CHAPTER SEVENTY

MAE POV

I retreated from the meeting room with my happy smile dead and completely buried. The day was going from bad to worse, and from worse to full blown disaster.

      I could barely even grab a breath as I headed back to my desk, my lungs crushed to shit by the weight of impending doom.

      I jumped a clear mile as Jesse landed a healthy slap on my back, shunting me over the threshold into our admin room.

      “Great job in there,” she congratulated. “IT issues aside, you were impressive. Seriously impressive. You even got a thanks. Mr Douglas barely gives thanks, it’s usually more of a grunt.”

      She pulled a face to illustrate, and in regular circumstances it would have been worth a decent laugh, but not today.

      I stared dumbstruck until she registered my expression of horror. Her eyebrows jumped up in surprise, even though she kept on smiling.

      “What’s up? You look like a ghost just took a crap on your grave.”

      If I’d been even a minute closer to regaining my composure I’d have shrugged her off with a fake nothing, but she caught me slap bang in the middle of my despair. Plus, she was the closest thing I had to a friend in a hundred mile radius, so I guess that made her as good a confidante as any I was likely to stumble across.

      I took her elbow and guided her past the gathered accounts team, herding us both into a corner by the photocopier and away from over enthusiastic ears.

      “My laptop,” I blurted out. “He took my laptop, and I…”

      She tipped her head to the side. “And you what?”

      My haunted eyes must have spoken volumes, but she carried on grinning regardless.

      “Shit,” she said. “You've been checking out dirty pornos on your work machine or something? IT are going to have a field day with your browser history.”

I wished that was it.

 But no.

      It was worse than that.

      So much worse than that.

      “I have some… personal documents on there…” I confided.

      It took her a moment to get my meaning. “We talking pictures? Or…” She was struggling not to laugh and I knew it. Her amusement made my belly flip all over the place.

      “Documents… like… stories…” I told her, and she gave in to a giggle.

      “Holy hell, Mae,” she whispered. “Stories? Like dirty stories? Are you one of those kinky sex writers in your spare time? Maybe Mr Douglas fancies himself as a filthy book hero, you never know. He could be all over that stuff, jerking one off in the server room as we speak.” Her next laugh was a whole lot louder than the first. A couple of the accounts team flicked us a glance and I prayed to God they wouldn’t come over.

      I’ve always been cursed with being one of those girls who blush like a beetroot. It’s been a bane of my existence ever since I stepped into school for the first time and became a laughing stock in front of my classmates.

      A stupid joke, some insult or other, a compliment that makes me feel squiggly inside — all of them lead to my face flaming up like a big red beacon for the entire universe to see.

      Now was no exception. You could’ve toasted bread on my cheeks as the full depth of my potential humiliation flared in my mind.

      Jesse was right about the sex stories. Much closer to the truth than she knew.

      I’d been writing dirty fantasies since I first started crushing on Mr Adam back in high school, and once I got the bug for it I never stopped. If anything, it was a bigger deal for me now than back then. It was my outlet for the long, lonely hours out of office. My main source of entertainment once I was curled up on my lumpy couch at night.

      Only now the dirty fantasies I’d been penning out of hours weren’t about Mr Adam at all, they were about Mr Douglas himself.

      Not only that, but having run my own shitty refurbished laptop into the ground over my final term at university, and having spent all my savings to get up here and into my cruddy apartment a few months ago, I hadn’t managed to get myself a replacement. Those stories were all on Mr Douglas company property.

      Oh, how the universe was laughing at me and my stupid ideas. I’d grinned like a Cheshire cat as I’d realised I’d be getting a work laptop as standard. I’d almost air-punched as I saw people taking them home to check into

  emails out of hours without anyone batting an eyelid. I thought I was in for the win, not in for getting fired when my filthy fantasies about my boss made their way around the office.

      The laptop situation should have been temporary. Was going to be temporary.

      I was hoping to scrape together enough over the next few months of my training wage to invest in a basic machine of my own.

      Hoping, planning, would’ve, could’ve, should’ve…

      None of that mattered anymore, not now my machine was being examined in the IT suite downstairs.

   I hadn’t even taken the precaution of hiding my work all that well. It was in a folder within the standard documents folder, aptly named Mae’s stuff for anyone who wanted to take a look at it. With a name like that it was screaming click me for anyone snooping around.

      I’d figured nobody would have any reason to take it off me. That thing was glued to my side every minute of every day both at home and in the office. Hell, I almost went to sleep hugging the thing for safekeeping.

   Jesse was still staring at me, waiting for me to fess up with more info, and I was still burning like a hot plate, struggling to bring myself to admit something, anything, even a vague half-truth, when all I wanted to do was race down to the IT room and throw myself over my poor cursed machine before it could cough up my sins.

      “It’s just some stories, right?” Jesse prompted, and I managed a shrug.

      “Some stories, yeah. But they’re, um… dirty.”

      She leaned in a little closer. “I like a good dirty story. Ping them over to me will you when you get a chance?”

      Like hell I would.

      My next words were barely a whisper. “If I’m not fired and shamed all the way to Hell before the day is done.”

      She laughed out loud. “Even Mr Douglas isn’t going to fire you for writing some dirty fantasies. He can hardly be offended by a bit of filth. He’ll probably take a copy for later.”

      “You think?” I asked, wishing she was someone from uni. Someone I could just spill the full force of my embarrassment to and hope she had some words of comfort.

      She leaned in so close her mouth was right by my ear. Her breath tickled. “I know. We heard things. Ages ago…”

      My breath stopped. “Heard things?”

 I felt her nod. “His girlfriend used to be office manager here, up until about eighteen months ago. She was a hard-nosed bitch, always thinking we were checking him out, which we were.” Her giggle made my toes scrunch in my shoes. “I mean we’re human, right? Any girl with a pulse is gonna be checking him out, but that’s beside the point.”

      I could feel that the point was going to hit me hard in tender places.

      Places I shouldn’t be feeling them in.

      Places that were getting me into this crap in the first place.

      She cleared her throat before continuing. “She said he was dirty. In the bedroom. As demanding as he is the rest of the time. All rough and domineering and, well… it was full on.”

      It was my turn to clear my throat. “She said that?”

      “Oh yeah, she told Becky in the order processing department. They split up not long after, she said she’d had just about enough of him. I don’t know if it was the sex, or just him in general. Maybe both.” She took a breath. “I wouldn’t mind finding out though, I dunno about you.”

      I’m surprised the heat radiating from me wasn’t enough to set her alight. “And she left? Work, I mean?”

      “Yeah, ages back. Guess working with your ex isn’t most people’s lifelong ambition.”

     Neither is working for a man who read a load of your dirty fantasies about him… that’s if I managed to survive an outright firing.

      “You’ll be alright,” she said and gave me a friendly elbow in the side. “I mean how offended could he possibly be?”

      I hoped I wasn’t about to find out.