Monday.
We drove to the office together. His Audi, the leather, the jazz station.
But, everything was different.
He was in a suit. He drove me to my rental room, and I asked him to park a few doors down. I just ... I didn't want him to see it. Not yet. And bless his heart, he didn't argue. He didn't even ask. He just did it, and I looked back and he wasn't even watching me. He knew I didn't want him to see, and he let me have that. I didn't look at the mitten, the microwave, the ramen. I threw my clothes on the bed and changed into ones he got me. And the thong. Because it made me feel ... wanted.
I got back in the car, and he nodded. And started to drive.
"Rules," he said after a few minutes. Looking at the road. Both hands on the wheel.
"At the office, I'm your boss. We're professional. Nothing changes in how we act around anyone else until we've figured out what this is."
"Okay."
"That's not because I'm ashamed of you. Or of this. It's because I'm 52 and you're 20 and I own the company and if anyone decides I'm using my position, the damage lands on you. Not me. You're the new hire. I'm the boss. That math doesn't work in your favor."
"I know."
"Do you?"
I looked at him. His jaw was tight. He was gripping the wheel slightly harder than usual. This was Graham worried. Graham Mercer, who walked into investor dinners and rooms full of rich people like he'd built them, was worried about protecting me from the consequences of what we were.
"I know," I said. And I reached over and put my hand on his leg, just above the knee, and squeezed once. The same move he'd made at the dinner, his knee under the tablecloth. Except now it was mine. My move. His playbook, but I was running it.
He looked down at my hand. His jaw relaxed. He put his hand over mine for a second, squeezed back, then returned it to the wheel. "Okay."
I waited a few moments. Then I ventured: "You said, 'new hire.'"
He smiled. Not all at once, it was like each muscle in his face had to have its own say in what was going on, the smile forming over the course of several seconds as a series of twitches. "You've proven your use, you've proven you're smart, you've proven you understand this work. Our contract with the temp agency requires we continue to keep you through them for a three-month lockout, and I think we're a little over half-way through that. I already asked Dina to start the paperwork to bring you on. Last week. Assuming you still pull your weight. That delay will also help appearances."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't. My throat had clenched up and my eyes were wet. We finished the drive in silence.
We parked. He took the elevator. I took the stairs up two flights, and a different elevator the rest of the way.
Dina was there, glasses on, espresso in hand.
"You look different," she said.
"New tie," I said. (It was totally the same tie.)
"Hm." She went back to her screen. Dina missed nothing and commented on very little.
The day was normal. Filing, scanning, a meeting I sat in on and took notes. Graham was professional. Polite. Didn't come to my desk. Didn't ask me to stay late. He talked to me once, about a zoning document, in the same tone he used with everyone. If you were watching you wouldn't see anything. That was the point. This was the office, it was work.
And yet, each step I took, the thong playing across my hole reminded me what was really happening. Maybe that's why I wore it: Not because of what it represented, but because it was a real, tangible, constant reminder that this was really real.
I was watching him. Not obviously. Not the way I'd watched before with the constant glances at his office, the tracking of his routines. But I was aware of him in a new way. Like a radio tuned to a frequency nobody else could hear. When he stood up from his desk. When he put his glasses on. When he walked to the kitchen and came back with water, not coffee, because he'd already had two cups at home. At his house. Where I'd slept. Where I'd woken up yesterday and kissed him on the couch and he'd carried me to his bedroom.
I looked at a spreadsheet. I did not think about his bedroom, about holding his hard cock, about stroking it as he gripped my hand and demonstrated what he liked, about him cumming all over the both of us.
I thought about the spreadsheet and nothing else as the thong played across my cleft.
And nobody was watching us.
Except Jett.
I saw him around 11. He was coming from the kitchen with his protein shake, the branded cup, and he looked at me. Then at Graham's office. Then at me. His face was doing something complicated. Not the not-smile. Something rawer. He knew. I don't know how. Maybe the suit? Maybe something in how I was carrying myself, which was maybe different, because everything was different. Or maybe he just knew because he'd been where I wanted to be and he could read the signs of someone who'd gotten there. Or did something happen on Friday that I don't remember?
Jett didn't say anything. Not then.
