Telling My Boss To Fuck Off!

Hi, here *waves*. This story is a part of the On the Job Story Event hosted by the phenomenal HeyAll.

Abstract: After five years of putting off her own career ambitions, Daphne quits her job during the 2021 ice storm. Her boss, Kyle, thinks she’s working from home on a report.

Disclaimer: This story is just a light romance about a workplace affair in a marketing company. If you like romance, comedy and a little bratty Dom/sub play, then hopefully you’ll enjoy it!

Thank you for reading, and thank you HeyAll for hosting this event!

As always, all characters are over eighteen, and all rights are reserved.

“Omigod, Daphne, you should have been a lawyer. Or a doctor. Or a pharmacist. Or, hell, even a manicurist. Anything else,” I mumbled under my breath as I typed up a report for my anal retentive boss, Kyle.

This Marketing Analyst job was only supposed to have been a short term gig. Two years tops. Just something to tide me over while I earned enough money to get my MBA, since my parents were putting all their savings (as well as their hopes and dreams) into my sister, Natalia’s, medical school education. But five years later, instead of the forecasted two, here I was, still doing the same old shit.

Playing devil’s advocate, the company I worked for would probably claim that I technically wasn’t doing exactly the same thing I’d been doing five years before. I wasn’t still just a Junior Marketing Analyst, like I’d been when I started; I was now a Senior Marketing Analyst. My job was no longer merely highlighting numbers in raw data and comparing regional sales; now, I was also entrusted with the responsibility of taking those highlighted numbers and plugging them into Excel-based charts and graphs.

Big whoop.

In reality, it was the same old shit and just came with a new title. My job promotion didn’t even come with an office or even a new desk. No: for five years, I’d been in the exact same spot, in the exact same position—still at my boss, Kyle’s, beck and call at the desk directly in front of his office door.

I hadn’t even been given a new desk chair! And I’d been in this job for so long that my butt had left a permanent dent in the seat; not that the company seemed to care about that at all. In fact, they probably saw it as evidence that I was a team player. Before COVID, I was expected to be at my desk, in that horrid, uncomfortable chair, for exactly seven hours a day with an hour’s break for lunch; no more and no less, unless I’d been preapproved for overtime. But because of COVID, my company was allowing me to work from home on alternate days, so long as my boss, Kyle, didn’t need me in the office.

So, why did I stay? After graduating at the bottom of my class from a bottom-tier college near my hometown in upstate New York, I thought that this job was probably the best I could do. Plus, there was the company’s “super seductive” 401(k) match, medical, full dental and a handful of other benefits. As a Senior Marketing Analyst, I was finally earning enough to live alone instead of with roommates (hooray: adulthood!)—although, most of my income went towards the rent on my tiny pre-war one-bedroom apartment in a walk-up in Long Island City.

If it wasn’t already clear enough: I wasn’t making bank. My new, inflated job title and slight salary raise barely could keep up with real world inflation! And I’d hit the ceiling of anything more I could achieve career-wise without further credentials. The only way I could achieve more and do more was to go back to school and get my Master’s degree in business. After five years of the same old shit, even the pay was no longer worth the agita.

Especially since I had to earn that pay by working for Kyle Campbell. Yeah, even his alliterated name was annoying! Granted, all the C-level heads of our company were impressed by him, and he was a well-known rising superstar in the advertising industry. But still: being a super successful, super brilliant, super accomplished businessman didn’t make up for him being suuuuuch a total douche. And neither did his handsome face, or how amazing he looked in a suit, or the sexy way he’d sometimes rake his fingers through his thick hair while he was thinking….

Wait…. I totally did not mean that last sentence!

What I meant was that working day in and day out with Kyle was completely draining. Literal torture. Despite my company’s official COVID policy, Kyle still regularly asked me to come into the office to work! My hours were from eight a.m. to five p.m., and as soon as his clock read eight o’one, Kyle would either call me into his office, or come to my desk to dictate a list of tasks and assignments as long as he was tall. And every assignment always had a million checkpoints that required me to go back and touch base with him, so that he could “make sure I knew what I was doing.” Insert rolled eyes here.

