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After that weird and wonderful fantasy of mine with the Melissa in my head, I finish out the rest of the workday. I get through a huge chunk of Vanacore’s case files and adding notes to them. I also make some good headway in noting down her dictation and collecting the next batch of recordings, ones she’s just loaded to our filesharing client.
Chapter Eighteen
Tommy
After loading all of my completed work in file folders for Vanacore to examine and I clock out for the day. But before I can get out of the office completely, Ms. Vanacore stops me. “Wait a moment, Tommy.”
I stop short, feeling terrified by the gruff tone in her voice. My knees and stomach go weak, feeling like I’m about to get scolded. I turn around, not knowing why I’ve just thought I might turn around to see her with her cane out, asking me to bend over her desk, or over her knee.
I don’t turn around to see either of those things. But what I do see is tense light flickering in her eyes. “Yes, ma’am?”
Ms. Vanacore doesn’t answer for a moment. Instead, she rocks back and forth a bit in her chair as if she’s thinking or weighing out something.
When she does speak, she says, “I’ve been around a long time, Tommy. I’ve heard it all. Seen it all. I lived through a great amount of it myself. People can be stupid, mean creatures. To the point, I don’t believe they should even be called human. As an old southern woman, I lived in a quiet world. Stifled. In my day, we didn’t have things like HR, and pleasing the boss was just the way you moved up in the world.” She looks at me more closely, searching my face. Her gaze runs over parts of my body. “I know you like me. I know this without asking, and without you telling me, son.”
She clears her throat, and at that moment, her eyes spark was something like yearning. Like she yearns to be more than a mother figure presence to me. At that moment, I see that she doesn’t just want to be the quintessential boss —she wants to be more than that to me, for me. She wants to be my lover or something, though that thought makes me uncomfortable.
Not because I’m not at all attracted to her. I am. She’s good-looking enough, but my career plans did not and do not have anything to do with getting involved with my boss. Particularly not when a whole floor of my ex-coworkers already insinuated such, and use that to smear me and diminish my success.
“Ma’am, I don’t know what to say, I—”
Ms. Vanacore gets up from her desk. She walks over to me and puts one of her hands on my cheek gently, almost as if she is not touching me at all. She strokes the skin there, under my eyes and by my mouth. “You don’t need to say anything, Tommy,” she answers huskily. “I just want you to say that you trust me. That you’ll tell me if something’s happened, and you need me to take care of it.” On these words, she leans closer. Her perfume and hand lotion — there are two different, floral smells coming from her — fill my head. It makes it almost impossible for me to think or breathe. “I’ll take care of you, Tommy. I know how to handle things…” Her voice trails off as her hand trails down from my cheek to my neck, to the front of my shirt. “Things…specific things that a young…”—her hands drift down toward my slacks, toward the zipper and the button— “driven, incredibly-handsome man like yourself need from time to time. You need guidance and support around from your older, wiser, and much more experienced boss.”
Just as her fingers go to the tab of the zipper and pull, I step away. As much out of fear as confusion and excitement. Excitement is the part I hate the most. The part I fear the most. My heart is beating its way out of my chest, and I’m beginning to sweat more than I usually do. “Ms. Vanacore, I don’t think I’m…”
“Ready?” asks Ms. Vanacore, and I can tell she is. Her voice is deep and breathy enough.
At that moment, I completely lose track of what I was going to say. All I can do is stare at her.
“I could make you ready,” offers Ms. Vanacore softly, noticing that I’ve noticed her excitement.
Somehow, though part of my mind is traitorously into the idea of seeing just how ready she could make me, I shake my head. “No,” I say softly, “I’m sorry, Ms. Vanacore, ma’am, but I don’t think that’s a good idea. I don’t want people thinking that I got this far just because I’m…”
