If I’m Honest
by Corrupting Power
Chapter 5 — Ashley (But Not Christina)
The next day, I clearly needed to get into the office. I could probably dip and dodge a little bit longer, but frankly, I’d never liked ducking out on my responsibilities. I’d set up the division myself, and while it wasn’t the kind of thing that most people would’ve considered exciting, it was honest work and it kept a roof over my head.
Everyone thinks that setting up a call center is easy. They figure, how hard can it be, getting a handful of phone banks lined up, hiring a handful of trained simpletons to answer them and setting up a few phone lines to handle the calls. How hard can it be, they ask themselves?
Then they try.
Some of them even last a couple of weeks before it all falls apart, but eventually, pretty much all of them fall apart. And never in the same way, but always some degree of spectacular failure. Let me tell you some of the things I’ve seen. Overtaxed phone lines. Poorly written scripts. Bad databases. Bad interfaces. Untrustworthy hires. Awful structure. Horrible location. Insufficient power. Hell, I’ve even seen call centers shut down for things like asbestos and termites.
There’s a million ways to fuck up these kinds of things. You might think I’ve listed them all, but I’m barely even getting started. There are a lot of reasons we set up a company to do this kind of thing, but the fact that we knew how to do it was the biggest. We’d learned all our lessons the hard way, and when we’d finally set up our first call center, back at Oracle, we’d gained so much institutional knowledge, that we knew we could monetize the shit out of it for other people.
And, fuck it, we were bored.
So me and my partner John left to join Alexandria Indexes. At the time, they were mostly a theoretical company. The foundation was there, but they didn’t have any real talent. The idea behind the company was that they would set up individual divisions for teams of people who had unique skills, things that were only available to a very small subset of people. They needed us, well, people like us, people who were precise specialists at what we do.
AI wasn’t looking for us, specifically. They didn’t know what they were looking for, if I’m honest. Heh. They had the beginnings of a business model, and had done some of the ground work, but they hadn’t scored any actual talent. They figured once they had their first, they’d be up and running, off to the races. And, as it turned out, AI’s CEO, Lawrence Ma, was an old college buddy of my partner John. So John called them, offering us up as their first client.
I agreed to meet with them, and it was clear to me from our first meeting, there were two very important details I took away. Number one, Larry Ma was very very business savvy. If we entered into business with him, he was going to take us a long, long way. Number two, and perhaps more importantly, Larry Ma was a fucking shark who didn’t hold permanent allegiances to anyone. If we ever stopped being valuable to him, he was going to stab us in the back so fast, we wouldn’t even be a single step past him before the knife was hilt deep between our shoulder blades. So we were going to have to always be somewhat useful to the company. No resting on our laurels.
You’re probably asking, what happened to John? Why isn’t he managing the day-to-day of call centers with me? As it turned out, John was pretty crap at remembering what we learned over at Oracle, but he was good at managing people, so he got moved from my division to the center stalk of AI, which was probably for the best. If he was trying to set up call centers, he’d only be fucking things up and I’d be doing work twice.
Since we’d joined AI, John had gotten good at filling out the company. He talked Larry into acquiring a team of people who were experts at setting up a customer service ticketing system, so that a client would have an entire history of work. After that, they hired a team of IT professionals who would set up an internal/external interface team at a company. And they kept on going, while I stayed in my little pond and tended to my portion of the business.
It wasn’t like John and I were good friends. Not really when we were at Oracle, and we hadn’t gotten to be any better friends since we’d moved over to Alexandria Indexes. If anything, the relationship had gotten a bit worse.
I mean, John had hooked up with my ex girlfriend.
Except she wasn’t my ex when she hooked up with him.
Yeah, that sort of shit stings bad, and I don’t forgive lightly.
But John was on the other side of the company, so I don’t have to think about it often.
Normally.
Today didn’t look like it was going to have anything to do with normal.
It all seemed okay at first. I walked into the office and Jen, one of my two lieutenants, met me near the main door. “Heya boss, you have fun in London?” she said to me, as we walked to the elevator. “Party like a rock star so hard you needed an extra two days to recover?”
Jen’s the kind of woman you want in your corner for a fight, but she’s not exactly subtle. I didn’t pick her because I needed subtle. I picked her because I needed someone who was a scrapper, to handle the more difficult clients
“I’ve been having a whirlwind chaos time since I came back, Jen,” I sighed as I pushed the button for our floor. “But even if I told you what the hell’s been going on, I have zero faith that you would believe me. Shit, I wouldn’t believe me, the sort of crazy story I’ve been living.”