And no way a task could possibly take longer than he thought it should, or that a client might call and ask for last-minute changes that could push back the deadline. No way! If anything like that happened, then Kyle would literally come and hover over me all day, standing over me to watch me work and put his two-cents into whatever it was that I was doing.

I haaaaaated that, more than anything. So frustrating! Not only was his tall, broad physical presence totally and completely overbearing: I could feel the tension in his energy whenever he did that, and also—sigh—his expensive cologne would always smell so good….

I hated to admit it, but damn! Murcielago, I loved Kyle’s cologne! I liked it so much that, even as much as I hated to say anything to him that could potentially be interpreted as a compliment, I actually broke down before Christmastime and asked him to tell me what the scent was. “Why do you want to know?” he asked in his stern, serious bass voice. He raised a brow, as if he was just gearing up to get ready to reprimand me for some mistake that I’d made on a client document!

I gave a half-shrug and fiddled with an unruly strand of my blonde hair as I frowned and looked away in my uncertainty. I know it sounds dumb, but I hadn’t really considered what I’d say if Kyle asked me why I wanted to know (actually, to be perfectly honest, why should it have mattered to him why I wanted to know anyways?! I mean, come on! What was he going to do if I’d said, “I’m gonna spray it on my pillow at night before humping it.” Seriously?) But my gesture was probably a complete giveaway to him as I muttered, “I don’t know. I was just wondering.”

When he grinned devilishly at me and replied, “I think it’s because you love how I smell, and so you’re planning to buy me a bottle of it as a gift. I’m flattered, but don’t waste your money, Daphne,” I wasn’t sure what I wanted more: to split his skull open with my angry fist like One Punch Man, or for the floor to split open and swallow me up whole in my embarrassment!

I could feel my face steaming as I stammered, “Omigod, you’re so full of yourself. If you really must know, I was planning to get it for my boyfriend for Christmas! It stinks on you, but I think it would smell really great on him.” Spoiler alert: I didn’t have a boyfriend—that was all a lie. Technically, I had been kind of seeing this guy, Vinnie, and I thought things were getting serious, but TL;DR, Vinnie turned out to be a total, two-timing jerk, and thus, my love life was non-existent.

But Kyle didn’t know that. Nonetheless, he didn’t seem to like my answer. He grimaced as if I’d hurt his feelings, raised his chin as he looked down on me and was very stiff as he said, “I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about things like personal scent with colleagues,” and walked away!

That probably sounds very odd, but that was Kyle. He was very odd! He was in his early-to-mid thirties but acted as much an old-timey fossil as the old antique Dell desktop at my cubicle!

He begrudgingly accepted and read my emails, but preferred face-to-face meetings and landline phone calls. Texts, chats, instant messages, DMs and any other form of modern communication were an absolute no-no for him. And the worst of it was that he didn’t even blackline documents in Adobe; he wanted every draft of every document printed out on paper (single-sided no less!) so that he could hand write—in red ink, like a substitute teacher—his comments and corrections. Of course, icing on the cake: his handwriting was completely illegible.

So anyways, that morning had started like any other work day. I woke up late (FML!) and forgot that Kyle had asked me to come into the office that day, since my working from home would have caused him a minor inconvenience. I rushed to shower and dress, find a face mask that matched my outfit and ran like lightning to catch the Manhattan bound E-train to World Trade Center station.

Meanwhile, the news up and down the East Coast was all reporting that an ice storm was brewing: one that would likely hit in the afternoon, but definitely would be in full effect by the evening. The E-train was a ghost train; basically every other business in Manhattan that wasn’t already closed due to work-from-home situations related to COVID was closed because of the impending storm. Every business except the stingy, soul-sucking corporation that I worked for; no, of course, for them, a little thing like an ice storm wasn’t any reason to expect that people shouldn’t come to the office!

