Closet Fetishist's Stories
Closet Fetishist's Stories
Author: Closet Fetishist
Written: May 24th, 2026
The rejection emails had become background noise. Elliott had lost count somewhere around the hundredth 'We've decided to move forward with other candidates' notification that landed in his inbox with the mechanical indifference of a form letter. Months of this. Months of tailoring cover letters to positions he was overqualified for, months of watching his savings dwindle while job boards refreshed with the same listings recycled across a dozen platforms. The few interviews he'd managed to secure had dissolved into awkward silences and hollow promises to 'keep his resume on file.' One hiring manager had actually laughed when Elliott mentioned his degree. Not cruelly—just the tired, reflexive chuckle of someone who'd heard the same credentials from four hundred other desperate applicants that week.
Then Plume Group International appeared.
The listing had been sparse—administrative support, entry level, no specific industry mentioned. Elliott applied on a Monday afternoon, half-expecting another automated rejection. By Tuesday morning, an email from someone named Julie Olam requesting a virtual interview. The call lasted eleven minutes. Julie's camera was off the entire time; her voice was clipped, transactional, asking nothing about his experience or ambitions. Just availability, willingness to follow instructions, and whether he could start Wednesday. Elliott said yes before the question fully left her lips. Wednesday at 8 AM, he stood in the lobby of a mid-rise office building downtown, clutching a messenger bag and wearing his only clean dress shirt.
Julie Olam met him at the elevator. She was a compact woman in her forties with a severe bob and glasses that magnified her disinterest. She didn't smile. She didn't shake his hand. She simply turned on her heel and walked, expecting him to follow without instruction.
"We're on the fourth floor. Keep up."
The tour lasted four minutes. Julie gestured at a break room, a supply closet, a row of glass-walled offices—all empty, all identical, all bearing small brass nameplates he couldn't read at her pace. She deposited him at a cubicle in a bank of six, only three of which showed any signs of habitation. A pale young man sat hunched at one, typing with the mechanical rhythm of someone who'd stopped thinking about the task hours ago.
Julie pointed at Elliott's monitor.
"Password manager's bookmarked. Work booklet's on the desktop. Read it. Follow it. Don't bother me unless the building's on fire." There was an implication in her tone that seemed to not even want to be told about the building being on fire either.
She left before he could ask a single question.
Elliott took a seat and opened up the work booklet. It was a disaster. Forty-seven pages of AI-generated corporate jargon that somehow said nothing while using every buzzword in the modern lexicon. 'Synergize cross-functional deliverables. Optimize document lifecycle workflows.' Strip away the language and the tasks were almost insultingly simple: rename files, move folders between directories, draft templated responses to emails that appeared in a shared inbox. Elliott read it twice, convinced he was missing something. He wasn't.
Plume Group International itself offered no clarity. The company's online presence consisted of a single landing page—a name in elegant serif font, a stock photo of clouds, and a generic contact email. No about page. No team section. No indication of what the company actually did or who its clients were. Elliott had searched business registries, LinkedIn, industry databases. Nothing.
By midmorning, Elliott had settled into the rhythm. Open file. Rename. Close file. Open next file. The work required just enough attention to prevent his mind from wandering entirely, but not enough to engage it. Elliott had eventually learned the name of the pale man three cubicles over, Dennis, but beyond that he hadn't spoken a word.
The office hummed with the white noise of ventilation and distant keyboard clatter. Julie's glass office sat at the far end of the floor, its blinds drawn, her silhouette occasionally visible behind the frosted glass.
It was, Elliott thought, almost too easy. The speed of the hire. The vagueness of the work. The absence of any real onboarding or supervision. He'd spent months begging for scraps, and now he sat in a climate-controlled cubicle doing tasks a high school intern could handle, drawing a salary that seemed generous for what was being asked. Something about it didn't add up. But the direct deposit was scheduled for Friday, and Elliott had learned not to question good fortune when the alternative was eviction.
He opened another file. Renamed it. Closed it. Opened the next.
The morning hours crawled by with the excruciating lethargy of a clock running on dead batteries. Elliott had worked through the first batch of files in the shared drive—renaming, reorganizing, moving documents between folders that seemed to serve no discernible purpose. By his estimation, he'd processed somewhere around forty files, and the work booklet suggested there were several hundred more queued for the week. The tedium was almost physical, a weight pressing against his temples.
Elliott glanced to his right. The young man in the thick dark-rimmed glasses sat hunched over his keyboard, fingers moving with the careful precision of someone defusing a bomb. His posture was terrible—shoulders curved inward, chin nearly touching his chest—and every few seconds he'd pause to adjust his glasses with a knuckle before resuming his typing.
The silence of the cubicle farm had begun to feel oppressive. Dennis three rows over hadn't made a sound beyond the occasional cough.Even the ventilation system seemed to hum at a frequency designed to discourage conversation.
Elliott swiveled his chair slightly and cleared his throat.
"Hi, I'm Elliott. I'm new here."
The young man's eyes shifted first—a quick, darting glance sideways—before his head followed with a mechanical turn. A smile formed on his face, though it looked like a muscle being asked to perform an exercise it hadn't practiced in months. His lips pulled back, his cheeks bunched, but the expression never quite reached his eyes.
"Yes, I saw you come in." His voice was soft, slightly reedy, with a faint tremor underneath. "We... welcome. I'm Samuel."
They shook hands briefly. Samuel's grip was limp, his palm slightly damp.
"How long have you been working here?" Elliott asked.
"About a week."
Elliott raised his eyebrows. "Oh really? You're new too."
Samuel nodded, his glasses sliding down his nose. He pushed them back with his index finger. "Yeah, pretty much everyone is. Paul so far seems to have been here the longest. Three weeks. Other than Julie, I presume."
The information landed strangely. Elliott's eyes narrowed, a crease forming between his brows. Three weeks. The longest-tenured employee besides management had been present for less than a month.
"That seems odd..." Elliott murmured, more to himself than to Samuel.
Samuel offered a shrug that conveyed nothing—no curiosity, no concern, just the mechanical acknowledgment of a fact he'd apparently already processed and filed away. After a beat of silence stretched between them, he turned back to his monitor, his fingers resuming their careful dance across the keys.
Elliott sat motionless for a moment, the revelation settling into his thoughts like a stone dropping into still water. He turned back to his own screen, but the files blurred together. Three weeks. Everyone was new. What happened to the people before? Where did they go?
He opened another file. Renamed it. The questions wouldn't stop circling.
---
The breakroom was small—a counter with a coffee maker, a mini fridge that hummed too loudly, a round table with four mismatched chairs, and a window that overlooked the parking lot. Elliott found Paul sitting alone at the table, working through a sandwich that appeared to consist of nothing but deli meat and a slice of yellow cheese between two slabs of white bread. A bag of Cool Ranch Doritos sat open beside him, and every few bites he'd reach in and extract a chip with the detached efficiency of a man fueling a machine.
Elliott hovered in the doorway for a moment, then approached.
"Mind if I sit here?"
Paul glanced up. He was somewhere in his late twenties, with a broad face and the kind of build that suggested he'd been athletic once but had since surrendered to desk work. He chewed, swallowed, and gave a single nod without speaking.
Elliott settled into the chair across from him and unpacked his own lunch—a container of yesterday night's leftover rice and orange chicken from Panda Express. For a moment, they ate in silence. The coffee maker gurgled. The fridge hummed.
"So," Elliott began, poking at his rice with a plastic fork, "Samuel mentioned you've been here the longest. Three weeks?"
Paul's jaw worked through another bite of sandwich. He didn't look up.
"Yep."
"And that's... the longest anyone's been here?"
"Yep."
Elliott waited for elaboration. None came. Paul reached for another Dorito, bit it in half, and brushed the crumbs from his fingers onto the napkin beside his plate.
"What happened to the people before?" Elliott pressed, keeping his tone casual, conversational. "High turnover, or...?"
