Page 41 of Pierced

“What?” he asks, mouth full of breakfast burrito.

“Jesus, chew, man. Were you raised in a barn?”

“Yeah,” he says.

Oh right. He grew up on a horse farm. Forgot that. In any case… “Dude, last night… man.”

I plop down in the chair facing his desk. He begins to speak. I wave my finger at him, forcing him to swallow before he speaks again. Once the bite has cleared his gullet, he says, “What the hell are you talking about?”

I lean in close, lower my voice. I don’t know why I do it. There’s no one else here. But I do. “Last night…” I look around for a reason I can’t identify. “Last night, I went to Myrtle’s house.”

“O-kay.”

“And she stripped me down to my underwear, put me in a cage with a lion, shoved a ball gag in my mouth, slapped me, showed me her torture toys, gave me a hard-on, and then sent me away. Dude… it was fucking awesome.”

I lean back in my chair and smile. He stares at me for a second, picks up his napkin, wipes his mouth, throws the napkin and the rest of the burrito in the trash can, nods, and says, “Come again?”

“I know. I know. You were right, man. I needed to prostrate myself. But what we didn’t consider is that I didn’t just need to prostrate myself for her. I needed to do it for me.”

He pinches the place between his eyebrows. Shit. Now I feel like I need to get him to a neurologist too.

“Lemme… lemme see if I can parse through what you’re saying.” He takes a breath. “Are you saying that when I suggested you needed to cow yourself before Myrtle, you took that literally? I mean, are you saying that you went to Myrtle’s place to do some kind of BDSM thing? Is that what you’re saying? ’Cause it sounds like that’s what you’re saying.”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. It was great.” I pop my shirt cuffs and tweak my cufflinks because… I dunno. Because I think it looks cool.

“Dude…”

“Hey, listen, do me a favor. Don’t tell anybody. OK?”

“Who’m I gonna tell?”

“Um, your girlfriend?”

“Dude. C’mon. You know me a little. There’s no way I would—”

“I’m sorry, what did you do, exactly?” Eden asks as she barrels into the room. Declan, Andrew’s development guy, is on her tail.

“Andrew, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” says Declan, “she stopped by my desk on her way to see you and I was showing her what we’re working on and I just opened the app on your phone remotely, and… shit. Sorry. Hey, Pierce.”

“Declan.”

“Dev.”

“Sure.”

“What did you do?” Eden asks again.

“Honey,” Andrew starts, but Eden throws up a ‘talk to the hand’ hand and he backs off.

“OK!” says Dev. “Feels like my work is done here! See ya!” And he takes off. Can’t believe I forgot that Andrew has a developer called Dev. Funny.

What’s not funny is the way Eden is looking at me. She has her hands on her hips and is staring at me, hard. Her glasses are down at the tip of her nose and she’s looking at me over the tops of the rims. She’s breathing a little hard. Not like she’s out of breath, but almost like she’s kind of pissed. And even though millions of people have seen her cupcakes millions of times, I’m trying not to stare at the rising and falling of her chest because she’s Andrew’s lady friend and because I’m classy like that.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I tell her.

“I’m talking about what exactly you did to my friend, Myrtle. What did you do?”

I look at her. I look at Andrew. In return he looks at me with a combination ‘sorry/what do you want from me’ expression. I close my eyes, take a long inhale, and say, “I did exactly what Andrew told me to do.”