Page 27 of Not Safe For Work

Chapter 7

I’d had sex with Rick Pierce.

Oh my God.

All weekend, he’d been Rick—amazing kisser, eager submissive who loved to be teased and fucked. I’d been tempted to get into some heavier kink, but I’d held off. I wanted to make sure we really were that comfortable with each other, and that it hadn’t just been the heat of the moment making us want to push the envelope. Later, once we’d done the groundwork, we could break out the toys and see how things went.

I was pretty sure that would come sooner rather than later. What had happened between us definitely wasn’t just the heat of the moment. I knew I wanted Rick, and I couldn’t wait to see him after work tonight. But first, I had to see him at work.

Shiiit.

As I drank my coffee on the way to the office, hours after that long kiss good night, he’d become Rick Pierce again in my mind. The CEO of our biggest client ever. The man with Mitchell & Forsythe wrapped around his finger.

What would happen when he walked into the office again? His company had its own offices elsewhere, but he’d been working so closely with the architects on this enormous project, he’d become a regular fixture around our building. He’d been distracting as hell from the beginning. Seeing him on the app had fucked with my brain.

Now that I’d seen him…

I shivered.

Of course I trusted him to keep this on the down-low, and I sure as hell wouldn’t say anything. Still, during my twenty-five-minute commute, I checked my rearview three times to make sure I didn’t have “I handcuffed Rick Pierce and fucked his mouth” tattooed across my forehead. I was irrationally certain that the second I walked into the building, people would look at me and know.

The powers that be would have my head on a pike if they knew I’d even entertained impure thoughts about Rick. They couldn’t outright fire me for getting involved with him, but they could find another reason to direct me to the unemployment line. Maybe they’d reconsidered their stance on modeling and decided to go with 3D printing or CGI instead of continuing to pay me to painstakingly build them by hand. Budget cuts could fall from the sky and kill my job, along with those of the other builders and drafters who I supervised.

My blood ran cold. Fuck. My crew.

It occurred to me that my job wasn’t the only one on the line these days. If the firm found out I was sleeping with Rick, and decided to replace me with the high-tech modeling techniques that Teagan and I had been afraid of for the last few years, everyone in the department would likely be downsized. Drafters were necessary, but they’d be absorbed by another department, and that department would quickly phase them out in favor of some recent graduates who’d do the same job for half the money.

As I headed upstairs from the parking garage, still nursing my coffee, it occurred to me that I was probably overreacting—if anyone got fired over this, it would be me and only me—but the thought of my crew did stick in my head. If there existed anyone who’d be able to look at me and know, it was them. When it came to sniffing out dirt and gossip, the CIA had nothing on the people I worked with day in and day out. And they were unavoidable because we shared a communal workspace.

At a quarter to eight, I braced for the worst and strolled into the office, such as it was. We had commandeered an unused conference room a few years ago. It was huge, with loads of natural light pouring in through the windows, so it was perfect. The drafters worked on their computers while Teagan and I each had a desk and a large table for building our models.

In spite of the fact that we were drawing and modeling multimillion-dollar buildings for multibillion-dollar companies, and an oversight on any of our parts could result in costly problems at job sites or lost contracts for the firm, we may as well have been a few junior high kids hanging out in the art room after school. We took our jobs seriously, but the same couldn’t be said for anything else. Pretty much everything that was said in this room would be considered NSFW—Not Safe For Work—in any other office.

Only the closed door—which Cal had marked “NSFW Zone”—and our blasting music kept the rest of the office from hearing what went on in here, which was probably just as well. Otherwise, every last one of us except maybe Silent Dave would have been summarily marched down to HR, a journey brought to you by the words “sexual” and “harassment”. We were shameless, and nothing was out of bounds. In a normal work environment, Cal wouldn’t be able to randomly recite already offensive rap lyrics, which he’d carefully modified to be even more offensive. Lengthy discussions wouldn’t be had about whether a guy should wait until the second or third date to broach the subject of anal sex. Teagan would quietly excuse herself to the ladies’ room without the announcement that her nipple ring had snagged on the lace of her bra again.

It was the perfect work environment for me. Probably not something I’d ever find anywhere else, and I loved it, but for all the same reasons I loved it, I was nervous about coming into it that particular Monday morning. If any member of my crew had even the most minute reason to suspect what—or who—had gone down over the weekend, I’d never hear the end of it. And these fuckers could read me like a book sometimes.

But it couldn’t be avoided, so I steeled myself, walked past the “NSFW Zone” sign and into the lion’s den.

At first glance, all was normal. As normal as it ever was, anyway. Silent Dave was insulated from the rest of the world by his massive noise-cancelling headphones. The other drafters—Cal, Scott and Bianca—stared at computer screens and clicked mice with music thumping in the background. Hunched over one of the modeling tables, Teagan snapped her gum to annoy Cal. Across the room, Scott crunched loudly on chips to annoy Bianca. Yep, business as usual.

The current CD was one of Scott’s many KMFDM albums. I wasn’t usually a fan of industrial rock, but today, I fully intended to let myself get lost in it, if only to drown out the rest of the world. There was nothing quite like a screaming guitar, an angry singer and some ear-shattering percussion to give me a temporary ticket to elsewhere.

I should’ve known that would be too much to ask, though. I’d barely set my coffee cup on my desk before Cal called out, “Hey, Gramps! How was your weekend?”

Funny you should ask…

“Oh, you know.” I started shrugging off my jacket. “Just the usual boring shit at the old folks’ home.”

“Another weekend without falling and breaking your hip,” Teagan said. “Can’t complain about that, right?”

“Ha, ha.” I rolled my eyes and hung my jacket on the back of my chair. “You know, I’m not that old.” I eased into the chair at my desk, pretending not to notice the residual soreness in my back and hips.

Scott clicked his tongue. “McNeill, we’ve talked about this. You’re over the hill with a few years’ practice. Therefore, you’re old. Deal with it.”

“Don’t make me beat you with my cane, fucking whippersnapper.”

“You’d have to catch me first.”