CHAPTER 32 - WORKING
1197 Words
I last three hours into my shift before he invades.
Three hours of steaming milk and wiping counters and pretending my thighs aren’t aching from last night and that the bite on my shoulder isn’t throbbing under my collar every time I reach for a cup on the high shelf. I was actually starting to feel like a functioning member of society when the bell above the door chimes and Knox walks in and sits in his booth and doesn’t order, and I know from the way he’s looking at me that the corner booth isn’t his final destination today.
He waits until 2 PM when the afternoon rush dies and Beth goes on her break and Leah is restocking napkins at the front counter with her earbuds in, and then he stands up and walks past the register and past the espresso machine and straight through the “STAFF ONLY” door like the sign is a suggestion that doesn’t apply to him, which in his mind it probably isn’t because Knox Voss has never encountered a boundary he didn’t consider a personal challenge.
I follow him into the stockroom because not following him would involve explaining to Leah why a six-foot-three man in a leather jacket just disappeared into our supply closet, and explaining that would require vocabulary I don’t currently possess.
He’s leaning against the shelving unit in the back between the boxes of paper cups and the industrial coffee filters, and the fluorescent light in here is unflattering on literally everything except Knox Voss, who looks like he was lit by a cinematographer even under buzzing tube lights in a room that smells like cardboard and ground espresso.
“Knox, I’m working–”
He pulls me forward by my apron strings and spins me around and my back hits the metal shelving and a sleeve of paper cups topples off the shelf above my head and bounces across the floor.
Knox's mouth is on my neck before the cups stop rolling and his hands are already under my skirt and his fingers find me through my underwear and press hard enough that my hips jerk forward and a sound starts building in my throat that I swallow back like poison.
He lifts me up and my legs wrap around his waist and I hear his belt unbuckle behind me right before he pushes my underwear to the side and sinks into me in one stroke that shoves my back against the shelving hard enough to rattle every shelf above us.
A box of stirring sticks falls. A container of lids follows. The stockroom sounds like it’s being disassembled and the espresso machine on the other side of the wall is hissing loud enough to cover most of it but not all of it and I should care about that more than I do.
He f***s me against the shelving with a desperation that feels territorial, his hands gripping the metal bars on either side of my head while his hips drive forward in hard strokes that knock something new off a shelf with every thrust, and the ridiculousness of the situation – the falling cups, the fluorescent lighting, the employee-of-the-month poster on the wall behind his head, the door that anyone could walk in through – would be funny if I wasn’t so overwhelmed by the angle he’s hitting that my eyes are rolling back and my nails are digging divots into the leather of his jacket.
A knock on the stockroom door.
“Ivy? You okay in there? I heard something fall.”
Leah. My coworker. Standing four feet away on the other side of a door that doesn’t have a lock because STOCKROOMS DON’T NEED LOCKS IN NORMAL WORKPLACES, and Knox doesn’t stop. He doesn’t slow down. He doesn’t even change his breathing. He shifts his angle so his thrusts are shorter and quieter and he puts his hand over my mouth and looks at me with those grey eyes that are daring me to handle this, and the dare is so quintessentially Knox that my p***y clenches around him hard enough to make his jaw tighten.
I pull his hand off my mouth and call out, “Yeah, I’m fine! Just knocked over the cup sleeves. Give me a sec!” and my voice comes out NORMAL. Steady mildly annoyed in the way a person would sound if they actually had casually knocked over cup sleeves and weren’t currently being f****d vertical against a shelving unit by their werewolf stepbrother while their coworker stood close enough to touch the door handle.
“Okay, no rush!”
Leah’s footsteps retreat back toward the counter and Knox’s hand comes back over my mouth and his hips snap forward hard enough to slam my back into the shelving one more time and the box of filters on the top shelf finally gives up its fight with gravity and cascades down around us like confetti.
I c*m with my scream trapped behind his palm and coffee filters raining down on both of us and his body pinning mine against the metal frame so hard that I’ll have grid marks on my shoulder blades for the rest of the day.
He finishes inside me thirty seconds later and sets me down on legs that have filed for unemployment, and he picks a coffee filter out of my hair and hands it to me like a receipt and walks out the back door into the alley without a word.
I stand in the wrecked stockroom surrounded by fallen cups and scattered filters and lids rolling in circles on the concrete floor and try to remember how to be a barista.
I come back to the counter four minutes later with my apron straightened and my hair fixed and a flush on my face that I’m blaming on the stockroom heat if anyone asks, and Leah looks at me over the register with an expression that says she is putting two and two together and arriving at exactly four but choosing not to say it out loud, and I appreciate her silence in a way that I hope my face communicates because my mouth is currently occupied with not screaming.
The door opens and Theo walks in. His eyes find me immediately the way they always do, and I watch him take in my flushed face and my re-tied hair and the way I’m leaning against the counter because standing upright is a generous description of what my legs are doing, and then his gaze slides past me to the stockroom door behind the counter, which is still swinging on its hinges because I didn’t close it all the way when I came out.
He looks at the door. He looks at me. He looks at the door again.
He orders his iced Americano and sits at his usual table and opens his laptop and doesn’t say a word, but the way he’s not saying a word is louder than anything he’s ever said – and the clock that started ticking the day Knox stood up in that booth just moved several hours closer to midnight.
- Writer