Paul finally looked at him. His expression wasn't hostile, but it carried a flatness that suggested he'd already had this conversation—or some version of it—and had arrived at a conclusion that didn't invite further discussion.
"Don't know. Didn't ask." He took a sip from a water bottle. "You shouldn't either."
The words hung in the air. Elliott opened his mouth to respond, but Paul had already returned to his sandwich, his attention sliding back to his food with the finality of a door closing. The message was clear enough: some questions didn't have answers worth chasing.
Elliott ate the rest of his lunch in silence, the rice turning to paste in his mouth. Through the breakroom window, the parking lot shimmered in the midday heat.
The silence between them had settled into something comfortable—or at least, something Elliott had stopped trying to fill. Paul chewed through the last of his sandwich with the mechanical efficiency of a man completing a task rather than enjoying a meal. His eyes stayed fixed on some middle distance beyond the breakroom window. Elliott poked at his rice.
Paul balled up the sandwich wrapper and set it beside the Doritos bag, which still held a few broken chips at the bottom. He didn't reach for them. His hands rested on the table, palms down, fingers slightly spread—a posture that might have looked relaxed if not for the tension visible in his forearms. Elliott opened his mouth to say something—anything to break the stillness—but the words died before they reached his tongue. Some silences, he was learning, weren't invitations.
Then Julie appeared in the doorway.
She didn't announce herself. Didn't knock on the frame or clear her throat. She simply materialized there, compact and severe, her bob haircut framing a face that had never learned the mechanics of warmth. Her glasses caught the fluorescent light and turned opaque for a moment before she tilted her head.
"Paul."
His name, nothing more. But Paul's reaction was immediate—his spine straightened, his hands flattened harder against the table, and his gaze snapped to Julie with the reflexive obedience of a dog hearing its owner's voice. Elliott watched the transformation happen in real time: the slight slackening of his jaw, the way his throat moved as he swallowed.
Julie's lips twitched. Not quite a smile. Something adjacent to one—a small, satisfied curl at the corner of her mouth that carried implications Elliott couldn't yet decode.
"Ms. Moss would like to see you."
The color drained from Paul's face so quickly it looked almost theatrical, like a stage trick performed with makeup. But there was no makeup. Just blood retreating from capillaries, leaving his skin the shade of old paper. His expression barely changed—he held it together with the desperate discipline of someone who'd practiced not reacting—but Elliott could see the shift in his eyes. Something behind them flickered. Dimmed.
Paul stood. He didn't clean up his wrapper or the chip bag. He didn't say goodbye or excuse himself or offer any of the small social lubrications that humans typically performed before leaving a room. He simply rose and walked toward Julie as if a command had been transmitted through frequencies only he could hear. His movements were smooth but empty—the gait of a man operating on autopilot while his mind retreated somewhere safe and far away.
Elliott watched him go. At the doorway, just before disappearing beyond the frame, Paul turned. Their eyes met for a fraction of a second. It was hard to read—harder still to name. Not quite fear, though fear was there. Not quite pleading, though something in his gaze reached toward Elliott like a hand grasping at air. Then he blinked, turned back, and was gone. Julie's heels clicked twice on the linoleum before the sounds faded into the ambient hum of the office.
The breakroom felt larger now. Emptier. Elliott sat with his plastic fork suspended above his orange chicken. He stared at the doorway. The fluorescent light buzzed. Somewhere in the building, a door opened and closed.
He looked down at the table. Paul's sandwich wrapper lay crumpled beside the chip bag, the few broken Doritos still sitting at the bottom like remnants of something unfinished. Elliott's stomach twisted—not from hunger, but from a sensation he couldn't name. Something was wrong. Not wrong in the way a mistake was wrong, or wrong in the way a broken machine was wrong. Wrong in the way a locked door was wrong when you could hear sounds behind it.
He couldn't figure it out. Paul might be getting fired—that much seemed obvious, or at least plausible. People got summoned by bosses and came back with cardboard boxes. That was normal. Corporate. Mundane. But the way Paul's face had gone pale. The way he hadn't cleaned up. The way Julie's almost-smile had carried something that looked less like authority and more like anticipation.
Elliott collected his own trash, then reached across and gathered Paul's wrapper and the chip bag. He balled them together and dropped them into the bin by the door.
He walked back to his cubicle. The corridor felt longer than it had that morning. The glass-walled offices passed in a blur of drawn blinds and unreadable nameplates. When he sat down in his chair, the monitor glowed with the file queue—patient, meaningless, waiting.
Elliott stared at it. His fingers rested on the keyboard but didn't move. Samuel's typing continued in the next cubicle, that careful, mechanical rhythm. Dennis coughed three rows over.
The office hummed. The files waited. Elliott opened a file. The name blurred on the screen. He closed it without renaming anything and opened the next.
The clock on Elliott's monitor ticked over to 5:00 PM with the quiet inevitability of a verdict being read. He logged out of the virtual machine, the screen going dark with a soft click, and pushed back from his desk. The office had thinned out over the past hour—Dennis had vanished at some point without a sound. Elliott glanced toward Paul's cubicle. Empty. The chair was pushed in, the monitor dark, the surface bare except for a single sticky note that had been there since morning. Paul had never come back. Whatever Ms. Moss had wanted, it had consumed the rest of his day—and possibly more.
Samuel was still typing when Elliott looked over, but his rhythm had deteriorated. The careful precision of the morning had given way to a sluggish, intermittent clacking, his shoulders sagging further with each keystroke. When the clock hit 5:01, Samuel sat back in his chair with a sigh that sounded like air escaping a punctured balloon. He logged out, stood, and stretched his arms above his head, his glasses sliding down his nose in the process.
Their eyes met across the cubicle partition.
"Well," Samuel said, pushing his glasses back up with one finger, "see you tomorrow."
Elliott nodded. The words left his mouth like an afterthought, barely disturbing the air between them.
"See you tomorrow."
Samuel shuffled toward the exit without another word, his messenger bag hanging limp at his side. Elliott stood motionless in the emptying office, he looked at Paul's cubicle one more time. The sticky note fluttered slightly in the draft from the air conditioning.
---
The apartment was exactly as Elliott had left it that morning—small, dim, smelling faintly of the instant noodles he'd eaten for dinner the night before. He dropped his bag by the door, kicked off his shoes, and collapsed onto the couch without changing out of his work clothes. The TV flickered to life with a press of the remote, some reality show about people buying houses they couldn't afford filling the room with canned laughter and bright colors.
He wasn't watching.
Elliott held the container of cup-o-noodles in his hand as steam curled from the Styrofoam rim. Elliott ate mechanically, lifting the fork, chewing, swallowing, his eyes fixed on the screen but seeing nothing. The noodles tasted like salt and nothing else. He finished half of them before setting the container down, the broth cooling into a greasy film.
Paul's face kept surfacing in his mind. That look in the breakroom doorway—the way his eyes had reached for Elliott like a drowning man grasping at a rope that wasn't there. The pallor of his skin. The robotic way he'd risen from his chair and followed Julie without protest or question.
Where was he now?
Elliott's laptop sat open on the kitchen table, its screen dark. He stood, crossed the small apartment in four steps, and dropped into the chair. The screen woke with a tap of the spacebar, casting his face in pale blue light.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard.
'Moss Plume Group.'
He typed it into the search bar and hit enter. The results loaded in a fraction of a second—and there was almost nothing. A few directory listings confirming the company existed at the address he'd been to that morning. A cached version of the landing page he'd already seen. No news articles. No press releases. No Glassdoor reviews. No industry mentions. For a company that occupied an entire floor of a downtown office building, it existed in a vacuum of information that felt less like obscurity and more like deliberate erasure.
But there—a LinkedIn result. Third from the top.
Harper Moss. CEO, Plume Group International.
Elliott clicked.
The profile loaded. A photograph appeared—Harper Moss staring directly into the camera with the composed confidence of someone who had never once questioned her place in the world. Long brown hair fell past her shoulders in straight, precise lines. Light brown eyes that carried something sharp beneath their surface. A smile that didn't quite reach them. She was beautiful in the way a blade was beautiful—something to be admired from a safe distance.