“Yeah, well, as much fun as hearing about all this sounds,” Jen said as the door opened on our floor, “Larry’s looking for you, and you know it’s never a good idea to keep him waiting.”
“For me? What the hell does Larry want to talk to me for?” We walked to our section and I waved my badge in front of the reader, it giving an audible beep as the door unlocked.
“Dunno. He wandered by my office this morning and was asking if you were due in today. I told him you were, but that you might be in a little late, and reminded him that you’ve never been a morning person, so no matter how many times he asks you to come in early, your agreement when you joined AI was that you kept your own hours,” she said with a shrug as we walked into our section. It wasn’t much, mostly just a corner of the building with me in a corner office and “You should probably just go by his office and see what’s what.”
“You heard anything from Zack?”
She laughed heartily. “He’s bored as fuck in Omaha.” She wandered into the office to the left of mine as I headed into my corner office. “Don’t forget! Go see Larry!” she shouted at me, as she closed her door.
I could go immediately and see Larry, but the last thing I want is him getting comfortable knowing I’m at his beck and call. Let him wait for a bit. If it was really that important, he would’ve sent an email instead of “bumping into” a member of my team and telling them he wanted to see me. To my mind, it felt like another one of his patented walk’n’talks, where he’d take thirty minutes to get to the point of something he could’ve said to you in three.
My office isn’t all that ornately decorated, but I do have a handful of eccentricities scattered around it. The one that most people don’t see when they enter, but always see when they leave, is that fact that I’ve hung a literal broadsword over the doorway, a veritable Sword of Damocles.
There is also, of course, some artwork on the walls, chess themed, gifts from friends and exes over the years. In particular, there’s one piece I love with highly stylized Japanese kanji that reads “every pawn has the potential to be a king” on it, a man on a hill, overlooking a wide valley covered in a low cloud level that obscures the actual treetops. A gift from my sister, the artist, for my twenty-first birthday.
I sit down at my desk and check through my emails quickly, looking for anything that’s top priority, and there’s only one thing, a follow up email from the team in Ireland who’d made a few mistakes with the phone number database and didn’t know how to unfuck the mistake they’d made to the formatting. But, like I said, that’s what I’m here for. I’ve seen pretty much every possible fuck up a call center could make, and I knew what they’d done within half a page of their email. I also had an email from an earlier client that I could use and modify with just a few things and send off their way, so I got that bit of business done first.
Just as I was finishing getting the email done, my phone gave a happy little chirp, a sound that I’d gotten a message in the Signal messenger app. I’d heard of the app before a week ago, but Colleen had made me install it so she could send me dirty pictures of herself securely, and in an untraceable way. This one, when I opened it, was one of her tits pressed up against glass. No face, of course, but clearly done with a selfie stick.
She’d sent me two to three such pictures a day, and I’d sent a few back in return, although I was still far more self conscious about it that she was. I mean, she had a knockout body and I’m, well, me. But it wasn’t just sexting—we’d done some actual communication as well, late night texts from her about how she was feeling insecure about the new project, or how she wasn’t sure people were taking her seriously as an actress, all of which I was happy to respond to, to try and put her somewhat more at ease. As confident and cocky as she’d seemed when I first met her, she was vulnerable and human just like the rest of us.
I’d send her a dirty picture back sometime later in the day, when I could be somewhere a little more private. I mean, I could’ve just locked the door to my office and taken one here, but that was the sort of thing I wanted to work up to.
After sending her back a short encouraging message, I decided it was probably time to go see what the fuck Larry wanted.
Larry’s office was on the floor above mine, at the top of the five story building. AI had been nothing more than a tiny little rented office above a coffeehouse when we’d started, but in the years since then, we’d moved into this snazzy little building of our own. The top floor was executive management, and while I was invited to have an office up here a couple of times, I’d always declined.
John had an office up here, naturally. Not that he and I spoke much these days. He’s best buds with Josef, the asshole VP who had an affair with my girlfriend. That sort of put a crimp on me wanted to talk with him.
Outside of Larry’s office sat his secretary, sorry, his executive assistant, Ashley. Ashley’s in her early thirties and always dressed somewhere between high class businesswear and extremely high end dominatrix, with maybe a bit of stern schoolteacher or librarian mixed in. Her hair, mostly blonde with a few aqua blue streaks in it, was done up like it usually was, in a bun on her head with chopsticks sticking out of it. She always has her glasses on, those wooden frames that circle her eyes. She’s fit, like, gym bunny fit. Today she’s got on a black pencil skirt with gray stockings, an almost sheer white silk top over a black lacy bra, a black blazer resting over her chair back, a dark red scarf doubling as a belt. Around her neck, she had on a black velvet choker, with a little tiny bell hanging from it. Her skin was porcelain white, a stark contrast to that deep, almost blood red shade of lipstick she had on, a pencil between her lips that she was desperately trying not to gnaw on.
