The Orc from the Office (Claws & Cubicles Book 2)

The key to making relationships work is setting healthy boundaries. Or, so I’ve heard. And that’s the advice I give to friends because it sounds like a smart plan. Just because I’m mate-bonded with Khent doesn’t mean I’m getting unhealthily attached. I’m just dating him the way I would date anyone.

Which starts with stealing one of his shirts.

Not really stealing, just borrowing it.

There isn’t a lot of mattress space left in my bed when he stays over, so I roll off the top of him and land a little too hard on the floor.

I grab his button-down shirt off the floor and pull it on like it’s a bathrobe, rolling the sleeves up a number of times before I head to the kitchen to make my usual eggs and toast.

“One or two eggs?”

“I don’t really eat breakfast,” he shrugs. He leans against my cabinetry as he threads his belt through his.

“You’ve said, and I cannot believe that,” I tell him. I can’t imagine not eating even a little in the morning. Usually, my stomach is what compels me to get out of bed. Two eggs barely sustain me till lunch, and eyeing Khent I can’t believe he doesn’t have at least a dozen.

“It’s my deepest flaw,” he shrugs, rolling his eyes with a smile.

I turned the stove off and slid the eggs onto their awaiting toast. I turned away from them to give Khent a good morning kiss, but of course it becomes anything but brief.

He takes a knee to come down to my height, shuffling his shirt off of me, putting his arms through the sleeves even as my hands thread into his hair.

When he’s halfway through putting his shirt on, he curls an arm around me, pulling me in and letting out this big sigh like he’s the most content person alive.

When he’s got me gathered up in his arms like this, I wish he would never let go. That the world could fall away and it would be just this until my stomach completely rebels.

But then my ‘You should be leaving now’ alarm starts to beep, making us shuffle away from each other. Overlord, I’m not even dressed yet.

“Should we both be late?” he hums, taking in my now borrowed-shirt-less body. One of these days, I’m going to convince him to leave without it.

“That’s a dangerous question,” I return, shivering as his gaze sweeps down my skin.

“We could be very, very late.”

I tilt my neck back and feel the way his tusks graze my skin as he trails kisses down my neck and collar. My hands trace down his shoulders… and start buttoning up his shirt.

We’ve already been very, very, very late twice.

“You go, I’ll catch up,” I tell him. “Probably in the parking lot because you’ll have passed out from not having breakfast.”

“Hasn’t happened yet.”

“One day,” I tug on his tie and he leans in for another kiss goodbye. He doesn’t even fully kiss me back, he’s smiling too hard, the nerd.

Then he’s out to go pick up a change of clothes from his place before work, and I’m standing naked in my kitchen, waffling back and forth between getting ready and kind of staring at the door after him.

I do mean it. I can see a day when our routines will have finally meshed together seamlessly. And I will finally make him see how vital a meal breakfast is.

This has been our routine for the last week or so. Somehow, I still get to work mostly on time, and Bill has observed my abnormally chipper mood of late.

“I don’t want to get into trouble with HR,” I text Khent during a particularly boring meeting, my phone hidden behind a stack of binders I have on the table. “Or Monsters Resources.”

Employee relationships aren’t exactly forbidden, but considering the bureaucratic hoops you have to jump through so the company can guard itself against sexual harassment lawsuits, personal injury suits, property damage filings, and other things, they might as well be.

I’ve led enough employees through exactly that kind of paperwork. I’ve done the explaining what it all means and the legal clauses and how all this is important to maintaining a professional evil work environment.

I’ve seen employees go from puppy love to falling out of love after filling out everything in triplicate. It’d honestly be easier just to make pre-nups for everyone involved.

“Think about the paperwork we’d have to do for MR and HR,” I type, not really giving him a chance to respond to my first text. “Especially after all the paperwork following up the filing cabinet incident.”

Especially considering we were instructed to avoid each other to avoid liability issues.

After a few minutes of me constantly unlocking my phone to see if he responded yet, he sends back, “We’ll be fine.”

He adds a smiley with a capital C instead of a singular parentheses. C:

I like his nonconforming smiley faces. They seem bigger and goofier than the standard parenthesis conveys.

“Still, maybe we can keep things on the down-low at least.”

