Arcadia Resurgence, Vague Vermillion [best book club books for discussion .TXT] 📗

- but Hall jerked it back with a furious command, "Gloves!"

Eiri could not keep back a sigh as he turned to leave the room, go to his desk, and fetch the ultrasuede gloves used for handling proprietary product, and returned to the Director's office to find Hall sitting in one of the two cushioned seats on side of the the Director's desk. He was not invited to sit in the empty one. 

Hall tossed him the phone. "Explain. Explain to the Director what happened here."

Eiri scrolled down, confirmed which of the tests Hall referenced - product recall, the weakest of the bunch. "Tests came back with lower-than-anticipated uptake. Where we fell down in recall–"

"Fell down?" Hall interrupted. "Dropped off a cliff, more like."

Eiri fought to remain calm, feeling his jaw tighten as he handed the phone back to Hall. When the elf refused to take it from him, he set it on the Director's desk. "Some lag in product recall is expected, given the limited scope of test titles. We knew that without a color association, the average coffee-drinker would..."

Hall snatched the phone from the desk and threw it at Eiri, narrowly missing his head. It bounced off the glass with a sharp bang, drawing the attention of every worker on the open floor beyond the pane. "We're not interested in the average coffee drinker. This is a high end product for a highly sensitive audience. That's been our market focus from day one. Is that hard for you to recall?"

The Director said nothing. Did not even react throughout Hall's tantrum. Eiri glanced at her three times while appealing to Hall's logic, correcting his hyperbole, redirecting his anger. Never once did she return his gaze. But, at last, when Hall had risen to his feet, threatening to cancel the entire project, she interjected, "That's enough. You've aired your grievances. Now pick up your phone, and take a walk to cool off. Lao and I will align on next steps."

Hall rounded on her, like a bear rearing on its hind legs to attack. But the Director fixed her eyes on him, and Eiri felt sure she was pressing the elf with her vampiric persuasion. "Take. A. Walk," she said. 

Hall left. As the door swung shut behind him, the Director touched something on her phone to frost the glass to full opacity. Alone, shielded from the eyes of others, Eiri started to relax, and take a breath.

But then the Director stood and came around the desk to kneel at his feet. He saw a flash of white skin, the delicate patch just above the inside of the knee, and realized she wore a slitted pencil skirt, not her usual suit pants. Kneeling as she was, he could see the tender white underside of her thigh, a triangle of red lace formed by her panties as the fabric pressed against her. 

"I've missed you... Master," she said, shyly. 

"You've got to be kidding me," he said. He hadn't meant to say it, but the tension broke him, his hot anger surfacing between the shards of his fractured calm. "Now?"

She looked up. He saw high spots of color on her cheeks - the beginnings of embarrassment. "Why not? He thinks I'm punishing you. Why not use the opportunity to punish me instead?"

"Get up," Eiri insisted, rising. "You can't be serious right now."

She stood, tilting her head back to look up at him. He did not like her eyes on him. Don't you push me like you pushed him...! But even though he could not swear she compelled him, he felt his body stir, starting to respond. 

"You want to, don't you?" she asked. "You're angry - I can see it. Let loose. Let me enjoy it."

"Enjoy it?" Insulted, he grabbed her shoulders, giving her a little shake. "You think I enjoy this?"

The spots spread over her cheeks. She smiled, the tips of her fangs just peeking over her lower lip. He couldn't stand the sight of them. He spun her around, pushing her. She collided with the desk, fell forward. Artfully pushing her ass toward him, the skirt tightening around her hips, her rounded buttocks. His cock stirred at the sight of it. 

Eiri let his anger guide him, slapping her ass with one hand, hard. She gasped in surprise at the foce of it, bracing her hands on the tabletop to steady herself. He reached for her right arm, pulled it behind her, twisting. 

"You enjoy this," he accused her. "This is for you." He spanked, hard.

"I do," she groaned, a soft, desperate noise choked out between the slaps. "I do enjoy it."

He smacked her firm butt a few more times, not caring if the sound carried beyond the glass. She writhed and wriggled under him, somehow managing to thrust her hips back further with each punishing spank. Furious that she was enjoying his rage, he grabbed the split hem of her skirt and yanked it up over her hips, tearing it.

"Lao," she breathed, startled. "That's expensive–"

He ignored her protests, grasping the band of the red panties sitting over the defile of her ass, and yanking them down around her thighs. The sight of her backside exposed was even more thrilling than his memories of it, and he paused to savor the sight, feeling the throb in his groin. He hated himself for it, and struck her bare buttocks twice more, one blow for each cheek. It left barely a mark. She moaned again.

 

 

She really is enjoying this, he thought. She was selfish. She did not care about the tests, she did not care about Hall's humiliation of him. She didn't even appreciate that he was mad; the net result was the same to her. 

