Chapter 8: Business Interruption
The grandfather clock in the hall marked the passing quarter hours with a dull, brass thud. Each note felt like a small hammer driving a nail into the day. Mark sat in the leather chair, the scent of old paper and polished wood failing to soothe him as it once had. The Singapore deal was a fractured, shifting thing on his screens, numbers refusing to coalesce into sense. His body ached from the garage, a dull throb in his lower back. The smell of spray lubricant seemed to have seeped into his sinuses.
A soft knock, then the door opened before he could answer. Emily slid inside, closing it silently behind her. She wore a oversized grey sweatshirt and leggings, her hair in a messy bun. In her hands was a large, flat rectangle wrapped in a faded bedsheet.
“I need your opinion,” she said, her voice devoid of its usual challenge. It was a neutral, almost student-like tone.
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Not now, Emily. I have a call with the Hong Kong team in ten minutes.”
“It’ll only take a second.” She leaned the wrapped object against the bookshelf and approached the desk. She didn’t circle to his side. Instead, she sank to her knees in the well of space beneath it, disappearing from his view. He heard the soft rustle of fabric.
“What are you doing?” His voice was tired.
“Looking for a pen I dropped yesterday,” her voice floated up, oddly muffled.
He glanced at the clock. Eight minutes. He tried to focus on his opening remarks. The figures on the monitor blurred. Then he felt her hands on his thighs. They pushed his knees apart. He looked down. She was crouched in the shadowy cave beneath the mahogany desk, her face a pale oval looking up at him. Her expression was unreadable.
“Emily…”
“Shhh,” she whispered. Her fingers worked at his belt buckle, the metal clinking softly. “You work. I’ll be quiet.”
His zipper slid down with a hushed, definitive sound. She reached into the opening of his trousers and boxers, her cool fingers wrapping around his soft flesh. He was too tired, too conflicted, too ashamed to respond. He just watched, detached, as she pulled him out into the cool office air.
She studied him for a moment, then leaned forward and took him into her mouth.
There was no teasing preliminary. Her mouth was hot and wet, a startling contrast to the room’s chill. She engulfed him, her tongue flattening against his underside, and he felt a weak, reluctant stir of blood. She began to move, a slow, deep, rhythmic suction that made the tendons in his thighs tighten. Her head bobbed in the shadows, a precise and terrible machine. One of her hands cupped his balls, rolling them gently; the other gripped the base of his cock, guiding her own movements.
A chime from his computer. The call window popped up, faces appearing in a grid. Daniels in London, Chew in Singapore, Patel in Mumbai. He fumbled for the headset, his fingers clumsy. He clicked the audio on.
“...hearing me, Mark?” Daniels was saying, his voice tinny through the speakers.
“Yes, loud and clear,” Mark said, his voice miraculously even. He adjusted the mic. Emily’s suction increased. He could feel the back of her throat, a constricting, velvety ring. He focused on the spreadsheet on his secondary monitor. “I’m looking at Q3 projections now. The shortfall in the Malaysian corridor is concerning.”
“It’s a supply chain issue,” Patel cut in. “The port delays are systemic.”
Emily’s pace quickened. The wet, slurping sounds were horrifically loud to him, though the mic couldn’t pick them up. She was working him with a focused intensity, her nose now buried in the coarse hair at his base. He was fully hard, an excruciating, throbbing length in her ruthless mouth. Saliva dripped onto his thigh, warm and slick.
He cleared his throat. “We need to bypass Port Klang entirely. Look at alternatives in Thailand.” His words were logical, clean. His body was a riot.
She pulled off with a soft, lewd pop. He glanced down. She was watching him, her lips swollen and glossy. She held his gaze as she spit a thick strand of saliva onto the head of his cock, then used her hand to smear it down the shaft, her fist pumping him slowly. The visual was so obscene, so deliberately degrading, that his hips jerked involuntarily.
“Mark? You have thoughts on the Thailand angle?” Chew asked.
“I… I need a minute to pull up the shipping manifests,” he stammered. He frantically clicked on a folder, his vision swimming. Emily lowered her head again, taking him deep, then deeper, until he felt the tip nudge the entrance to her throat. She held it there, her body rigid with the effort not to gag. He could see the strain in her neck. Then she relaxed and swallowed, her throat muscles convulsing around the head of his cock in a slow, milking pulse.