Below the photo, the details were sparse but telling. Education: Yale undergraduate, Wharton MBA. Previous positions at firms Elliott recognized—Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, a venture capital outfit he'd seen in the business pages. Then, three years ago, the trail went cold. Plume Group International appeared with no context, no transition, no explanation for why a woman with that pedigree would found a company that did... what, exactly?
Elliott scrolled down. The About section was boilerplate corporate language—'innovative solutions, forward-thinking leadership, redefining the modern workplace.' It said nothing. The company page linked from her profile was even emptier than the landing page—a single paragraph of text and a stock photo of a conference room.
He sat back in his chair. The TV murmured in the other room. The noodles congealed on the coffee table.
Something was wrong with Plume Group International. Elliott had known it since Julie's clipped tour that morning, since the work booklet's meaningless jargon, since Paul's pale face and Samuel's mechanical shrug. But wrong how?
---
Elliott barely registered heading to bed, it was like an autopilot. He knew he needed to sleep but he couldn't get his mind off this mystery.
Sleep came in fragments. Elliott lay in bed staring at the ceiling, watching the digital clock on his nightstand tick through the minutes like a metronome counting down to nothing. His mind kept circling back to Paul—that pale face, those eyes in the doorway, the way he'd risen from the table like a man walking to his own execution. What happened in Ms. Moss's office? What could consume an entire afternoon and leave no trace?
He rolled onto his side. The sheets were tangled around his legs. The apartment hummed with the ambient noise of a city that never fully slept—distant traffic, the whir of the refrigerator, a neighbor's muffled television.
2:14 AM.
2:47 AM.
Sometime after that, darkness finally took him.
The alarm blared at 6:00 AM with the mercy of a fire alarm. Elliott's hand slapped the snooze button, then slapped it again nine minutes later. By 6:20, he'd resigned himself to consciousness and dragged his body into the shower, where the hot water did nothing to dissolve the knot of unease that had settled between his shoulder blades. He dressed in the same rotation of button-ups and slacks, ate a granola bar he couldn't taste, and joined the morning commute—forty minutes of brake lights and coffee-stained thermoses and the slow crawl of humanity toward another day of whatever this was.
The office looked exactly as he'd left it. The fluorescent lights hummed their sterile welcome. The carpet still held the vacuum lines from the night crew. And Paul's cubicle sat empty, the chair pushed in, the monitor dark, the sticky note still fluttering slightly in the draft from the vent.
Samuel was already hunched over his keyboard, fingers moving with a renewed energy that suggested sleep had treated him better than it had treated Elliott. His glasses reflected the monitor's glow, and his lips moved slightly as he typed—murmuring something to himself, some private liturgy of data entry. Dennis shuffled in a minute after Elliott, his bulk filling the corridor as he made his way to his cubicle without a word, without a glance, without any acknowledgment that other human beings occupied the space around him.
Elliott logged in. The file queue appeared. He opened the first document and began renaming it, his fingers moving on autopilot while his mind remained elsewhere.
Ten minutes passed. Then Julie's office door opened.
She emerged with the clipped efficiency of someone whose schedule ran on rails—no wasted motion, no hesitation, no pause for pleasantries. She headed for the office exit and Elliott heard the ding of the arriving elevator on the other side of the door. When Julie returned, she wasn't alone. A man followed a half-step behind her, and Elliott's eyes tracked them both with the careful attention of someone who'd learned to watch the exits.
The new hire was young—mid-twenties, maybe—with a clean-shaven jaw and the kind of fresh-faced optimism that hadn't yet been ground down by fluorescent lighting and meaningless work. He wore a plain button-up and tie, the same uniform as the rest of them, but his fit differently. His shoulders were back. His chin was up. He looked like a man who believed he was starting something, not walking into something.
Julie led him through the cubicle farm with her usual tour—the breakroom, the supply closet, the restrooms—her voice carrying just enough volume for Elliott to catch fragments. "...shared drive... work booklet on your desk... questions directed to me..." The same script. The same cadence. The same hollow welcome.
Then she brought him to Paul's cubicle.
Elliott's fingers stopped moving over the keyboard. He watched as Julie pulled out the chair, gestured for the new hire to sit, and began logging him into the system. The man settled in with the eager posture of someone ready to contribute, to prove himself, to earn his place.
Julie reached down and plucked the sticky note from the monitor. She didn't read it. Didn't even glance at the handwriting scrawled across its surface. She simply crumpled it between her fingers—a small, decisive motion—and dropped it into the nearby wastebasket. Then she turned on her heel and walked back to her office, the door clicking shut behind her.
The finality of it hit Elliott like a physical thing. Paul wasn't coming back. Whatever had happened in Ms. Moss's office yesterday, it had been the end. Not a warning. Not a suspension. An ending. And now someone new sat in his chair, logged into his computer, ready to rename files in a company that devoured its employees and replaced them without ceremony.
Elliott stood. He kept his movements casual, unhurried—the walk of a man heading to refill his coffee, nothing more. But his path curved toward the wastebasket near Paul's old cubicle. The new hire was focused on his screen, reading through whatever welcome materials had appeared on his monitor. Samuel's typing continued its mechanical rhythm. Dennis coughed three rows over.
Elliott reached the trash can. He glanced down.
The sticky note lay atop a crumpled tissue and a paper coffee cup. White, slightly curled at the edges, with a few words scrawled in hurried handwriting. He reached in—quickly, casually, as if adjusting his sleeve—and pinched the note between his fingers.
He palmed it and returned to his cubicle. His heart was beating faster than it should have been for something so small. He sat down, angled his body toward the partition, and carefully unfolded the note.
The handwriting was cramped, almost panicked—letters pressing into each other as if the writer's hand had been shaking. Two words, written in blue ink that had bled slightly into the paper:
I'm next
Elliott stared at it. The words sat there, ominous yet inexplicable, carrying a weight that had nothing to do with their meaning and everything to do with the terror embedded in their strokes. Paul had written this. Paul, who had gone pale at the mention of Ms. Moss's name. Paul, who had never come back.
He folded the note again and slipped it into his pocket. His coffee sat on his desk, half-drunk, growing cold.
---
The breakroom felt different when Elliott sat alone. The table that had held Paul yesterday now held nothing but the faint impression of absence—a scuff mark where his chair had scraped. Elliott unwrapped his sandwich without appetite, the bread soft and slightly stale from sitting in his bag since morning. He chewed mechanically, his gaze drifting toward the doorway every few seconds as if expecting someone to appear. No one did.
Through the gap in the doorframe, Elliott caught glimpses of the office floor. Julie moved into view, her silhouette unmistakable—compact, precise, purposeful. She approached Dennis's cubicle with the same measured steps she'd used yesterday, the same clipboard tucked against her chest. Elliott couldn't hear the words from this distance, but he could read the choreography. The lean in. The brief exchange. Dennis looking up with the confused expression of a man who hadn't yet learned what that visit meant.
Dennis's reaction was different from Paul's. Where Paul had gone pale and robotic, Dennis seemed genuinely perplexed—his brow furrowing, his mouth opening to ask a question Julie didn't bother answering. He stood slowly, his large frame unfolding from the chair with the reluctance of someone who didn't understand why he was being pulled away from his work. Julie didn't wait for him to gather himself. She turned and walked, and Dennis followed, still wearing that expression of mild confusion, like a man being led somewhere he hadn't planned to go.
Elliott watched until they disappeared around the corner. He set down his sandwich. The bread left moisture on his fingers.
---
The afternoon stretched like taffy—slow, sticky, resistant to movement. Elliott returned to his cubicle at 1:00 PM and opened his file queue, but his eyes kept drifting to Dennis' desk three rows over. The chair sat pushed back at an angle, the way Dennis had left it when he stood. His coffee mug remained beside the keyboard, a brown ring forming at the liquid's edge. His jacket hung on the back of the chair.