In a furious rage, he shoved his fingers into the hot crevice between her fleshy mounds, probing, digging. He found the tight little aperture and inserted a finger into it. She gasped, froze. With his finger pinning her in place, he let go of her arm and went on spanking her, swiping his hand downward over the fleshiest part of her cheeks in painful swats. She struggled, unable to push back without inviting more of the finger into her. She spread her hands on the desk, bracing against the blows. He heard her panting, and he plunged a second finger into the puckering orifice, working the knuckles inside of her. She grunted, twisted under his assault. 

"Do you enjoy that? Do you like being fucked in the ass?" he demanded. He thrust his hand against her, roughly, bending the fingers inside of her. "Because that's what you're doing to me! This is what you put us through!" 

He grabbed her hair, and pulled while shoving a third finger into her. She hissed in pain, arching her back, throwing her hips against the edge of the desk trying to get away from those stabbing fingers that stretched her. "Stop," she said. "Please...!"

Eiri paused, amazed at his temerity, wondering if she really wanted him to stop or if it was all part of the game to her. Before he could decide, there was a knock on the door.

In a blindingly fast motion, she stood up, turned, wrenching her ass free of his grip, and struck him. Eiri flew backward with the force of it, colliding with one of the chairs, falling over it. Everyone definitely heard that. 

"What is it?" the Director said, voice steady but sharp. She was straightening her clothes, smoothing her hair, her back to him.

"Ma'am," her assistant called in a knowing sing-song voice. "Your 11 o'clock is here."

"I'll take it in here. Bring coffee." The Director ran a hand over the torn seam of a skirt. She would not look at him, but he knew she spoke to him when she said, coldly, "You should go."

He stepped outside her office, feeling the throbbing parts of his back and neck where they struck the chair. His erection long gone. It wasn't until he made it to the bathroom that he saw the blood on his glove. Shame, mingled with pleasure, twisted his stomach. 

Eiri hid there until it was time to go home for the day. 

... 

Oddly, work improved for the team after the incident. The Director moved them out of the war room back into the open floor, allowing them to take one of the bays near the windows on the fourth floor. Hall also took them off swing shift, allowing them to clock in at 10am instead of 3pm. The regular hours put them in contact with the other Starbucks employees, and moral improved. Christy wore less makeup; Alan and Jaymin spent less time together and indulged in fewer exclusionary jokes. Eiri had the opportunity to meet with several other designers and attend the broader company marketing syncs. The contact restored the team's spirit and gave them each new ideas for improvements to the product.

The move also kept them at the office mainly during daylight hours. The Director and her subordinates weren't around, then, for chance encounters. Once or twice, Eiri drifted by the frosted fishbowl office, searching for her silhouette. She was never there, even after sundown. 

Guilt tore at him. As much as he felt he had the right to be angry, he couldn't convince himself that his actions toward the Director were appropriate. Two wrongs don't make a right, his mother often told him. 

He struggled with how to atone. A private message? A note to her assistant? Eiri never saw the woman anywhere on campus during his work hours. Leaving a note under her office door wasn't even open to him - the seal was airtight and monitored by camera. 

Fulbright chugged along. The second round of taste tests with the "soft boil" technique and his Bauhaus-inspired font tracked positive on sentiment analysis and product recall. Christy also found a new compound treatment for the inside of the cups that improved flavor, pulling long overtime hours in the lab with a few of the chemists she met during lunchtime. 

One day, she invited Eiri to visit her there below ground in the secure lab, and he was started to see bite marks on her neck. "Has the Director seen this?" he asked, innocently, when she finished explaining the science of flavor manipulation.

Christy's hand went to her neck, a telltale sheepish crinkle forming in her lips "Yes... she wanted to know why I kept staying late. We got dinner a few times..."

Eiri was shocked to realize he was jealous. She never bought me dinner, he thought. Did she ask you to brush her hair, too?

Christy mistook his look for one of chagrin. "Oh, don't worry, Eiri-chan! She's really very nice, and it doesn't hurt at all. It's like getting a hickey!" She smiled. "I can... show you sometime if you like?"

"I make it a point not to fool around with coworkers," he lied. 

The deadline for the spring taste test approached. Eiri found himself putting in more hours alongside Christy, revising the go-to-market strategy and backfilling the roadmap with her achievements to improve Hall's confidence in the tests. Jaymin completed the menu logging ahead of schedule, but Hall, always ready to exploit, hinted that Eiri needed to pull an all-nighter to design a new lid for the limited edition seasonal cups. 

Vindictive son of a bitch, Eiri thought. Nevertheless, he obliged, lowering all the lights in his corner of the bullpen and losing himself in the design process he loved so much. 

Sometime before midnight, he caught sight of the Director, walking the concrete path that looped the center of his floor. She was alone, without even her assistant, engrossed in something on her phone screen. She went to the fishbowl and shut the door, frosted the glass. Eiri's heart thumped in his chest. Had she seen him? Did she know he was there? 

A tumult of