At lunch he stopped by my desk. Leaned against the edge. The same lean. Everyone leaned against my desk. I was starting to hate it.
"Good weekend?" he said.
"Fine."
"You look rested. Better than Friday." A pause. "Where'd you end up Friday night? You disappeared."
"Went home."
"Right ..." He looked at me. His jaw was working, the muscle tightening and releasing. "You know what you're getting into? With him?"
"I'm not getting into anything."
"Sure." He straightened up. "When he gets bored of you, and he will, you'll remember I tried to tell you."
He walked away. I sat at my desk and I waited for the cold thing, the stone in my stomach, the doubt. It didn't come. Weeks ago his words had knocked the scaffolding out from under me. Now they bounced. Not because I was certain Graham would never get bored. People get bored. Relationships end. But because Jett's prophecy wasn't about me. It was about him. It was the thing he told himself so that what happened to him was a pattern and not a rejection. If Graham always gets bored, then Jett wasn't special enough to fail. Graham was just broken. And I was next and Jett would have another person who he could feel sorry for instead of himself.
Except, I wasn't Jett. And Graham had said "I'm not good at this" while gripping his desk, and he'd made me eggs in bare feet, and he'd said the dust in my hair at Morrison was the first time in twenty years he'd had to walk away from someone before he could talk. Jett hadn't gotten any of that. Jett had gotten the moves. I'd gotten the person.
I just felt tired of him. Tired of the bitterness wearing a mask of concern. Tired of someone else's rejection being made into my problem.
Wow. I wondered if that's what being an adult is actually like. Just realizing that Jett was pushing his own insecurities at me, and I was beyond it.
The afternoon was quiet. At 2pm Graham had a team meeting. Normal stuff, quarterly updates, new projects. I took notes on a name-brand tablet. He didn't look at me more than anyone else.
After the meeting, we filed out. Jett lingered. He went to Graham, standing too close, speaking too quietly for me to hear from my nearby desk. Graham's face changed. The warmth left it. Not anger. Just ... absence. The temperature dropping from warm to nothing, which on Graham was more unsettling than shouting from anyone else.
Graham said something short. Jett's expression tightened. He left the conference room and walked past my desk without looking at me.
At 4pm Dina went into Graham's office. Closed the door. She was one of the few people who ever closed Graham's door other than him. She was in there ten minutes. When she came out she walked to Jett's desk and said something and Jett's face went white.
I watched him pack. A laptop bag. A framed photo from his desk that I'd never looked at closely. His coffee mug, one of those motivational ones, black with white text that said EXECUTE in all caps. Before, it seemed like a promise, but over the last few days it now seemed like a threat. He put everything in a canvas tote and a banker's box and he stood up. He didn't look at me and he didn't look at Graham's office. He walked to the elevator, pressed the button, and he waited with his shoulders straight and his jaw set and when the doors opened he got in and was gone.
The office was quiet. A few people looked up. Then back to their screens. I think most of us were watching through peripheral vision. Not rubber-necking, but rubber-eyeing, like a traffic accident. Only this one was self-inflicted.
At 5:30, the floor started emptying. I stayed. Nobody asked me to. I just didn't leave. By 6:15 it was mostly dark and Graham's office was the only light on the floor other than my desk lamp and computer, like it had been every night I'd stayed late, and I got up and walked across the dark carpet to his door.
Open. Always open.
He was at his desk. Jacket off. Sleeves rolled. Glasses on. Macallan in the glass. The whole picture. The same picture I'd been watching since my first day, the one I'd looked at for just a few seconds and thought about all the way home. Except now I'd been inside his house and inside his arms and inside his bed – and his tongue had been inside my mouth – and the picture meant something different.
He looked up at me over his glasses.
"Hey," I said.
"Hey."
"You fired Jett."
"Jett was out of line today. To say nothing about Friday, trying to get you drunk, sneaking you into a bar under-age, and possibly having the bartender do something he shouldn't have. Several fireable offenses, including creating a hostile work environment for a member of my team. And threatening me is never a good idea."
"A member of your team."
He took off his glasses. Set them on the desk. Looked at me with those eyes. Tired. Warm. The same eyes that had looked at me from between my legs yesterday afternoon. "Come in. Close the door."