By 2:00 PM, the coffee had stopped steaming.
By 3:00 PM, the jacket still hung there, untouched.
Dennis did not come back.
Elliott's fingers hovered over his keyboard. The cursor blinked in a file he'd opened twenty minutes ago and hadn't touched. He turned in his chair, facing the partition where Samuel sat hunched over his own screen, typing with that same mechanical rhythm he'd maintained since yesterday.
"Hey," Elliott said, keeping his voice low. "You notice Paul is gone?"
Samuel's typing didn't stop. His fingers clacked through another sequence before he looked up, his glasses catching the fluorescent light. He peered past Elliott toward Paul's cubicle—toward the new hire who sat there now, already absorbed in his work as if he'd always been part of the furniture.
"Oh," Samuel said. "Yeah, I guess."
He looked back at his screen.
"Don't you think that's a bit strange?" Elliott pressed, leaning closer to the partition.
Samuel shrugged—a small, economical movement that barely disturbed his shoulders. His eyes stayed on the monitor.
"Seems to happen a lot."
The words landed like stones dropped into still water. Elliott stared at him, waiting for the elaboration, the context, the explanation that would make the sentence make sense. Samuel offered nothing. His fingers returned to the keyboard.
"What?" Elliott asked, the disbelief sharpening his voice.
"Yeah, like, every day," he said, settling the frames back on his nose. "Someone leaves. Doesn't come back. New person comes in. Happened every day I've been here."
Elliott felt something hot crawl up his throat. Anger, maybe. Or fear wearing anger's skin.
"Are you serious?" He kept his voice low, but it trembled at the edges. "Don't you wonder what's going on?"
Samuel looked at Elliott then—really looked at him—for the first time since they'd spoken. His expression wasn't hostile. Wasn't dismissive. It was something worse. It was the face of a man who had made peace with not knowing, who had filed the question away in some locked drawer and thrown away the key.
"Hard to find good help, I guess."
He turned back to his screen. The typing resumed.
Elliott scoffed under his breath—a sharp, bitter sound that died in the empty air between them. He swiveled back to his own monitor, the cursor still blinking in the untouched file. His jaw clenched. His hand drifted to his pocket, where Paul's note sat folded against his thigh.
I'm next.
The words pressed against his leg like a wound.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a haze of renamed files and mounting dread. Elliott worked, but his mind operated on two tracks—one processing the meaningless documents, the other cataloging everything wrong with this place. The empty cubicles. The revolving door of employees. Samuel's eerie calm. Julie's ritualistic summons. Ms. Moss, who sat behind a closed door at the end of the floor and consumed people.
---
The second day ended much like the first. Elliott gathered his things, rode the elevator down, and sat in his car for ten minutes before turning the ignition. He gripped the steering wheel and stared at the concrete half-wall ahead, Paul's note still folded in his pocket like a splinter he couldn't extract.
At home, he didn't search for answers. He showered, ate leftovers from the night before, and fell asleep with the TV on. The dreams were formless—dark hallways, closed doors, the sound of typing that never stopped.
Days blurred. Wednesday became Thursday became Friday. Elliott arrived at 8:00 AM, logged in, and renamed files until his eyes burned. He ate lunch alone. He watched Julie emerge from her office with that clipboard, watched her cross the floor with surgical precision, watched another face go pale or confused or resigned. The new hires came and went like tides—some lasting three days, some five, none longer than a week. Each morning brought a fresh face in a cubicle that had been occupied the day before. Each evening left another desk empty, another jacket unclaimed, another coffee mug abandoned mid-sip.
Elliott stopped counting after the sixth one.
He told himself it didn't matter. He told himself he needed this job—the pay was decent, the work was easy, the commute was manageable. He told himself that maybe these people were being transferred, promoted, sent somewhere better. The lies tasted thinner each time he swallowed them, but he swallowed them anyway, because the alternative was unthinkable.
Samuel continued typing with his mechanical rhythm, never looking up, never asking questions. His glasses reflected the monitor's glow, hiding whatever lived behind his eyes.
By the following Wednesday—exactly one week after Elliott had started—Samuel was called.
It happened just before lunch. Julie appeared at the edge of his cubicle, clipboard pressed to her chest, and said his name. Samuel looked up with the same mild, unbothered expression he wore when the printer jammed or the coffee ran out. He saved his work, pushed back his chair, and followed Julie without a word.
He never came back.
Elliott stared at Samuel's empty cubicle for a long time that afternoon. The new hire—some kid with a patchy beard and nervous hands—was installed by 2:00 PM.
---
More days passed. Thursday. Friday. The weekend arrived like a reprieve Elliott hadn't earned. He slept until noon on Saturday, ate cereal standing over the sink, and spent the afternoon on his couch watching reruns of shows he'd already seen. He didn't think about Plume Group. He refused to.
Monday brought him back. The elevator. The carpet. The hum of fluorescent lights. Another week of meaningless files and silent colleagues and the slow, creeping certainty that his turn was coming.
It came on Friday.
Elliott sat in the breakroom at his usual corner table, a sandwich unwrapped before him. The bread was stale—he'd made it that morning with the last of the loaf. He chewed without tasting, his eyes fixed on the middle distance, his mind somewhere between nowhere and nothing.
The door opened.
Julie stepped through. Her heels clicked against the linoleum—sharp, precise, inevitable. Her eyes found Elliott immediately, locking onto him with the calm certainty of someone who had done this many times before.
"Elliott." Her voice carried no warmth, no malice—just the flat efficiency of a woman delivering a message. "Ms. Moss would like to see you."
The sandwich sat untouched on the table. Elliott looked at it for a moment—the stale bread, the thin layer of mustard, the single slice of turkey that had seen better days. Then he looked up at Julie.
Something settled inside him. Not peace, exactly. But acceptance. The dread that had lived in his chest for two and a half weeks finally quieted, replaced by a strange, hollow calm. He'd been waiting for this. Dreading it. And now that it was here, the uncertainty was worse than whatever lay behind that dark wooden door.
"Okay," Elliott said.
He stood. He didn't clear his spot or wrap his sandwich. What would be the point?
Julie turned and walked. Elliott followed.
The hallway stretched ahead of them—beige walls, gray carpet, doors that all looked the same. Julie's heels kept their metronome rhythm. Elliott's shoes were silent beside them. They passed the cubicle farm, where the latest new hire sat typing in what had once been Samuel's chair, then Dennis', then someone else's before that. The cycle continued, unbroken, indifferent.
Julie stopped at the door at the far end of the floor. Dark wood, polished to a mirror finish. A brass nameplate gleamed under the hallway lights:
HARPER MOSS
CEO
Julie knocked twice—sharp, precise raps—and opened the door without waiting for a response.
"Elliott is here, Ms. Moss."
She stepped aside, gesturing for him to enter with a small tilt of her head. Her expression remained neutral, but something flickered behind her eyes—pity, perhaps, or just the professional detachment of a woman who had opened this door too many times to count.
Elliott crossed the threshold.
The office was exactly as imposing as he'd imagined. Dark wood paneling lined the walls, warm under recessed lighting that cast everything in a golden glow. The carpet was thick—his shoes sank into it with each step. A massive oak desk dominated the center of the room, its surface immaculate except for a single laptop, a crystal water glass, and a small stack of documents held together by a silver clip.
And behind the desk sat Harper Moss. She was taller than he'd expected, even seated.
Harper Moss's fingers danced across the laptop keys with the practiced ease of someone who had typed a thousand commands that reshaped people's lives. The clacking filled the silence of the office—sharp, rhythmic, deliberate. Elliott stood in the center of the room, the thick carpet swallowing the sound of his shifting weight. The golden light from the recessed fixtures caught the curve of her cheek, the slight upturn of her lips, the way her light brown eyes remained fixed on the screen with absolute focus. She didn't look up. She didn't acknowledge him. She simply continued typing as if the man standing before her was nothing more than furniture she hadn't yet decided to rearrange.