A little bit later, he sends me a lowercase face. c:

I bite back against my own grin. Who knew there was this adorkable Orc hiding in the IT department all these years?

All around the meeting table, my coworkers look like they’re either falling asleep with their eyes trained on the powerpoint presentation, or like they’ve gone to some deep recess of their soul. No wonder nothing gets accomplished in meetings and we end up repeating everything again in follow up emails.

I school my face into something similarly bored. I wouldn’t want them to wonder what’s up with me by looking excited to get to work.

It was a feeling that was increasingly hard to keep under wraps. My mind would wander into coming up with excuses to interact with Khent at work. The next few days were a blur between the heightened moments of passing notes to each other tucked into documents, pretending not to look at each other too much when we passed in the hallway, but still brushing shoulders. In stolen moments, we’d been exchanging flirty emails that are not nearly as covert as we thought we were, about floppy drives and uploading my data onto his hard drive.

I’m happier than I’ve been in a long time.

The next day, I stop in the office lobby, lingering by the front desk. I’m pretending I have a reason to fritter away moments because I don’t want to go up to my desk just yet. I know I said I wanted to keep things hush at work, but I want one more glance at him before I start my day.

I catch Khent out of the corner of my eye and try not to look too excited at the prospect of running into him in the lobby. We see each other so sparingly in person during work, it gives me a little rush just to walk past him. Something about being around him makes the skirt I’m wearing feel so much shorter.

I swear I can feel the heat radiating off of him as he brushes past. I gripped the counter of the lobby desk as I scribble nonsense on a sign-in page that is really just for visitors. Goosebumps raise up on my skin and the familiar ache between my legs hits me so suddenly my knees shake. It’s really for the better that we spend most of our work day several floors apart.

Since our relationship started and I’ve been seeing Khent after work and getting my back blown out nightly, the Blood Fever has all but died down. I barely notice it during the day, unless I run into him and it flares up again. I’d imagine that there’s likely also something about being pumped full of Orc cum nightly that calms the raging fever down. But I’m no scientist.

Maybe it’s because of that oil stuff I got from the holistic place. I set up a little mug warmer at my desk that I put a drop of it on every few hours. It’s tempting to just dab a little on my wrists and rub them together like a perfume, and just smell that warmth incarnate on myself all day. The thing that stops me from doing that is the memory of buying that little bottle and the girl behind the counter telling me that a lot of people use it as lube. And after some additional research, apparently using it as lube during the mating ritual is pretty common.

But during a company-wide meeting all I could do was sit and thirst from across the room, gripping my chair and hoping I wasn’t going to charge across the table to climb him like a tree. The thought had crossed my mind several times and almost seemed like a good idea many of them.

I hold still and scribble circles on the corner of the page like I’m trying to get ink out of the pen while Khent crosses to the elevators and presses the button. I breathe slowly and carefully listening as it arrives, the doors trundle open and he gets in, the carriage creaking under his weight.

I don’t hear the doors close though, and turn around to look.

He’s holding the elevator door open and as my eyes meet his, he raises his brows.

Sharing an elevator with Khent. Heat blooms across my skin at the thought and my body moves before my brain fully processes it.

The elevator door closes behind me and I’m hooking my fingers in Khent’s belt loops, looking up at him. He glances away, holding back a smile.

Even with the elevator’s mirrored walls, I can feel how little space there is in here. When I turn around to push the button for my floor, my ass brushes up against him. I stretch and do it again just so he knows it was entirely on purpose.

The elevator’s machinery begins to whir, the floor jerks and I let myself use it to fall back against him. I tilt my head back against his sort of the lower end of his chest to glance up at him through my eyelashes. I can see the color in his cheeks just before he lifts a hand to trace my jawline. His other hand drags up my hip, palming the fabric of my skirt upwards. I grind back against him harder.

“I take it we need to go to your office and fill out some paperwork?” he murmurs, voice so low it goes straight to my clit.

“Fuck the paperwork,” I gasp, gathering up fistfuls of my pencil skirt, hiking it up enough to actually do more than tease. His hand curls fully around my thigh, giving me something to grind desperately against.

My heart is beating out of my chest when he leans forward to hit the emergency stop switch, bringing the elevator to a halt between floors.

The lurch sends me forward, I catch myself against the mirrored wall, the cool surface a stark contrast against my skin. Khent drags a thick finger through my cunt, until it’s slick enough to enter me.

