Two Little Secrets From My Boss

Chapter 83

Lora came to me—repeatedly, with a persistence that transformed proximity into pressure.

Within days of the office, she appeared in my building's lobby with a folder of Gerald's tax documents requiring "urgent review." Then, she materialized at a client lunch. Later, she was waiting in the parking garage at the hour I left, leaning against a concrete pillar with an expression that dared me to pretend she wasn't there.

"We need to talk about what’s going on," she said in the garage, her voice echoing off the low ceiling.

"Nothing that needs discussing. It was a mistake, Lora. We both know that."

She stepped closer, close enough that I could smell her perfume—that clean, sharp scent that had haunted me since the gala. "I felt you in that office, Xander. That wasn't a mistake. That was the most honest thing either of us has done in years."

I got in my car and drove away. But—

I didn't tell her to stop coming.

That was the cruelty of it. I hadn't promised Lora anything, but I also hadn't stopped taking what she offered. Every time she appeared, I didn't turn her away—my silence became its own kind of language. She heard commitment in the spaces where I should have spoken rejection.

She started leaving notes in my desk drawer. Handwritten on cream-colored stationery: Thinking of you. Can't focus today. She wrote about "our future" as though I'd promised one—trips, a life after Gerald, after obstacles she saw as temporary.

Two weeks after the office, she invited me to dinner. A restaurant in Midtown, private booth, under the pretense of reviewing Gerald's quarterly portfolio. I knew it wasn't about business. I knew exactly what it was.

I agreed anyway, because whatever Lora stirred in me was different from Bianca—darker, more consuming, stripped of performance. With Lora, I didn't have to be anyone's success story. I could simply be the worst version of myself and she'd still reach for me across a table.

The restaurant was dimly lit, candles flickering between us, other diners' murmur creating a curtain of white noise that made our booth feel private as a confessional. We ordered wine and talked about capital allocation with the practiced fluency of two people who knew the conversation was a costume.

Halfway through the main course, Lora's hand found my thigh under the table. She didn't look at me when she did it—kept her eyes on her wine glass, her expression composed, her voice steady as she discussed offshore holdings. Her fingers moved higher, slow and deliberate, and the sexual tension became a physical weight pressing against my chest, my throat, my ability to form sentences.

"Stop," I managed, though my hand had already covered hers, and I wasn't pushing it away.

"Should I?" Her fingers didn't pause. "Say it again, Xander, and mean it this time. I'll know the difference."

I didn't do that. I paid the bill while she disappeared toward the back of the restaurant, and I followed ninety seconds later like a man walking toward a fire he'd set.

The bathroom was single-occupancy—marble and brass, locked from the inside. She was already waiting, and she pulled me in by my shirt before the door had fully closed.

I pinned her against the vanity counter. Her hands clawed at my belt while I pushed her skirt up around her waist. I lifted her onto the marble surface, cold beneath her thighs, and she locked her ankles behind me.

When I drove into her she arched back against the mirror hard enough to rattle the fixtures, and I gripped her hips with both hands and thrust with a rhythm that was urgent and punishing and entirely devoid of anything resembling love.

It was power and consumption—two people devouring each other to avoid examining what was hollow inside themselves. When it was over we stood panting in that bathroom with the reality of what we kept doing settling over us like something we'd never wash off.

Lora sat on the counter in front of me, blouse unbuttoned, skirt hiked above her hips, legs wrapped loosely around me. She wasn't performing anymore—the seduction had dropped away, and what remained was raw, desperate, painfully honest.

"Leave her," she said. Her voice was quiet but carried the weight of everything she'd been building toward for two weeks. “Bianca… You don’t love her! I see it in your eyes when you look at her. Nothing like when you are with me.

"Choose me, Xander. We can build something real—something that isn't a lie wrapped around another lie. I'll leave Gerald. We start over, clean, honest, together."

"That's not possible, Lora." I stepped back, creating distance between our bodies that felt like a surgical separation. "I'm in love with Bianca. What's been happening between us is a complication I never should have allowed, and it ends tonight."

Her voice cracked on the word. "You've been inside me twice in two weeks and you're calling it a complication?"

"You're Gerald's wife. The partnership can't survive the fallout of what we've been doing. My company, my reputation—it all collapses if this continues. We have to stop, immediately."

"You're choosing her." The disbelief in her voice curdled into something darker. "After everything you felt in this room, what you felt in your office—you're choosing a woman who's playing you for a fool, and you're throwing me away like I'm nothing."

"You're not, but this was never going to become what you wanted it to become. I'm sorry, but the answer is no. It's finished."

"You don't get to decide that alone!" Her composure shattered. Tears spilled down her cheeks. "I left my life open for you, Xander! I rearranged everything because you made me believe I was worth more than what Gerald gave me. And now you're standing there telling me it was nothing?"

"You need to calm down, Lora. You're being hysterical, and this isn't productive for either of us." The words came out cruel, edged with a brutality I deployed because her obsession terrified me. The depth of it, the speed at which it had consumed her. I thought only cruelty would penetrate the fixation.

"What happened between us was physical, nothing more. You've constructed a fantasy on a foundation I never agreed to build!"

She went completely still. The hysteria evaporated as though someone had thrown a switch inside her, shutting down everything human and leaving behind only machinery—cold, precise, operational.

She slid off the counter, pulled her skirt down, and buttoned her blouse with steady fingers, each movement mechanical, emptied of emotion.

She walked to the door and paused with her hand on the lock. She didn't turn fully—just angled her face so I could see her profile, tear tracks still glistening on her cheek, jaw set like carved stone.

"You've just taught me exactly what I'm worth, Alexander."

She unlocked the door and walked out. Her footsteps faded down the corridor, measured and unhurried, the sound of a woman who had made a decision she would never reverse.

I stood alone in that marble bathroom, staring at my reflection in the mirror where her body had been pressed, and I understood: whatever Lora Morrison chose to do with the lesson I'd taught her, I would have earned every consequence.