Anh Stays for the Boss

The last of the crew had taken the lights down the service elevator. The marketing floor of the Hanoi office was quiet enough that I could hear the winter wind against the glass. I was forty-one, the director who had signed her contract, and Anh Tran was twenty-three, still in the cream wool coat she had worn between shots. She stood at the long window while the city went dark, and I asked her to stay for one more look now that everyone else had gone. She did not invent an excuse. The campaign would carry her face through the winter, which meant that whatever we did in this room would sit beside how the company saw her. I knew that, and I think she knew it too.

I walked her along the aisle of dark monitors and told her she had held the room better than the brief. Someone had left a tray of cold tea on the reception desk. She listened with her chin slightly down, as if praise had arrived faster than she could decide whether it belonged to her.

“You can leave,” I said. “I asked you to stay because I wanted to look at you without a dozen people waiting on the next frame.”

She kept beside me, her steps matching mine on the carpet. “The floor feels different when it is only us.” She did not finish what that difference was, and then a small tease crossed her mouth as if the first half had been a joke about the heating. I set my hand at the small of her back and she leaned into the contact instead of away from it. We stopped at my office door. I told her she was the reason the work was good, not the copy and not the lighting. She looked at my mouth. She walked in ahead of me and set her coat on the chair as if she had already chosen.

I closed the door and turned the blinds on the strip of corridor glass. When I came back to her she was close enough that I could smell the cold still in her hair. I put my hands on her waist over the knit dress and she lifted her face. The kiss was not a mistake and it was not rushed. She opened her mouth under mine and made a sound I felt more than heard. I lifted her onto the edge of my desk and papers slid. She let her knees part so I could stand between them, and her boots hooked at the back of my thighs. I told her she was beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with the stills. Then I put my mouth on her throat while my hands found the hem of her dress and pushed it up her legs.

I sat in my own chair and drew it forward until her knees framed my shoulders. She watched me with her lips parted, shy and willing at once, her fingers white on the edge of the wood. I hooked her underwear aside rather than taking it off, because I wanted her to feel kept inside her clothes, and I put my mouth on her cunt and found her already wet. She tasted clean and a little salt. I licked her slowly at first, the flat of my tongue along the heat of her, and then I sealed my mouth over her clit and sucked until her hips tried to lift off the desk. I held her there with both hands. I told her, speaking into her, that she was a good girl for staying.

The words went into her skin. She covered her mouth with the back of her wrist and I still heard her. I worked two fingers into her while I licked, curling them against the place that made her breath break, and she clenched around them in a rhythm that had nothing to do with cameras. I praised her for how wet she was and for how she opened for me. I praised the way she stayed on the desk when she could have put her feet down and left. Her thighs began to shake against my ears. I did not stop. She came with a sound she tried to swallow, sweet and startled, and I kept my mouth on her until she tugged my hair and laughed into the quiet office, breathless, her other hand still covering her mouth as if the building might hear.

I kissed the inside of her knee and looked up. Her eyes were darker than they had been by the window. She was still on my desk because she wanted to be, and I wanted her to know I had seen that.

She slid down before I asked her to, her dress bunched at her hips, and she went to her knees on the carpet under the overhang of the desk as if she had thought about the shape of the room. I stayed in the chair. She opened my trousers with careful hands and drew my cock out, and she looked at it the way she had looked at my mouth in the doorway, deciding. Then she licked the head and took me in, warm and wet, and I put my hand in her hair without pushing. She sucked me slowly at first, learning the weight of me, and then she took more, her tongue working along the underside while her hand wrapped what she could not fit.

“That is it,” I said. “You look so pretty like this. You stayed, and now you are under my desk with my cock in your mouth, and you are doing it so well.”

She made a small sound around me that I felt in my spine. Her eyes flicked up, shy and pleased together, and she sucked harder, spit shining at the corner of her mouth. I told her she was a good girl again, quieter this time, and her throat worked as she tried to take me deeper. The winter heating hummed above us. My desk hid her from the glass even with the blinds drawn, and the secrecy of it made her bolder. She bobbed on me until I had to breathe through my teeth. When I eased her off she was flushed, lips wet, and she stayed on her knees a moment longer as if she were waiting to be told she could stand.

I lifted her. I kissed her mouth and tasted myself there, and she let me.

I turned her to the desk and bent her over the wood she had just sat on. I rolled the condom on with one hand while the other kept her dress at her waist. She reached back and found my hip, guiding me, and I pushed into her cunt in one slow stroke that made her drop her forehead to her folded arms. She was tight and soaked and she took all of me. I stayed still until she pushed back onto me herself. Then I fucked her in long strokes, the desk inching, a pen rolling off and hitting the carpet without either of us caring.