Then her fingers stopped. One final keystroke—Enter—and the silence rushed back in like water filling a void. Harper closed the laptop with a soft click and leaned back in her chair, her gaze lifting to meet Elliott's for the first time. The smile that spread across her face was exactly like the one in her LinkedIn photo—composed, sharp, knowing. It was the smile of a woman who had already decided how this conversation would end before it began.
"Elliott." She said his name like she was tasting it. "Hello."
She gestured toward the single chair positioned before her desk—a deliberate invitation, a small theater of hospitality that both of them knew was a performance. Elliott moved forward, his legs carrying him with a hesitance he hoped she couldn't read in his stride. He sat. The leather was cool against his back.
Harper studied him the way a collector might study a specimen pinned under glass. Her eyes traced the lines of his face, the tension in his shoulders, the way his hands gripped the armrests. She tilted her head slightly, and something shifted in her expression—not softness, but recognition. The kind of recognition that came from watching someone for a long time.
"I've noticed you, Elliott." Her voice was smooth, unhurried, carrying the cadence of someone who never needed to raise her volume to command a room. "You're not like the others, are you? You have questions. You've had questions since the day you walked in, haven't you?"
Elliott felt something cold slide down his spine. She'd been watching him. Not casually, not in passing—watching. The way a predator watches from the tree line, patient and certain. He opened his mouth, but no sound came. Instead, he nodded—a small, vulnerable motion that felt like an admission of guilt he couldn't name.
Harper mirrored the nod, her smirk deepening by a fraction.
"Well, let me start by saying that, as much as I appreciate your curiosity, your story will end just like the others." She paused, letting the words settle like dust in the warm air. "But I'd love to humor you. It's been so long since anyone has had any intellectual curiosity around here."
She stood. The motion was fluid, unhurried—rising from her chair with the grace of someone who had never once been rushed by anything or anyone. She came around the desk, and as she approached, Elliott became acutely aware of her height. She was tall—taller than him, even—and the heels she wore added another three inches that made the difference feel architectural. Her pencil skirt hugged the generous curve of her hips, and her blouse, buttoned only halfway, revealed the swell of cleavage that moved with each step. She smelled expensive—something warm and floral with an undertone of something sharper, almost metallic.
She stopped two feet from him. Close enough that he had to tilt his chin up to meet her eyes. The power dynamic was physical now, not just psychological. She stood over him, and he sat in the chair she'd provided, and the geometry of it said everything words didn't need to.
"Ask me one question, Elliott." Her voice dropped to something almost intimate. "What do you most want to know?"
The air between them felt thick, charged with something Elliott couldn't name. Her presence was overwhelming—not because she was physically imposing, but because of the absolute certainty that radiated from her like heat from a furnace. She was a woman who had never been disobeyed. A woman who surrounded herself with people who understood their place. And standing here, in her office, with her eyes locked onto his, Elliott understood with terrible clarity that he was already in that category. He just hadn't accepted it yet.
The question formed before he could stop it—rising from somewhere deep in his chest, from the place where two and a half weeks of confusion and dread had been compressed into a single, desperate need to understand.
"What is the point of the work?"
The words hung in the golden light. Elliott's voice had been steady, but barely. He watched Harper's face, searching for a reaction—a crack in the composure, a flicker of surprise, anything that might tell him he'd asked the right question.
Harper Moss smiled.
It was not the composed, professional smile from before. This one was different—wider, warmer, touched with something that might have been genuine delight. She looked at him the way a teacher might look at a student who had finally grasped a concept that everyone else had missed. Or perhaps the way a cat looks at a mouse that has done something unexpectedly clever.
"Oh," she said softly, almost to herself.
Harper Moss let the silence stretch after Elliott's question, her lips curving into a smile that held both amusement and something sharper—disappointment, perhaps, softened by understanding. She tilted her head, studying him the way one might study a puzzle that had revealed itself to be simpler than expected.
"The question is a bit disappointing," she said, her tone conversational, almost gentle. "But I suppose, if I were in your shoes, that would be the most pressing answer I'd want."
She began to pace slowly around the chair where Elliott sat, her heels sinking into the carpet with each measured step. The movement was languid, predatory—the kind of circling that suggested she had all the time in the world and he had none.
"A small, localized variation on the philosophical question of 'why am I here,'" she continued, her smirk deepening. "Asked of your... creator."
The word hung in the warm air between them. Harper seemed to savor it, rolling it around in her mouth like a fine wine. She stopped pacing and leaned against the edge of her desk, crossing her arms beneath her considerable chest.
"The work, Elliott, is more or less meaningless. To me. To you." Her voice carried the casual certainty of someone stating immutable facts. "It means something to the people paying me to get results, but it's just as menial as you probably guessed early on. You're the equivalent of a machine—doing brainless work because that's what the market demands."
She pushed off the desk and walked toward him again, each step deliberate, each movement calculated to remind him of exactly where he stood in the hierarchy of this room.
"You're not special," Harper said softly, almost kindly. "But you knew that already, didn't you?"
Elliott lowered his gaze, the weight of her words pressing down on his shoulders like hands. There was no denying it. He was one step above a chimpanzee, banging away on keys to make someone else's life easier. The humiliation was intellectual, existential—and she delivered it with the precision of a surgeon's scalpel.
Harper turned back toward her desk, the motion fluid and unhurried. She opened the top drawer with a soft click and reached inside. When her hand emerged, it held a roll of silver duct tape.
Elliott stared at it. The object didn't belong here—not in this sleek, minimalist office with its dark wood paneling and warm recessed lighting. Duct tape was crude, utilitarian, the kind of thing you found in a garage or a construction site. Its presence in Harper Moss's desk drawer was wrong in a way that made his stomach tighten.
Harper noticed his confusion and laughed—a low, rich sound that filled the room.
"I can see the question forming behind your eyes," she said, dangling the roll from her fingers. "Let me save you the trouble of asking."
She walked back toward him, her hips swaying with each step, the pencil skirt pulling tight against the generous curve of her thighs. When she reached his chair, she leaned down—close, too close—until the fabric of her blouse brushed against his cheek. Her scent overwhelmed him: warm florals, expensive perfume, and something underneath that was purely, undeniably her.
"I had a very large lunch today, Elliott," Harper murmured, her voice dropping to something intimate, conspiratorial. "Lobster bisque. Garlic bread. A rather ambitious portion of broccoli cheddar soup."
She straightened and began circling him again, the roll of tape swinging lazily from her fingers.
"And I've been holding something in all afternoon. Waiting for this moment. Waiting for you."
Elliott's hands tightened on the armrests. The implication crashed over him like a wave, and he felt the blood drain from his face.
"You see," Harper continued, her tone conversational now, as if she were explaining quarterly projections rather than what she clearly intended to do to him, "the work was never the point. The files were just busywork—something to keep you occupied until I was ready for you. Until I decided what to do with you."
She stopped in front of him and crouched down, bringing her face level with his. Her light brown eyes held his gaze with an intensity that pinned him in place more effectively than any restraint.
"You're going to learn what your real purpose is here," she said. "You're going to be my fart slave, Elliott."
The words landed like a physical blow. Elliott opened his mouth—to protest, to beg, to say something—but Harper was already moving. She tore a strip of duct tape from the roll with a sharp, decisive sound and pressed it firmly over his lips before he could form a single word.
"Shh," she whispered, pressing one finger against the silver tape. "None of that. You'll learn soon enough that begging doesn't work here. It never does."
She stood, admiring her handiwork. The tape sealed his mouth shut with brutal efficiency—crude, effective, dehumanizing. Elliott's muffled protests died behind the adhesive, reduced to nothing more than incoherent vibrations.
"Now," Harper said, smoothing her blouse and adjusting her skirt with the casual air of a woman preparing for a meeting. "Stand up. Walk to my chair. Get on your knees in front of it. Put your head back on the seat."
Elliott didn't move. His mind screamed at him to run, to fight, to do anything other than obey. But his body—traitorous, conditioned by two and a half weeks of watching others disappear—rose from the chair on trembling legs.
