Page 16 of Love, Laugh, Lich

I pull out the chair from his desk, and stand up on it to look him in the eye.

“But it's not sharing, is it? If it's pushed upon me without consultation, then what am I but another piece in the hoard you control? How am I supposed to be ok with us, when there isn’t any respect between us? I barely even feel like there is an ‘us’!”

I see the flame spark in his eye at that, and clearly I’ve touched a nerve. I watch him struggle internally for what to do with his hands, his claws flexing dangerously at his side before he paces away, tearing them through his mane.

“Respect? How can you bring up respect when you accept his advances? How can you—” he looks away from me, struggling for the words he wants. “—After all I’ve shown you?”

Shown me? What?

I stare at him, indignation and upset bubbling up among some new heartbreak as I realize his meaning, the implication of his feelings.

No, he doesn’t get to make this my fault. Not when this is the first time he’s even broached the idea that he can have feelings for me.

“You’ve shown me nothing, no hint about what you’re feeling. For all I know, I’m only skin and sensations for you to take from. And you—you put my shiver in the storage closet, you didn’t even use it!” I say, and those are the words that finally exhaust my anger. That there could have been feelings between us this whole time, and I’d been locked out of them, that I’d been made to feel like I was just another piece of office supplies to him. “I gave my body to you, and I would have given you my heart too, if I thought you wanted it. But I can’t give it if it’s just going to be part of your hoard,” I say, and that’s all I can get out as my voice wavers dangerously. Ok, I might cry at work. But I won’t cry in front of my boss.

I can’t look at Soven after that. I turn on my heel and leave.

9

Janice looks up from her desk as I approach, her expression becoming confused as she takes in my significantly more lifeless than usual state.

“I think I might be getting fired soon,” I sigh, too exhausted to give any emotional weight to the statement. I think if I tried, I’d crack open and blubber about it for hours.

“What? What’s going on?” she asks, looking a bit alarmed. I don’t usually visit her during the workday.

“C’mon, smoke break.”

“We don’t even smoke—”

“Then we’ll start, or whatever. Coffee, we’ll get coffee,” I grumble, pulling her up from her desk in an attempt to drag her along with me. She gets up and pulls out of my grip, but follows me out to one of the break rooms on a lower floor. “Although, apparently that’s a fireable offense now.”

I wait until we get to one of the break rooms, and the door swings closed behind us. Janice approaches the vending machine and starts trying to feed it coins.

“I had a fight with Soven,” I sigh as her coins plunk through the slot, one by one. “I stood on a table and yelled at him.”

“…Yeah, I think there’s no coming back from that,” she concedes after a moment. She doesn’t ask if it was before or after the pit opening up in the office floor.

I nod weakly. I don’t know how to explain all of it, why I had to stand on a desk.

“It wasn’t just a shiver,” I say at last.

“I had a feeling,” she says, rolling her eyes. Sounds like she hadn’t really believed me when I’d told her about the shiver initially.

I give her a rundown of the last few days, not sparing any detail except about Soven’s absurd number of cocks, though I wondered if it might make her any more sympathetic to my motives.

“Are you sure you didn’t get a promotion from secretary to sex slave?” she asks, looking somewhat unimpressed with me.

“I’d think there’d be a change in my benefits programs,” I say dryly.

“I mean, new desk, an intern to delegate to, those are the perks of dating your boss,” she shrugs. “Alongside getting taken advantage of, nepotism, lack of boundaries—”

“Hang on. I’m the one who seduced him; he’s not taking advantage of me.”

“What are you saying? You want to file a harassment claim against yourself?” She rolls her eyes and gives me a look. “Honey. He’s the one with the power to fire you.”

I hang my head and sigh, because I hadn’t thought about how badly things could go. When I had first kissed Soven, all I could think about was how exhilarating it was, how his body made mine react. All our goofy chats in the office had only ever brought us closer and closer, of course I never thought this would drive us apart, and be unable to ever have that again.

I let Janice go back to her desk, despite her offers to try to handle whatever comes next with me.

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