Savaged

  “Do you want to do it again sometime?” she asks quietly.

  “Maybe,” I answer. “Not for a while though. That kind of took a lot out of me.”

  “You did look a little scary, you know.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yeah, just a little.”

  “I didn’t hurt you at all, right?”

  “No,” she confirms. “My arms were getting a little sore at the end, but I pulled them down. I didn’t think you even noticed.”

  “I didn’t,” I admit. “I think I was a little focused on something else.”

  I wink at her, and she reaches up to kiss my lips and then narrows her eyes at me.

  “You never kissed me,” she comments.

  “I guess I didn’t.” I scratch my jaw and ponder. “It didn’t seem right.”

  “Why not?”

  “I dunno…it’s just more intimate, I guess.”

  “More intimate than having your dick in me?” She laughs again.

  I think about it for a moment.

  “I couldn’t have forced you to kiss me back.”

  “Why would that matter?” Melissa asks. She tilts her head toward me again, her eyes inquisitive.

  “Even with you fighting against me,” I explain, “I knew I could physically get you into the position I needed to have sex with you, but if I kissed you…”

  I pause to make sure I get the words right.

  “If I tried to kiss you,” I say slowly, “and you didn’t kiss me back…well, that would hurt.”

  She stares at me for a long moment.

  “Yeah,” she finally says, “I guess I can see that.”

  She settles against me again, and it isn’t long before she’s drifted off to sleep. As her breathing steadies, I replay the whole night in my head. The anticipation of waiting for her to get home, grabbing her outside her apartment, shoving her down on the bed. I think about what worked well and what didn’t. I think about what I would do differently next time.

  Next time?

  I still feel a little twisted for enjoying it so much. I feel like there’s a perverted, violent streak in me somewhere that I don’t want to acknowledge. Just thinking about holding her down is getting me hard again.

  Maybe it’s inside every man. I don’t know; I can’t speak for others. I only know that Melissa’s fantasy has awakened something in me—something I never knew was there before. I’d never even considered it. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s not a bad thing at all. We’d talked about it; I’d planned for it with her safety in mind; and we’d both enjoyed it.

  Melissa isn’t a pervert, and I’m not a sociopath, and I’d never consider actually forcing anyone, least of all Melissa, to do something like that. This is playacting. This is fantasy. There’s a huge difference between fantasy and reality. Despite my physical actions, Melissa had complete control over the situation the entire time.

  Maybe that is all that matters.

  One thing is for sure—this isn’t going to be our last risqué encounter.

  ~The End~

  Want No More

  If someone told me ignoring a fire alarm to fight with a copy machine would totally change my life, I never would have believed it.

  Mr. Kender was sitting behind his desk, clicking away with a mouse and looking intently at the screen of his docked laptop. He drummed his fingers against the mouse pad for a bit before he sighed and leaned back in his chair.

  “What’s my damn password for the red folder?” Mr. Kender asked. Sometimes I thought I must have been hired for my rote memorization skills. Melody must have told him I was a diva at multiple choice tests before I had to drop out of high school. I rattled off the combination of letters and numbers twice before he managed to get it entered correctly. He smiled his thanks and motioned toward a large stack of paper.

  “Olivia, please take this packet and make enough collated copies for the board meeting this afternoon.”

  “Yes, sir!” I replied before heading out the door.

  I stumbled into the elevator, almost completely tripping over the damn red heels Melody had put me in. More professional, my ass. If I fell on said ass and sent the hundred-page packet scattering all over the floor, how good my legs looked wasn’t going to help out my career. Mr. Kender had been a decent boss so far though he definitely needed to watch the personal space issues and occasional leers. The board meeting was an important one, so I was pretty sure he wouldn’t like me to bring the whole thing back to be re-sorted.

  I had only been with the company for three weeks, and I hadn’t done a lot other than doing data entry, making copies, and reminding Mr. Kender which password went to which folder. I had no idea what was in the folders, but I swear there was at least one per Crayola Big Box color. I didn’t really expect much else from this job since I was only an intern, but hey, this twelve-month internship was going to make me enough money to pay for a four-year degree. When you have been trying to support yourself since the age of sixteen off the meager life insurance policy your dad left you, it was definitely worth any tasks I might have normally considered beneath my intellect.

  My mom died of bone cancer when I was little, and I didn’t really remember her very well. It was always just me and my dad, but he worked a lot of hours, and I learned to take care of myself. It was a good thing, too. My dad was a police officer, and he died when he was hit by a car while chasing a suspect through Chicago traffic. I was a month shy of my seventeenth birthday and didn’t have any other family, so the family court agreed to emancipate me. I got my GED that year and started working at a fast food place, trying to make enough money for college. It sucked. Big time. This job was a dream come true for me.

  I was hired as Mr. Kender’s personal assistant. It was a job I wasn’t totally qualified to do, but his actual administrative assistant, my best friend Melody, did most of the real work. I was there for backup, which meant I was given all of his secret passwords in case Melody wasn’t around to remind him and do all the menial stuff she didn’t have time to do. I’ve known Melody since high school. She graduated a couple years before me and has really tried to help me out since my dad died. I don’t know what kind of pull she may have had, but I was called back after the first interview and offered the job, so something must have clicked for me.

