Good Girl

by BelleMorte79, PhoenixRose678 (BelleMorte79)

Summary:

As the internship begins, late nights at the publishing house come with unexpected demands. When Miles Finch, the enigmatic editor, commands more than just your attention, how far will you go to satisfy his demands? A story of quiet obedience, sharp edges, and the heat of control.

Notes:

The "What If" here is, "what if" the movie Secretary, but instead of James Spader's lawyer as the boss, it is Miles Finch at a high stakes publishing House in midtown Manhattan.

And this was born.

Good Girl

---

Premier Semaine

I woke before my alarm, my heart already doing too much. I lay still for a moment, staring at the cracked ceiling, letting the silence thrum around me like static. My roommates hadn’t stirred yet. Good. I needed quiet to assemble myself.

I was supposed to stay three months. Just long enough to pay off my third maxed-out credit card and get my feet under me again. Just long enough to stop feeling like I was failing through my twenties.

My fingers found the gold chain at my neck, tracing it down to the small book-shaped pendant resting against my collarbone. My mom gave it to me when I found out that I got the internship. “To remind you why you’re there,” she’d said.

I would need reminding. This wasn’t just a job. It was proof of concept.

I got up, made tea, brushed my teeth with one earbud in listening to my morning playlist. Everything had to be deliberate. Controlled.

My outfit was already laid out: wide-leg black trousers, a fitted cream blouse, and a moss-green blazer with a cinched waist. Professional. Soft. Strategic. No cleavage, but figure conscious. I picked out a pop of color: Red lipstick in Zikora, my favorite matte.

At the mirror, I whispered affirmations I no longer fully believed but said anyway:

“You are where you belong.”
“You are more than enough.”
“You do not have to prove anything.”

But I did. Of course I did. And that was fine. I knew that I had to be twice as good for half the recognition. It was the price of being a young, black woman in corporate America.

I got there early. The receptionist hadn’t even arrived yet. I waited fifteen minutes in the lobby before being buzzed up by my friend from college, Melanie, she was a junior editor. She graduated the year before me.  She had this internship and she ended up being hired on there full time.  It seemed like a blessing in disguise. She was stressed every time that I saw her and she smelled like dry shampoo and burnout.

I got the job because I knew her, and because I knew how to format PDFs and lie without blinking. The office had big windows, concrete floors, and a bowl of black river stones on the receptionist’s desk like that meant something. It was the kind of place where people whispered the word branding like it was a religion. Everyone was dressed in designer clothes they could barely afford. Everyone wore good shoes. Even the custodians.

“It’s kind of chill before lunch,” Melanie said as she gave me the tour. “Mr. Finch usually works from home in the mornings. Doesn’t like small talk. If he speaks to you, just… be direct. Or invisible.”

“Invisible?” I asked.

“You’ll see.”  She said walking back to her desk, “You good?”

I smiled at her, “I’m good.”

Most of the day passed in a blur of logins, manuscripts, and awkward small talk. I ate lunch at my desk—a sweet potato samosa, wrapped in foil. It was a messy lunch. In my hurry in the morning I poured the tamarind and coriander chutneys indiscriminately. I nibbled slowly. Tried not to get grease and sauce on the stark white pages of the manuscript. I finished my lunch and washed my hands and dove back in again. 

By 2:00 my palms stopped sweating. My breath evened out.

By 2:45, I almost felt steady.

Then he arrived.

No one warned me. There was no photo on the website, no LinkedIn post, no creep who needed to message me and give me a heads up. No, he was just thrust upon me. I heard Melanie behind me in her professional voice saying the words, “You’ll be assisting Miles. He’s the Creative Director.” And before I could ask follow-up questions—there he was.

He walked through like a whirlwind, all coiled tension and heat. He swept through the office at a brisk pace disrupting all of the calm like the Tasmanian devil in those old Looney Toons cartoons. He was not even five feet tall, but he walked through the place like he expected the ground to rise up and meet him, not the other way around.

It was like he didn’t enter the room so much as burst into it. I had my head down, typing hoping to be inconspicuous. Just his energy made everyone scatter. He talked over his shoulder, gesturing with a coffee cup, already halfway through a sentence no one else was part of before I could lift my head. I was just another body at a desk until his eyes landed on mine and I felt the temperature in my chest jump by a degree.

He was in polite parlance “a little person.” But there was nothing little about him in truth. He was intimidating. Compact. Powerful. Like someone had taken a beast of a man and compressed him into something denser with a hydraulic machine. Something sharper. Dark hair, black button-down sleeves rolled to the elbow, voice low and hoarse like it had been dragged across gravel. I couldn’t tell if he was thirty-five or forty-five.

He looked at me like I wasn’t new. Like I had been there for years and he already knew what I could do.

And the atmosphere in the office changed when he came in. It was like as soon as the elevator dinged the temperature dropped. I didn’t hear him at first—I heard the reaction to him. Melanie sat up straighter. Someone cursed and minimized their browser. A few interns scattered like mice.

