Bonus Chapter: Performance Review

An exclusive bonus scene from Spreadsheet Daddy & Coffee Boy
by Jace Wilder

This bonus chapter takes place six months after the epilogue. Contains explicit content. Spoilers ahead.

Performance Review

Eli

The conference room is dark when I badge in at 9:47 p.m.

Not the small one on the east side where we ran the Haldane audits. The big one. The one with the polished oak table that seats fourteen and the floor-to-ceiling windows that turn Manhattan into a wall of light after sunset. The conference room where, six months ago tonight, Garrett Cole kissed me for the first time and the entire trajectory of my life changed direction.

I told him I was working late. He believed me because I do, sometimes, work late at Mercer & Ross, and because Garrett Cole — for all his analytical brilliance — has a blind spot exactly the shape of me. He doesn’t see my lies because he doesn’t expect them, which is either a testament to his trust or a failure of his pattern recognition, and either way, I’m using it.

I set the bag on the table. Inside: his glasses. The black-framed ones I lifted from his nightstand this morning while he was running. A Post-It note. And a bottle of the wine we drank on our first real date — the one he remembered from the night I brought it to his apartment, because Garrett remembers everything, except tonight the remembering is going to work against him.

I adjust the lamp I borrowed from Carmen’s desk — angled low, casting the same amber glow that transforms this corporate fishbowl into something intimate. The same light that was on the night everything started. I’ve thought about this for weeks. Planned it the way Garrett plans quarterly filings — methodically, with contingencies, except my deliverable isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s the man who taught me what spreadsheets sound like when they moan.

My phone buzzes.

G: Where are you? Invoice is sitting on my laptop and I can’t find my glasses.

E: Twentieth floor. Conference room B. Door’s unlocked.

G: What are you doing at Whitmore?

E: Come find out.

I set the phone down. Lean against the table. Wait.

Fourteen minutes. That’s how long it takes for the elevator to chime, for his footsteps to echo across the empty floor — that particular cadence I memorized in my first week, deliberate, unhurried, the walk of a man who knows where he’s going — for the conference room door to open and fill with the silhouette of a man in jeans and a T-shirt who has clearly driven from the Upper West Side to Midtown at ten o’clock on a Friday because his boyfriend stole his glasses and sent him a cryptic text.

He looks good. He always looks good, but there’s something about Garrett in casual clothes that hits differently — the T-shirt tight across his shoulders, the jeans sitting low on his hips, the bare forearms that started this entire disaster six months ago. Without the suit, he looks less like a weapon and more like a man, and the man version is the one that makes my hands unsteady.

“Eli. What are you—”

He stops. Takes in the room. The dark windows. The amber lamp. The wine on the table. The glasses case, positioned exactly where his briefing folder sat six months ago. I watch the recognition hit — the spatial memory, the pattern match, the moment his analytical brain catches up to what his body already knows.

“Happy anniversary,” I say.

His jaw does the thing. The three-flex — surprise, recalibration, want. I’ve been reading that jaw for six months and I still haven’t gotten tired of watching it work.

“You planned this.”

“I planned this.”

“In the conference room where we—”

“Where you dropped to your knees for me six months ago, yes. I thought it deserved a commemorative event.”

The sound he makes is somewhere between a laugh and a surrender. He steps inside. Closes the door. Locks it. The click of the lock echoes in the empty room, and my pulse responds to the sound the way a body responds to a trigger — instant, involuntary, devastating.

“Put the glasses on,” I tell him.

He looks at the case on the table. Looks at me. His eyes narrow — not suspicion, assessment.

“You stole my glasses so I’d have to come get them.”

“I stole your glasses because you look like a different person when you wear them. Less armor. More human. And tonight I want the version of you that doesn’t have any armor left. Put them on.”

He opens the case. Slides them on. The black frames settle on his face, and the transformation is the same one that stopped me dead in a doorway five and a half months ago — the controlled, impenetrable CFO becoming someone softer, more touchable. A man who reads in bed. A man who can be undone.

“Now sit down. In your chair. The one at the head of the table.”

Something flickers across his face — surprise at the command, then recognition, then a heat that darkens his eyes behind the lenses. He sits. The head of the table. His chair. The power seat. Except tonight the man in the chair isn’t delivering anything. Tonight he’s receiving.

