He’s the Boss Now Pt. 01

The last I saw of Mark was him walking across the stage to get his diploma, five whole rows before me, with the other Bs. B for Ballentine–Mark Ballentine. I was a little ways back with the other Hs, as in Hawthorne. Nikki Hawthorne.

“Nikki Hawthorne,” came the announcement about a half hour later, and as I crossed, I looked directly at where he sat after having returned to his seat… But my best friend couldn’t even be bothered to raise his eyes and give me a congratulatory smile.

He had a smile that could knock a girl right out of her pants.

Or so I’d heard. He never tried to get me out of mine.

Not that he would have had to try.

But at least we were friends, or so I thought, so imagine my puzzlement when I went looking for him only to hear that he’d already left and wouldn’t be coming to the after party. That was a final slap in the face that, if I was being honest, set my confidence meter so low that I didn’t dare seek him out on social media for years after.

And he was just gone, leaving a troublingly large hole in my heart. A pale chalk outline where a vibrant friendship had been.

Something about him had already been receding from me, even before that. It started a month before graduation, in late spring, when the rain would come down in buckets one moment, and the next thing you knew, the sun would light it all up like pearls on the windows.

We used to walk home every day together, rain or shine.

I used to think I had a chance with him.

As time ticked down and our senior year flew by, I felt more and more desperate. Would those big brown eyes come closer and closer to me–would his thick lashes droop shut–would his lanky arms cradle my body as he kissed me? Would he spark the tinderbox inside me that I had only recently started to notice existed?

When would it happen? I was a whirlpool of anxiety and hope and some other jagged feeling that time was running out. We were going our separate ways, at least, that’s what I assumed. I was going to college and he was going–well, I thought I knew where he was going, but then everything started changing and getting weird.

One minute I was a girl pining for her best friend. The next, I had no best friend–just a guy who couldn’t seem to sit still long enough to even look at me anymore.

And now I was here in a dark, unfamiliar hallway looking through these big glass doors at goddamn Mark Ballentine.

All grown up.

Even though his head leaned a little over his cluttered desk, I could tell he’d gone from long-limbed bordering on gangly to broad and big–maybe even thick. He rolled his shoulders as I stared, shoulders I’d cried on more than once, shoulders that were disconcertingly muscular. I knew those shoulders, yet they were foreign.

I knew that thick dark hair that he swept a hand through; I knew that hand, which had pulled me up into a tree we used to climb together all the time, had untied me when some jerks from high school band had pranked me; I knew that mouth, I knew that chin, and even though I didn’t know the brawn or the stubble, I knew it was him. My whole body was shouting at my brain: That’s Mark!

I couldn’t stop the swell of joy I still felt at seeing him. And it hurt like hell when memory crushed me a moment later.

My second day on the job and I was going to fucking cry.

But fuck me if Mark was going to see me like that. My brain assessed the situation: glass doors, glass walls, too much damn glass in this place. If I moved suddenly, surely he’d look up and see me. There wasn’t the usual office bustle to camouflage my movements; I was working late, and I hadn’t seen anyone else for over an hour.

So I’d have to ataşehir escort move slowly and deliberately until I could round a corner.

I could feel my poor face, stuck between warring emotions of “cry, girl,” and “don’t you dare cry, don’t be a baby,” and “your heart is being CRUSHED all over again, damn right you’re going to cry” when suddenly it became urgent that I not cry, because Mark had looked up, and since me seeing him meant he could see me, and since he had the benefit of having known me for six years, even in a darkened hallway he would be able to tell why my face was all scrunched up.

So that’s probably why I went for anger. Oh yeah, I felt that frown all the way down in my stomach. I was in full-on glower mode because my face muscles were fighting to do something I couldn’t let them do.

I saw him stand up–man, he had to have grown another couple of inches, and he looked so solid–and take a lurching step toward me. After that I didn’t see what he did, because I gave up all pretense and sprinted down the hall.

Back to my desk.

I needed to get my purse, my jacket, my other pair of shoes, my favorite coffee mug. The picture of me and my parents. Every item I’d brought to personalize my new work space.

Because I didn’t know if I’d be coming back tomorrow.

