Chapter Text
Gerri’s accustomed to being in charge. It’s her baseline, her touchstone. It’s comfortable, and comforting.
She’s heard of people whose dominance at work makes them want to submit in their off-hours. High-powered CEOs who pay high-class escorts to whip scars onto their skin, but only the parts that a well-tailored suit will cover. That’s not Gerri; never has been.
She likes power. She needs power. And if power thrills her just as much in the bedroom as it does in the boardroom, well, why should anyone judge her for what she does when she’s off the clock?
Why should she judge herself, for that matter?
She’s pondering this while swirling some scotch, neat, in a snifter, watching CNN by herself late at night – one of her favorite ways to unwind after a long day. And, as if he could hear her thoughts from his penthouse half a mile away, Roman sends her a text.
you watching this prescott story? five-alarm shitshow 🚨
She glances up at the television and realizes that she is, indeed, watching the Prescott story, though her mind had wandered so far from the broadcast that she hadn’t noticed. She squints at the chyron: INTIMATE PHOTOS LEAKED OF VIRGINIA SENATOR BENJAMIN PRESCOTT.
Benjamin himself appears on screen, a handsome, greying man with piercing blue eyes and a roguish half-smile. They’ve chosen to run the story with his official headshot, rather than show the photos in question – but the way the reporters are talking around the heart of the issue, Gerri gets the gist. Words like “fetishistic” and “BDSM” and “shocking” are being thrown around – not always cruelly, but when the disgust and confusion aren’t directly stated, they’re heavily implied.
Normally when encountering a story like this, she would stuff down any semblance of empathy, compassion, or personal interest, and go into work mode instead: start mapping out the moves, taking mental inventory of the legal recommendations she’d theoretically make if she were brought on board. But the scotch has cast a pleasant glow over her, so instead, she texts Roman: Yes. Thinking about how I could shatter your career in an instant with the photos I have of you, if I wanted to.
It’s hard to convey tone via text, and she’s not about to stoop to using emojis. But evidently he reads her correctly, because he texts back: at least there aren’t any of me wearing a ballgag like benji-boy. unless you want that?? plz advise
She smiles at the mental image. That’s disgusting, Roman. Get some sleep.
He writes back: probably gonna jerk off first but then yes absolutely 😴
She lets out a little huff of laughter and locks her phone, and of course, that’s when Laurie walks back into the room, having just finished washing the dishes from their dinner. “What’s so funny?” he asks, and drops onto the couch beside her. Then, seeing the TV: “Oh, the Prescott story. Can you believe this guy? As if we need more perverts in the Senate.” He rolls his eyes, grabs the remote, and flips around until he settles on an old Cheers re-run.
Gerri knocks back the last of her scotch in a single gulp. “I’m going to bed,” she says, and does.
“Okay. Night, hon,” Laurie calls after her, and she hopes he doesn’t see her shudder.
Gerri arrives at work the next morning to an exhausting scene: her assistant Arlene has somehow managed to break the espresso machine relied on by half the lawyers on the floor. Gerri settles heavily into her desk chair and watches through the glass wall with consternation as Arlene mashes the machine’s buttons in vain, while it lets out a worrying whine. “Just call the repairman,” she snaps at Arlene over the intercom, annoyed and uncaffeinated and annoyed about being uncaffeinated.
As she’s unloading notebooks and files onto her desk from her briefcase, she notices that she received a text from Roman five minutes earlier: hey why didn’t you hold the elevator for me?? (i know you just didn’t see/hear me in time but i’m gonna choose to believe it’s actually cuz you like when i suffer or whatever)
She bites her lip and texts him back, Is there coffee where you are? Bit of a mechanical mishap here with Arlene and the machine.
The answer comes immediately: omw, see ya in 5
She’s chipping away at the emails that came in overnight when Roman walks in a few minutes later with a steaming stoneware mug. “Here to deliver your drug of choice,” he announces, placing it on her coaster, “like a wildly overdressed packmule.” He is indeed looking quite nice, Gerri notes – dark grey suit, white shirt left unbuttoned at the collar – and the coffee smells glorious. He flops onto the chair opposite hers, as if she’d invited him to stay.
She watches him coolly over the rim of the mug as she sips, and is somehow both flattered and irritated to discover that it’s made the way she likes it – milk, no sugar. “Thank you, I appreciate it,” she says, and the way his face softens into a smile makes her heart hurt.
She can’t help but think about last week, when she’d been working from home and called to Laurie in the kitchen, “Could you bring me a coffee?” and he’d told her to “ask nicely” and “say the magic words,” as if she was a six-year-old learning good manners instead of a sixty-year-old deliberately eschewing them. And when the coffee in question had finally arrived, it’d been made the way he liked it – black and sweet – and tasted so vile that she’d only been able to get a few gulps down.