Then his voice—already mid-thought: “No, tell Simon to get fucked, it doesn’t need a rewrite, it needs a lobotomy—Christ, is anyone in this office not asleep—”

I looked up to see Miles Finch cut through the hallway like a blade. Short. Impeccably dressed. Eyes sharp and fast. His energy wasn’t chaotic. It was concentrated. Like a blowtorch.

He passed me. Stopped. Doubled back.

Looked me up and down once. Not lecherous. Just... measuring.

“You’re the intern?”

“Yes. Felicity Adamu.”

“Good name,” he said, already walking again. “Don’t fuck it up.”

His door slammed.

My hands had started sweating again.

I didn’t move. The room hadn’t fully exhaled yet. I stared at the hallway, pulse loud in my throat.

“Girl,” Melanie breathed.  She appeared at the edge of my cubicle, coffee in hand, cherry-red nails tapping the lid. “So… now you have met Miles Finch,” she said. “In case you didn’t notice it under the sonic boom.”

“I noticed,” I said. My voice was steadier than I felt.

“You didn’t flinch from him. Not bad. Most people blink when he’s five feet away.”

“I don’t blink,” I said, and lied well.

She smirked. “Mami—that man is a force of nature. Don’t let his size fool you. I have seen him make big strong men cry in this office.”

He had presence, that was one word for it. I still felt the echo of his eyes on me—the look that read my blouse, my name, my entire existence, and returned a verdict with one syllable.

I sat slowly. Wiped my palms on my pants.

“Is he always so intense?” I asked.

Melanie shrugged. “Brilliant. Intense. No tolerance for bullshit. If he likes you, he’ll push you until you break. If not...” she drew a finger across her throat. “Gone by Friday.”

“Advice?”  My stomach was chewing itself to bits.

“Don’t try to impress him. Don’t try to please him. Be sharp. Push back. He eats soft, docile girls for breakfast.”

I nodded. But my mind was still stuck on the way he looked at me. That flicker of something—approval? interest?—before he disappeared into his office like smoke.

I had a horrifying thought then, If he told me to kneel, I might.

Jesus. My mother would be so disappointed in me if she could see my thoughts .  It was going to be a long internship.

Most people were gone by six. I stayed, tidying a manuscript Melanie had tossed my way with a sigh.

I didn’t hear him approach.

“You flagged the dialogue in chapter six.”

I turned. He stood at my cubicle, file in hand. My notes paper-clipped to the front.

I rose. “Yes. The tone shifts abruptly. The character loses consistency.”

He studied me. Still. Exact.

He looked up at me, “You don’t have to stand every time that you want to make a point. Sit.

I sat.

“Most interns don’t read. They skim and pray.”

“I read. I don’t pray.”

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth.

“Walk with me.”

I hesitated—then followed.

He didn’t go to his office. He took me to the small conference room with the glass walls. The door didn’t close all the way.

He leaned against the table. I stood.

“You’re not what I expected.”

“I get that a lot.”

“Polished. Controlled. But you wrote this like someone who doesn’t mind being a little mean.”

“I was honest.”

“You were sharp.”

He stepped closer. Just inside my space. I didn’t move.

“I value that,” he said. “But here’s what I want to know, Miss Adamu…”

I waited, breath caught.

“…can you stay hard under pressure? Or do you soften when someone with power pays attention?”

I blinked. Once. Twice.

“I don’t minimize,” I said. “Not for attention. Not for power.”

His eyes dropped. Just for a second. I felt it all the way down.

“Good,” he murmured. “I’m watching.”

He turned and walked out.

I stayed. Breath shallow. Every composed part of me unraveling, slow and fine as thread.

Two days later, I got a Post-it from Melanie with only four words on it: Finch. Edit room. Now.

He was waiting in the back room at the end of the long hallway. The one with the bad lighting and buzzing fluorescents, and he was leaning over a table full of galleys and red pens.

“Close the door,” he said.

I did.

“Sit.”

I did.

“I need your opinion,” he said, sliding a galley toward me. “It’s the kind of book people pretend to like to feel smart on planes. I hate it. Tell me if I’m wrong.”

As I leaned over the table to look at the galleys I was painfully aware that my lower back was exposed.  I thought I was daring and fashionable when I picked out this dress, and now I felt exposed.

I read the opening. “You’re not. It’s all style, no soul. Literary peacocking.”

He leaned back. “You really don’t blink.”

“I’m not here to be liked.”

A pause. His mouth twitched.  I could feel his presence behind me, a heat.  As I was leaning over to mark something with a red pen I felt his breath just at the small of my back.

“Good. Let’s test your eye.” He said, and I got goosebumps all along the flesh of my back.

We spent an hour editing. He challenged every cut. It was exhausting. Thrilling.

Then he moved closer, and I could smell his cologne. Like wood and leather.

I could feel him behind my chair. Close.

I felt him before I saw him. His body heat. The shadow of breath.

He reached past me. His pen dragged across the margin. His arm brushed mine. Barely.

“You missed that,” he said near my ear. “Sloppy.”

I turned. He was closer than I’d realized.

His eyes flicked to my mouth. Then back.

I spoke. “Maybe I wanted to see if you’d catch it.”

A pause. His lips curved. “Cheeky girl,” he said softly.

