ROMANCE: PARANORMAL ROMANCE: Coveted by the Werewolves (Paranormal MMF Bisexual Menage Romance) (New Adult Shifter Romance Short Stories) (171 page)

              With that, Olivia left the boys behind. She needed to work things out in her head. This would surely break Sara’s heart. How could she have done such a thing? Maybe this was her punishment for behaving so shamelessly.

             
Olivia avoids Sara for the next few days, unable to face her friend while she is riddled with guilt, but that morning she receives a text from her, asking to meet up for lunch. She wonders if she knows, if Wayne has already spilt the beans? She has no idea how she’s going to explain herself, but she knows that she must try, even if that means the end of their friendship, she can't live a lie with her best friend. 

              She sees Sara waving from an outside table, and her stomach does a flip. It’s a beautiful day, the sun is shining down with its rays heating her skin, but inside she feels cold.
Oh well, here goes
, she says to herself, forcing a smile on her face as she approaches Sara.

              “Well, don’t you look the misery?” Sara says, watching her arrive. “What’s the matter? Never mind,” she continues before Olivia can even answer. “I have some great news. I got the job!” she says, excitement lighting up her eyes.

              Olivia sits down with a smile. How can she spoil this wonderful day for Sara? Yet she must tell her the truth.

              “Now then, the next bit of news might come as a bit of a shock, but hear me out,” Sara continues.

              The waitress arrives at the table for their order and Sara insists on the biggest chocolate milk shakes they have, she says she’s celebrating. The waitress looks genuinely pleased for her, glad that someone is having a good day.

              Olivia sits and awaits the news, feeling that it’s all going to spill out any minute, and their friendship will be over.

              “Okay, get ready,” Sara says, not looking at all annoyed. “When I went for the interview, I met a guy who was also being interviewed. We both got on really well and one thing led to another and… Livvy, he is drop dead gorgeous and I think I’m in love with him.” Sara’s eyes are alight with excitement, “but, and here’s the best part,” she pauses for breath. “Because we’re both new to the city, we’ve decided to share an apartment, at least then we’ll have one friend each in the big city. What do you think?”

              “Wow, Sara, that’s amazing news. I’m so happy for you. What about Wayne?” she asks, dreading her answer.

              “Oh, I dumped his two timing ass the other day when he came to see me. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I can’t believe I thought I was ever in love with him. After I’d been with this other guy, I was thinking of ending our relationship anyway, but I didn’t tell you because it all happened to quick.”

              “Oh,” Livy responds, unsure what to say. “I thought you’d be together forever. Did he ever tell you who the other woman was?” Olivia dares to ask.

              “Nope, and to be completely honest with you, I don't really care. I think there’s more than one anyway, as he has been acting strange for a while, I had my suspicions and now I know for certain,” Sara’s words were bitter and Olivia thought she was more upset than she was letting on.

              Anyway enough about him. This changes nothing between us. You’ve still gotta come and visit.”

Olivia smiles but says nothing. She sits there and lets Sara do all the chatting because she’s so happy for her friend. No way is she going to spoil Sara’s day with the news that she had betrayed her. But that’s what growing up is about, keeping secrets, looking after yourself. Maybe, one day when when all this has settled down, she might tell Sara about all her guilt at what she did, but for now, Sara deserved to be happy, she’d worked so hard for it. 

THE END

In Bed With My Bosses

              They say that lawyers and polisci majors are a special breed.  There’s a reason so many jokes are made on their behalf, at their expense, whatever other cliché you can think of.  They’re cutthroat, they’re fun-loving, free-wheeling, hard playing.

                    So all in all, a very attractive bunch.

                    I moved to West Philadelphia right after I graduated college in New York.  All right, so the Big Apple is always going to have a piece of my heart, but the jobs and real estate in Philly were much more my speed.  You know what you can get for the price of a flat in West Philly in New York?  Pretty much somebody’s toilet, part-time.  Instead, I graduated Hunter College and took the admin job in Philly’s biggest law firm.  The job came with this fantastic studio in a less-than-reputable part of town.  Sure, my mom likes to call and worry, but what are you going to do?  It goes hand in hand with coming from a large Greek family.  So I answer the phone calls, shush my mom, and don’t tell her about the sounds of gunfire two blocks away.  I just lock my doors and don’t open them until the Seamless delivery guy shows me his ID.

                    You can’t be too careful.

                    It’s all worth it, though.  My apartment has windows from my midsection to the ceiling, three closets, and the cutest little kitchen in the world.  And although there are cicadas that hang above my bed at three in the morning, I don’t miss the rats and roaches of New York City.  What I do miss, though, is greasy Chinese food at all hours of the night.  Being so close to a train that you can hear it pass by your window.  The loud chatter of local immigrants whenever you wandered over into Crown Heights or Chinatown.  Philly’s clean, it’s quiet, and these things pull me in, but sometimes, just sometimes, I miss my city, filthy and gritty.

                    I still get e-mails from my kids.  Calm your tits, I’m only twenty-two, they’re not the fruit of MY looms.  In the middle of writing my econ papers, dodging my mother’s spanakopita, and working for Mr. Prinkus, this Upper East Side lawyer who hired me as his paralegal throughout my college career, I tutored other college kids for their LSATs.  I had passed mine a year before I was set to graduate, unheard of in the city university circles, and I was regarded amongst them as something of a rock star.  Granted, they were mostly anal college freshmen and sophomores’ intent on getting a head start on one of the most important exams of their lives, but it still gave me a rush.