And Vice President of Market Research Kyle Campbell definitely didn’t seem to think that was a reason why any of his employees, especially me, should have a late or weird start to the day. “Hope everything’s okay with you,” he observed lightly as I made a point of it to angrily throw my purse and heavy parka on my cubicle’s coat hook before changing from my clunky snow boots to my work heels. I kept an eye on the news all morning, and saw that the ice storm projections were getting even worse. When I went to the break room to get coffee, I ran into my friends from the IT department, Fatima and Anne, and they gave me the lowdown on what was soon coming down the pipeline.

“The office is definitely going to close early. This storm is going to be hell, so the powers-that-be probably want to avoid any liability for keeping people here during dangerous conditions. We’re finalizing the security for the mass email that HR is going to send out to everyone,” Fatima explained as she made herself a cup of the generic K-Cup coffee.

“They’re being really nit-picky about the language in the email,” Anne said irritatedly, “They need to just go on and release it so we can make sure all employees get it! This storm is getting a lot worse.” She wrinkled her nose, and I wasn’t sure whether it was from disgust at the watery coffee or her skepticism as she added, “‘King Kyle’ is going to get the email, too, so don’t you dare let him act like he doesn’t know you’re supposed to leave early today.”

“So far, he’s been pretty subdued,” I said, “But my AmEx account report is due on Friday: fuck a storm. Kyle will probably end up riding my ass regardless.”

Fatima hummed and sucked her teeth. She grinned wickedly as she said, “He can ride my ass anytime,” and giggled apologetically as I rolled my eyes. “Sorry, Daffy, I know he’s a total dick to you sometimes. But still… he can get it! He’s so fine!”

Anne shook her head. “Yeah, but an ugly attitude can make even the most handsome guy unattractive.”

I sighed. I felt completely deflated. “And when it’s your boss that has a shitty attitude with you, it makes you feel like you’re the stupidest person in the world, and makes even the worst job in the world more unbearable.”

“You’re too good at what you do to feel so unappreciated, Daffy,” Anne said supportively. “You know we’d all miss seeing you everyday, but if this company doesn’t see all the value you bring, then maybe it’s time for you to start looking elsewhere.”

“And tonight’s as good a time as any,” Fatima added, “Cause you’re already going to be stuck at home due to the storm. They're saying it’s going to be bad. Like, road closures and subway closures bad. We’ll probably be sending out another email around two a.m. to tell people not to come into work tomorrow! This storm could go all weekend!”

“Don't jinx me! I actually hope it doesn’t,” Anne complained. “My parent’s thirtieth anniversary party is scheduled for this weekend. My brother and I have been preparing for this party for months! Getting all the decorations, and getting the catering stations and dance floor and everything all socially distanced!”

“Thirty years? With the same person?” Fatima shook her head and frowned. “No way. I can’t imagine myself with anybody for that long… but bring me a slice of their cake, okay?”

We said ciao for now and went back to our office spaces. Finally, just after eleven a.m., the company sent out the mass email to all employees letting everybody know that the office would be closing at noon. Even though everyone else started wrapping things up as soon as they received the email, I kept working on my report since I knew that Kyle was expecting it returned same-day.

“Omigod, Daphne, you should have been a lawyer. Or a doctor. Or a pharmacist. Or, hell, even a manicurist. Anything else,” I mumbled to myself under my breath as I typed.

I went through my memos, Kyle’s comments and my analytical notes several times before printing a final copy, knocking on his office door and setting the papers on his enormous desk. “I’m headed out now,” I explained politely, as if he hadn’t just received the exact same email that I, and thousands of other employees, had received. “The weather is starting to get really bad and I need to catch the Queens-bound train.”

Kyle never said anything appropriate, and he clearly wasn’t planning to use the ice storm as an opportunity to start. “Wait a minute, Daphne,” he ordered, as he set aside the document he’d been reading and began studying my report.

Sooooo frustrating! Sometimes, he was just difficult for literally no reason! It made me so angry watching him just silently reading my report: not moving, not saying anything—just scrutinizing my work for as many mistakes as he could find in the few minutes before the mandatory office closure!