Then he left.  And I sat there—confused. Face heated. Stomach chewing itself.

I didn’t know what he wanted.

I didn’t know what I wanted.

But I knew I wanted more.

As I stood by the K-cup machine in the break room talking with Melanie I could hear his voice cut through the air. He was calling me into his office.

His office was all glass and sharp corners. Concrete and cold steel. Shelves full of hardcovers with nary a speck of dust to be seen and spines straight as teeth. He gestured toward a stack of books.

"Reshelve by imprint. Organize alphabetically, then by year."

I nodded. "Yes. Of course."

Still typing: "You fidget too much."

My lips parted.

"Don’t," he added, flatly. Then turned the screen toward me. "What’s wrong with this?"

I leaned in, already forgetting to think. "Kerning’s tight here. And the spacing collapses the air."

He didn’t touch me. Not at first. But he stepped closer. His breath warmed the back of my neck. My skin tightened. Gooseflesh.

"Good girl," he said.

Those two words burrowed themselves into me--deep.

I froze, fists tight against the desk.

"You can go," he said, already sitting again.

I moved like I was balancing a full glass of water inside me. My hands were buzzing. My face hot.

For a long time I sat, blinking at the print proof. My fingers hovered above the paper, useless. All I could feel was the echo of breath, all I could hear were those two words: Good girl.

Back at my desk I pored over the edits that I was still working on.  

I tried to focus. I really did.

The sentence in front of me blurred. The proof I’d been reading might as well have been in Cyrillic. My eyes moved, but my brain didn’t catch.

You’re fine.
You’re overreacting.
You’re not this girl.

My fingers twitched. An ache was building within me. I pressed my thighs together, subtly. The pressure did nothing.

“Good girl.” The words echoed again, like they’d been carved into the air and were now bouncing back at me.

It wasn’t what he said. It was how he said it. Low. Certain. Like it wasn’t praise but confirmation—like he already knew something I didn’t want to admit.

My body shouldn’t have reacted. But it had. It was reacting. I could feel my pulse in places I didn’t want to name in an office.

Breathe. Just breathe.

I told myself I needed to pee. It wasn’t a lie. Not exactly.

I stood and walked fast—too fast—down the hall. Second floor. Quiet. Less foot traffic.

The bathroom door closed behind me. I locked the stall. The bolt clicked like a confession.

Leaning against the wall, I tried to slow my breath. Shame curled in my belly. But it sat on top of something worse.

Want.

Heat gathered, heavy and low. I hated myself for it.

I slid my hand under my waistband. Not to finish. Just to touch. Just to prove it was real . My underwear was damp.

Jesus.

I squeezed my eyes shut. My other hand braced the stall wall.

And in my head, there it was again.

Good girl.

This time I whispered it aloud. My own voice. Shaky. Ragged. But it sounded like him.

The ache clenched sharp and involuntary. My hips stuttered forward.

Oh God.

I stopped. Pulled back. Panting. Ashamed. Burning.

I didn’t come. I didn’t want to. I just wanted the feeling to make sense.

But it didn’t.

I washed my hands over and over. Bit my lip until I tasted blood. Told myself I was done.

I wasn’t done.  I was drawn tight like a bow string.  I looked around at the faces of everyone in the office as I returned. I was afraid they could see what I had done.

I came back with clean hands and a guilty mind.

My lip stung. The sting was good—it gave me something to hold onto. Something to blame for the heat still clinging to my skin.

The hallway was too bright. I kept my eyes on the floor. Melanie didn’t say anything as I passed, and I was grateful.

Just sit down. Be normal. Be fine.

The seat was still warm. Sweat beaded in the center of my back.  I sat like someone lowering themselves into a too-hot bath, pretending not to flinch.

I picked up the proof. Tried to reread the same sentence. It didn’t land. My brain kept sliding off the page.

Get a grip.

You’re not this girl. You don’t fall apart over a breath. Over a voice.

I reached for my pen, but my hand shook, just slightly. I adjusted, tried again. Focus.

Then I tasted it.

Metallic. Sharp.

I’d bit my lip back in the bathroom without realizing how badly. Now it was bleeding again—just a thin line, a drip slipping from the corner of my mouth.

I reached for a tissue—

And froze.

He was behind me.

I hadn’t heard him approach. He didn’t say a word.

Just reached out—slow, deliberate—and ran his thumb along the corner of my mouth.

His skin brushed mine. Caught the blood.

My breath stopped in my throat.

Then—without pause—he brought his thumb to his lips and licked it.

Not seductive. Not performative.

Just… absentminded. Thoughtless.

Like it was his.

He dropped a marked-up manuscript on my desk.

“You missed a comma,” he said.

His voice was calm. Bored, almost.

Then he turned and walked away. No smirk. No acknowledgment. No pleasure in the power he had just exercised.

Which somehow made it worse.

I didn’t move.

I couldn’t.

The throb was not in my chest.

 

Notes:

Once a good girl goes bad, she's gone forever.

https://youtu.be/GIrrLGJKXtA?si=71kS5IudN7yJ73IG

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of The Intern