I’m still a little sore from our antics last night at my apartment, but in some ways that heightens the sensation of it all. I move my hips experimentally as his finger slides in and out, the smallest of moans riding on my breath.

We don’t have much time before someone notices the elevator isn’t working, but the thought of being able to watch ourselves in the mirrored walls is making me wetter by the second.

I turn around, unbuttoning my blouse. His cock is straining against his pants, which I imagine must have some fantastic tensile strength to be able to contain him.

“I need you in me. Now. Right now,” I breathe, a combination of words that’s becoming a habit, almost a ritual between us.

The look he gives me is the same look he’s given me the last few nights between my place and his. He raises an eyebrow, a smile tucked away behind a tusk. He thinks he’s so fucking cute, I swear I’m going to bite him if he tries telling me to ask politely again.

He corrals me into his arms, holds my chin, kissing my forehead, my nose, and mouth in turn. He wants to see how long he can tease me before I’m practically begging for his cock. I make another noise of impatience, staring at him, starting to undo his belt and zipper my goddamn self.

He rolls his eyes and takes a knee in front of me. It does make it easier for me, even if I have to stand on my tiptoes to get things started.

He lifts and steadies me with a hand on my hip with a familiarity that almost makes me blush. I bite back any comment about being able to do this myself. I watch the reflection as he guides me down onto the head of his cock. My hands find fistfuls of his shirt as we start to move together, and I take more and more of him in me with each thrust. I’m not saying we should record porn of us, but I am surprised I’ve never seen human/Orc porn before.

He pushes my bra aside and dips his head to flick his tongue across one nipple, sucking and licking and kissing my tits, treating each of them in turn. As his tongue worked away at my breast, the pleasure he gave only increased the ache and need in my pussy. It snags my attention how he knows what I like, that a little more sensation while he’s rutting into me is enough to push me over the edge.

Somewhere between the sensation of and the sight of him pounding into me, I break.

“Fuck, Khent, I’m–” I can’t even manage a verb before I’m gasping for breath with a cry.

If there’s one thing the Blood Fever has taught me, his orgasm will quickly follow mine. I can feel his release course into me, hot and wet. I can’t think about how I’m going to figure out how to clean up after this, all I can do is ride the aftershocks of my orgasm and try not to rip the buttons off his shirt.

We slow our movements until it’s just our breathing, holding each other loosely, our foreheads touching, the way he held me in his gaze and the way I couldn’t even meet his eyes through my blush. It’s just a touch too intimate, even after all we’ve done together. It’s just something too much to know he’s looking at me like I’m wonderful and I can see that soft smile on him. I can’t put my finger on it, but it makes me want to take myself out of the equation. Like a sunlight so bright I need to shield my eyes from it. A warmth you could either melt or burn under.

I pull away first, running my hands through my hair and shaking off the afterglow.

My hair is a mess and my tits feel like they’ve been shuffled around in my bra.

I pull down my skirt from where it’s hiked up around my hips, despite the cum I can feel starting to stick between my thighs. When we’re sort of tidied up, he presses the button again, gets the elevator moving. A moment later the doors are opening on the IT department.

“Here’s where I get off,” he says, tucking his shirt in, cheeky smile and all.

I’m holding myself up against the elevator wall. I snort. “Yeah you do.”

He blushes, running a hand through his tousled hair. “I didn’t mean it like–”

“Yeah you did. See you later, nerd,” I return, scrunching my nose at him.

He waves goodbye to me and that little gesture makes my knees weak. The doors rattle shut and I’m left alone, smiling like an idiot.

I never thought it was possible to be this happy.

The elevator begins to move upwards again, and I push off the wall. My legs are starting to regain some amount of steadiness, but I’m definitely going to collapse in my chair once I get into my office.

I turn to the mirrored walls, no longer fogged up by two of us panting in these tight quarters, and start to adjust my appearance, hopeless as that seems. Even if I don’t run into anyone in the twenty feet from the elevator to my door, I still look like I’ve been jogging for an hour. Not to mention the cum still sticking between my thighs.

I’m fixing my hair when I spot it, and it makes my blood run cold.

The little red blink in a black lens tucked away in the ceiling corner.

It was never safe to be this happy.