Fic: Another Working Day
Title: Another Working Day
Author: mswyrr
Characters: Peggy/Don
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: explicit sexual activities, explicit language
Disclaimer: Don't own the characters.
Spoilers: 3x07 "The Suitcase"
Summary: They're not fucking.
Author's Notes: Thanks to erinya for the research assistance and beta! Thanks to blacksquirrel for encouragement and awesomeness.
Still, tomorrow's gonna be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest,
That's all, I'm trying to get some rest.
--Paul Simon, American Tune
Don didn't stop drinking. He wasn't ever going to stop drinking. If you did, people thought you were weak. Self-righteous. Hypocritical. They didn't want to be around you.
The solution, like most everything, could be found in salesmanship. If you stopped all at once, you were suddenly labeled a drunk. But if you could just... slow down enough, most people would write off the embarrassing things you'd done.
Everybody liked to have a good time.
Don made himself some new rules, and started keeping a close count in his head. No more pouring himself one (or more) when he was alone at work. No more matching Roger drink for drink.
Peggy was the first to notice. She smiled at him the way he'd only ever seen women smile when they were selling a product. Full on beaming delight. She didn't say any patronizing words of encouragement, just looked at him like he'd made her day.
He tried to feel indulgently amused at her taking it all so seriously, but it was the highlight of his day, too.
She didn't beam quite that way again (he was glad, imagining what people would say if she made a habit of it), but from that point on they had an unspoken agreement. He'd keep it under control, and she'd notice. And care. And be proud of him.
-
He wasn't looking for anything sexual with her.
It just happened. A couple weeks after they worked on Samsonite together.
They'd stayed late in his office again, going over ads for tampons, of all things. SCDP was trying to make a bid for Tampax.
Don was sitting at the end of his couch near Peggy's chair, listening to her pitch ideas.
He'd noticed her catching hell over this account from the boys in creative. They had made a lot of bad puns, from what Don could tell, and Joan had come down hard on them for an incident with ketchup.
Don didn't do anything about it. Peggy had to pay her dues like anybody else. If he played favorites, it would make things worse.
But he was making a point to be polite. Serious. Respectful. Tampax was an important company. And Peggy didn't need anymore shit.
One after another, she gave him dignified, elegant ads with the general themes of beauty and confidence.
He nodded, and tried to look thoughtful. He honestly felt a little adrift here. He wasn't sure about judging which one of the pitches would speak to their audience. The way women felt about this part of their lives wasn't something they talked about with men. An invitation to spend time with a woman's pussy wasn't the same as having insight into how she felt about it.
He was reluctantly considering letting Dr. Faye help on this one when he saw Peggy go rigid, staring down at her portfolio of sketches.
He craned his head, trying to get a look. "Something wrong?"
She took a breath, reached out and methodically crumpled a drawing into a very small, very tight ball. "Nothing," she said firmly. "One slipped through that I didn't approve."
"One of Danny's?" He raised an eyebrow. "Is Tampax the 'cure for the common tampon' now?"
"No," she gritted out. "That was from Stan."
He hadn't heard a woman say a man's name with such disgust since the last time he'd talked to Betty.
"How can he even..." Peggy started, fiercely, then caught herself.
Don raised his brows. "What?"
She lifted her chin. "Nothing."
"No," Don said. "Spit it out."
"You don't want to hear about it."
"I know I don't," he agreed. "But you want to say it, so say it. Get it off your chest. It's not like I'm going to fire you for mouthing off."
"Okay," she snapped. "All right. Why do they spend so much time trying to get into our pants if they hate it down there so much?" she asked. "Stan has special magazines just to look at it, but just as soon as we get this assignment," she said, snapping her fingers, "it's like a vagina is some kind of horrible disease."
Oh.
For a minute, Don had to reassess the situation. This wasn't the kind of ribbing he had dealt with when he was coming up. He found his eyes suddenly drawn to the swell of Peggy's breasts under her blue and white blouse.
He caught himself, looked away.
What would it be like to be the only one with tits in the room?
He shifted awkwardly, taking a sip from his glass. "It's not hate," he said, disturbed by her use of the word. "They just don't want to think about..." he reached for the right word and settled on, "maintenance."
"No," she said. "It's not just that. You didn't see what he did with the," she looked nauseous, "ketchup."
"I thought Joan handled that," Don said.
"She shouldn't have to!"
"Okay. Why didn't you do something?"
"What am I supposed to do? I don't have any power over them."
"You're their boss," he said. "You answer to me and they answer to you."
"You think that, but they don't. What can I do to them? I don't pay them. I can't fire them. I can talk. I just... talk. If you said something..."
"Do you really want me cutting you off at the knees like that?"
"No," she said. "I want you to tell me that if I reprimand someone working under me, that means something. I want you to tell me that you'd trust me if I said someone had to go."
“Okay,” he said.
“What?”
“I said 'okay.' Fire them all, if you want.” He leaned forward, “but it's on you to make sure the work still gets done and find a replacement without my help.”
“I can handle that,” she said. She was damn near beaming again.
“Don't get excited,” he said. “If SCDP gets a bad reputation, that's on you, and you still can be fired, too. Besides, I don't know why you'd need to fire anyone over something like this. They're kids, Peggy. Playing pranks." He let his distaste for the young bloods show. "It's not fun working with them, but you have to toughen up. They don't hate you," he said, trying to get across how hysterical that had sounded. She shouldn't talk like that if she wanted respect. "They're playing around."