I walk to him. Slowly. Stop between his knees. Look down at him.

“You’ve been very good this year, Mr. Cole.” I keep my voice low. Professional. The exact register I used when I was his temp. “Exceeds expectations in every category. I have notes.”

His breathing changes. The chest rising faster under the T-shirt. His hands gripping the armrests, knuckles whitening. His pupils expanding behind the glasses until the gray of his irises is just a ring around the dark.

“However,” I continue, and I reach up and loosen my tie — I wore a tie tonight, because details matter, because this man has a thing for ties and I have a thing for exploiting his things — “there are a few areas where additional development is recommended.”

“What areas?” His voice is already rough. A full register lower than his professional tone.

I pull the tie free. The silk hisses through my collar. I drape it over his shoulder. Lean down, one hand on each armrest, caging him, my face inches from his.

“Delegation. You’re still doing too much yourself. Tonight, I’m going to need you to delegate entirely.”

“Delegate to whom?”

“To me.”

I kiss him. Deliberate. Controlled. I set the pace, and the pace is slow. My mouth on his, thorough, tasting the catch in his breath and the wine he had with dinner and the particular sweetness that is just Garrett underneath everything.

His hands come off the armrests — reaching for me — and I catch them. Both wrists. Press them back against the armrests and hold them there, my fingers wrapping around the bones, his pulse hammering against my thumbs.

The sound he makes — low, involuntary, pulled from somewhere beneath his diaphragm. A groan that vibrates against my tongue and goes straight to the base of my spine. His hips shift in the chair, pressing upward, and I can feel him through his jeans — hard already, straining against the denim.

“Eli.” My name in his mouth like a white flag. “What are you—”

“I’m conducting your performance review. Please hold all questions until the end.”

I release his wrists. His hands stay where I put them — on the armrests, gripping, obeying without being told to continue obeying, and the voluntary compliance is hotter than any restraint I could impose.

I sink to my knees.

The conference room floor is cold. Hard. The same unforgiving surface where Garrett knelt for me six months ago. Tonight I’m returning the gesture. Not as submission — as devotion.

His hand comes to my hair. Automatic, instinctive — fingers threading through the curls, not pulling, just holding. I lean into it, press my cheek against his palm for one second, and the tenderness of the contact makes something in my chest turn over.

Then I get to work.

I undo his belt. Slowly. The leather sliding through the buckle, the metal clicking — sounds that are ordinary in daylight and obscene in this context. I unbutton his jeans. Pull the zipper down. He lifts his hips to help me and the cooperation is its own kind of surrender.

I pull his jeans and boxer-briefs down his hips in one motion, and he’s hard and flushed and beautiful, and I wrap my hand around the base and feel the weight of him against my palm and think, as I always think: this man runs a two-hundred-person firm and right now his entire world has narrowed to my hand.

“You’re so good at this,” I murmur, pressing my lips to the inside of his thigh — the muscle there taut, trembling under my mouth. “Letting go when it’s just us. Do you know how rare that is?” I trace my tongue along the crease where his thigh meets his hip, and his hand fists in my hair and his breath comes out in a rush. “A man who holds the world together all day and then lets me take him apart at night?”

“Don’t—” His voice cracks. “Don’t say things like that when your hand is—”

“When my hand is where?” I tighten my grip. Stroke once, slow, root to tip, and watch his head fall back against the chair.

“Eli.“

“Tell me where my hand is, Garrett.”

“You know where your—” He breaks off on a groan as I stroke again, twisting at the top, my thumb sweeping across the head where he’s already slick. “You’re going to kill me.”

“That’s not in the performance review. Stay focused.”

I take him in my mouth.

The first contact — my lips closing around the head, my tongue pressing flat against the underside — pulls a sound out of him that echoes off the glass walls. Not a moan. Something bigger. The sound of a man who has been holding himself together for thirty-eight years encountering the specific sensation of being wanted thoroughly, attentively, by someone who has spent six months learning exactly how to want him.

I take my time. Not teasing — worshipping. There’s a difference, and the difference is intent. I’m not withholding to build anticipation. I’m savoring because this man — this brilliant, impossible, stubbornly lonely man who kept Post-It notes in a desk drawer because they were the closest thing to love letters he’d ever received — deserves to be savored.

