Impromptu Match (Goliaths of Wrestling, #1)

by Lily Mayne

Then it hit me, and I had a mini existential crisis at my desk. This is it. This is my life. I spent ten minutes picking out my tie this morning. I ironed my underpants even though no one ever sees them but me. I’m going to die here.

Even my password was boring. TH-workstation-348.

Chicken salad sandwich, a bag of carrot and celery sticks, a banana and a protein bar. I was pretty sure I’d brought a tuna salad sandwich instead once. About nine years ago. But then I’d worried about smelling like fish all day, so I’d never done it again. Maybe I’d brought an apple instead of a banana a few times too, but that was it. That was the extent of me deviating from my routine.

I’d typed out the word ‘synergy’ so many times in the last twelve years that it appeared in my dreams. I still didn’t even really know what it meant, and at this point I was too afraid to ask.

How do I have a precise time that I put my lunch in the fridge every day? I shrieked to myself in my head as I calmly closed the fridge door. How did this happen? What have I become? Why aren’t I the one going to orgies all the time with a twenty-something hippy called Sage?

Zero pints of ice cream consumed in over a decade. Zero orgasms at the hands of another person for four years. Exactly zero orgies attended.

Dick-starved, I decided. It was a miserable, dick-starved mouth. I hadn’t had a dick in my mouth in four long years. Whatever muscles were used for dicksucking had probably just given up. Resigned themselves to the knowledge that they would never be put to work again. Or maybe it was the ice cream-eating muscles that had given up. Now I was picturing a nice, hard dick covered in ice cream, and I was getting a sad boner.

If I climbed onto a chair and announced, ‘I don’t even really know what HutSec does,’ would they all slowly start nodding and agreeing? Would we all collectively say, ‘fuck it,’ and start chugging our drinks and turn this into a bacchanalia? Would it devolve into an orgy?

I accepted a slice of cake on a paper plate from Sharon with a smile and a somewhat enthusiastic, “Thanks,” even though it was lemon cake, which was the cake choice of evil villain overlords hellbent on sowing chaos and destruction, in my opinion.

Are you, Mindy? Are you really glad, or is your eye twitching slightly as you eat it because deep down, you know lemon cake is what the devil would choose to torture all the damned souls in hell with?

Oh god, maybe this was hell. And Sharon from Accounts was the devil.

Okay, Satan, I’ve figured it out. Maybe it’s time for a new kind of torture? I don’t care what it is, as long as it gets me out of this room. I’d take standing in line at the DMV over this. I’d take public speaking over this. Want me to give a presentation on the kind of porn I like? If it means I can leave, gladly. I’ll even time stamp the key moments that make me nut, if it helps.

Sharon didn’t even look over, back to flirting with Tim from HR. I was pretty sure Satan would have better taste in men than Tim from HR, so maybe she really did just like lemon cake.

Was I having a stroke? I just blinked at her, not even trying to make sense of what she’d said. How had I been here twelve years and I still had no fucking idea what anyone was talking about half the time?

Some of the tension eased from my shoulders. This was better. I wasn’t actually going to drink the whole six-pack, because then I wouldn’t be able to drive home and I’d have to—I shuddered—get a ride from a co-worker. But I could stay up here for ten minutes, drink this beer and eat my shitty cake, then go back downstairs a touch more relaxed and less likely to dropkick the rest of Sharon’s cake all over the break room.

“Yeah, I know. I, um, took a really long phone call in the stairwell.” “Oh.” He sounded concerned. “Everything okay?” “Yeah, my… sister is going through a messy break-up.” I didn’t even have a sister. Why had I said that?

Um… what? Was there a secret punk book club held in the basement of the building after office hours?

“He specifically requested—” He squinted down at his clipboard. “‘—sad office worker forced to attend a colleague’s birthday party.’ I mean, that’s clearly you.”

I reared back in outrage. How dare he? It didn’t matter how painfully accurate it was, it was still offensive!

I felt too seen. Maybe Devil-Sharon had heard my pleas earlier and this was her new form of torture—getting her demon minions to throw me into a wildly uncomfortable situation and point out how sad my life was.

“I’m not a fucking character! I am a sad office worker who hates his life!” God, that sentence was depressing. “I just want my fucking keys so I can go home and fall asleep watching Antiques Roadshow!” Sniffer let out a hearty laugh. “Perfect, bro.”

Was this a stroke? Was I saying something completely different from what I thought was coming out of my mouth? I couldn’t tell which one of us was acting deranged. This guy seemed so convinced about who I was that I was starting to doubt myself. Had I signed up for some weird dating site in a moment of desperate weakness? Had someone stolen my identity online? Some… niche actor guy who got hired to go to parties as the most depressing person in the room to make everyone else feel better about themselves?

The boss of a secret wrestling association operating out of the basement of my work building had dressed up in a costume and hired an exotic dancer to give him a sexy “sad office worker” striptease in his office. I couldn’t decide which part was the weirdest.

“Mmm. No, you’re not, are you?” He gave me a coy smirk, and I quickly realised with horror that he thought this was part of my ‘act.’ “You’re just a sad little office drone who thought he might claw back some excitement in his life by stripping for strangers after work, aren’t you? God, that’s hot.”

“Take the tie off first,” he purred. “And tell me how it felt to stand in that sad, lifeless room with all your colleagues and realise you’d be doing it for another thirty years.” Okay, this had to be some form of demonic torture, because it was hitting far too close to home. Or maybe I’d never even gone up to the roof. Maybe I had snapped in the break room and this was all a delusion, and I was actually still upstairs, smearing cake all over my naked body while my co-workers looked on in horror.