A raw, broken sound caught in his chest. He slammed his finger onto the mute button.
“Fuck… Emily…” he groaned, his head falling back against the leather.
Seizing the opportunity, she gripped his hips for leverage and forced herself down, taking him entirely into her mouth and throat. He felt his entire length sheathed in incredible, choking heat. Her nose was pressed against his pelvis. She held the position, her body shuddering, a gag reflex violently suppressed. He looked down and saw tears springing from the corners of her squeezed-shut eyes.
The sensation was unbearable. The pressure, the tightness, the absolute violation of it, the sheer fact of it happening while the faces of his colleagues stared blankly from the screen. It coiled the spring in his gut to its breaking point.
“You’re muted, Mark,” Daniels’ voice crackled, unaware.
On screen, Patel was talking, his hands moving. Mark’s own face in the little corner window looked flushed, his eyes too wide. He unmuted. “...apologies, technical glitch,” he forced out, his voice strangled.
Emily began to move. With him buried in her throat, she started a shallow, brutal fucking of her own face, sliding him in and out of that convulsive, tight passage. The sounds were guttural, wet, choked. Her tears dripped onto his trousers. The desk trembled slightly with her motions.
He was going to come. It was a tsunami building behind a dam of pure will. He tried to think of anything else—the numbers, the clock, the smell of leather. But all he could feel was that exquisite, choking squeeze, the visual of her wrecked face working between his legs.
“The cost-benefit analysis simply doesn’t support a Thai pivot without client reassurances,” he heard himself say, the sentence a miraculous feat of cortical override.
Patel began to reply. The dam shattered.
Mark’s orgasm ripped through him with a silent, seizing violence. He jammed the mute button again as his hips bucked off the chair, driving himself deeper into Emily’s throat. A ragged gasp escaped him. He came in hot, pulsing jets, flooding her throat as she continued to swallow him down. He felt the swallow reflex, a series of frantic, fluttering contractions around his sensitive head, pulling every last drop from him. Her hands clawed at his thighs, holding on as he spasmed.
On screen, Patel finished his point. There was a pause.
“Mark? Your take?”
He unmuted, his breath a faint whisper in the mic. “I… concur with Patel. The client reassurances are paramount.” His voice was hoarse, utterly drained.
Emily slowly released him, pulling back with a final, clean suck. He slipped from her mouth, wet and spent. She stayed under the desk for a moment, her breathing harsh and ragged. Then she crawled out. Her face was a mess of tears, saliva, and smudged mascara. Her lips were puffy and red. She didn’t look at him. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, stood on shaky legs, and walked to the wrapped canvas.
She picked it up and left the room without a word, closing the door with a soft click.
The call continued for another twenty minutes. Mark spoke when required, his answers short, his mind a perfect, blank static. When the final goodbyees were said and the screen went dark, he sat in the profound silence.
The taste of copper filled his mouth. He’d bitten the inside of his cheek raw.
He looked down at himself. His cock lay against his thigh, soft and glistening in the low light. A string of milky fluid, mingled with her saliva, still connected him to the dark space under the desk. The smell of sex, sharp and salty, had infiltrated the room of old books and leather.
He reached forward with a trembling hand and minimized the call window. Behind it, untouched, was the digital calendar. Blocked in for tomorrow, 11 AM: Family Brunch - The Oak Room.
A laugh, dry and hollow as dead leaves, escaped him. It echoed in the quiet office, a sound without any humor at all.
He cleaned himself with a tissue from the box on the desk, the act mechanical and pointless. The stain was not on his clothes. It was in the silence, in the calculated blankness of her exit, in the perfect, horrific efficiency of what she had just done. She hadn’t been seeking pleasure. She had been conducting an audit. And she had found him, once again, utterly solvent in his own corruption.
He turned his chair and looked out the window at the gathering dusk. Somewhere in the house, a door closed. He didn’t know if it was Susan’s or Emily’s. The distinction was beginning not to matter. They were both on the other side of doors he had locked himself.