"Good boy," Harper murmured, and the words sent a shiver down his spine that he couldn't identify as fear or something worse.
She guided him forward with a hand on his shoulder, pressing him down until his upper back rested against the edge of the leather seat, his bound wrists—now wrapped in duct tape she'd applied with startling speed while he'd been processing her words. The position was degrading, exposing, and utterly helpless.
The sound of fabric sliding against skin filled the silence of the office—a soft, deliberate whisper that Elliott recognized even through his panic. He couldn't turn his head; the position Harper had forced him into held him locked in place, his bound wrists aching against the armrests. But he could hear. And when the sound stopped, and the soft click of heels approached from behind, he knew something fundamental had changed.
Harper stepped into his line of sight.
The pencil skirt was gone. In its place, she stood before him in nothing but her heels, her blouse still unbuttoned halfway, and a pair of black lace panties that she hooked with her thumbs and slid down her thighs with theatrical slowness. They pooled around her ankles, and she stepped out of them with the casual grace of a woman undressing in her own bedroom.
Her ass was—Elliott's mind rebelled against the thought, but it came anyway—perfect. Round, full, shapely in a way that seemed sculpted rather than grown. The skin was flawless, unblemished, catching the warm golden light of the office like something from a Renaissance painting. It was the kind of posterior that men would stare at on the street, would fantasize about, would write clumsy poetry about at two in the morning.
But this was not the street. This was not a fantasy. And Harper Moss was not offering him anything worth fantasizing about.
She stretched in front of him—arching her back, rolling her hips, letting the muscles of her glutes flex and release in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. It was deliberate, performative, designed to draw his eyes and remind him of exactly what was about to happen to him.
"You know," Harper said, her tone conversational, almost light, "I was diagnosed with IBS about three years ago."
She turned slightly, giving him a profile view as she bent forward and touched her toes—a stretch that pulled every muscle taut and made her ass jut out obscenely toward his face.
"Irritable Bowel Syndrome," she continued, straightening up and rolling her shoulders. "Sounds clinical, doesn't it? Almost harmless. But the reality is..." She trailed off, clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "Well. Let's just say that my digestive system has a mind of its own. And today—"
She patted her stomach with one hand, and the motion produced a low, ominous gurgle that Elliott could hear from three feet away.
"—today has been particularly active."
Harper began to walk toward him. Each step was slow, measured, her hips swaying with the confidence of a woman who knew exactly how much power her body held. The heels sank into the carpet. The distance between them shrank.
Six feet. Four feet. Two.
She turned her back to him.
Elliott's eyes went wide. He could see everything—the curve of her lower back, the dimples just above her tailbone, the way her cheeks parted slightly as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She was so close now that he could feel the heat radiating from her skin, could smell her—something warm and musky underneath the expensive perfume, something primal and undeniable.
Harper bent her knees slightly, angling herself. Her hole was inches from his face, and Elliott could see it flex—once, twice—a preamble to something he desperately did not want to experience.
"Here it comes, Elliott," Harper whispered, and there was genuine delight in her voice. The delight of a woman who had been waiting all afternoon for this exact moment. "I've been holding this in since lunch. Three hours of meetings. Three hours of clenching. Three hours of—"
She didn't finish the sentence.
BRRRRRRPPPPPTTTTTT
The sound was enormous—wet, forceful, reverberating off the walls of the office like a foghorn in a cathedral. The blast hit Elliott's face with physical force, a wall of hot, rancid air that slammed into his nostrils and eyes with the subtlety of a freight train. The smell was indescribable—sulfur and rot and something chemical, something that clawed at the back of his throat and made his eyes water instantly.
Elliott choked. His body convulsed against the chair, his muffled screams trapped behind the duct tape as the noxious cloud enveloped his head like a living thing. He tried to turn away, tried to breathe through his mouth, but the tape held firm and the smell was everywhere—in his nose, in his lungs, in his brain.
Harper showed no remorse. She didn't flinch, didn't apologize, didn't even pause. Instead, she lowered herself down—slowly, deliberately—and sat.
Full weight.
Her ass pressed against his face with the finality of a coffin lid closing. His nose was buried between her cheeks. The weight was immense—not crushing, but absolute, pinning him against the chair with the casual authority of a woman sitting on a piece of furniture.
Which, Elliott realized with a clarity that cut through the fog of his panic, was exactly what he was.
"There," Harper sighed, settling into position with a small, satisfied wiggle that ground her cheeks against his features. "That's much better."
She reached for something on the desk—her phone, Elliott realized, as he heard the tap-tap-tap of fingers on glass. The weight on his face didn't shift. The smell didn't dissipate. If anything, it intensified as the warmth of her body trapped the noxious cloud against his skin, recycling it through his nostrils with every desperate, shallow sniff he managed to take.
Harper Moss settled into the rhythm of productivity with the ease of a woman who had long ago mastered the art of multitasking. Her fingers danced across her phone screen—tap, tap, swipe, tap—composing emails with the same precision she brought to everything else. The weight of her body remained firmly planted on Elliott's face, her cheeks spread wide over his features like a warm, fleshy mask that allowed him only the barest slivers of air through the gaps at the edges.
She hummed softly to herself—a tuneless, contented sound—as she read through a message from one of her clients. Her hips shifted, a small, unconscious grind that pressed her left cheek harder against his nose for a moment before easing back. The motion was casual, almost absentminded, the way someone might adjust their position on a comfortable couch while watching television.
"Mmm," Harper murmured, tilting her head as she considered a response to an email. Her thumb hovered over the keyboard. "That's a good question, Kristin."
She wasn't talking to Elliott. She was talking to her phone, composing a reply to some executive who had no idea that the CEO she was emailing was currently sitting on the face of a bound, duct-taped subordinate. The absurdity of it—the sheer, gleeful wrongness—made her smile widen.
Then she felt it. A pressure, low in her gut, building with the slow inevitability of a tide coming in. The broccoli cheddar soup. The garlic bread. The lobster bisque, rich with cream and butter. All of it churning together in her irritable bowels, producing gas that demanded release with an urgency that bordered on the physical.
Harper shifted her weight to the left, tilting her hips so that her right cheek lifted just slightly from Elliott's face. The movement was subtle—barely an inch—but it created a gap, a narrow channel between her hole and his flared, desperate nostrils. She could feel him breathing—shallow, rapid, panicked breaths that tickled her skin.
"Here comes another one, pet," she whispered, almost tenderly.
PBBBBBBBRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTTT
This one was different from the first—longer, wetter, with a rattling undertone that vibrated through her cheeks and into Elliott's skull. The sound echoed off the office walls, obscene and unmistakable, a declaration of dominance that no boardroom presentation could ever match. The smell hit Elliott like a physical assault—hot, thick, rancid, carrying notes of sulfur and decay and something almost sweet in its putridity. It poured directly into his nostrils, filling his sinuses with a noxious cloud that left no corner of his respiratory system untouched.
Elliott convulsed beneath her. His body bucked and writhed against the chair, his bound hands pulling uselessly at the armrests, his muffled screams vibrating against her skin like the buzzing of a trapped insect. He tried to turn his head, tried to create space, tried to do anything to escape the suffocating blanket of her flatulence, but Harper's weight held him pinned with the casual authority of a paperweight on a stack of documents.
She laughed.
The sound was warm, genuine, delighted—the laugh of a woman watching something amusing on television, not the laugh of someone torturing a helpless man. She wiggled her hips, grinding her cheeks against his features with a slow, circular motion that smeared her scent across his face like war paint.
"Oh, Elliott," she sighed, returning her attention to her phone. "You're squirming so much. It's almost cute."
She typed another email—one-handed, her left hand resting casually on her thigh—while her ass continued to smother the man beneath her. The disconnect between her actions was staggering: professional correspondence on one surface, human degradation on the other. She balanced both with the same effortless competence.