I use everything I’ve learned. Six months of data. The spot just below the head that makes his thighs clench. The pace — steady, relentless, no teasing — that builds pressure without letting him crest. The pressure from my hand at the base, firm and rhythmic, synchronized with my mouth. The eye contact — and this is the part that destroys him every time — looking up with his cock in my mouth and my hand in his lap, letting him see me, see how much I want this, see that being on my knees for him is not a concession but a privilege.

“Eli — fuck — your mouth—” His hand is shaking in my hair. His hips are making small, involuntary movements — restrained, controlled even now. “You feel — God, you feel so—”

I pull off. Not all the way — my lips hovering, my breath hot against him, the proximity without contact more devastating than the contact itself. “Use your words, Mr. Cole. This is a review. I need specific feedback.”

“You want me to — while you’re—”

“Articulate. Data-driven. Just like a real performance review.”

“You feel perfect.” The words come out raw, stripped of every professional polish. “Your mouth is — you’re perfect, Eli. You’re the best — the best thing that’s — please don’t stop. Please.”

Garrett Cole said please. Twice. In a conference room. With my hand around his cock and his glasses fogging and his voice breaking on a word he has never, in his professional life, been required to use.

I take him back in. Deeper this time. Faster. His hand tightens in my hair and I can feel him getting close. The rhythm of his breathing going ragged, the muscles in his thighs locking, the way his voice drops to a register so low it’s almost subsonic.

I pull back. All the way off. Sit back on my heels.

“Not yet.”

“Eli.” Half-growl, half-plea. His hand tightens in my hair. His hips chase the contact — the CFO of Whitmore & Associates, chasing my mouth with his hips in a conference room chair, the most undignified thing this man has ever done in a professional setting, and the beauty of it makes my vision blur.

“Stand up,” I tell him.

He stands. His legs are unsteady — the slight shake in his thighs, the way he braces one hand on the armrest. I rise from my knees and guide him to the table. The conference table.

“Your turn,” I say, and I press him backward against the edge, and the look on his face when he realizes what I mean — that the table is for him tonight, that the surface that launched everything is going to hold him while I take him apart — is the most unguarded expression I’ve ever seen on a human face.

He sits on the edge. I push his shoulders gently and he lies back — Garrett Cole, CFO, spread across a conference table, T-shirt rucked up to his ribs, jeans pushed down his thighs, glasses still on, looking at me with trust and desire in equal measure.

I pull his jeans the rest of the way off. His boxer-briefs. He drove here in slides because I texted him at 10 p.m. and he didn’t even think about shoes, and the urgency of that is its own kind of love letter.

I stand between his legs. Look at him. The full length of his body on the table, lean and exposed, the silver threading through his hair catching the lamplight, his cock hard against his stomach, his chest rising and falling with uneven breathing.

“I’ve got you,” I say. The same words I said the first time. Our language. Our shorthand. “I’ve always got you.”

I lean down. Kiss his stomach. The muscle contracts under my lips. I trail lower — tongue tracing the line of hair beneath his navel, the cut of his hip, the sensitive skin of his inner thigh that makes his leg jerk and his hand find my hair again.

I take him in my mouth again and this time I don’t hold back. No pacing. No restraint. I want him incoherent. I want the man who communicates in spreadsheets and quarterly projections to lose every word in his vocabulary except my name.

My hand wraps around the base. My mouth takes everything else. I set a rhythm that’s relentless — deep, wet, purposeful — and his back arches off the table and his hand twists in my hair and the sounds he’s making have left the territory of language entirely. They’re pure sensation vocalized — groans and gasps and half-formed syllables that might be my name or might be prayers.

I reach up with my free hand and find his. The one gripping the edge of the table so hard his knuckles are white. I interlace our fingers. Hold his hand while I suck his cock on the same table where we had our first kiss, and the simultaneity of the tender and the filthy — the held hand and the working mouth — is the thing that tips him.

“Eli — I’m going to — I can’t hold—”

I squeeze his hand. Take him deeper. Look up at him from between his legs with everything I feel visible in my eyes — the want, the love, the bone-deep certainty that this man is mine and I am his.

