Chapter 7: New CEO
The leather of the executive chair was cool and sticky against Billy’s bare back. His hands rested on Marla’s hips, fingers splayed over the sleek fabric of her skirt, which was rucked up around her waist. Her ass was bare, pale in the sterile office light, slapping against his thighs with a steady, wet rhythm.
She was riding him, her back to his chest, her eyes fixed on the large monitor dominating her glass desk. The only sounds were their joined, heavy breathing, the creak of the chair’s hydraulic cylinder, and the slick, obscene noise of her taking him, over and over.
“Look,” she said, her voice a little breathless but utterly focused. She tapped a manicured nail against the screen. “Up another three points this hour. They’re calling it the Bloodstone Bounce.”
Billy turned his head, pressing his lips to the side of her neck. He tasted the faint salt of her skin, the ghost of her perfume. He was hard, achingly so, and the deep, grinding rhythm of her movements sent pulses of dumb pleasure up his spine. He mumbled into her neck, “Your name’s on it.”
“Our name, darling,” she corrected, without looking away from the charts and graphs. “Billy Bloodstone. Executive Vice President. It has a certain weight, doesn’t it?” She leaned back, driving him deeper inside her with a sharp gasp, then resumed her controlled pace. “A certain… finality.”
A year. A year of this: of tailored suits that cost more than his old car, of whispers in hallways that fell silent when he approached, of his signature on documents he barely read. A year of Marla’s body, her approval, her cold, rewarding smile. A year of not thinking about the last morning in his old apartment, of the packed box Kate had left by the door with his things, of the single, unanswered text that simply read: Why?
He fucked the thought away, burying his face in her red curls, gripping her hips tighter to meet her strokes. His world had narrowed to this office, this chair, this woman, this feeling.
On the monitor, beside the financial data, a news feed ticked. Marla’s eyes flickered to it. She stopped moving, clenching around him so tightly he saw stars.
“Well, well,” she purred. “Speaking of finality.”
She clicked a key, maximizing a video player. The sound of shouting, chaotic and raw, filled the silent office. On screen, a protest swirled outside the Clamp Centre’s main gates. Signs bobbed: “NO TO GREMLIN LABOR” and “CLAMP = CRUELTY.” The camera jostled, then focused. There, at the front of the scrum, being shoved back by a security guard in black armor, was Kate.
She looked older. Thinner. Her hair was hacked short, messy. She was screaming something, her face a mask of furious, useless anguish. The guard’s hand connected with her shoulder, spinning her. She stumbled, fell to her knees on the asphalt.
Billy’s body went rigid. The pleasure curdled, a sour rush flooding his mouth.
Marla felt it. She began to move again, a harder, more punishing rhythm, grinding down on him as she watched the screen. “Watch,” she commanded, her voice hot in his ear. “Watch what happens to nuisances.”
On screen, another guard grabbed Kate’s arm, yanking her upright. She struggled, a wild, feral thing. A zip-tie was produced, cinched around her wrists behind her back. The camera zoomed in on her face as she was led away—the dirt on her cheek, the defiant, utterly broken glare.
“They’ll process her, charge her with trespass and disturbing the peace,” Marla said conversationally, as if commenting on the weather. She reached a hand between her own legs, fingers rubbing circles where they were joined, heightening her own sensation. “She’ll be out in a few hours. A little poorer. A lot more humiliated. It’s a good lesson.”
Billy couldn’t look away from Kate’s captured, receding figure. A memory, unbidden: Kate laughing, handing him a stupid souvenir snow globe from the Clamp gift shop. For your future executive desk, she’d joked.
“Fuck me, Billy,” Marla snarled, the veneer of control slipping into raw hunger. “Fuck me like you mean it. Like you’re glad to be here and not down there in the filth with her.”
She was demanding a performance, a sacrament of his allegiance. He forced his eyes from the screen, back to the pale slope of Marla’s shoulder. He gripped her waist, his fingers digging in, and thrust upwards, driving into her with a sudden, savage force.
“Yes,” she hissed, bracing her hands on the desk. The monitor shook. “That’s it. That’s my vice president.”
He pounded into her, the chair slamming against the floor with each stroke. He wasn’t making love. He wasn’t even fucking. He was demolishing something, trying to bury the image of Kate’s fall under a wave of physical sensation. The raw, slap of skin, her sharp cries, the smell of her arousal and his own sweat—it was a wall he built, brick by brutal brick.
“Tell me you love it,” Marla gasped, her head lolling back against him. “Tell me this is better. Tell me this power is better than her pathetic love.”
His mind was a blank white noise. His body, trained now to respond to her, to seek its validation in her climax, was hurtling toward the edge. “It’s better,” he grunted, the words torn from him.
“Say you love me.”
He couldn’t. That word was a locked room he’d bricked over.
She seemed to know. She twisted, looked at him over her shoulder, her eyes dark voids. “Come inside me, Billy. Mark what’s yours. Your company. Your office. Your cunt.”
The crude permission, the total ownership, was the final trigger. With a choked shout that was more pain than pleasure, he emptied into her, his body convulsing, his vision blurring at the edges. She followed a moment later, her inner muscles fluttering around him in rapid, greedy pulses, a silent scream of triumph.
For a long minute, they stayed like that, fused together in the CEO’s chair, the only sound their ragged breath and the muted cheers of a stock market rally on the monitor. The protest video had been minimized.
Slowly, she lifted herself off him. She smoothed her skirt down over her thighs, the fabric now damp and wrinkled. She didn’t look at him as she walked to a private bathroom, the door clicking shut.
Billy sat there, exposed and spent. The leather was unpleasantly warm beneath him. He looked at the monitor. The ticker continued its relentless climb. He looked at the door to the bathroom, behind which water was now running.
He looked at his own hands, resting on his knees.
Then, with a movement that was purely mechanical, he reached for the tailored trousers pooled on the floor. He pulled them on, fastened the belt, buttoned the crisp white shirt. He fastened the cufflinks, solid obsolute carved in the shape of a ‘B’. Bloodstone.
By the time Marla emerged, pristine once more, he was standing by the window, looking down at the city streets far below, where the protesters had already been scattered, the evidence of their struggle hosed away by dawn.
She came to stand beside him, not touching. “The board meeting is at ten,” she said. “You’ll present the quarterly security efficiencies. The gremlin containment protocols.”
He nodded. “Yes.”
She studied his profile. The hollows under his eyes, the firm set of a mouth that once smiled easily. “Regret is a luxury, Billy. One we can’t afford.”
He didn’t answer. He just watched a tiny ambulance weave through the traffic, its light a silent, frantic blue. He wondered, idly, if it was headed for the precinct where they were booking her. He wondered if she was hurt.
“I know,” he finally said, turning from the window. He met her gaze, his own emptied of everything but a cool, functional resolve. “The slides are ready. Shall we?”
A smile, thin and genuine, touched her lips. She took his arm, her grip firm. “We shall.”
They walked out of the office together, the doors whispering shut behind them, leaving only the hum of the servers and the relentless, rising numbers on the screen.