Roman’s too perceptive, likely from decades of proactively appeasing his father as a self-protection strategy, so he catches her shifting expressions. “Delish, right?” he says, smiling. “Does it make you feel like a big strong boss-bitch when the COO runs errands for you?”
She takes another sip. “Yes.”
He jumps out of the chair and heads back toward the door. “Good,” he says. “And hey, let me know if you need help firing Arlene. Anyone who fucks with the caffeine supply chain around here is on thin fucking ice, if you ask me.”
It’s not that Gerri doesn’t know she’s kinky; it’s just that she’s never really had the time to pursue it. When some of her college classmates were attending weird sex parties and going to see Masters & Johnson lectures, she was hitting the books to earn her summa cum laude. When Baird had brought home the occasional blindfold or feather tickler to “spice things up,” she’d laughed it off and told him she was too tired from work to mess around with anything but the basics. And Laurie, well, Laurie had made a biting remark in the first few weeks of their courtship about an ex-girlfriend who’d been into bondage, and then there were the comments about Benjamin Prescott, all of which didn’t exactly make her want to open up.
Telling people what she wanted was messy, risky, not in her own best interest. Aside from the occasional late-night Google session in incognito mode, or (once) a curious call to an anonymous phone-sex line, she’d rarely let her darker thoughts become anything more than thoughts.
But it increasingly feels as though Roman can see into her mind – as though he has X-ray vision that penetrates the walls she’s built around her hidden deviance. And the most terrifying and thrilling part of it is that she can see his, too, and it looks remarkably like a mirror image of her own. As much as she wills herself to want Laurie, the safe and respectable choice for a woman of her station, it’s Roman who she pictures on a leash or in a cage or under her heels when she touches herself at night, eyes shut tight against reality.
News breaks that one of the people Benjamin Prescott was exchanging kinky images with was, in fact, a Waystar exec – a married and ostensibly straight man, not that it’s any of Gerri’s business. No, her job is simply to protect the company at all costs, and in this case that means issuing a flurry of NDAs, having her assistants draw up a severance package for the offending employee, and strategizing with Karolina well into the evening.
As she’s finally packing her things to go around 10:30, she checks her phone and sees that she has several missed texts from Laurie. They’d had dinner scheduled for 6, Gerri remembers with a start, but what with the chaos of the day, it’s slipped her mind completely. Although frankly, she thinks privately, if he had looked at the news for even a moment, he would have fucking known why she never showed.
6:23 p.m.: Hey hon, I thought we were supposed to have dinner tonight? Where are you?
6:48 p.m.: Everything okay?
7:12 p.m.: This is really rude and hurtful and I expect better of you. I doubt you’ve ever stood up one of your work colleagues like this.
7:28 p.m.: I’m going for dinner on my own. Give me a call when you get this, we need to talk.
She doesn’t even have the energy to roll her eyes. Another man who whines at her and needles at her, while simultaneously seeking to shame her into submission. Another man who expects her to do his bidding rather than wonder what she might need from him. Another man who mistakenly thinks she’ll ever, ever, ever set her career aside in favor of something so pedestrian as romance – or, more accurately, docile domesticity.
She grabs her briefcase and marches toward the elevator, still scrolling through all the notifications she missed while deep in the trenches, and sees that Roman texted her some dumb lawyer meme earlier in the day. this reminded me of you, hardass lawsuit queen
The meme itself barely registers, tired as she is, but the gesture lands. Funny, she writes. Needed a laugh after dealing with the Prescott madness all day.
yr just finishing work now?? he replies immediately. sucks to be you. i’ve been at home binging breaking bad in my jammies for hours. livin large
When she doesn’t reply during her elevator ride or her walk to the car, he texts again: hungry? that indian place near me is open late
If she had any energy left, any emotional labor available to expend, any smiles to distribute or niceties to dispense, maybe she’d tell him she’s fine and can just go home and order some delivery. But her tough outer layers have been burned away by the hellfire of the day, and all that’s left underneath is a bossy, brassy bitch who loves power and likes Roman. She doesn’t even have the fortitude to deny it to herself.
Meet me there in fifteen and don’t be late, she replies. You’ll pay for the meal, and I might have some additional tasks for you after that, assuming you behave yourself and don’t say anything too repulsive.
She gets in the car that’s waiting for her and tells the driver where to go. Roman texts, fuck why did that get my dick hard even tho i’m watching walter white kill a guy right now lol, and Gerri lacks the willpower to self-censor. She types what she would type if this were a dream of hers, a lewd fantasy late at night, a drifty daydream to liven up a lacklustre meeting.
Because you’re a pathetic creep who wants nothing more than to do whatever I say.
His immediate response is just a string of emojis – 🥵🥵🥵 – and the heat in her belly feels right, like lust, like power.