Page 18 of Service Included

My breathing grew louder.

“You’re delaying, Mary.”

The accusation made me turn to face him.

He’d folded his arms across his chest, waiting. “I told you to comb out your hair.”

I raised my hands and splayed my fingers across my scalp, running them from my temples around behind my head. As I spread my arms and pulled my fingers through to the ends, strands clung to my fingers and drifted in the air to land on my nipples. My Scandinavian-straight hair felt less substantial than the weight of my need.

His falcon gaze circled from my hair to my breasts to my face, absorbing me while he seemed to grow larger. He’d been all lean muscle, but now he seemed transformed, his lips darker, his chest broadened. “Come here to me.”

Like a woman in a dream, I obeyed.

My breasts pressed against his chest and his dark curly hair tickled me like dewy grass gone to seed. My collarbone burned where the heated muscles of his chest supported me. Even the skin on the outside of my arms felt alight where his arms embraced me. He must have understood what I wanted, because his hands curved under my backside and hauled me past mytiptoes, bringing me even tighter against his body. It made me feel delicate.

Then he kissed my lips for the first time. I became both taller and smaller. It was a kiss that wiped all others from my memory, because he was a man who obliterated the boys I’d known. His lips were soft, but he didn’t use them softly. He suckled my lower lip, and I wanted to collapse and melt into him. The stubble on his chin scraped, making me want more. I knew I wanted to be marked by his male texture, but he kept kissing me. Even when he let my body slide back to the support of my own feet, he didn’t stop kissing me. My breasts rubbed down his chest, and the fabric of my skirt caught high on his thighs. I felt the scratch of his wool suit pants through my stockings. Automatically, I spread my thighs to thrust at the bulge that caught my opening, halting me for a second. I liked that pressure building between my legs, liked it fiercely. I didn’t feel nervous about breaking him like I did with most city boys. My tongue plunged deep into his mouth, tangling with his, tracing the top of his teeth, trying to show him how much I liked pushing against his body.

He must have understood, because he lifted me again. Each time he hauled me past my tiptoes, it felt like he took me ten stories above myself, and when he let me slide down over the pressure I craved, the notch between my legs sought him, and found him, and I wanted to rock on his shaft. Kissing and rubbing ourselves together could only ever be practice, good practice, and I could have practiced this for a very long time, but I needed more.

Then the back of my legs bumped up into the couch. He’d maneuvered us across the room. “Shall I help you with this?” He stroked my hip over the side zipper of my skirt.

It didn’t sound like a question, but I answered. “Yes, yes. Please.”

The metal teeth parted almost silently, but each little rasp felt like he’d turned up a thermostat. My skin flamed by the time my skirt dropped to the floor. For a moment, he seemed startled to find that I wore a pair of lace-top thigh highs and a white garter belt, but I’d hated the demon of pantyhose since the day my mother first stuffed me in knit tights. I’d come to the city for freedom, and discovering Victoria’s Secret had liberated me from more than the smothering encasement of control tops from egg-shaped plastic containers.

He paused with his first finger pressing one of the small tabs that held up the stockings and said, “Why, Mary, this is a surprise.”

I allowed that I could remove the garters for him. He said I needn’t bother. Then my discarded skirt tangled under my heels, a pair of navy-and-white spectator pumps with tight ankle straps, and his hand at my waist steadied me. “My shoes,” I said. “They’re still buckled.”

He glanced down. “Leave them too.”

Before I could kick myself free of the fabric, he crouched. His hand encircled my ankle and lifted my foot away, then moved to the other. The skin on my stomach quivered, yearning to feel the soft dark hair on his head brush across the bare bits above my skimpy panties. His face was so close to my thighs, he must have known how my panties clung to my opening. How my legs trembled. I didn’t know whether I wanted to grab that curly dark hair and smush his face between my legs, or whether I wanted to plant my heel on his thigh and push him to the ground at my feet, just to see if I could. Whatever I did, I suspected he would look at me and say, “Patience.”

Before I did either, he’d pushed the skirt away. “Sit on the couch.”

I sat. With my skirt removed, my wispy stockings were an insubstantial barrier to the crushed velvet imprinting on theback of my legs. Each prickle felt soft and yet a tiny bit scratchy at the same time, which left me wondering how it compared to a man’s stubble.

“Spread your legs.”

Every command he gave me was the first time anyone had ever spoken words like that to me, the first time I had done these things. And each one strung my nerves taut, until I vibrated like barbwire in a high wind. The velvet seemed to resist as I pushed my legs apart, and the skinny strip of my white panties couldn’t have been designed for this, but I did as he commanded.

After he stared down at me for what felt like forever, he knelt between my spread legs. His hands, resting on my whisper-soft stockings below my uncovered thighs, had my whole attention. I waited, but he didn’t shift them. He breathed, and I breathed, but I wouldn’t move until he told me.

“Lie back.”

It was a relief to fall backward, but when his fingers crossed to the bare skin above the tops of my stockings, the tension of sitting on the edge of this giant couch was replaced by an entirely different tension. I wanted him to touch where my panties clung so near to the reach of his thumbs, but he did not. Somehow, I knew that if he touched me there, I would become different, a woman, not a girl. But, nothing. Not rubbing. Not squeezing. Not touching the triangle of wet white fabric. I wanted to touch myself, I wanted him to touch me, I wanted. I couldn’t breathe, looking down my body at his thumbs, but no, no, this man I’d chosen was being mulish.

So be it. My body hummed full of needs and curiosities, and if he wouldn’t satisfy them, I could. I ran two fingers from the velvet underneath me up and across the cling of the dewed fabric until I arrived at the lace band below my belly button. My hips rose involuntarily to follow my fingers. He would have to give me more.

“Did I permit you to touch yourself?” He tweaked one of my nipples hard enough to startle a gasp from me.

“Sir!” I slapped my hands on the couch beside my hips, my head spinning from the aftershocks of that wicked twist. I’d never pulled that firmly on myself. I should have.

“Wait.”

Mr. G’s words issued a command, but I thought his hips bumped the edge of the seat cushion, perhaps seeking either the hand I’d pulled away or the place I’d touched. The other secretaries were tutoring me on when and how to disregard silly instructions, for our bosses’ own good, and I suspected this was one of those times.

“Please.” I arched my back and looked into his eyes. “Please, sir. Touch me.”

---