“Oh hey Deke,” she said to me, looking up with a sultry smile. “Larry’s on a phone call for another five or ten minutes. Can I get you anything? Coffee? OJ? I could have one of those great breakfast burritos sent up from the cafeteria if you want.”
“No thanks, Ashley, I’m good,” I said, moving to take a seat in one of the waiting chairs. “You have any idea what Larry wanted to see me about? He didn’t send me an email, just told Jen to have me wander up here when I had a chance.”
“Well, that’s never a great sign,” she said with a laugh, “but it couldn’t be anything too serious, because he hasn’t had human resources up here this morning.”
“So I’m not getting fired,” I said, nodding. “That’s a start, I suppose.”
After a minute or two of silence, Ashley sort of looked over at me with a wolfish smile, licking her lips a little bit. “You still single, Deke?”
“I’m dating a bit here and there, but nothing serious as of yet.”
She nodded, as if the answer delighted her. “Maybe we can go get lunch after your meeting.”
“Why Ashley, are you asking me out on a date?”
“Dating isn’t really what I had in mind, Derrick,” she purred.
At that moment, Larry stepped out of his office, seeing me sitting there. Larry’s of Korean descent but feels Silicon Valley all the way, by way of San Diego. You get the impression he’s one step removed from a surfer frat boy. Hell, maybe he’s a shark who ate a surfer frat boy. He’s dressed in a black silk shirt and black silk pants that probably cost more than my car. “Oh hey man! C’mon in!” He turned and walked back into his office, leaving the door open. “Ashley, close the door after him, wouldja dear? Thanks, doll.”
Ashley rolled her eyes for my benefit, but not so that Larry could see, as I got up and headed into the office.
If my office was a demonstration of subtlety, Larry’s was one of excess. It was ten times the size of mine, with its own private bathroom and bedroom off to one side, behind one of the doors. I’d heard rumor there was a kitchen back there as well, so his office basically doubled as an apartment for when he didn’t feel like going home to his McMansion and his McWife. Hell, he even had a motorcycle in the room up here. Just to show off, or sit on and go ‘vroom vroom,’ I guess.
There’s plenty of art on the walls, but don’t ask Larry about any of it, because the only thing he’ll probably able to tell you about any of it is the price. It drives me nuts. There’s an actual Warhol hanging on one of the walls, and when he asked about it, he referred to it as “the one from the soup guy.” He didn’t know Warhol’s name, he didn’t know the name of the piece. I wanted to punch him in the face, but considering he owns the company, that seemed a poor idea at the time.
It still seems like a poor idea, but I still want to punch him in the face.
“Heya Deke, how was Dumbai?”
“You mean Mumbai?” I said, moving to sit down at the desk, trying not to show how annoyed I was with him not even knowing what I was doing on the day to day. “It was lovely, although I didn’t really have much time to see the city, as I was getting a bunch of work done. The client tried to do it themselves first time out instead of coming straight to us, so the first few days were literally just unfucking what they’d already done to themselves.”
“Why the hell would they try and do things themselves instead of just coming to us?” he sighed, throwing his hands up in the air.
I placed my hand on the edge of his desk. “Let’s cut through the bullshit, Larry. You summoned me to your office for some reason, so can we just get on with it?”
He shifted a little in his seat, his posture tweaking strangely for a moment before he refocused on me. “Sure. Okay. If I’m honest...”
I immediately sat up and got very, very nervous.
“If I’m honest... I’m thinking about cutting your mate John loose from the company,” Larry said. “Now I know you guys came in together, but I want to assure you that you and I, we’re cool, and you’ve been killing it here at AI, so I don’t want you to worry about your place here, because we want you and your team on lock. So I was going to dance around the subject for twenty or thirty minutes while I sussed out how you’d feel if we as a company terminated John, but since you asked, maybe I should be honest and upfront with you about it all. Are you going to be mad if I do?”
“Larry, your memory is utter and total shit, isn’t it?” I laughed.
“Yes? Maybe?” Larry said. “What am I forgetting?”
“So, when you hired me, you remember I was dating a girl named Vanessa?”
“Vaguely?”
“The same Vanessa who John married a couple years back?”
“Oh shit!” Larry laughed. “How long after you broke up did they hook up?”
“Say... negative two months or so?”
