The Sexual Harassment Suit Will Not Be Filed update (Patreon)

Well, it was a vibrator, Emma could say that with some confidence. What it was supposed to vibrate, she had no idea. Oil derricks? Small naval ships? Kinky elephants? Jesus, it looked like a suppository for Optimus Prime. It looked like a baby redesigned by H.R. Giger. It looked like the little dangling thing at the back of your throat if you were a monster truck.

Emma definitely didn’t have enough lubricant for this. Maybe she was supposed to hide it? Had it come with a saddle? She checked the box. No saddle.

“Maybe she forgot the saddle,” Emma said, and took a drag from the bottle. She’d been saving the tequila for a special occasion, it being a gift and her not really liking tequila, but if there was one way to describe having your boss sexually proposition you, getting a vibrator from her, and then not being able to figure out the mechanics of clitoral stimulation like she was a guy or something… she supposed ‘special’ was on the list.

Maybe it was literally a massager. Like, for your back. If she laid down on it, it would work the kinks out of her back, and that was Regina’s fetish.

Only it looked like it would roll around, like a medicine ball. A medicine ball that had also tried to kill Sarah Connor in Terminator.

She swigged some more tequila. It was getting better the more she had of it. Maybe that was the design principle behind the vibrator. Sure, the first foot or so would hurt, but then—like, by the metric system…

E-mail. Emma happily abandoned the vibrator/possible-Roswell-artifact to get on her laptop. She would send Regina a nice e-mail saying that, while she was very excited about the prospect of kinky sex with her—preferably kinky in the sense of Miley Cyrus trying to be shocking, not the backroom of a sex shop—she would prefer something that had less mental association with a C-section for her. Maybe, it being their first date and all, Regina could just pee on her?

Emma quickly backspaced. Don’t suggest peeing, obviously. Handcuffs? Probably give her a cramp. Whips? Riding crops? Painful. She didn’t get the appeal. If she wanted sex to hurt, she would date a woman with long nails.

“I was born in the wrong decade,” Emma lamented to her computer. “I managed to be prepubescent through the years when just being a lesbian was kinky enough, and now that I’m in my twenties, I have to pretend I like strap-ons.”

Maybe a dog collar. That wasn’t so bad. A little demeaning, but hell, she rode the subway. Of course, a collar also meant she’d have to let Regina put a leash on her, right? Again, not so bad, but it definitely seemed like there should be a hard NO in there somewhere.

Emma counted off on her fingers. “Barking like a dog. Walking around on all fours… I should probably only be called a bitch once or twice. I’m not black, that’s not a friendly thing for me.”

She jotted that down. This was coming together nicely. What else, what else was kinky—blindfold. She would totally let Regina blindfold her. And ice cubes. She didn’t really get the appeal of rubbing ice cubes all over someone, but if Regina was into that, she could meet her halfway. And leather clothes—she could do that, as long as it wasn’t summer. Leather didn’t breathe, after all.

Emma took another swig. She could absolutely be kinky. It wasn’t a problem at all. Not like she’d never had a weird sexual fantasy in her life…

***

Emma entered Regina’s office the next morning clutching her purse like she was doing a drug deal. “Is it true bread helps with hangovers?”

“Does bread help with…” Regina paused. “Are you on lunch break?”

“I think I’ve been on lunch break since I drank the worm.” Emma limped over to Regina’s desk, helped herself to a chair, and slumped down in it. “Why?”

“I just don’t like to be conducting personal business on company time.”

“So we’re having lunch together?”

“I suppose, technically—“

“You order pizza? I think I could stomach some pizza…”

Brow furrowed, Regina reached down to open a drawer. “I have some power bars. And some bottled water.”

“That’ll do,” Emma said. “I suppose I should pack a lunch. Then I can just bring it in here and we can do lunch that way.”

“Or we could eat out,” Regina said.

There was a slight pause.

“Should I wink?” Emma asked.

“I think you should’ve winked.”

“Sorry, I might still be a little drunk.”

Regina handed her a water bottle and two power bars.

Emma took the bottle, uncapped it, gulped down water, then paused to say “So, get any good e-mails lately?” Then drank more.

“I did,” Regina announced evenly. She turned to her laptop. “’Dear Regina Mills, have you ever seen the movie Ella Enchanted? In it, Ella, played by Anne Hathaway, is under a spell where she has to do whatever anyone tells her to do, no matter how embarrassed it makes her. I think it’d be kinda hot if I dressed up as Ella and you told me to do stuff and maybe I cried a little and then we did sex.’” Regina paused a moment. “And this next line is either a typo or a saying in Swahili.”

Emma pursed her lips. “Probably a typo.”

“Yes. Moving on. ‘P.S. no butt stuff.’” Regina resolutely tapped on her keyboard to close the e-mail. “Is this you making fun of me?”

Emma held her hands up. “No, Ella Enchanted is actually a pretty good movie. I mean, it’s no Princess Bride, what is, but it’s a pretty good-faith effort. It has Hugh Dancy from Hannibal, which gives the whole thing an added layer of hilarity if you’re a Hannibal fan, which you should be, and they also got Eric Idle, and Anne Hathaway is great in it, I really don’t understand the backlash, she’s talented, she’s charming—“

“Emma!”

“Willing to do nude scenes…” Emma stopped and held her head. “I promise, I’m not making fun of you.”

“I thought we were going to have an… an intimacy. I told you what I wanted you to do and you seemed fine with it.”

