LITMIR.BIZ

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filing. You’re not here to bring me a Scotch.’

      He isn’t really anything of the sort – he was always Woods’ PA. It’s just that I can’t have him being something like that right now. I need him to be away, writing letters for other people who don’t need a letter writer at all.

      ‘Oh,’ he says, but he doesn’t look as embarrassed as I’d feared he would. There’s a hint of sheepishness there, true, but then I imagine that’s his default state. Whereas the other emotion on his face – disappointment – probably isn’t.

      He looks like the kind of guy who takes most things in his stride. Unless it’s his brand-new boss telling him she can’t possibly spend her time ordering him to do humiliating menial tasks on her behalf. Then he just seems as though his entire world is falling apart, right before his eyes.

      And oh, I don’t like what that completely naked expression on his face is making me want to do.

      ‘I don’t need you to caddy for me at the golf course.’

      I really, really don’t like what it’s making me want to do.

      ‘I don’t require you to dry my hands for me after I’ve been to the ladies’ room.’

      God, I know it’s going to make me do it.

      ‘But if you want, you can … compose letters for me. And compile some reports.’

      Damn it.

      ‘Really?’ he says, and oh Jesus he just looks so hopeful. No one should ever look that hopeful over the prospect of writing to the head of the board to ask what the fuck is going on. I mean, a phone call might have been nice, you know? Promotion would have gone down a lot easier if it hadn’t been phrased thusly, in a letter:

      You’re now the managing director of Barrett and Bates, effective immediately. If you have any concerns, contact several people who don’t give a shit.

      ‘I hardly see why not,’ I say, though I know it’s a mistake. And I know it more strongly when I ask Benjamin to leave, and on his way out of the door he says:

      ‘Thank you, sir.’

      Of course, he realises his error almost immediately. He’s that sort of person, I think – the kind that makes many goofy blunders, but is intelligent enough to know he’s made them only a second later.

      Though it doesn’t make it any easier, I know. It still makes his mouth open and close, that sweetly curving upper lip of his compressing as he searches for a way to rectify what he’s done. He called me sir, even though I’m a woman. He called me sir, and for reasons we won’t go into it’s making him all flustered.

      ‘Sorry – I meant –’ he starts off, but I cut him down dead.

      ‘Sir is fine,’ I say, as I wave him out the door.

      * * *

      Of course, sir is not fine. And after he’s gone I sit at my new desk and consider all the ways in which it isn’t fine at all. It’s what I used to call Woods, for a start. It’s meant for a man, for afters. And then there’s the fact that it makes my body flush from the tips of my toes to the roots of my hair.

      Yeah, there’s that.

      I close my eyes and try to think of something else. There are a million things for me to think about, after all. Woods had apparently allowed a whole department to keep operating unnecessarily, for reasons left unclear in the paperwork he never actually did. Tomorrow I’m going to have to fire every one of them, while he most likely suns himself in Barbados.

      And yet my mind returns to that one word over and over, so casually said. Sir, I think. I am somebody’s sir, and then I have to count all the things about him that aren’t right, just to keep myself on an even keel.

      His mouth is strange. It’s like it has no corners or definition around it, no real shape to keep it in place. Of course, occasionally when he talks it’s given a proper outline, but then, it’s not really the outline I want it to have. Movement just makes those lips plumper, more obviously sensuous, and then when he stops talking all I can see is how smooth and soft that mouth is. If he didn’t have that heavy jaw and all of that overflowing size, he’d look like a cute cartoon character, and nobody wants that. They want men with intense, cold, manly gazes. Not that warm, soft-focus eagerness. Not those sooty lashes that probably look beautiful spread over his cheeks – when he closes his eyes in ecstasy, maybe.

      God. God. How did the word ‘beautiful’ get into that sentence? How did ‘ecstasy’? I have absolutely no clue, and yet for a long moment it’s all I can think about. All of the things that are exactly right about him crowd out the things that probably aren’t wrong at all, and I’m left helpless on the burning ship again.

      Though I don’t clutch at my desk this time. I turn to my computer – the ridiculous wood-backed thing my former paramour ordered from Japan, and that I’ve already searched for any evidence of his impenetrable motivations – and do what I’d wanted to the moment I knew he was gone.

      Hell, I wanted to do it the moment I knew he was different, on Friday afternoon.

      I go online, and start looking for someone who can give me the things he no longer knew how to. The things I’m no longer getting, and apparently need so desperately that I’m willing to actually venture onto Craigslist and read insane ads like:

      I want to piss on your head. Call 1-800-asshole, if you’re into that.

      No, 1-800-asshole. I’m not into that. But of course the problem is I don’t know what I am into. It was just easy to do the things Woods wanted me to do. It was calming and pleasurable and a distraction, from Anderson in sales being a doucheknuckle. From Patterson in marketing smacking my ass as I pass by his department – then acting like I’m the sourpuss when I tell him he’ll lose a finger the next time he pulls that shit with me.

      It meant I didn’t have to go home and stare at the walls of my pathetic apartment, with my pathetically neat little dinner for one in front of me, and know that this is my life. I am the managing director of a mid-sized but well thought of publishing house, operating out of the tiny city of York.

      And that is the most of it.

      Even if it’s not, exactly. After all, I am here in this plush little office, in my prim little suit with the perfect cuffs, looking at images of women who’ve been doing some very dirty things. And though that’s not quite on the level of what my predecessor was getting up to between these classy-painting covered walls, there’s a certain frisson to it, I have to say.

      I can understand its allure exactly, and not just because I want something to replace whatever Woods was providing. It’s the look of things, I think. It’s the smell in here, of varnish and too-thick carpets, as I bring up a picture of a woman facing away from camera.

      Though I confess: it’s not her face I’m interested in. It’s her back, her naked back, and the pattern of stripes working its way down over that flesh. Red on white, red on white, from the slim span of her shoulders to the curve of her ass, everything so perfectly uniform that it’s almost not a line of cane marks at all. It’s like a dress she’s wearing, made of a million crimson stripes. And if I could just find the right person, if I could meet someone who understood the insides of me, he could give me a garment just like it.

      Or I could give the garment to him.

      Of course I try to shake it off the moment the idea occurs to me, but the trouble is, it doesn’t want to go. It’s there right behind my eyes, along with the image of Benjamin’s ever-shifting gaze, and his strange mouth, and his big hands. What would hands such as those look like dressed in red? Do people even do that – do they crack something down on their palms, in the same way someone has done it to her back?

      I’ve got to imagine they do, because the thought holds a sweetness for me that the idea of being caned across my back doesn’t. When I think of the palms of my hands, I

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