Dean doesn’t move away. His body is heat and shadow at my back, his breath grazing the hollow beneath my ear like he’s studying the way I twitch when it touches me.
“Don’t you dare stop,” he whispers, voice threaded with quiet threat. “Hands on the keyboard, baby girl.”
The nickname makes my stomach clench, my thighs squeeze tight under the desk. My fingers stumble, hitting rrttttt across the page.
“Sloppy.” His hand comes down lightly on my shoulder—warm, heavy, claiming. His thumb traces the line of my collarbone, slow and deliberate, until goosebumps chase over my skin. “You’re supposed to be working, not trembling.”
“I—I am working.” My voice breaks on the lie.
“No.” He bends closer, his lips brushing the crown of my head now, words seeping into me like poison. “You’re unravelling.”
The heat of his palm drags over my arm, slow enough that every fine hair stands on end. His fingers ghost down to my wrist, then guide it firmly back to the keys when I falter.
“Type,” he orders, barely above a whisper.
I obey, each keystroke jagged and clumsy, sweat beading at the back of my neck.
He leans lower, his mouth near my jaw, and murmurs, “What will you do when I slip my hand higher, right here—” his palm presses into my thigh beneath the desk, inch by deliberate inch “—and you can’t even spell your own name?”
The keyboard rattles as I slam random letters, heart a drumbeat against my ribs.
“Pathetic,” he taunts, voice molten against my ear. “You’ll never win this game. I can make you fall apart with one finger, and still you’ll type for me.”
His thumb digs into the sensitive inside of my thigh, and the breath leaves me in a shudder.
“Tell me,” he whispers, all predator now, “how many more touches until you give yourself away?”
The screen blinks, a graveyard of ruined sentences, and my body screams knowing that I’m already giving myself away—every second I stay in this chair.
The screen blurs, letters piling into chaos, my breathing too ragged to steady. His hand presses harder into my thigh, and my fingers falter, missing keys, stumbling across the board.
“Wrong,” he murmurs, the single word crawling down my spine.
Before I can recover, his grip clamps over my wrists—rough, sudden, dragging them off the keyboard with a scrape of plastic.The silence that followed swallowed the sound of keys clattering under my palms.
He holds me there, wrists pinned together in his one hand, lifted just above the desk like he’s presenting my failure to the room.
“You couldn’t even last five minutes.” His tone isn’t loud, but it’s brutal, each word slicing clean.
I twist instinctively trying to free myself, but his hold doesn’t budge. If anything, he tightens, thumb pressing into the frantic pulse hammering at the inside of my wrist.
“You think you’re strong, don’t you?” His mouth finds the edge of my ear, his teeth grazing. “But all it takes is this.” He jerks my wrists a little higher, forcing me to arch against the chair. “And you’re finished.”
“Dean—” His name slips out like a curse I shouldn’t have said.
He chuckles low, unholy, right at my neck. “There. Finally. You can’t even keep my name out of your mouth.”
I swallow hard, heat pooling in my stomach. “You wanted me to fail.”
“Yes.” His admission is sharp, merciless. “Because now I get to decide how to punish you.”
The way he says it—like it’s inevitable, like there was never another outcome—makes every nerve in my body scream.
His free hand skims down my side, slow and teasing, stopping just where my blouse tucks into the waistband of my skirt. He lingers there, fingertips sliding under the fabric, testing how far he can push before I beg.
“Look at the screen.” His voice drops lower, harsher.
I glance up. The words I typed are nothing but nonsense, broken letters scattered as if I’d lost language altogether.