"You know," Harper continued, her tone conversational, as if they were having coffee in the break room rather than engaging in something that would constitute multiple felonies in a just world, "I'm technically still your boss."
She paused, considering.
"Well. For a bit longer, anyway."
The words hung in the air—or rather, they hung in the toxic miasma that had replaced the air around Elliott's face. His nostrils were burning. His eyes watered. The smell had seeped into his skin colonizing him at a molecular level. He felt dizzy, lightheaded, as if his brain was being slowly starved of oxygen and replaced with something far less breathable.
Harper felt his struggles weaken beneath her. The frantic bucking had subsided into feeble twitches, the muffled screams into whimpers that vibrated against her skin like the purring of a dying engine. She smiled—satisfied, proprietary, the smile of a woman watching her investment mature.
"That's it," she murmured. "Just relax into it. You'll get used to the smell eventually."
She didn't believe that, of course. No one got used to it. That was the point.
A minute passed. Then another. Harper answered three more emails, scheduled a meeting for the following Tuesday, and reviewed a quarterly report that her assistant had flagged for her attention. All while sitting on Elliott's face. All while his world shrank to the suffocating confines of her ass cheeks and the noxious cloud she'd trapped between them.
Then she felt it again.
Harper felt the resistance beneath her fading like a candle guttering in a draft. The frantic bucking had long since subsided into feeble twitches, and now even those were growing sparse—Elliott's body going limp, his struggles reduced to the occasional involuntary spasm of a man drowning in her scent. She frowned, glancing down at the phone in her hand. The quarterly report could wait.
She didn't want him passing out just yet. Where was the fun in that?
Harper planted her hands on her thighs and lifted herself up—slowly, deliberately, letting her cheeks peel away from Elliott's face with a soft, obscene sound. The separation created a vacuum, and she could feel the desperate rush of air as his nostrils flared wildly, his chest heaving as he gasped for oxygen with the frantic urgency of a drowning man breaking the surface.
That was exactly what she'd been waiting for.
She tilted her hips, angling herself so that her hole was directly above his wide open nostrils. The pressure in her gut had been building for the last minute—a deep, churning gurgle that she'd been suppressing, savoring, waiting for the perfect moment to unleash.
"Fresh air, Elliott?" Harper taunted, her voice dripping with mock sympathy. "Here. Have some more of mine instead."
BRRRRAAAAPPPPPPPBBBBTTTTT
This one was different. Heavier. Wetter. The sound had a thickness to it, a density that spoke of fermentation and rot—of broccoli and cheddar soup curdling in her irritable bowels for hours, producing something that transcended mere flatulence and entered the realm of biological warfare. The smell hit Elliott's upturned face like a hammer—cheesy, rancid, with an undertone of something green and sulfurous that coated the inside of his nsotrils like oil.
Elliott moaned.
It was not a sound a human being should make—a low, guttural, deeply tortured wail that came from somewhere primal, somewhere beyond language or reason. The sound of a creature in extremis, pushed past the boundaries of what flesh could endure.
Harper laughed.
The sound was bright, musical, utterly at odds with the horror she was inflicting. She lowered herself back down—full weight, no mercy—and sealed Elliott's face back between her cheeks with the finality of a tomb door swinging shut. The noxious cloud she'd deposited directly into his nose was now trapped against his skin, recycling through his flared nostrils with every shallow, desperate breath.
"There we go," Harper murmured, settling back into position with a satisfied wiggle. She picked up her phone again, scrolling through her inbox as if nothing had happened. "That's better. Can't have you passing out on me yet, can we?"
She felt Elliott's body trembling beneath her—fine, involuntary shivers that vibrated through her cheeks like the buzzing of a low-frequency current. His moans had devolved into something quieter, the sounds of a man who had passed beyond panic into a numb, dissociative acceptance.
Harper smiled and began typing another email.
Elliott's body shuddered beneath Harper's weight—a violent, full-body tremor that started in his shoulders and rippled down through his spine like an electrical current. It felt almost like an orgasm in its intensity, the way every nerve ending fired at once, every synapse screaming in unison—but it was the terrible opposite. There was no pleasure here, no release, only the absolute annihilation of every sense by the putrid stench that poured into his body through his flared, desperate nostrils. The smell had become a living thing inside him, colonizing his sinuses, his throat, his lungs, replacing oxygen with something foul and chemical and wrong.
He groaned—a low, pained sound that vibrated against the warm flesh pressed against his mouth. His face felt flattened, compressed, the cartilage of his nose mashed between Harper's cheeks like a grape beneath a boot. The weight was absolute, inescapable, and Harper showed no signs of shifting.
She didn't even notice.
Her fingers continued their steady rhythm across the phone screen—tap, tap, swipe—composing a response to some board member's inquiry about Q3 projections. Her brow furrowed slightly in concentration, her lips pressing together as she considered her wording. The professional mask she wore was impeccable, betraying nothing of what was happening beneath her.
Then her body betrayed her.
It started as a soft rumble—barely audible, more felt than heard—a gentle vibration that rolled through her cheeks and into Elliott's already tortured face. Her hole puckered, relaxed, and released a soft, bubbly fart that burbled against his nostrils with the casual indifference of a pot of water reaching a gentle simmer.
pffft...blub...blub...pffft
Harper didn't acknowledge it. Didn't pause. Didn't even blink. Her thumb kept moving, her eyes stayed fixed on the screen, and the fart dissipated into the trapped atmosphere between her cheeks like it had never happened. To her, it hadn't. It was background noise. Autonomic function. The cost of doing business.
But to Elliott, it was another nail in his coffin.
The smell had layers now—building upon itself, compounding, each new emission adding to the toxic soup that filled his sinuses. His nostrils burned. The world beyond Harper's ass had ceased to exist, replaced by a singular, all-consuming reality of flesh and stench and suffocation.
Harper shifted her weight slightly—a small adjustment, the kind a woman makes when she's been sitting too long in one position. The motion tilted her hips, created a momentary gap between her right cheek and Elliott's face, and in that gap, pressure built.
She felt it coming. Didn't bother to clench.
BRRRRPPPPBBBBTTTTT
Elliott's body was becoming actively weaker. He could feel it—a slow, systematic dismantling of his physical capabilities, as if the stench was dissolving him from the inside out. His muscles refused to obey simple commands. His thoughts grew sluggish, syrupy, each one requiring enormous effort to formulate and then dissolving before it could be completed.
Harper kept working.
She was reviewing a contract now, her eyes scanning clauses with the focused intensity of a woman who had built an empire on attention to detail. Her left hand rested on her thigh, fingers drumming a soft, unconscious rhythm. Her right hand held the phone at the perfect angle for reading. Between her thighs, a man was dying.
She didn't care.
Another gurgle built in her gut—deeper this time, more insistent. She could feel it churning through her intestines, gathering force, recruiting new particles of fermenting matter as it traveled. The lobster bisque. The garlic bread. The three cups of coffee she'd consumed before lunch. All of it contributing to something greater than the sum of its parts.
Elliott's body began to twitch.
It started in his fingers—a fine, involuntary trembling that spread up through his wrists, his forearms, his shoulders. His legs jerked, his heels drumming a frantic, arrhythmic tattoo against the carpet. His back arched, then collapsed, then arched again, each spasm more violent than the last.
It felt like suffocating.
Because he was suffocating.
His body was desperate for something—anything—that wasn't more farts. Oxygen. Clean air. The memory of fresh-cut grass or rain on hot pavement or any of the thousand small mercies that the living take for granted. But Harper's ass offered no mercy. Only more of the same. Only more stench, more heat, more weight, more nothing.
The pressure in her gut reached critical mass.
BRRRRAAAAPPPPPPPBBBBTTTTTTT
The fart ripped through the silence of the office like a thunderclap—long, sustained, rattling with a wetness that made Harper's cheeks vibrate. She delivered it directly down Elliott's nose with the casual precision of a woman pouring herself a glass of wine. No hesitation. No acknowledgment. No fucks given.
Elliott shook.
