Small Victories

“What are you smiling at?”

Marc looked up from his phone. Most of the office was dark, though one of the up-and-coming auditors was burning the midnight oil on the other end of the floor. That or he just wanted to be that guy who never left before the boss - not that Marc was the very tip-top boss of the business, but he knew that everyone on the floor saw him that way.

It was part of why he promoted them.

Jillian was also still out at her desk down near the elevators, though it was her job not to leave before Marc did and she was paid well to do it.

That left just Marc and Astrid in the small island of light that was his office.

“Just enjoying une petite victoire,” Marc said.

“Must be fucking nice,” Astrid grunted, turning her attention back to her computers.

Marc would have liked to have called Astrid Kennedy Beauchamp his best investigator, but she was freelance and hated the idea of her being ‘owned’ by anyone. She was a thin woman and would have been conventionally attractive if she had stayed in line with the plans that her parents had likely laid out for her when she was somewhere around the age of two. Top private schools all the way, then an Ivy League post-secondary education where she was supposed to meet the love of her young life, with marriage right after graduation as the new son-in-law joined the family business, or perhaps she would join the other families business for a time before starting to pop out wealthy, entitled babies to repeat the cycle.

Astrid looked the part, mostly. She was still cute and dressed herself in the attractive, casual way that only someone who grew up in money could carry off with such a laissez-faire attitude. But her cute, aristocratic look was betrayed by her hair and her demeanour. She wore her hair long and dyed a vibrant green that was almost neon.

“I’ve almost got this bitch, by the way,” Astrid said. “Shouldn’t take more than a couple of fuckin’ minutes…”

She also swore like a sailor. Marc had thankfully been able to convince her to tone down the most offensive of her filthy language while she was in the office. The swearing didn’t actually bother him, it just wasn’t appropriate for a workplace setting.

Astrid was a hard-working, highly intelligent woman with an attraction to danger that made Marc feel a bit of a kinship with her, though they chased it in different ways. He went scuba diving and enjoyed exploring wrecks at over 40 meter depths, and had continued to train in karate long after most of the students his age had moved on (though that practice had slowed considerably in the last decade.) She, on the other hand, had found her spark in the grey areas of internet hacker culture. It’s how she’d gotten kicked out of her Ivy League school, though she’d also admitted to him once that it was how she’d gotten in to the school in the first place. It was also how she’d made a stupendous amount of money for herself despite only being twenty-three.

Marc was attracted to her, and she was to him, but they would never work. It wasn’t even the age gap - they were just too similar in the bedroom. They liked the same things. They liked doing the same things. Being in control. Neither of them was interested in being controlled.

So they were friends, of a sort. Detached, since without romance the age gap did provide a connectivity issue in a lot of areas of life. Marc sometimes gave her the sort of advice she wasn’t going to get out of her parents on bleeding edge financial decisions, and she did work for him that needed to be off the books of the company.

“So what was the ‘little victory?’” Astrid asked as she continued to tap away rapidly at her keyboard. Marc had known it was going to be a larger job for her this time, so he’d had the desk moved into his office and the computers set up for her in the configuration that she’d sent over. The small jobs she just did from home, or wherever it was she worked usually, but the big stuff he had her come in for. “Don’t tell me you found some way to turn that blonde of yours even more into your pet, or you needed to discipline her for something.”

Marc smiled softly. “No, Felicity is still as perfect as ever,” he said.

“Then what is it? You don’t smile like that unless it’s a dominance game, Marc,” Astrid said. “Do you have a new plaything?”

He sighed a little and put down his phone. “I might,” he said. “It’s a… complicated situation. She’s receptive, but not initiated into things.”

“Mmm,” Astrid nodded, still typing away. Marc could see the text on the screen moving quickly in the reflection of her eyes. “New bitch, huh? You haven’t broken in a chick properly before, have you? And Felicity doesn’t count - she took to it way easier than you had a right to.”

Marc pursed his lips in a little smile. Even Astrid didn’t know about his arrangement with Felicity, and she knew more than most about his sexual side. “It’s been a long while,” he said, thinking back to his early thirties when he’d had a string of girlfriends that had only partially fulfilled his desires. He hadn’t been as sure of himself and his wants back then, and had still thought he wanted something different and more traditional.

“Well, if you need any help breaking her, I’m fucking available,” Astrid said. “My boy toy is starting to like femdom punishments a little too much lately; I could use a spin with a hot chick that needs to learn her place.”

“It’s much too early for something like that,” Marc said. “She’s… Every encounter with her is a balancing act, and might be the last one.”

“So you’re saying she’s a challenge,” Astrid smirked as she looked up from her screens at him. “Fuck, you are loving this stubborn cunt, aren’t you? I’m a little jealous you get to have so much fun.”

“Small steps,” Marc said. “Lots of small steps. Now, are you into that server or not? If there is something hiding in those files I need it for my meeting in the morning.”

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