a job.

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Yes you do.” He stood. He came around the desk, slow, and sat on the edge of it right in front of me so his knee was almost touching mine. “You’ve been falling apart for a year. You answer emails at three in the morning. You cried in the supply room in March and thought no one saw.”

Heat climbed up my neck. I opened my mouth to say something sharp, something that would put us back on the right side of the line, and nothing came out.

“You’re so tired of holding it all up,” he said. “You don’t want the promotion. You want someone to take the weight off you. You just don’t have the words for it yet.”

“That’s not,” I started.

“It is.”

He said it the way you close a door. Quiet. Final. And the awful thing, the thing that made my face burn, was the way my breath went short, the way my thighs pressed together on their own, like my body had heard a question I had not been asked and already said yes.

I dug my nails into my palm. I am twenty nine years old. I run a department. I do not melt because a man uses his low voice on me in an empty office.

But I was wet. I could feel it, the slow give of it, and the shame of feeling it made it worse, made me clench around nothing and hate myself for the small sound that almost got out.

Cole watched my face the whole time. He saw all of it. That was the part I could not survive, that he was sitting there reading me like one of my own reports, and he was not even surprised.

“There she is,” he said.

He reached down and lifted my chin with two fingers. Light. He did not need to grip. I let my head go where his hand told it to go, and the second I did, something in my chest came loose that I had been holding clenched for so long I had stopped feeling it.

“Here’s how this works,” he said. “You don’t make decisions for a while. You don’t carry anything. You do what I tell you, and I keep you. That’s the whole arrangement. Rules, and someone to follow them for. Do you understand what I’m offering you?”

I did not understand. That was a lie I told myself for exactly one second. I understood completely, and the understanding went through me like cold water and then like heat right behind it.

“This is insane,” I whispered.

“Maybe.” He let go of my chin. “Stand up.”

My legs did it before my mind weighed in. I stood. I was shaking, and I could not tell anymore whether it was fear or the other thing, and somewhere around then I stopped being able to tell them apart at all.

He walked to the credenza along the wall, the long low cabinet where I had assumed he kept files. He opened the bottom drawer. When he turned around he was holding something white and folded and thick, and it took my brain a full beat to name it, and when it did my whole body went hot to the roots of my hair.

A diaper. He was holding a diaper.

“No,” I said. The word came out thin. “Cole, no. I’m not. That’s not.”

“You’re going to tell me you don’t need looking after.” He set it on the desk and smoothed it flat with one hand, calm, like he was straightening a memo. “You, who hasn’t slept through a night since you took this job. Come here.”

My feet stayed planted. Refuse, I told myself, this is the part where a normal person picks up her bag and walks out and reports him on Monday, this is the line, this is the actual line. And under that, quiet and traitorous, a thought I had no defense against at all: it would be so easy to stop being the one in charge.

That thought scared me more than the diaper did.

“I can’t,” I said, but I had already taken one step.

“You can. You will.” He held out his hand. “It’s just us. The building’s empty. No one will ever know but me, and I’m not going anywhere. You’re safe.”

Safe. The word landed somewhere deep and pulled, and my eyes stung, and I took the second step, and the third, and then his hand closed warm around mine and that was it, that was the whole fight, lost.

“Good girl,” he said.

It should have been humiliating. It was humiliating. My face was on fire and my eyes were wet and I wanted to die. But the praise hit a spot I did not know I had, and a small embarrassing flood of warmth went straight down between my legs, and I pressed my thighs together standing right there in front of him and he saw me do it.

“Oh,” he said softly. “You like that.”

“I don’t,” I said, which was the most obvious lie I have ever told in my life.

He smiled. He turned me by the shoulders, gentle, until I was facing the desk, and then his hand came to the small of my back and pressed, just slightly, just enough that I bent.

“Hands flat on the desk.”

I put my hands flat on the desk. The glass was cold under my palms. My skirt was riding up and I could feel the air on the backs of my thighs and I could feel exactly how wet I was, how obvious it was, how nothing about my body was hiding what I had spent the last ten minutes swearing was not happening.

“Look at you,” he murmured, behind me now. His hand slid up the back of my thigh, slow, taking its time, and stopped just under the hem. “Soaked through. And you were going to stand there and tell me you didn’t need this.”

“Please,” I said. I did not even know what I was asking for.

“Please what.” His fingers moved up another inch. The pad of his thumb brushed the wet cotton between my legs, just once, just barely, and my whole body jerked and a sound came out of me that I had never made before.

“That’s it,” he said. “Stop fighting it. You don’t have to be strong in here. That’s the whole point.”

His thumb pressed again, slow circles through the fabric, and my hips pushed back into his hand without asking me, shameless, greedy, and the heat built so fast I could not breathe around it.

“Cole,” I gasped.

“Daddy,” he corrected, calm as ever. “In here, it’s Daddy. Say it.”

Every proud thing in me reared up one last time. I am a grown woman bent over my own boss’s desk in an empty office and he wants me to call him Daddy and I am going to come if he does that with his thumb one more time. The wrongness of it should have been ice. It was gasoline.

His thumb stopped.

“I didn’t hear you,” he said.

I held out for one heartbeat. Two. He waited. He had all the patience in the world and I had none, none at all, I had nothing left, and the absence of his hand was unbearable in a way that made my eyes spill over.

“Daddy,” I whispered. “Please.”

“There she is,” he said again, and this time it broke something open in me. He hooked his fingers in the waistband of my ruined underwear and started to draw it down, slow, over my hips, and the diaper was waiting folded open on the desk an inch from my face, and his other hand spread warm and certain between my shoulder blades to keep me down, and his voice dropped to almost nothing right against my ear.

“Now hold still for Daddy,” he said, “and let me take care of you.”