Violently.
The world dissolved.
It didn't fade gracefully—didn't slip away like a sunset or melt like ice cream on hot pavement. It simply ceased. One moment, Elliott was drowning in the suffocating embrace of Harper Moss's flatulence, his body convulsing with the violent tremors of a man pushed past every conceivable limit. The next, there was nothing. No smell. No weight. No sound. Just the velvet blackness of unconsciousness wrapping around him like a burial shroud.
Harper felt the change immediately. The trembling stopped. The feeble twitching ceased. Beneath her, Elliott's body went slack—not the temporary relaxation of a man catching his breath, but the absolute, boneless stillness of a puppet whose strings had been cut. She could feel his breathing slow to a shallow, barely perceptible rhythm against her skin.
She chuckled.
"Night night, Elliott," Harper whispered, her voice soft with something that might have been affection if it hadn't been so thoroughly drenched in cruelty.
She didn't move. Didn't rise. Didn't grant him the mercy of fresh air even in his unconsciousness. Instead, she settled more comfortably into her seat—his face—and returned her attention to her phone. The quarterly report wasn't going to review itself.
Hours passed.
The office lights dimmed as the automated system shifted to evening mode. Outside, the city skyline glittered with the indifferent beauty of a thousand windows reflecting the dying sun. Harper worked through her inbox, answered two calls from board members, and ate a late dinner of leftover Thai food at her desk—all while remaining seated on her unconscious subordinate.
The farts came and went as they pleased. A soft, bubbly one around 7 PM. A longer, wetter emission around 8:30 that she barely registered. A sharp, staccato burst around 9:15 that she acknowledged only with a slight shift of her hips. Each one seeped into Elliott's unresisting face, but without his struggles to entertain her, the act had lost its luster. He was functional now—nothing more than a utilitarian symbol of her total dominance. A seat cushion that happened to be made of human flesh.
Eventually, Harper sighed and set down her phone.
"Time to go home," she murmured to no one in particular.
---
The SUV's engine hummed with the steady, mechanical indifference of a machine that had no opinion about its cargo. Street lights passed in rhythmic succession—bright, dark, bright, dark—each one casting a fleeting slash of orange across Elliott's face before vanishing into the night.
His eyes fluttered open.
Vision blurred. The world was a smear of shadows and light, formless and meaningless. He could make out the back of a front seat. A silhouette in the passenger side that moved with a familiar sharpness—Julie's angular shoulders, her severe bob, the rigid set of her jaw that she never seemed to relax even when she wasn't watching.
The rumble of tires on asphalt vibrated through his skull. The freeway. They were on the freeway.
Elliott tried to speak. Tried to move. His lips parted, but only a weak, wet sound escaped—something between a groan and a whimper that Julie didn't acknowledge. She was looking at her phone, her face illuminated by its cold blue light, her expression unreadable.
Then the smell hit him again.
It was still there—clinging to his face like a second skin, embedded in the folds of his nostrils, coating the back of his throat. Harper's gas. The memory of it, the lingering molecular traces that refused to dissipate, triggered something primal in his hindbrain. His stomach lurched. His vision swam. The street lights blurred into a single, elongated streak of orange.
Elliott's eyes rolled back in his head.
He was gone again.
---
Sunlight.
Not the harsh fluorescent glow of Harper's office or the passing amber of street lights. This was real sunlight—warm, golden, unfiltered—pouring through a window with the gentle insistence of a friend shaking your shoulder to wake you.
Elliott's eyes fluttered open.
A ceiling. His ceiling. The familiar water stain in the corner that he'd been meaning to paint over for months. The ceiling fan with one blade that wobbled slightly if you set it above medium speed.
His bedroom.
Elliott lay still for a long moment, staring upward with the blank incomprehension of a man who had forgotten how to be a person. His body ached in ways he couldn't articulate—a deep, pervasive soreness that went beyond muscle fatigue into something more fundamental, as if his very bones had been compressed and then released.
He shook his head slowly, the motion sending a dull throb through his temples.
A dream. It had to be a dream. The office. The chair. Harper's weight on his face. The—
He reached toward his nightstand for his phone and knocked something to the floor. Paper. The sound of it sliding across hardwood was soft, almost apologetic.
Elliott rolled toward the edge of the bed, his body protesting every inch of movement. His fingers found the paper on the floor—thick, expensive stock, the kind that cost more per sheet than his lunch. He brought it up to his face, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the morning light.
The letterhead was embossed. Gold foil on cream paper. A logo he recognized immediately.
Plume Group International
Below it, in simple impersonal type font:
Elliott,
Thank you for your service to Plume Group International. It is at this time, however, that we must terminate your employment effective immediately. Please find the enclosed severance payment to assist in your transitionary period.
We wish you all the best in your future endeavors.
Sincerely,
H. Moss
CEO
The weight of his firing hit Elliott like a truck.
Not a physical blow—his body had already endured far worse than that in the last twenty-four hours. This was something deeper, something that landed in the pit of his stomach and spread outward like a slow-acting poison. The letter sat in his lap, the gold embossing catching the morning light with an almost mocking elegance. H. Moss. Not even a full name. Just an initial, as if the woman who had used his face as a personal toilet seat for hours couldn't be bothered to sign her whole name to his termination.
Despite everything—despite the torture, the suffocation, the systematic destruction of his dignity—something about being fired after all that felt like a worse insult. It was one thing to be used. It was another to be used and then discarded. The cruelty of it had layers, like Harper's farts. The violation came first, and then the dismissal, and somehow the dismissal cut deeper because it reduced everything he'd endured to nothing. Not even a footnote. Just a line item on some HR spreadsheet: Employee terminated. Reason: N/A.
Elliott stared at the ceiling, his jaw tight.
This must be what happened to all the others.
The thought crystallized slowly, rising through the fog of exhaustion and residual trauma like a bubble through molasses. Paul's pale face when Julie summoned him. The three-week tenure. The revolving door of male employees who vanished around lunchtime and never came back. Elliott had wondered about it—had even asked questions, which in retrospect probably marked him as someone who needed to be dealt with sooner rather than later.
Now he understood.
They were all used. Every single one of them. Taken into Harper's office, subjected to whatever particular brand of humiliation she had in store that day, and then disposed of like—
Elliott almost laughed.
Like toilet paper.
The analogy was too perfect. Too on-the-nose.
An hourly employee's worth to the executive class, distilled into its purest form: take their shit, then throw them away.
His fingers tightened around the letter, crinkling the expensive paper.
Then he remembered the check.
Elliott rolled out of bed, his body screaming in protest. Every muscle felt like it had been wrung out like a dishcloth and then left to dry in the sun. His bare feet hit the hardwood floor, and he winced, steadying himself against the nightstand before lowering himself to his knees to search.
The check had slid further than the letter, skittered under the edge of the bed frame. Elliott reached beneath it, fingers brushing against dust bunnies and a lost sock before finding the small slip of paper.
He brought it up to his face.
His eyes went wide.
$75,000.
The number didn't register at first. It sat there on the check—seventy-five thousand dollars, written out in both numerals and words, bearing the same embossed Plume Group International logo and the same impersonal signature—and Elliott's brain simply refused to process it. Seventy-five thousand dollars. For two weeks of work. Well two weeks of work and half a day of something that felt like cruel, medieval torture.
He sat back on his heels, the check held loosely between his fingers, the morning light illuminating the water stain on the ceiling above him.
It wasn't enough to retire on. Not even close. But it was more than enough to breathe. To take some time. To find a new job without the desperate, clawing urgency of a man watching his savings account dwindle to nothing. He could take a short break—even a vacation, if he wanted. Regroup. Reconsider. Figure out what the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life now that he knew what this world really looked like from the inside.
Elliott looked down at the check again.
Seventy-five thousand dollars.
The corner of his mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Not yet. Something more complicated than that—a strange, bitter, almost amused expression that carried within it the full weight of everything he'd endured and everything he'd gained.
He smirked.
Maybe it was all worth it.