My Office Rival Swore I'd Beg First, and I Took the Bet novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Four Minutes

They agree it never happened, then write the rules of a wager on the whiteboard and test them with four minutes of hands over clothes that leave both of them unfinished.

Nobody was in the hall.

The latch had just given up, the way old latches do, and the steel door stood open on an empty corridor.

Drake picked the receipts off the floor and put the box back on the shelf.

I picked up the sales report, which I had crushed into a roll.

"That did not happen," I said.

"Agreed," he said. "It happened to two other people."

We took separate elevators.

The next day we sat across from each other in 4B and discussed the Ridgeline Kit.

He wore the navy vest and the sleeves rolled to the elbow.

I wore the mustard cardigan and a pencil skirt, and I did not look at his forearms once, not even a little.

At six the floor emptied out.

Drake closed the laptop and said, "I should address the situation."

"There's no situation."

"There's a situation, Szymanski, and it's about nine feet from me in a skirt."

I put down my pen.

"I could go ninety days without touching you," I said. "Easily. I've gone two years."

"I could go longer."

"You'd be begging me by Halloween."

He looked at the ceiling as if the ceiling might help.

"I have never begged for anything in my life."

"Then you won't mind a bet."

I stood up, took the dry-erase marker off the tray and walked to the whiteboard.

I wrote BET in block letters.

"Whoever begs first loses," I said. "Whoever comes without the other one's leave loses."

"Comes."

"Yes, comes. You're a grown man in a vest."

"Go on."

"Each day has a keeper. The keeper says what happens. Nobody gets off unless the keeper says so."

He took the marker out of my hand.

His fingers touched mine and I felt it up to my elbow.

Under mine he wrote, in a neat engineer's hand, 1. ROZ: MON WED FRI. 2. DRAKE: TUES THURS SAT.

"Sunday?"

"Coin toss."

"Leave has to be spoken," I said. "'You have leave.' Out loud."

He wrote it.

"Begging means please, in any form, used to ask for it."

He wrote that too.

"And work stays out of it," he said, still writing.

"Nobody trades a vote or a slide or a number. If it gets near the job, we stop."

"Obviously."

"What does the loser do?"

I thought about it.

"At the next all-hands, the loser stands up and says, in front of everyone, 'The other one's line is the better line.'"

His mouth twitched.

"Switchback beats Cairn."

"Or the reverse."

"It won't be the reverse."

He capped the marker and set it in the tray.

"Today is Tuesday," he said. "That makes me the keeper."

My heart did a stupid, disloyal thing.

"A baseline," Drake said. "To see what we're working with."

He took out his phone, opened the timer and set it to four minutes.

Then he put the phone on the table face up, where we could both see it.

"Sit."

I sat on the edge of the long table, on top of the Ridgeline printouts.

My skirt rode up my thighs.

He came and stood between my knees, with his vest against my cardigan and his breath above my forehead.

"Start it," I said.

He pressed the button.

His right hand slid under my skirt, up the inside of my thigh and over my tights.

He didn't hurry.

He cupped me through the nylon and my underwear, his palm heavy and warm on my pussy, and I heard myself make a noise.

"Quiet," he said. "Glass walls."

"You picked the room."

"Kip picked the room."

His thumb found my clit through the layers and began to circle.

It was slow, a patient little circle that made me grab his vest with both hands.

"There," he said, very softly. "Right there. Do you want to tell me how long you've been thinking about this?"

"Never."

"Szymanski."

"Since the carabiner."

The circle tightened.

My hips came up off the table to meet his hand, and the printouts crackled under me.

He leaned in and his beard brushed my ear.

"You are so wet I can feel it through your tights," he said.

"Don't talk."

"I'm the keeper. I talk."

Heat climbed up the backs of my legs.

My toes curled in my shoes, and my breath went short and high.

The phone said 0:40.

I wanted to look at it and I wanted to look at him and I could not do either.

He pressed harder, one small stroke right on the spot.

I was at the edge, and I could feel the whole thing tipping.

"Drake."

"Not yet."

The phone said 0:12.

"Drake, I'm going to."

"I know," he said, and took his hand away.

I made a sound I'm not proud of.

My whole body hung there, throbbing, wet, empty, with my skirt around my hips.

The phone chimed.

"Time," he said, and he sounded unsteady. "Three minutes fifty. I stopped it early."

"That's a foul."

"There are no fouls. It's day two."

I pushed him back and slid off the table on legs that did not feel like mine.

"My turn."

"It's not your day."

"It's a baseline," I said. "For science. Reset the clock."

He looked at me for a long second, then pressed the button.

I put my hand flat on the front of his trousers.

He was already hard, hot and thick against my palm, and he drew in a breath through his teeth.

I stroked him through the wool, from the base up, with my whole hand.

"Hands on the table," I said.

He put both hands on the table.

His knuckles went pale.

I worked him slowly, listening to his breathing, and when I squeezed at the head his hips jerked.

"Roz."

"Say what you want."

"I want," he said, and stopped.

I smiled at him.

"You want what?"

"I want you to keep going and I want you to stop at three fifty."

At 0:15 I felt him swell under my hand.

His head dropped, and his whole big body shook.

At 0:03 I took my hand away.

He stayed bent over the table with his eyes shut and his chest heaving.

"Foul," he said hoarsely.

"There are no fouls."

He laughed, once, helplessly.

We stood in the glass room, flushed and wrecked.

I took out my compact and fixed my lipstick with a hand that shook.

On the whiteboard it said BET, and under it, in his neat hand, DAY 2: 0 TO 0.

We rode the elevator down together because there was no way out of it.

I kept my eyes on the floor numbers.

The doors opened at the lobby, and Kip Danforth stood there in his fleece vest with a coffee.

"Working late?" he said, smiling.

"Yes," we said together.

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