One Night Stand with My Boss novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Drayton
Dumped by text, Felicity picks a sober stranger at a hotel bar, leaves a cutting note and takes his phone by mistake, and on Monday the founder holds her phone up at the all-hands and she has to stand.
My boyfriend of two years dumped me by text at 10:40 on a Friday night.
"I need someone who's less. You'll be fine."
I read it in the back of a cab, and the cab driver watched me do it in his mirror.
"Where to?" he asked.
I looked up at the lit sign sliding past the window.
The Drayton Hotel.
I had walked by its bar twice that week and never gone in.
"Here," I said. "Right here."
The bar sat on a mezzanine over the lobby, all dark wood and low amber light.
I took the second stool and ordered a club soda with lime.
I wanted to remember every minute of what I was about to do.
I had no idea yet what that was.
There was one other person at the bar.
He sat three stools down with a glass of tonic water, and he was reading nothing on his phone.
Dark-blond hair pushed back, a charcoal sweater, a steel watch, the kind of stillness that costs money.
He had looked up when I walked in.
He did not look away when I looked back.
I carried my glass down three stools and sat beside him.
"I'm having the worst night of my life," I said. "I want one thing in it that I chose."
He turned the tonic a quarter turn on its napkin.
"That's a lot to hang on a stranger."
"You don't have to be good at it. You just have to be here."
The corner of his mouth moved.
It was the first thing about him that did not look controlled.
"Is that a challenge?"
"It's a room number," I said. "Pick one."
He put a card on the bar for the bartender and stood up.
His hand settled at the small of my back, light and warm.
He steered me to the elevator without saying a word.
The doors closed on the two of us.
I could see us in the brass doors, a woman with her chin up and a man a head taller.
He was not touching me anywhere else.
"Say something," I said.
"Take off your glasses."
I took them off.
He folded them with one hand and slid them into his pocket, and I felt the whole car tip.
In the room he did not turn on the lamp.
Streetlight came through the curtains in a stripe across the bed.
I pushed my cardigan off my shoulders and let it fall on a chair I could not see.
He watched me do it.
"Come here," he said, low.
I went.
His mouth was careful for a moment.
Then I got my hands in his hair, and the care went out of him all at once.
He kissed me.
My back met the wall beside the window.
He lifted me onto him, a hand under each thigh, and held me there.
"Tell me what you want," he said against my throat.
"Everything," I said. "Fast, and then slow."
He laughed, a rough breath, and carried me to the bed.
My dress went over my head.
His sweater went somewhere on the floor.
He was lean and hard under it, warm all the way down.
I ran my hands over his ribs while he stripped the rest of me, slowly, and I felt it in my knees.
When he put his mouth between my legs I grabbed the sheet in both fists.
He took his time.
He held my hips down when I tried to rise.
I swore at the ceiling.
"Again," he said, and I came with his name nowhere in my mouth, because I did not have it.
I pulled him up by the hair.
"Now," I said.
"Say please."
"Elliot," I said, because the bartender had said it when we left, "please."
That was a mistake, or the best thing I did all night.
He went still above me for half a breath.
Then he pushed into me, slow and all the way, and the sound he made went straight through me.
I wrapped my legs around his back.
He fucked me deep and steady, with his forearms braced on either side of my head.
His eyes stayed on mine the entire time.
I had never been looked at like that.
Not once in two years.
"Faster," I said.
He gave me faster.
I dug my nails into his shoulders and met every thrust.
The headboard hit the wall, and I did not care who in the next room heard me say his name.
"Look at me," he said, rough.
I looked.
I came a second time with his cock buried in me and his name tearing out of my throat.
He followed a moment later with his face in my neck, shaking.
We lay there afterward breathing.
He did not say anything clever.
Neither did I.
Later, much later, he rolled me over and took me again from behind, one hand flat between my shoulder blades.
I stopped counting.
I woke at 5:20 with his arm heavy across my waist.
The room was grey.
He slept.
I looked at him for a long minute, and something in my chest turned over.
Then I thought of the text, and my own good sense came back with its arms folded.
I found the hotel notepad on the desk and wrote fast.
Thank you for the night. Honest review: B+. Dropped points for the tonic. Do not call. I won't.
I left it on the pillow I had slept on.
I dressed in the dark and fished my glasses out of his sweater pocket.
I grabbed my phone off the nightstand and left.
On the train I noticed the case had a scratch on the corner that mine did not.
It buzzed against my hip.
A name lit the screen, and the name was not mine.
I had picked up the wrong phone.
On Monday I walked into Maddox Collective for my first day in a clean cardigan.
A stranger's phone sat at the bottom of my bag, and I planned to mail it back.
Ninety people packed into the pit for the all-hands.
I stood at the back by the brick wall.
A girl with a lanyard whispered, "He doesn't do these often."
A man walked onto the low stage.
Dark-blond hair, charcoal sweater, a steel watch.
My stomach dropped through the floor.
"Morning," said Elliot Maddox, founder and CEO, and he reached into his pocket and held up a phone.
My phone.
My own lock screen glowed over ninety heads, with Gwen and me grinning in the photo.
Above it sat a preview from Gwen herself.
"how was the stranger?? alive??"
The room made a small noise.
"Someone left this at the Drayton Hotel over the weekend," he said, evenly. "Does anyone here recognize it?"
Ninety heads turned, looking.
I felt the phone in my bag buzz against my leg.
I could have stayed behind the girl with the lanyard.
I could have let a few seconds pass until somebody laughed, and he put it away.
I walked down the middle of the room instead.
Past the designers, past the strategists, past a man holding a coffee halfway to his mouth.
I climbed the two steps onto the stage and held his phone out to him, screen up.
"That's mine," I said. "And this one's yours."
His eyes were grey-green, and they did not blink.
He took his phone back and put mine in my hand.
Then he said into the microphone, quietly enough that only the front row would swear to it:
"Welcome to Maddox, Ms. Fairbrother."
I had never told him my last name.
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