When I made it to the elevator with a tote full of stuff I’d dragged in only that morning, a small movement in the shadows startled me.

Mark stood there. He didn’t lean against the wall. He didn’t approach. I couldn’t read his expression, and I felt like I was looking at a stranger behind those familiar brown eyes.

And I felt like a coward. A silly coward–I hadn’t seen Mark in ten years. Why was I running from him now?

Why do you feel anything strongly about him now? a sly voice asked in my head, needling me. He obviously didn’t feel anything very strongly about you. He could barely look at you those last few days.

He doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you.

But I still felt something for him, especially standing there under his intense gaze: An underlying familiarity, an irresistible feeling of warmth and safety. A cavernous emptiness, gnawed away at my insides from days–then months–then years of uncertainty and abandonment.

And an entirely new awareness of our striking physical differences. I had been a late bloomer but now stood, at five-foot-five, with some serious breastage and an ass that had attracted several suitors.

The longer I stood there waiting for the elevator, the more my mind whirled between these feelings and desires.

Still, Mark didn’t move. He didn’t speak. I didn’t look at him, keeping my eyes front.

Finally the doors opened.

I stumbled inside and didn’t breathe until the doors shut and I was on my way down.

***

I wasn’t a stranger to the feeling of being unprepared. A CEO under thirty years old and I’d had my share of awkward, uncomfortable meetings where I should have known more than I did.

But it had been two years since I’d grabbed at the role after my business partner and mentor had bowed out, and I worked my butt off to never have that feeling again.

I knew what I needed to know. If I didn’t know it, I asked. If there was nobody to ask, I kept digging until I hit something useful. And if all else failed, I made it up as I went.

This company was my baby, mine and Phil’s, and just because Phil was moving to a consulting capacity didn’t mean he could answer all of my questions. So I took care of my baby with the ferocity of a mother wolf, scaring off poachers and killing the competition whenever I could.

It was a fight, a slog every day. And while I loved kadıköy escort bayan it–cherished it, was married to it–I knew I couldn’t neglect the rest of my life forever. At twenty-eight, though, I still had time to settle down.

The trouble was that there was nobody I wanted to settle with.

Then I looked up and saw Nikki, and I knew the truth: there was nobody else I would settle for.

Holy hell, had she grown up good. She didn’t wear heels but her ass didn’t need them, and the way her legs sloped up to the luscious curves under her skirt was almost obscene.

No–that was just my mind. My thoughts about Nikki had never been pure and chaste, seeing as I’d first met her in the throes of adolescence, but she won me over to friendship just a few weeks into seventh grade and lust hadn’t been a problem for the six years we knew each other.

Until a month before graduation, when it roared to the forefront of my feelings for Nikki.

Lust. Guilt. They went hand-in-hand, my mind going round and round as I planned what I would do with her–to her–until I finally realized I was just feeding an unhealthy, unwelcome obsession.

The obsession hadn’t come from nowhere. By age eighteen I had figured out my kinks and was thinking very hard about how I could get any girl I could to try them with me.

And nothing was working. Oh, a couple of girls were game–one was even more into some of it than I was–but it was, to my intense frustration, deeply unsatisfying.

Then one day, I’d walked into the storage closet attached to the music room. There, her hands and feet bound with those stupid little rope belts that were part of the choir uniforms, was Nikki.

What the hell? I had sprung over to help her immediately. The choir, band, and orchestra had all shared a big storage closet, and as I picked my way over instrument cases and boxes of sheet music, Nikki explained.

It was somewhere between hazing and a vengeance-motivated prank. Some of the band guys–who probably had wanted to date her, I thought at the time, having heard several of my peers discussing her–had jumped her, tied her up, and left her there for the choir to find at the next period. They didn’t mean any real harm; we were all adults now, but they still expressed their crushes on her by giving her shit, and the rivalry between choir and band was the perfect excuse. They had even left her a cup of water with a straw in case she got thirsty before she was found. The trouble was just that there was a free period before choir, so she had been there for a half hour before I found her.

“And my arms are starting to hurt in this position,” she had said.

