Page 28 of After Hours
When he laughed again, she tried not to show how much it meant to her that she could tease him. That there were no land mines, no eggshells.
“I like to pretend I like this place no frills, but the truth is, I hate managing shit like attendance and who paid and all that crap.”
“Well,” Romily said, smiling, “I happen to be excellent at that kind of stuff.”
Or she had been, once upon a time. She wondered if she was overselling herself—but when she started working the desk the next day, her worries melted away. His system was archaic, if it could even be called a system. Romily started researching gym management and payment options, and had the whole gym sorted out within a week.
He celebrated her accomplishments by tying her up on that big X above his bed and introducing her to his favorite whip.
Romily cherished those marks she’d earned until they faded.
Sometimes, deep down, she wondered if she was getting too involved all over again. Wasn’t this what she did? Not that Joseph had offered anything to get involved with aside from his ego—not that she’d understood that then.
But Zachary was so different from Joseph. Night and day. She couldn’t really entertain those thoughts for long. For one thing, she actually worked. She wasn’t playing pretend at the desk. Once she set everything up, there were phones to answer and endless calls about payment plans and membership and drop in costs.
She even made a round of swag that Zachary was sure no one would want. But the vintage-looking t-shirts with the gym namestamped on the front and no other adornments sold out within a day.
He’d celebrated that, too. This time with a paddle and what he liked to call the butt plugflight,like it was fancy. He gotverystern when she laughed about that in the middle of a scene and had taught her to mind her manners.
Her ass had hurt for days, and the memory made her smile.
Zachary was also incredibly stern and serious about paying her directly, every week. He paid her a generous salary. He also never acted like her lover when she was on the job. It wasn’t that he pretended she was a stranger. It was clear to anyone who paid attention that they were.., whatever they were. But he never delivered those orders they both knew she’d obey. He never touched her in a way that could be deemed inappropriate, by anyone.
She didn’t realize how much she appreciated this until she been doing it a while. Until it became clear to her that what he wanted was for her to becomfortableabove all else.
In certain settings, that was. For as stern and diabolical as he was in the bedroom, he was even more wicked in the gym, where he made her sweat, relentlessly. He made her limp. He made herhurt.
Still, he took care of her after gym sessions, too. He rubbed her sore muscles and lectured her on the benefits of creatine and showed her what active recovery looked like.
And after a handful of months rolled by, Romily barely recognized herself. She hadmuscles.She wasn’t frail any longer. She wasactuallystrong.
She knew this was true without having to glance in the mirror, because he told her. Because he celebrated all the muscles in her body, took pride in her gains, and seemed to only want her more and more as each day passed.
One night, he went out with his friends and she decided she should stay back in her boat. It was funny, but she barely went on the boat any longer unless it was for her therapy sessions. She hadn’t realized that, really. Not until she went back down to the marina and settled herself into her berth, expecting to feel at home the way she always had there.
Only to realize that it didn’t feel like hers any longer.
Romily stretched out in the bed she’d once thought she’d never leave, having worked so hard to get here. She stared out the window at the sky and the lights above, trying to remember if she and Zachary had ever discussed the fact that she was spending so much time at his place. But she already knew they hadn’t.
Meanwhile, she practically lived there. Maybe it was more accurate to say she did, in fact, live there. He’d gotten impatient almost immediately with her having to go get clothes from the boat, so she had a whole section of his closet. She’d learned quickly that she slept deeply with him, without so much as a hint of a nightmare. They worked together now, and it seemed to make sense to just… go upstairs afterward.
It all seemed to work seamlessly.
That probably should have alarmed her.
It was so rare to have a night to herself that Romily thought that what she really needed to do was sit here, take a breath, and ask herself if she was already fucking up. Already giving some other man too much of herself. Already making sure that this would end badly, because she obviously couldn’t trust her own feelings?—
But she couldn’t really connect to that line of thinking, so she fell asleep instead.
And when she woke up, there was a Viking standing over her, though he had to stoop to fit in her berth.
“Why aren’t you in my bed?” he demanded, looking… surly and annoyed and so delicious she went from fast asleep to awake andhotin an instant.
Romily didn’t ask him how he’d gotten into the marina, which was supposed to be locked to keep everyone who didn’t live here out. Or how he’d gotten onto this boat, for that matter, without any of her neighbors questioning him when—despite everyone’s preference to keep to themselves—they were still a pretty tight knit community. They didn’t throw block parties but they knew who was supposed to be on their docks.
Yet she had no doubt that Zachary’s talent for getting what he wanted was infinite.
And she supposed this should have scared her, that he could just show up when he felt like it, possibly by performing an illegal entry or two — but she wasn’t scared, she was happy he was here. Besides, she hardly had a leg to stand on, given the way they’d met.