“No shit?” Larry snapped his fingers angrily. “That is fucking stone cold, Deke. Why didn’t you come to me and ask me to fire his ass?”
“He’s a VP, and I’m only a section chief, so I figured I’d better just put the company first and go with the flow,” I grumbled. “But if you’re gonna shitcan him, I say go ahead. He’s probably had it coming for a long fucking time now. He’s always been good at business shit, but bad at dealing with people.”
“Yeah, well, he’s not so good at the business shit these days either,” Larry said. “He’s been angling to try and wrestle control of the company from me, and that shit don’t fly. That’s why I’ve enjoyed having you on staff so much. If I’m honest, I’ve always figured at some point that you’d just cash out and walk away from here and start up something new, hopefully not a competitor or anything, but hey, you’ve earned a thousand times the money we’ve invested in you, so I wouldn’t blame you if you did. That’s the normal thing people do in business. They get paid and then they start something new. Your boy John...”
“He’s not my boy...”
“Well, John just likes stealing shit from other people, trying to make them dance for him so he doesn’t have to do all of the hard work that it takes,” Larry said, pouring himself a glass of bourbon, despite it being barely past ten in the morning. “So fuck him! I’m gonna fire his ass today! You wanna be there for it? I wouldn’t blame you if you did. You could be sitting right there and wish him and Veronica...”
“Vanessa...”
“Wish him and Vanessa the best of luck. In their new future. Together. The fuck away from us.”
I laughed and waved a hand in his direction, both passing on the offer and on the fact that he was threatening to pour me a glass of bourbon as well. “I’m good, Larry. There won’t be any trouble from anyone in our division. The people who came in with me and John are far more loyal to me than they are to John, so as long as I’m still here, they’ll keep on punching time cards.”
“My man,” Larry said, downing the entire glass. “And if you decide you want to move on at some point, Deke, that’s total chill. Just come to me, tell me like a man and set me up with a successor to your little empire, and everything will be hunky dory. But don’t try and wrestle my fucking company from my by giving a reacharound to a handful of board members who are only gonna tattle on you.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it, Larry.”
“Killer. I’ll tell Ashley you’re staying with us and she’ll send a little thank you box down for you, and not the other one, which had your severance package in it, if you were gonna stand up for that little shithead.”
“Business is business, Larry.”
“Exactly!” Larry said, clapping his hands. “A’ight, I’m sure you don’t want to waste any more time here yapping with me, so get on out of here. I’m glad you convinced me just to be honest and cut through the bullshit. You’re my guy!”
I wasn’t even sure how to answer that, so I simple nodded and rose up from the chair, heading out of his office. I was just closing the door behind me when Ashley cleared her throat. “So which package am I supposed to give you?”
“The one where I’m staying,” I told her. “The fuck do I care about the rift between him and John? John hasn’t been part of my team for years, and hasn’t been part of my life for longer. I mean, he didn’t invite me to his wedding.”
“Well,” Ashley said, “to be honest, he did steal your girlfriend and marry her.” She picked up one folder from her desk and tossed it straight into the shredder. “So I need to ask you, what color do you like in a vehicle, and do you prefer a car or a motorcycle?”
I stopped and sort of swiveled my head. “Uh, blue, and car not a motorcycle. Is he giving me a car?”
“He said to give you ‘a nice Bulgati’ so I’m assuming he meant either a Bugatti or a Ducati. He’s not quite dense enough to mean bulgogi, which is a kind of beef. We’ll get a nice Bugatti Chiron sent to the office and you can drive it home in a few days.”
“Well, this is not what I expected when I came up here, but I certainly can’t complain.”
“Before you head back downstairs, can I borrow you to help me with this problem? Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get it all sorted out.”
It wasn’t like Ashley to ask for help, so I agreed, and we headed down the hall. There are four offices in the top floor, each with their own bathroom, but there’s also two bathrooms on the floor itself, mostly for visitors or staff members to use while they’re up there in one of the two meeting rooms also on the floor.
We headed into one of the bathrooms and Ashley stepped in after I did, closing and locking the door behind her, before she turned around, leaning her back against the door. “So what I want from you is one proper, brutal fucking.” She started unbuttoning her shirt before sliding it off her shoulders. “I want you to slap my ass. I demand you choke the life out of me.” She slowly tugged up her pencil skirt and she had on a tiny black thong beneath it, which matched the bra, both of which looked expensive. “I don’t want you anywhere near gentle. You can leave marks anywhere except the face, and if you don’t leave some marks, you are not walking out of that fucking door. Am I making myself clear?” She brought her fingertips up and unclasped the front of her bra, letting it fly open, exposing her tits, a silver barbell through each of her nipples.