  For once.

  I fixed the knotted red scarf at my neck—which matched the shoes and skirt, thank you, Melody—and stabbed at the button for the thirty-second floor a couple more times. I was pretty sure Melody had me all dressed up today because she was fixing me up with yet another guy she was sure would be the one I would want to get it on with. Ever since I told her I was sick to death of being a virgin, she had been fixing me up with every guy she thought I might be into. I swear, if she walked up to me, carrying a manila folder with the words “Operation Cherry Pop” on the cover, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  None of the guys were worth a second date, let alone actually allowing them to see me naked. I mean, not that I was that much to look at, but I had to have some kind of standards. Melody kept asking me what I was looking for. Hell, if I knew that, I’d go find him myself.

  The biggest issue with the last three dates? They kept asking me what I wanted to do. What movie did I want to see? What restaurant did I want to go to? What music did I want to hear in the car? When, at the age of sixteen, you have to start making life-altering decisions without the benefit of a proper high school diploma, the last thing you want is someone to ask you to make more decisions. How trivial the question may have been didn’t matter. I wanted to sit back and relax and have someone just tell me what we’re going to do on a date for once. That sounded like heaven.

  I sighed and stared at the wall display. I hated the elevators in this building. Well, if I were completely honest, I would have to say that I hated all elevators. I had always had a fear of getting stuck in one, even when I was little. Working in a skyscraper with fifty-seven floors wasn’t my first choice, but as I said
, the money was great. At least the copier was only two floors up. If it hadn’t been for the heels, I would have taken the stairs.

  The doors opened and I rounded the corner to the copier room. Thankfully, there wasn’t anyone else in there, so I didn’t have to wait in line. I pushed all the appropriate buttons and sat back for a second while the machine did its thing. I needed sixty copies, so it was going to take a while.

  I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself a bit. Something about working for the CIO of a government agency with its hands in all kinds of stuff got me a little worked up at times. I was always getting worked up, and I worried about making a major mistake and getting fired. It’s not like it was a stressful job, but I was still so nervous about doing everything right that I tended to get a little too anxious, even about making copies. That was probably because the damn Xerox machine hated me.

  It must have heard me thinking bad thoughts about it because the damn machine jammed before it was halfway done. I pulled open the upper tray, then the lower one, then opened the back cover. I didn’t see anything, so I put them all back in place and hit the button. It erred out again, so I went through the whole routine a second time. The machine swore to me there was a paper jammed in there somewhere, but I sure couldn’t find it. After about ten minutes, I finally gave up, checked to make sure no one actually witnessed me leaving the thing while it was still jammed, grabbed what I had so far, and headed to the other copier room on floor thirty-nine.

  At least this machine was more cooperative. I tried to think happy thoughts about the Xerox company while the copier did its thing. I knew it was going to take forever to run through the remaining copies because this machine was an older model and didn’t run nearly as fast as the other one.

  When the fire alarm went off, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Once I got over the shock, I let out a perturbed groan.

  I hated fire drills. I knew I was supposed to use the damn stairs, but there was no way I was going to walk down thirty-nine flights for a drill when I had all these copies to get back to Mr. Kender before noon. To top it all off, the copier had just run out of paper, and I had to refill it. Deciding to ignore the fire alarm completely, I dug through cabinets until I found the stack of “COPIER PAPER—TO BE USED FOR COPIERS—NOT FOR PRINTERS!” and managed to get the copier reloaded without actually breaking anything important-looking.

  I had probably been up there for about a half hour when my cell phone started buzzing in its little clip on my belt. I thought it looked totally dorky, but Melody reassured me that in an IT department, it was borderline cool. I looked down and saw Elissa’s name displayed. She was the receptionist for Mr. Kender’s department, and we’d been going out to lunch together a lot.

  “Hey, Elissa,” I said. “I should be ready in about ten…”

  “Olivia, thank God!” Elissa was practically screaming into the phone. “I couldn’t find you down here anywhere! Didn’t Lauren show you where our group meets in the parking lot? Where the hell are you?”

  “I’m in the copier room,” I said. I could hear Melody yelling in the background, which was odd because she was supposed to be in an all-day training session. She was having a catered lunch and everything. “I have a bunch of work to do, and I didn’t pay any attention to the drill. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

  Elissa was silent for the first time since I had met her.

  “Elissa? You still there?”

  “You’re still in the building?” Elissa’s voice dropped lower, and her tone sent a shiver up my spine.

  “Yeah, I figured the fire drill…” My voice trailed off as realization hit. There was a fire in the building. A real fire. And I was on the thirty-ninth floor.

  Oh my God! What am I going to do?

  “Olivia, you have to get out of there. Right now.” Elissa’s voice was eerily calm.

  “What floor has the fire?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be worse if the fire was above or below me, but I thought I ought to at least know, one way or the other.

  Elissa was silent for another couple of seconds.