“You feel perfect,” I told her. “This is why I asked you to stay. Not the campaign. You. Your cunt is gripping me like you do not want me to leave it.”

She moaned into her arm and then turned her face so I could hear her. I reached around and found her clit with two fingers and rubbed her in time with my hips. She was loud for a moment and then she bit the inside of her wrist, that sweetness fighting the filth, and I loved both. I told her how good she was being, how well she took it, how her ass looked with her dress rucked up and my hands on her. The age of me behind the age of her was in every stroke, and she kept pushing back for more of it. When I pulled out she made a noise of protest that she tried to turn into a laugh. I turned her, sat her on the desk again, and entered her from the front so I could see her face. Her boots locked at my back. I fucked her like that until her mouth fell open and stayed that way, and I kissed her while I did it, almost tender, almost a date, even as I drove into her cunt hard enough to make the desk knock the wall.

I took her to the sofa against the far wall because I wanted her in my lap and I wanted time. I sat and she climbed on, her knees in the cushions, and she reached down and put my cock inside herself with a focus that made my throat tight. She sank onto me until she was seated fully, and she rested her hands on my shoulders as if we were dancing somewhere decent. Then she began to ride me, slow at first, her tits moving under the knit of the dress. I pulled the neckline down and got my mouth on one nipple, then the other, and I told her they were beautiful, that her tits filled my hands the way I had wanted them to all afternoon while I had to watch her work.

“Your cunt is working my cock so well,” I said against her chest. “Look at you. If this floor could see you they would know what a good girl you are. They would be lucky to see how you take me, how wet you are, how you stay on it and use it.”

She rode me harder when I said it, her breath coming in little broken sounds. Then she did that thing she does when a sentence is too much. She restated me more gently, as if I had only been talking about the ads.

“You mean the campaign held,” she said, almost smiling, waiting to see if I would let the softer version stand. “That I did the job well.”

I held her hips still so she had to feel me all the way inside her. I looked at her until she could not pretend the difference had gone unnoticed.

“No,” I said. “I mean you. Not the work. You. You are a good girl, Anh. I mean your mouth and your cunt and the way you stayed when I asked. I mean you on my cock right now, being this good for me.”

She believed me for the length of her orgasm. I felt it start in the shake of her thighs and then she clenched down so hard I had to grip the sofa. She came on me with her forehead against mine, her eyes wet, her mouth open on a sound she did not try to hide. I kept saying it while she shook, that I meant her, that she was good, that she had been good the whole evening, and she rode me through it in small helpless movements until she had to stop and hold on.

I let her rest against my chest until her breathing evened. Then I held her hips and fucked up into her from below, still wearing the condom, still inside the heat of her. She kissed my jaw and let me use her that last stretch, soft and open, and I told her I was going to come. She nodded as if we had agreed on something kind. I came hard, buried in her, my mouth on her shoulder, and I held her through it the way I would have held her if we had been anywhere else, if the night had been a date with a dinner attached instead of an office and a job I could end.

We stayed like that while the heating clicked and the city kept being winter beyond the blinds. I rubbed her back over the bunched dress. She tucked her face against my throat. For a little while neither of us pretended this was still about a look at the campaign. I kissed her hair. She let me. When I finally eased out of her I dealt with the condom and helped her stand, and I smoothed her dress down her thighs as if I had the right to put her back together. She found her underwear on the carpet and stepped into it with a shy little laugh, and I buttoned myself and sat on the sofa again so she could sit beside me instead of across a desk. I kept my arm along the cushions behind her. She leaned into it. We talked about nothing that would look like a meeting. I asked if she was cold and she said the room was warm now. I believed she meant more than the heating, and I did not make her explain.

I walked her out through the empty floor the way I had walked her in, my hand not quite at her back. In the lift she put her coat on and checked her mouth in the dark glass, and she looked like a woman leaving work, which was the point and also the wound. At the ground floor we did not kiss. She had already given me more than a model owed a director, and I would not take a public piece of her on top of that.

“Thank you for staying,” I said.

She smiled, small and complicated. “You said I was good.” She treated it like a fact about me, about the kind of man who talks that way, and then she almost asked for the rest of it, the part that would not expire when the campaign did. She did not finish the ask. I heard it anyway.

We left separately. I watched her cross the wet pavement toward the motorbikes and the winter dark, her cream coat pale under the streetlights, and I understood what the evening had cost her. Praise during sex was not only a studio trick anymore. She wanted a man who would keep her and tell her she was good without a job attached to the sentence. She did not have one. In the taxi I thought of her half-finished wish and of the suitable man her own age who, she had mentioned in the lift as if it were weather, had already asked her to marry him. I could see her saying yes later, hoping a marriage could hold the praise I had put in her while she came on my cock, hoping a man who could not end her contract would still finish the sentence I had started.