“Yes ma’am.”
She frowned, annoyance plain on her face. “Don’t be deferential to me. Fucking go head at me.”
Now, I should be abundantly clear—this isn’t my bag. I’ve never been into the idea of inflicting pain on someone. Every guy I’ve known over the years liked being dominant, at least a little, but there’s levels to it, like all things. I’m not the kind of guy for whips and chains. I don’t get into hurting people. That’s not my thing. I understand that there are people who are into that, but for me, I’m going to be worried about being too hard.
There was some part of me that realized I wasn’t going to get out of this the way I normally do, by dialing in the bare minimum when I was uncomfortable. I was going to have to go completely overboard and if I was told to dial it back, then and only then should I try and pull back.
So if that’s the way we’re going to play it, I told myself, better get at it.
I lifted one of my hands up and wrapped it around her neck, my thumb on one side of it, my fingers on the other, and started to squeeze. I felt her tense up, but then saw her tongue slip out to wet her lips, as my other hand reached down and grabbed onto her thong and ripped it right off of her.
The damn thing was already wet the moment my hand reached it.
I brought the thong up, forcing her mouth open with one hand before I stuffed it into her mouth with the other, bunching it up in her mouth before forcing her to close her lips around it as best she could. I could hear her moaning through it, as I pinched one of those silver barbells and rotated it, twisting her nipple a good amount before letting go of it, the flesh twisting back into shape as her knees buckled a little bit.
My hand reached up and pulled out those chopsticks, letting her hand hang loose as I grabbed a fistful of it and wrenched her over to the sink, shoving her face right up against the mirror. “Look at what a filthy fuckrag you are,” I said, forcing her to smear her lipstick all over the shiny surface. “Making a goddamn mess in here.”
She tried to shift her hips a little, so with my other hand I slapped her ass as hard as I could, and heard her moan again, even more wantonly this time, as she shivered. I could see she had a large round jewel between those cheeks, the hilt of a plug obviously, but I decided to leave that right where it was.
“You want me to split open your fuckhole with my dick, don’t you?” She didn’t immediately react, so I spanked her ass again, hard enough to feel the flesh redden. “Don’t you?”
She nodded frantically, wiggling her ass in my direction. I grabbed one of her legs and lifted it up so her ankle was on the countertop, keeping her spread good and wide as I unbuttoned my slacks and unzipped them, reaching in to fish out my cock.
I braced one forearm against the back of her neck as I lined up the head of my dick against her snatch and then punched home, my other hand making sure her leg stayed affixed atop of that sink counter.
I swear I think she came when I thrust in that first time.
What followed was some of the roughest, filthiest, most brutal sex I’ve ever had in my life. I pounded her up against the wall for a bit, with her legs wrapped around my waist while I choked her with both hands. I pushed her onto her knees on the floor for a bit. And at the end, I fucked her bent over with her face in the toilet.
In a move I’ve never done in my life, I pulled out right before I came and made sure to blast that load right into her eyes. I felt awful about it, and she couldn’t have looked happier.
A coupe of minutes later, she was getting herself cleaned up, having taken the scarf from her waist to wrap around her neck, covering up the bruises I’d left there at her insistence. “Not bad, but if I’m honest, you didn’t seem all that into it, and I think you only went about half as far as I wanted you to. Still, good bit of fun.”
I left her cleaning up the bathroom. I’d tried to help but she’d swatted my hand away. She tried to give me the ripped thong as a memento, but I tossed it in the trash can as soon as I was out of the bathroom, not so that she could see it, naturally. I didn’t want to offend her, but that very much was not my scene.
I headed back downstairs, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, eager to just get some work done.
Right outside of my office, I ran into John’s little sister, Christina. She’s 22, bright, bubbly, blonde, cute but in that girl next door kind of way. She was dressed in a red blouse and a long black dress, smiling at me. “Hey, can I, uh, talk to you for a bit, Deke?”
Christina didn’t work in my division, and probably only really knew me through her brother. We’d met a handful of times, but she’d forgotten my name more than once, and I could think of only one reason she’d be here, asking to talk to me.
“Look, Christina, I’m really busy today, so if it’s quick, you can just tell me whatever you wanted to out here, but if not, we’ll have to do this another day, okay?”
“Um, okay,” she said, looking around the room, then leaning in to whisper to me. “I was going to come here to try and fuck you to get back at my brother for being such a dick, but if I’m honest, you’d only be disappointed, because while I often use sex as a weapon, I’m not really very good at it.”
Then she turned and walked away.
God, my life was getting too fucking strange for my own good.