Page 43 of Work: Strictly Professional

Wyn

“So,” says Derek, proppinghimself up on one elbow and curling his body toward me. “How’d I do?”

There’s a cocky smugness to him that makes my blood boil.

“It was fine.”

“What? Just fine? No notes?”

“I said it was fine,” I say quickly. “It was average like I thought it would be, and you should feel good about that. It was pretty decent for a first time. A solid B-minus, and that’s nothing to be ashamed o—”

“You know you screamed when you came, right?”

“Um, I think you’ll find that was a roar, Mr. MacAvoy. And a very manly one at that,” I correct. His eyes glitter, and I’m suddenly overly aware of how close he is to me. And how naked I am. “Okay, fine. It was a B-plus, but that’s as high as I’ll go.”

Lies, total lies. If he kisses me or tells me I’m pretty right now, I’ll bump that bad boy up to an A-plus so fast his head will spin.

Derek rolls off the bed and saunters to the bathroom, tossing a hand towel over to me. I clean up as best I can and will my legsto come back to life. I’ve regained sensation to about mid-calf when Derek comes back, towel around his waist, and perches on my side of the bed. He has his wallet in his hand. Soft, brown leather. Well used. Worn in. There's a deep crease in the leather from years of being in his pocket.

Big hands handle crisp hundred-dollar bills.

One

Two

Three

Four

All of them drop onto my nightstand. Then a fifty, a twenty, and a ten. Finally, he scrounges in his coin pouch and finds two one-dollar coins. He rubs them together between his thumb and forefinger, humming as if he finds something amusing but is doing his best not to laugh, before setting them carefully on top of the stack of bills.

The shock of what’s happened hits me like an icy splash straight to the face. One that slowly trickles down my arms and chest and puddles in my lungs.

Holy fucking fuck!

I just had sex for money.

With my boss. My employer. A deeply difficult man who I don’t like. An unmanageable man who’s made my life absolute hell since I met him. An impossible, infuriating man. The most impossible, infuriating man I’ve ever met.

A man I’d happily fuck for free.

I look at the money and flit rapidly through one emotion after another. There’s shock, of course, there’s oodles of that. A bit of horror too. And some disbelief. There’s something bubbly and hot that swells under my skin. I think it might be humiliation or shame, but I’ve never managed to work out the difference between those two. Either way, it heats me up from the inside out. It’s a thick, lumpy cocktail, but that’s not all. Right beneathall of that, tucked away deeply, buried under my ribcage, fighting for freedom, there’s something confusing. Something hard to explain and nonsensical.

A rambling, rampant sense of euphoria.

And it’s growing by the minute.

“Come on, let’s go,” says Derek, grabbing one of my wrists and pulling me up. I clamber to my feet and struggle to find my balance. As I attempt my first step, Derek takes it upon himself to motivate me by landing a tidy slap on my right ass cheek. It’s not all that hard. A firm pat more than a slap. It’s friendly more than anything else. Familiar. It makes me color from my head to my toes and back up again. Light as it was, I feel it as I walk. His hand on my cheek. His flesh on mine. His hand on my skin.

It takes the euphoria I felt before and twists it hard, wringing it out. Squeezing it. Changing it. Making it different. Turning it into the deepest desire I’ve ever felt.

Derek is waiting on one of the loungers near the pool by the time I’m dressed. He’s wearing navy-blue tailored shorts that fall to the knee, a white Hawaiian shirt with dark-blue palm leaf etchings all over it, and a pair of sunglasses that are doing astonishing things for his bone structure. He looks crisp and clean. Casual but put together.

I feel the exact opposite. I’ve lost control of my hair from the humidity and other things, and for reasons that are now unknown to me, I seem to have packed more running clothes than resort wear. I thus find myself in a pair of short athletic shorts and a pink tank with exaggerated cut-outs for the arms. The tank is one of those things I thought I could pull off—and sure, if I had a total personality change and started hitting the gym in earnest, I might be able to make it work. Things being what they are, I look ridiculous.

I clutch at my notebook, holding it over my chest in an attempt to bring something professional to the ensemble.

“I’m going to head out to buy Jamie’s nuggets and all that,” I say, with a little wave, “and then I’ll be back to check the installation and the rest of the setup.”

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