Page 91 of Boardroom Mask

I let go of his tie and smooth it flat against his chest, which is a mistake, because now, my palm is just resting there and I can feel his heartbeat, steady and sure underneath the fabric.

“You’re the worst,” I say.

“And yet here you are.”

“Yeah,” I breathe. “Here I am. What happens next?”

I can almost feel Kir’s smile, though I can’t see a bit of it. “I was thinking something along the lines ofthis.”

He spins me around before I can draw my next breath.

My palms slam flat against the metal shelf and a row of chemical bottles chatters. Kir doesn’t pause. His hands find the hem of mypencil skirt and wrench it up over my hips in one savage motion, bunching the fabric up above my waist.

“You had your turn,” he says. “Your rules, your pace, your cute little orders.” His fingers hook into the waistband of my underwear and yank them down to mid-thigh. “It’s my turn now.”

I don’t ask him to put on a mask. I don’t need one. The darkroom is pitch-black, deeper than nighttime or closing your eyes. There are no streetlights bleeding through curtains here and no red LED blinking from a vent. It’s a void. Pure nothing. Absolute, velvet, enveloping nothing, and inside it, his hands are everywhere and his body is a furnace behind mine. He is nobody and everybody and the only person alive.

The darkroomisa mask.

“You know what you did to me?” He reaches between the V of my legs to palm my aching center. “I didn’t touch myself the whole time you were performing. Not once. You told me to be patient, and I was. I sat there like a good fucking dog while you came all over your own hand and moaned my name.”

Two of his fingers push inside me. I gasp and grip the shelf hard enough that the metal edge bites into my palms.

“And then you fell asleep,” he continues as he starts to pump a thick finger in and out of me. “I watched you sleep. All night. Like a man who has lost his fucking mind.” He withdraws his fingers almost all the way, then drives them back in. I’d crumple to the floor if it weren’t for his hips pinning me to the table. “Which I have. Thanks to you.”

“You’re—” I start, but the rest of the sentence evaporates when he adds a third finger and stretches me open.

“I’m what?” He grinds the heel of his hand against my clit, and the sensations rippling outward from it make me stutter and drool. “Go on. Use your words. You were so chatty on Wednesday.How does that feel, Kir?” He mimics my breathy cadence alarmingly well. “Are you hard, Kir? Are you leaking for me?”

My face burns in the dark. “That was?—”

“Torture,” he finishes. “That’s what that was. You put on a show designed to break me, and then you went to sleep like a baby while I sat in a puddle of my own cum trying to figure out what the fuck just happened to me.” He bites the tendon at the side of my neck, not gently whatsoever. “So consider this your receipt.”

I hear his belt. The jingle of the buckle, the hiss of it sliding through loops, the metallic click. I assume he’s just taking it off… until suddenly, I feel that body-warmed leather around my throat.

“Hold still,” he commands.

He threads the end through and pulls until I feel a gentle, even pressure on both sides of my windpipe. My airway narrows and the world gets soft around the edges, cottony and distant. Every sensation below my neck doubles in intensity. I can feel my own pulse thudding against the leather.

“Good?” he asks.

I whimper something that vaguely resembles a yes. Even if I could speak, I don’t want to change anything. The pressure is too perfect, just enough to remind me that he’s here and he’s holding me. If I needed him to stop, he would. But I don’t need him to stop.

I needmore.

I reach back blindly and grab his hip, pulling him closer. He exhales against my ear and tugs the belt again, and I melt.

But even then, he doesn’t rush it. Bastard that he is, he lets me stand there anxiously waiting, skirt hiked to my ribs, underwear tangled around my thighs, waiting,listening, while he takes his sweet time.

“Kir,” I whisper.

“Say it again.”

“Kir.”

“Louder.”

“We’re in the middle of my newsroom?—”