I stepped inside.
I closed the door. I'd never closed his door.
The glass walls reflected the dark floor and the desk lamp multiplied in every panel and I could see us in the glass. Him behind his desk. Me in front of it. The door closed behind me.
"Sit down," he said.
I didn't sit. I walked around the desk and kissed him. In his office, in the building with his name on it, with the city lit up outside the windows. He made a surprised sound against my mouth and then his hands were on my waist, pulling me closer, and he kissed me back. Not careful like Saturday. Not slow like Sunday. Certain.
When we pulled apart he looked at me. "I thought we said professional at the office."
"The door's closed."
"The door's closed," he repeated.
"No one's here."
"No one's here," he repeated.
"And I'm wearing something you got me."
"Wearing something I got you?" His eyes searched. And then he smiled. The real one. The one from the couch.
He looked out the glass, confirming no one was there, then he reached into my pants in the back, and felt, and he pulled the thong up just a bit, and I moaned.
His eyes never left mine.
"So what happens now," I asked, after I recovered.
He handed me a few papers. I looked, and my throat felt like it had a golfball in it and my eyes burned for the second time today. I collapsed into the waiting chair.
It was the office expense reports starting 8 months ago and for the next four months. Dina's writing, the big, smooth lines of her pen that took me just two days to learn: "No clothing stores."
I looked up at him and he was blurry, but I refused to blink because I didn't want him to see. "You didn't have to do this."
"I want everything to be open. You were concerned. I have nothing to hide."
I felt the drops despite not blinking. He handed me a tissue.
"So what happens now? We figure this out. All of it," he said after I'd wiped my eyes.
"The age thing."
"Yes."
"The work thing."
"Yes."
"The me-figuring-out-who-I-am thing."
"That too, if you feel a need to."
"That's a lot."
"It is."
He was in his chair, looking up at me, and I thought about how different this was from maybe five weeks ago when I'd sat in the chair across from him and he'd shown me the Belmont renderings and I hadn't understood why I couldn't stop watching his mouth.That's all it had been. Just weeks since a broke guy with $43 in his bank account and a mattress on a floor and a whole identity he thought he understood walked into this building and sat down in this office and shook this man's hand and the world tilted.
"I don't have it figured out," I said. "I don't know what I am. I don't know what to tell people. I don't know what this looks like when it's not just us in your house or your office after everyone leaves."
"That's fine."
"Is it?"
"Drew." He leaned forward. Put his hand on my knee. "I'm not asking you to have answers. I'm asking you to stay." He paused. "Asking you. Not as your boss. Just me, just another human asking."
The word that started everything. The word he'd said on my first day and kept saying and Jett had poisoned and I'd let be poisoned and now he was saying it again in his office with his door closed and the city behind us and it meant the same thing it had always meant. It meant I want you here. It meant don't go.
"I'm staying," I said.
We left together at 8. Same elevator. Same garage level. He drove. The jazz station was playing something slow. I put my hand on the console between us and he covered it with his.
I didn't know what would next. His past, which I still didn't fully know. My family, because at some point I'd have to say something to someone about the person I was with, and that conversation scared me more than almost anything. The office, because 30 people had just watched Jett get walked out and some of them would eventually figure out why. The world outside the car, which would have opinions about a 20-year-old and a 52-year-old, and those opinions wouldn't all be kind.
But that was later. That was tomorrow.
Right now, it was Monday night and I was in Graham Mercer's car with his hand over mine and the city architecture going past the windows and the jazz low and slow. And for the first time in my life I wasn't directionless. I wasn't the college dropout without a plan. I wasn't the guy who had a girlfriend named Sarah and thought that was the whole story. I knew exactly where I wanted to be.
His door was closed now.
I was on the right side of it.
Author's Post Script: Thank you to everyone who read and commented and liked this story. This is it for Graham and Drew for the moment, but if you like this and want to see a potential season 2, let me know in the comments! Also, check me out on Substack where I'll be posting some additional, alternate endings / chapter branches for paid subscribers (@KaiAfterPractice).
If you enjoyed this story, consider supporting the author on Patreon.
To get in touch with the author, send them an email.