                    It was too much in some sense, I suppose.  The decision to take a year off before law school was not one that came easily to me.  I needed a break from having a million different activities to complete and chose to focus on one.  Administrative duties.  After my work with Mr. Prinkus and my extensive polisci knowledge, it seemed like the easiest decision to make.  Plus, it would give me some time to apply to law schools at my leisure.  The fact that the job offer came from such a prestigious law firm soothed my vanity immensely; I was sure that I would be learning from some of the best damn lawyers and be their right hand.

                    They do always say to be careful what you wish for.

                    I remember during my Feminists in Law class, I found myself wishing that my professor would notice me.  He was five foot eight, a short, compact, swarthy man bristling with energy, and a raging—in all senses of the word—feminist.  The fact that he was married only spurred the fantasies on.  I could imagine his wife, languid and sexless, making furious love with him in the dark, and pictured myself in her place, being fucked under the rapid pumping of his hips, his breath getting so erratic that I would lay under him, wondering if this was a measure of his excitement or if he was actually going to have a heart attack above me.  Either one would have pleased me.

                    I was young then, eager to impress, and so I answered all of his questions in class with the alacrity of youngsters who cannot contain themselves.  He noticed me, all right.  The night I asked him if we could talk after class and discuss my latest paper, he ate me out right on the beige metal desk from which he taught.  It sends an interesting kind of message, that, or it would have if he hadn’t forced me down roughly on my knees above five minutes after that and made me suck him dry.  I asked him how his wife would feel if she knew about what had just happened.  I wanted to know because I was also young enough to want to indulge my morbid curiosity.  He said that he didn’t care what she would think, then whispered in my ear that the whole time he was licking my open slit, he had been picturing what it would be like if she walked in and caught him doing to me what he always refused to do to her.  He was only twenty-six years old.

                    I got what I wanted then, and I got what I wanted now.  But now, at this job, much like being under my professor in college, it was not what I had been expecting.  I saw the powerful lawyers, day in and day out, but none of them ever asked me to assist on a case, or even take down notes for them while they listened to their clients.  I have been here for six weeks, and so far, the most I’ve seen outside of the front desk and a couple of offices has been the inside of a Starbucks, from which they direct me to order their coffees.  Strong, unsweetened, black.

                    Because anything less would be the mark of a pussy, and no lawyer on the planet would ever want to be that.

                    I schedule cases, meetings, interviews, and vacations.  It’s like living inside of that O. Henry story where the boss is so caught up in his work that he forgets marrying his secretary.  I book tickets for Aruba, Washington, and New York.

                    And not a single ticket is ever for me.

*                   *                   *

                    The day begins early, at least for me.  I’m there at half past seven, organizing the memos and making sure my boss’s desk is appropriately organized.  I check in on what meetings he’s got scheduled for the day and pull out the appropriate files; if necessary, I call other admins to make sure they send out what we need.  My boss only comes in at nine, swinging a sleek leather briefcase and sucking down his black morning beverage.

                    This morning, I see that we’ve got the bulk of our time before lunch dedicated to a custody case.  Like I always do, I sneak a look at the case file and something inside me swells with sympathy and excitement.  I can tell it’s going to be a case of who is beating up on this child more, the mom or the dad; there’s even a photo of the kid, a little black girl with those corkscrew braids all over her head and these big, sad eyes.  But the part that gets me going is that it’s going to be a close call; neither parent seems more fit to raise her than the other, and yet, like most difficult divorce cases, it’s become a battle over possessions rather than a clean separation.

                    I like messes.

                    A heavy-duty, doubly-reinforced paper cup slaps with a resounding smack on top of the counter that is above my head.  Caught in the act, heart pounding, I look up and find my boss, Mike Hannigan, staring at me with piercing blue eyes.  He’s got over twenty years of legal experience underneath his belt; what that means is that he’s also got enough life experience to climb psychologically underneath people’s skin and make them sweat with guilt even if they’ve got nothing to be guilty about.  Technically, it’s not against the rules for me to be looking at our case files, but I can tell that today, Hannigan has his game face on and even a small slip like this one isn’t going to pass his notice.  Even if I wasn’t easily intimidated, and I’m not, he cuts an imposing figure.  A cool six feet tall with professionally cropped, thick brown hair and a Hugo Boss suit that outlines his still-lean figure, Hannigan looks good for his age, which I would pin to about his mid to late forties.  He looks a lot like Paul Rudd, which I find strange to be thinking about since he’s pinning me with such a piercing glance.

                    I close the file hastily and gather my little electronic notebook underneath it.  Mike turns on his heel and enters the office behind the front desk, leaving the door open so I can enter.  That’s his signal for me to come in to type up a memo.

                    “Ten minutes,” he calls out through the open door.

                    The office is cool, ventilated, and beautiful.  The mahogany wood of the walls and desk is polished within an inch of its life, and he’s got the same windows in it that I have in my studio apartment.  There’s a little chair by the side of that desk for me to sit in as I type up whatever memo he’s planning to dictate, and that is where I position myself now.

                    I was never a particularly posh little princess, but I got used to dressing professionally in Mr. Prinkus’s office in New York.  That being said, there’s a benefit to being both professional and sexy, and when I finally moved out of my strict household, I began purchasing clothes that work to my advantage in both.  A severe black pencil skirt can hug my hips and rear just right, and an expertly tailored suit jacket can set off my waist and bust to advantage.  Sometimes, I get a thrill just looking at myself in the mirror.  I am the image of a professional career woman, except sometimes, I’ve got no panties on at all.  There have been times when I’ve gotten home from work and imagined a man slipping my shirt out from its tucked-in position and sliding his hands up my skin underneath it, releasing my hair from its simple twist and kissing my neck.

                    It works for me.