He was so ornery that it just seemed like it had to be a given conclusion that he lived a miserable life. A sex starved life. One even more sex starved than my own. Sometimes, I just wished Kyle had a girlfriend or wife so he could go home and fuck his feelings out with her, instead of taking all his pent up irritation out on me. Because there was no way that he was this uptight with me about every single minuscule thing and also had someone sucking his dick on the reg!

…Or, did he?

And if he did, who was she? Was she pretty? Did he think she was smart? And could she actually make dour, obnoxious Kyle laugh?

And… why did it simultaneously make me jealous wondering who this imaginary mystery woman was???

I sighed deeply, trying to shake off my feelings. Kyle had made it abundantly clear over the past five years of working with him that our personal lives were off limits to one another. I knew practically nothing about him. He didn’t discuss his personal life, and didn’t even have any personal photos or knick knacks or anything in his office. And none of his personal life leaked into the office space either; he never had any guest visitors, had no family vacations to talk about, no personal calls, no leaving early for family emergencies. Nothing. I’d even tried to do some social media stalking and my searches had come up completely empty.

He’d also made it clear that he wasn’t interested in knowing anything about me either. He didn’t engage when I mentioned my vacation to Greece the previous summer, or talked about how my parents were doing as empty nesters upstate, or the couple of times that I told him about Natalia and that she was finishing medical school.

Fatima brought it up a couple of times in the break room, to widespread agreement among Anne and our other coworkers: “I mean guys, come on, it’s so obvious: Kyle Campbell probably has some kind of Fifty Shades-level whips and chains lifestyle going on, and doesn’t want the whole world to know that he’s a freak on the D-L! Think about it; he is a high-profile Vice President of a Fortune 500 company. He’s in direct line to be the CMO someday! He doesn't want all his personal business out there like that!”

It was hard enough to imagine straight-laced Kyle doing anything fun, let alone anything fetishy like bondage and dominance. As he flipped the pages in my report, I gave it a whirl, and tried to imagine him sitting at his desk wearing head-to-toe leather: a leather collar, leather vest, leather jeans, steel-toed leather combat boots and a flogger between his teeth. It was easy to imagine his muscular frame getting on his knees before me, but the get-up itself made me sputter as I tried to hold back my laughter at the thought of him frowning and begrudgingly calling me mistress as he asked me to whip him.

“Are you sure these are the numbers for the Southwest region rollout?” he asked rhetorically, bringing me back to the present, before adding, “I don’t think this is right. You need to go back and double check this; I have a gut feeling that there was a gag order on some of this, and my gut feelings are always right.”

“I’ve got a ‘gag,’ and ‘orders’ for you, too,” I thought to myself, and had to bite my lip to keep from laughing as I imagined Kyle bound and gagged, laid flat on top of his big desk, his legs and feet dangling helplessly off one edge and his head draped over the other. That actually would be the perfect thing for Kyle: a ball gag in his mouth to keep him quiet!

Kyle looked up at me questioningly before going back to reviewing my report, and I had to admit that my wild imaginings were completely off base. He was probably as sexually adventurous as a Nilla Wafer. Probably less so. What a waste.

“Are you serious, Daphne,” he demanded as he flipped angrily through the rest of the report and brought my musing daydreams crashing back to earth. “You reference these simulations twice, but you don’t have any graphs or anything else that demonstrates your calculations? And you think this report is good enough to send out to our clients Friday and stillkeep those clients Monday? Come on! I mean… how long have you been doing this job? All of this analysis section needs to be redone!”

I don’t know what specifically made me snap. Maybe it was Kyle’s incredulous tone when he asked how long I’d been doing my job. Maybe it was his insinuations that I was going to have to stay and revise a client document during the middle of a dangerous ice storm when our company had already said “fuck a client, go home.” Or, maybe it was just as good a time as any to finally decide that I deserved something better.

Maybe I’d grown numb to that feeling of listlessness, numb to the feeling that everyday was less of a challenge and more of a beat down than the day before. Maybe I’d stopped dreaming for myself because, like my parents, I could put my inspiration and daydreams into Natalia and all that she might accomplish by following her passions.