Now I was back at my desk and could call up the memory of untying her as though that’s what I’d been doing five minutes ago, not staring at her as she boarded the elevator.

My body could call up, too, the memory of the feeling I’d gotten as I had crouched at her feet and worked my fingers underneath the ropes, trying to shimmy them off her.

I pushed my chair away from my desk and unzipped my pants. This memory was going to have its way with me; I was already at full mast.

I took my cock out from my boxers and started rubbing one out as I remembered.

Nikki had been sitting on the floor with her legs in front of her, her knees bent. She wore skirts back then, too, and this one had slipped until it bunched around her thighs. I’d had an incredible view of those toned legs in her little kitten heels, with the soft blue cord wrapped around her ankles a few times and tied into a knot.

My dick was so hot in my hand as I remembered how it had felt to handle her legs. Although she’d kicked off her escort maltepe shoes, I still couldn’t work the rope over her feet, so I had to pick away at it as she sat there and tried to stay comfortable on the hard floor.

And after I’d taken care of that… Reminiscing, I stroked myself harder, watching the bulbous head of my dick redden and swell. I knew she was all grown up–hell, I’d thrown her eighteenth birthday surprise party only months before–but I’d never before seen her as adult. Not until then.

Nikki hadn’t been able to stand. Instead, she’d knelt, turning her back to me so I could work on that knot, too.

My knuckles couldn’t help but brush against her lower back and her butt. And her quick little breaths went straight to my cock.

In the present, I was close. I let my memory fade into fantasy.

Instead of untying her, in my fantasy I held her head with one hand and used my other hand to rub the tip of my penis all over her lips. In my fantasy they were moist with that gloss she was always applying, and she didn’t resist me, just opened her mouth a little to receive me.

In this fantasy I’d had a thousand times, Nikki begged me to let her taste me. She kissed and sucked the head of my dick as I buried my fingers in her hair; she looked up at me with blissful eyes as I started to pump my hips forward, entering her, taking advantage of her helpless state. And in my fantasy, after I’d come down her throat, after she had swallowed everything I gave her, I just left her there until the next time. In my fantasy, nobody ever discovered Nikki but me.

And I used her again and again. Her mouth. Her pussy. Her ass.

In reality, when I had finished untying her and escorted her wobbly form to a lunch table, I’d had to excuse myself and find somewhere private–anywhere. A restroom, an abandoned classroom. Anywhere…

I’d clutched a textbook in front of my boner and made my way back to the scene of the crime: the still-empty storage closet, with those blue ropes lying in a heap on the floor. I had at least ten minutes before anyone would be in the classroom, and it only took thirty seconds to unzip, take myself in hand, and come harder than I’d ever come in my young life. I spilled my relief all over a handful of tissues I’d snagged from a box by the door.

And I’d never been able to look at her without being eaten alive by shame, ever again.

Now I sat rigid in my office chair, my dick exposed for anyone to see–but of course nobody was here. What the hell was Nikki doing so late on what could only have been a first or second day?

It didn’t matter. In my mind she had never gone to the elevator. In my mind, I had chased her, caught her, and dragged her back, kicking and screaming if need be, and bent her forcibly over my desk, and trapped her hands behind her back with mine, and shoved her skirt up, and torn her stockings down, and as my hand stroked faster and faster, I was mentally fucking her with all the energy that had built up from ten years of an unfulfilled wish.

Anger had risen up from somewhere–anger at Nikki, or at myself, or at nothing at all, but it sent me into a frenzy as I pumped myself harder, imagining I could have her over my desk every day, whenever I wanted, whether she liked it or not.

I grabbed a napkin left over from lunch and put it over the head of my dick as I feverishly stroked to completion.

Finally I felt my orgasm roll up through my hips. The thought of spewing it into her triggered it, and I came, hard and loud, almost too much for that napkin to handle.

And a decision crystallized in my mind.

Fuck that shame. I wanted her–and I knew exactly how I wanted her–and, even worse, I missed her. I didn’t know how much I had been missing her until it punched me in the gut, seeing her standing there, looking like she was going to break down, shaking me to my core.

I was resolved: if there was any way to make it happen, I was going to have her.