“I was! I am! But Regina, c’mon, look at this thing.” Emma plonked her purse down on Regina’s desk and wrestled the supposed vibrator out of it. “I mean, c’mon! If I ran an auto shop, I wouldn’t have enough lube for that! Who do you think I’ve been dating, the Expendables?”

“It has a very high user rating on Amazon!” Regina objected, trying hard to look Emma in the eye as Emma waved the thing in front of her face.

“Well, then the company had to have paid for good reviews, because there is no way that many women have a fantasy of being fucked by Ultron.”

Ruby picked then to poke her head in the door. “Reggie, Mr. Marlowe needs an answer on the conference ASAP.” She didn’t actually raise an eyebrow at the sight of a dildo being waved in her boss’s face, but managed to convey one entirely through voice. “Didn’t Indiana Jones find that in his last movie?”

Emma stuffed it back in her purse. Naturally, it didn’t quite fit.

Regina leaned to one side of her. “Tell Marlowe I’m reviewing the options right now.”

Ruby closed the door behind her.

Emma successfully got her purse to do a sword-swallowing act. “I mean, I get that that part is to stimulate my clit, but what are all these for? How many clits do you think I have?” She looked up to see Regina jotting out a quick e-mail. “Seriously?”

Regina stopped, slapping her hands down on the keyboard with a crunch of keys. Then she took her hands away and backspaced through all the gibberish she’d just made. “This was a mistake.”

“It’s okay, you can just press Ctrl-Z…”

“No, this.” Regina slammed the laptop shut. “Me, you—God.” Her elbow planted itself on the desk, her head falling into her outstretched hand. Emma half-emerged from her chair, going to comfort her, but also kept at bay by the sheer despondency of Regina’s grief. “Trying to seduce a woman half my age, what right do I have…”

“How old are you?” Emma asked.

“Forty-four.”

“I’m twenty-six, you’re not twice my age or old enough to be my mother or anything like that…”

Regina pried her hand away from her face, eyes suddenly red, and seeing her carefully composed face suddenly all knotted up with emotion was as shocking to Emma as seeing it covered with warpaint. “I’m forty-four, I have no children, I’m divorced, and I’m having my collegiate lesbian fling twenty years too late. It’s fucked up. It’s all fucked up.”

“Listen, Regina…” Emma started dragged her chair around the desk, gave it up, hopped up on the desk on Regina’s side, wishing she had the nerve to take Regina’s hand. “Tell me about it. Talk to me.”

Regina took a deep breath. “Tissue.” She held out her hand. “Please, could you just—hand me—“

Emma realized there was a box of tissues on a file cabinet adjacent to Regina’s desk, but Regina’s desk was so large that Regina couldn’t reach it. She plucked out a swath and handed them to Regina, who first dabbed at her eyes, then blew her nose. The soiled tissues went into a wastebasket that was already half-full.

“I do like… being in control,” Regina said at length. “I mean, obviously. Especially after Robin left. And when I saw that e-mail of yours, I thought that’s what you wanted too…”

“It is. I mean, kinda.” Emma shrugged. “It’s a weird dream, what can I tell you? But that’s not why I’m interested in you.”

“It’s not?”

“I’m interested in you because you gave me a job when anyone else would’ve buried me on the off-chance it would make them look good.” Now Emma did manage to take Regina’s hand. She couldn’t think of anything to do with it but hold it in her lap and not let go, but she hoped that made a difference. “And because you’re smart and a really good boss—absolutely the kind of person I want to be in twenty years, divorced and childless or not… and you’re beautiful, that helps, you are just… Robin’s an idiot.”

“Well, he managed to snag a woman who’s younger than you are and teaches yoga, so…”

Emma gave Regina’s hand a squeeze. “He’s an idiot.”

Regina nodded, visibly trying to believe it. “I really thought… with the dildo and the sexual fantasies, that’s what you would like. I mean, you kids these days, you have so much more experience… you go to rainbow parties…”

“Me? Experience? What’s a rainbow party?”

“You know, you… people in high school, they put on different color lipsticks and they take turns… you remember Monica Lewinsky?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, that happens, and so at the end, there’s a rainbow—“

“That’s disgusting. And no, no way anyone has ever done that. If anyone ever tells you that young people are having kinkier sex than you had when you were their age, it’s someone trying to sell papers. Or blogs… whatever it is these days.”

“Really?”

Emma got down off the desk, kneeling before Regina. Harder on her knees, but it felt better. “Trust me, Regina, I’ve been in like two actual relationships and one of them was being catfished. I go to gay clubs and I stare at girls and I wait for someone to make the first move and I spend way too much on overpriced drinks. I give a subsidiary to the alcohol industry every time I try to get laid. So you don’t know about this stuff because you’ve been married to a dude for the last fifteen years or whatever? I don’t know about this stuff because I’m a weirdo loner with a… massive crush on her boss. But if you want to figure it out, we’re two reasonably smart people. I think we can figure it out.”

Regina smiled. “And you really wouldn’t mind… maybe a little of the e-mail stuff?”

Emma petted Regina’s hand. “I went as Ella Enchanted for Halloween last year. But maybe we could also just cuddle on a couch and watch Game of Thrones? Because honestly, I fantasize about that a lot more than… collars.”

“Game of Thrones?” Regina looked down at her hand and Emma could just tell she liked the look of it in hers. “I can work with that.”

“Good, because I’m eighty percent sure that Yara and Daenerys are gonna bang.”

Ruby poked her head through the door again (“Oh thank God,” Regina muttered). “Mr. Marlowe called, he said never mind, the conference has been called off.” Seeing them, her lips pressed together. “Wow, you went from that to marriage proposal already?”