  “There is no fire, Olivia,” she said softly. “Please, just get out of there right now.”

  Her tone of voice nearly scared the piss out of me in a very literal sense. I left the oh-so-important-a-minute-ago copies and started running for the elevator.

  “Should I take the stairs?” I stopped in my tracks—looking from the elevator buttons to the door to the stairwell.

  “No, Olivia! Take the elevator,” Elissa commanded. “It’s faster and they might be in the stairwells.”

  “Who might be in the stairwells?” I asked as my heart suddenly dropped into my stomach.

  “They don’t know yet.” Elissa was whispering into the phone now. “Or at least if they do, they aren’t telling us. About a half hour ago, someone took over the building. That’s why everyone was evacuated. Olivia, you have to get out of there now!”

  “I’m trying!” Sudden, hot tears were trying to force their way out of my eyes as I jammed the down button with my thumb over and over again, as if that was going to help. Images of movies like Die Hard started stampeding around in my head.

  The bell rang out and the doors slid open, which startled me and made me gasp.

  “Are you all right?” Elissa was yelling into the phone again.

  “Yes,” I replied. “The elevator is here. I’m probably going to lose the signal.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Elissa said. “Just call me back as soon as you get down here!”

  “I will,” I promised as I walked into the elevator. True to cell-phone nature, the call dropped as the doors closed.

  My hands were starting to sweat, so I dropped the phone back into its clip and started slamming my fist into the little round button marked with an “L.” Once I was convinced the little light wasn’t going to get any brighter, I leaned back against the railing and tried to slow down my breathing, which was just about to the panting stage. I watched the numbers descend one by one in the most agonizingly slow way they possibly could.

  At floor twenty-three, the elevator stopped with a jerk, and I screamed as I fell forward against the door and then dropped to the floor.

  I pushed myself back up onto my feet and immediately started trying to pry open the doors, which was completely useless. The most I was going to manage to do was to get my beautifully manicured nails—thank you, Melody, for the suggestion—chipped less than twenty-four hours after Elissa hauled me out to lunch to have them done.

  Deep breaths, I told myself. You have to stay relaxed. That’s what dad always said—never panic in a crisis.

  I closed my eyes and tried to think of nothing but breathing in and out. About the time I had my breathing under control, the elevator jerked again, nearly sending me back to the floor. I let out the final long breath I had been holding and relaxed. As long as it was moving again, everything would be okay.

  That was before I noticed I was no longer moving down but back up.

  The elevator stopped on the thirtieth floor, the same floor where I had originally started this little frolic through the tulips.

  When the doors opened, a gigantic mountain of a man was standing in front of me with his hand on a key inserted into the little lock below the up and down buttons for the elevators. His pale brown eyes looked over to me, and a smirk crossed his face. He gave the key a little turn before releasing it and uttering one word.

  “Bingo.”

  My backside hit the rail, which was the first indication I had been moving backwards. I felt my throat tighten and stomach drop as his eyebrows rose up, and he smiled in an incredibly unfriendly way. I glanced around at my surroundings, which didn’t take long—I was in an elevator. It’s not like I was going to suddenly notice an alternative exit. I gripped the cold metal to stop my hands from shaking while I looked around him and wondered what my chances were of running past him.

  He chuckled and raised a gun up to my face.

  “Don?
??t even think it,” he said. His voice was as pale and cold as his eyes. He motioned for me to come out, and for the first time in my life, being in an elevator wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Considering the gun pointed toward me, the single exit, and the six-foot-who-knows-how-many-inches giant in front of me, I didn’t have much choice, so I did what he said. He reached out with the hand not holding the gun and grabbed my upper arm painfully. I mentally cursed Melody for dressing me in short sleeves instead of a thick blazer today, as if she were to blame. I managed to hold back a whimper until he shoved the gun into my side.

  He hauled me past my desk, past Melody’s desk, and into Mr. Kender’s office.

  Inside of Mr. Kender’s office were two other men. The tall, bald, and lanky one was standing by Mr. Kender’s filing cabinet, which was always kept locked but had obviously been broken into. I could tell because it was on its side with all the drawers bent up and strewn about. I wasn’t sure, but I thought there might have been a bullet-sized hole near the lock. The bald guy was digging through a bunch of files in red folders. Those were documents I was told never to touch.

  The other one was standing behind Mr. Kender’s desk, leaning with his hands on either side of Mr. Kender’s laptop. His hair was deep black and slicked back on the sides. He was wearing dark pinstriped pants and a white button-down shirt. There was a jacket matching his pants tossed over the back of Mr. Kender’s chair. His deep green tie matched his eyes, which I noticed immediately when he looked up toward the door.

  When his eyes met mine, I was kind of glad someone was holding on to me because I could have fallen right there on the floor. Not only were his eyes about the most intense shade of green I had ever seen, but once they locked with mine, I found I couldn’t look away from him. I think I actually gasped because he was, without a doubt, the most beautiful man I had ever seen. The intense look that was originally locked with my eyes slowly traveled down my body and back up again.