He comes with my name in his mouth and his hand gripping mine and his back arching off the polished oak, and the sound he makes is unleashed, unfiltered, the sound of a man who has stopped holding back. I take everything. Hold him through every pulse, every aftershock, my mouth gentling as the intensity fades, my hand still holding his on the table.

He goes boneless. His breathing is ragged. His glasses are completely fogged. His hand in my hair has gone from gripping to stroking — long, slow passes through my curls.

“Come here,” he says. His voice is wrecked. Beautiful.

I climb onto the table. He pulls me against him — onto him, over him, my body covering his. His arms wrap around my back and he holds me with the particular ferocity of a man who has just been taken apart and is using another person’s body as the framework for reassembling.

“You,” he murmurs against my temple. “You absolute—”

“Exceeds expectations?”

“Destroys the curve.”

His hand slides between us. Finds my belt. I’m so hard it hurts — have been since the first growl, since the first please — and when his fingers close around me through my slacks the sound I make is embarrassingly loud in the empty conference room.

“My turn,” he says, and his voice has shifted — still wrecked, still rough, but with the particular edge of authority that Garrett Cole brings to everything.

He unzips me. Frees me from my boxers. Wraps his hand around me with a grip that’s firm and warm and perfectly calibrated because this man has spent six months learning my body the way he learns financial systems — systematically, responsively, with devastating attention to feedback.

“You planned this,” he says, stroking slowly, his thumb swiping across the head on every upstroke in the way he knows makes my vision go white. “You stole my glasses. Wore a tie. Set up the room. You’ve been thinking about this for weeks.”

“Days. Maybe weeks. Possibly since the first time you kissed me in this exact—” I break off on a gasp as he twists his wrist. “Spot.”

“You’re so good.” His mouth is against my throat. His hand is moving faster. “You’re so fucking good, Eli. The way you take care of me. The way you see me. The way you planned an entire anniversary around a conference table because you know — you know that this room is where I stopped being afraid of wanting you.”

The words hit me like a physical force. Not dirty talk — truth. Garrett Cole doesn’t do dirty talk. He does something worse: he says real things during sex, things he can’t say with his clothes on, and the realness of them is more erotic than any filthy whisper could be.

“I love you,” he says. Not for the first time — but in this room, on this table, with his hand on me and his eyes on mine, the words land like a number that finally balances. Like a spreadsheet that reconciles. Like the answer to a calculation he’s been running for thirty-eight years.

I come in his hand with his name on my lips and his voice in my ear and the full, shattering understanding that being loved by Garrett Cole is like being the single correct answer to a very long, very complicated equation — precise, inevitable, and worth every variable it took to get there.

We lie tangled on the conference table. Both of us breathing hard. His glasses are sideways on his face. My tie is somewhere on the floor. Between us is the warm, sticky evidence of two people who just desecrated a piece of corporate furniture for the second time in six months.

“Performance review,” he says, after a long silence. His voice is wrecked and amused and tender. “You gave me a performance review.”

“Exceeds expectations. As noted.”

“I’m going to need this in writing.”

I reach into my back pocket. Pull out the Post-It note — the one I wrote before I came, the punctuation mark on six months of Post-It notes that started with Whole milk. You’re welcome and have been saying I love you in two-sentence increments ever since.

I peel it off its backing. Stick it to his chest. Over his heart. The yellow paper against his skin, my handwriting over his heartbeat.

He peels it off. Holds it up. Reads it in the amber lamplight, squinting because his glasses are fogged and crooked.

Still your favorite. Still here. Still not going anywhere.

His eyes close. His jaw does the thing — something new, something that looks like a man whose chest is too full to hold what’s inside it and is letting it show on his face because there is nothing left to protect.

“I’m keeping this one,” he says. His voice is thick.

“You keep them all.”

“I keep them all.”

He pulls me against him. Kisses my temple. My forehead. The bridge of my nose. Each kiss a word in a language he spent thirty-eight years refusing to learn and is now fluent in.

We lie on the conference table in the dark. The lamp casts amber shadows across the glass walls. Manhattan glows beyond the windows. The building is empty. The silence is not.

The silence is full.

The silence is ours.

Want the full story? Grab Spreadsheet Daddy & Coffee Boy now.

Never Miss a Release

Get new release alerts, exclusive bonus content, and reader-only giveaways.