Good Pet

Crack! “Are you going to hang out with that secretary again, even though I’ve told you that it doesn’t look good to do that sort of thing?”

Crack!

“Are you?”

Crack! This smack with the cane is much harder than the other two before it. It actually comes in with so much speed, I actually hear a bit of a whistling noise as it comes toward me. But as it hits, and I gasp out loud.

“You’ll earn yourself a few more if you don’t answer me, Tommy,” says Vanacore gravely, “but it seems this is more pleasure than pain for you.”

Crack! Crack!

Crack!

I’ve definitely got more than the original amount she promised now, and I’m feeling it.

She drops the cane from me as suddenly as she brought it up. “If you want to stay in this job, you’ll limit any more time with her to none. You’ll do as I ask when I ask.”

Vanacore pulls me away from the desk, spins me around, and takes a good look at my long, thick cock. As she does, I see that her nipples are hard. But she doesn’t show me. Or try to get me off. Instead, she just pulls my pants back up and sends me back to my cubicle.

“Finish out your workday, and then, come next week, I expect you to be ready to show me how much you’ve learned. How much more of a good boy you’re willing to be.”

Saying this, she leads me to sit on my warmed, painful ass. Nothing feels bruised. Not the way it would have been with my dad.

So, Vanacore was gentle by comparison. She didn’t hit too hard in reality, though it still hurts like a mother. I’m not injured in any way. Just brought in line. Brought to heel. And I’ll tolerate it to keep my job. Anything to be kept out of that cesspool.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Melissa

After having my fill of the shopping therapy that Friday evening, driving home to spend an uneventful weekend by myself — the first uneventful weekend in five years since Dennis and I are usually connecting via video chat and spending some “intimate” time together — I return to work. I return to business as usual that Monday.

It’s now Wednesday, and for three days in a row now, I’ve seen Tommy rush out for lunch, only to come back ten or fifteen minutes later, with various brown or plastic bags full of take-out food. One day it’s from a fried chicken place; another day, it’s from a sushi place, and today it’s from a Vietnamese noodle soup place.

And, like all the other days, it’s a small bag of food. Only really enough for one person. Momentarily, I feel like flagging him down, asking him what he’s in such a hurry for. Why he can’t even give himself a full half-hour to eat, but I think better of it. He’s not even looking my way, as he had for the last few days, and he looks more disheveled than usual. Frumpier than usual, too, which I don’t get a good feeling about.

Neither does Isabella because she says to me in between bites of her chef salad (we both decided to eat at our desks today) as Tommy disappears back up the elevator, “Poor kid. I know all the bosses around here work their assistants hard, but I’ve heard Ms. Vanacore takes that to a whole other level. A whole other understanding of hard.”

This starts a knot in my stomach. A knot that travels up to my neck and down my spine.

“What you mean?” I almost don’t want to know, but it’s better than catching Dennis’s eyes in the portrait I still have on my desk of him. Even though we’ve been “broken up” since before this last weekend, and I haven’t bothered to bring it up to Isabella, I can’t bring myself to do anything with this photo, his picture. It feels too final, and I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of final. Not yet.

“Heard she’s a bit of a slave driver,” she says. “Heard it goes beyond just asking for a lot out of her employees, to some of those requests being beyond what most people consider fair or acceptable.” She meets my eyes over another bite of lettuce, egg, and ham, or turkey. “Also heard from some folks that this played into her reputation at other law firms.” This causes my stomach to turn, twist, and tighten even more.

From somewhere in my heart, mind, and soul, I suddenly get the image I saw of Ms. Vanacore last Friday, as I was hurrying from the cafeteria to talk with Dennis. The meanness, possessiveness she had about her. The dismissiveness she had toward me, and the way I can only imagine she was with Tommy when she saw him in there, eating lunch. My heart, mind, and soul whispers one fatal word to me about her. Predator.