“Um…” “You think I don’t know how depressing my life is?” I was on a roll now, breathing hard, my skin clammy with sweat. “I iron my underpants, for fuck’s sake. I eat the exact same thing for lunch every day. I haven’t had ice cream in years. I haven’t been invited to any orgies—” “What?”

“So you’re… not the stripper?” Fucking finally, he gets it. Trying to claw back some semblance of dignity, I cleared my throat and lifted my chin. “No. I’m not the stripper.” The elastic of the party hat I’d completely forgotten I was still wearing chose that moment to snap. The hat pinged up off my head and into the air as we both stood there in agonising silence, before the pointy end of the cone hit the floor with a sad, anticlimactic tap.

“Well.” Holt broke the painful silence and cleared his throat. “If that isn’t a metaphor for your life.” My nostrils flared with outrage. “Fuck you. I don’t need some stranger telling me how sad my life is. I’m already perfectly aware.” “Clearly.”

He was hard? He had a boner from listening to me list all the details of my miserable life? What kind of sadist was he? And why the fuck was it kind of hot?

“And look, sometimes you just get hungry for really specific emotions, you know? Like when you’re sad and you want to stay sad so you only listen to sad songs on repeat. Or like… when all you want to eat is a hotdog, and you literally can’t think of anything else but eating a hotdog. It was nothing personal—you know, the whole… asking you to strip while telling me about your sad life.” Oh god, we were back to this.

“Sometimes when Larkin thinks I’m working, I’m really just colouring,” Holt told me. I stared at him, glass halfway to my mouth. “Huh?” He nodded and opened a desk drawer to pull out an adult colouring book. “It’s relaxing.”

“Do you think a testes tuck is a thing?”

“One of them asked me to hire an acting coach for him so he could ‘hone his craft.’” Holt snorted into his drink. “He’s called the Tasselled Tussler. His ‘craft’ is making his pecs bounce so his nipple tassels spin around. Don’t get me wrong, he’s great at it. It’s mesmerising, honestly.” “It… sounds it,” I said weakly.

“So fuck him and his stupid come noise. And I don’t know him. It’s not like I’m ever gonna see him and say, ‘Taylor told me you sound like a dying chicken when you come, bro.’”

“God, this ice cream is amazing. Except now I keep thinking about what my dick would look like covered in it.” I snorted, eating a spoonful of salted caramel, then looked over at him. “We should totally do it.” “Do what?” “Put the ice cream on our dicks.”

Oh god. Oh no. I’d forgotten that he was, like, some wrestler Mafia boss or something. Here came the threats. Something about cannoli and concrete shoes. Sleeping with fishes.

“Um, okay,” I said slowly. “I mean, I figured.” His nostrils flared. “You figured I was a nerd?” “No, I mean the cosplaying thing. But what’s wrong with being a nerd anyway?” “Nothing,” he said quickly. “That’s what I am. A regular old human nerd. I take it super seriously.”

“It’s just… the wrestlers are all, um, pretty passionate about their costumes. They go all out. Like, really go all out. Some, uh… animatronic tails and stuff…”

“It just might look a little… weird at first. But they’re just… really great actors. I’ll put you on the list for tonight.” “Okay. Thanks.” I grinned, and after a second, Holt’s smile softened and grew wider. “Maybe no rum tonight, though.” He grimaced. “Definitely fucking not.”

Suddenly, more rum-soaked images were filling my brain. Holt had gotten the night security guard to let us up here so I could get my keys and backpack. The moment he’d seen the sign, he’d grabbed a pen from the front desk and come back out here to change ‘HutSec’ to ‘HotSex’ while we both snorted with laughter. Oh god.

“Yeah, I’m… Just slept badly.” Lance tutted in sympathy. “Worrying about your sister?” What? I didn’t have a sister. What the fuck had I told him?

I’d thought this place was hell already, but I’d never experienced it while hungover as shit and terrified that someone else was going to pop up and say they’d found photocopies of someone’s balls pinned up in their cubicle or something.

“I almost got arrested for indecent exposure when I was on vacation in Tokyo,” Holt had said with a cringe. “I was wearing really, really tight pants and I tripped on the Shibuya Crossing, and when I went to break my fall the back of my pants split open. I’d run out of clean underwear so I wasn’t wearing any. A large group of Japanese businessmen saw my butthole.”

“What’d he ask for tonight?” Ludo cocked his head, brown eyes trailing over my frame. “Wait, let me guess… sleep-deprived dad at a zoo?”

Cosplaying was a kink I’d never known I had, but it was doing it for me. He looked so hot.

My belly squirmed with pleasure, but I tried not to read into it. Clearly, he’d been drunkenly rambling because of the “human” quip. He’d just… been in his cosplay character. Who maybe got really hot for sad office workers with boring lives.

His robe fell open a little more, revealing a pink tassel on his nipple. Oh my god. This was the nipple tassel guy? It felt like I was meeting a celebrity. “Hi, darling, I’m Corey. The Tasselled Tussler if you’re nasty,” he added with a coy smile, showcasing the two big tusks jutting up from his lower jaw.

“Not sure where a bottom-of-the-barrel romance novel hero got all this confidence. Who reads fae romance, anyway? It’s all about the vampires, am I right?”

“Wait… Nipples,” I mumbled blearily. “Uh.” Holt sat back on his heels. I was lying on the floor of the private viewing box, and he was sitting beside me. “Nipples?” “I want to watch.” I managed to sit up, using my sleeve to wipe the water from my face. “The wrestling.”

“That’s why it’s so exclusive.” I stared at him with wild eyes. “And why you asked me not to tell anyone. You’re… None of you are human.” “No doy,” Larkin muttered. “You seen my wings, bro? They’re sick.” “Larkin, you’re not fucking helping,” Holt gritted out.