"You don't get it," she said quietly, looking genuinely surprised. "I honestly never thought there'd be something that you just didn't get."
"There's a lot of things I don't get, Peggy," he said, tired with this. "I don't get how to sell this product, for one thing. I'm not ashamed to admit it. Women don't talk about these things with men."
"I can't imagine why," she said, rolling her eyes.
"Hey!" he said, offended. "We're not all stupid kids."
"But none of you really wants to hear it."
"I do," he said.
"You do," she said, eyeballing him dubiously.
“Of course I do!” he said, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it. "I'm trying to campaign for an important client here. I don't have the luxury to be juvenile, even if I wanted to. If you have some special insight that you're keeping to yourself," he said, waving his hand, "I'm all ears."
She nodded. She was sitting stiffly. Her hands clenched where they were resting on her lap. "Okay," she said. And didn't go on.
Don frowned, taking a drag as he looked at her. "Do you want a drink?"
"Very much."
"Why don't you get us both one," he said, handing her his empty glass.
She took it. He watched her get up and go through the motions of pouring. He hoped the distraction would settle her down some. And she did seem calmer when she handed him his glass and sat back down.
"I used a word earlier," she started, "'hate,' and I could tell you didn't like that. But it's important." She took a sip from her glass. "It's really hard not to hate yourself or feel hated when you're a woman."
It was the craziest thing he'd ever heard.
He opened his mouth to say so.
"Don't," she said. "Please. Let me finish."
"All right."
"One minute you're a little girl," she said, "And things aren't great, but you're... so free," she sounded wistful, "but it doesn't last. All of the sudden there's this... thing," she said, her nose crinkling. "It's bleeding and it hurts. It's terrifying, and you know that you're wrong. You're something that has to be cleaned up. And then there's..." she gestured expansively, "humiliating accidents, and pills that don't work and cups and devices and leering doctors." She leaned forward, "You have no control. And later on sex is good, but the exact same men who want to get inside you so much, most of them hate it, too!" She threw her hands in the air. "How do we sell that? I look at a tampon box and all I think about is... all of that. How do we get past that? How can you possibly make a woman look at," she tapped the portfolio on the coffee table, "any of our ads and not be so caught up in that and the thought of having to put them in, having to take them out, having to look at them - that none of our messages get through? You talk about advertisements making people feel okay, but I don't know if you can do that with this."
When she was done talking, Peggy finished her drink in one swallow and leaned back in her chair, giving him a wary look.
Don felt a little overwhelmed. As Peggy had talked, he'd kept thinking about Sally's recent incident. And because he and Peggy could shift effortlessly from business to the deeply personal and back again, he said something about it.
"My daughter's starting to go through that," he said. "She hasn't had her period yet, but she..." he sighed. It was harder to say than he'd thought. "I don't know why I don't want to say it; half the parents in Ossining know."
"What happened?"
"She was at a friend's house, and the friend's mother found her touching herself. In front of her friend."
Peggy's mouth opened. "Oh," she breathed. Her face fell in sympathy for his daughter, though she barely knew the girl. "Is she all right?"
"She's talking to someone. A child psychologist."
He could see her start to come up with something positive to say, but she went for honesty on the last minute. "Is that good?"
"I don't know." He shook his head. The whole thing made him sick for the way Sally was feeling, and he couldn't do anything. “Her mother thinks it means that she's a,” he waved his hand again, then took another drag of the cigarette. He started again, “She said only 'fast' girls do stuff like that.” He cocked his head at Peggy, raised his brows.
“Are you asking?”
He shrugged.
“Me?” she said. “Because I... well, I think my sister did some things, and she's married with a kid, so...” She shrugged.
“I just, uh. I keep thinking it's something I passed on to her.”
Her face fell. “That's not true,” she said firmly.
She had a way of saying what he needed to hear that he marveled at. He was usually the one providing that service. He wondered how much of it she believed.
“Peggy,” he said, “cut the bullshit. You know what I'm like.”
Her face was a picture of discomfort. “Yeah,” she said slowly, “but I don't think it works like that, passing things on.”
It was already out there, so he kept going. “Why wouldn't it?” he asked. “My... the woman who raised me used to say I had bad blood.”
“That's horrible,” she said. “Why would she say a thing like that?”
He paused before spilling his guts. He didn't think it would be uncomfortable if he told Peggy, considering their past. They liked and understood each other. And if that ever wasn't enough, they both had something on each other. Secrets and debts owed weren't better than fondness, but they were a good back up.
“My father spent more money on alcohol than we did on groceries,” he said, and toasted her with his glass, as if to show her how that got passed on, “and my mother was a prostitute.”
She blinked at him. “That must have been hard,” she said simply.
“Yeah.”
“But I still don't think that your-step-mother?” she inquired, testing the word out.
“Yeah,” he confirmed.
“--I don't think she was right.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, you have sex because you like it, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But prostitution isn't... I don't think women do it because they like it, Don. It's... if they just really liked sex, they'd just have a lot of it with people they liked. Being a prostitute can't be fun, because you wouldn't like most of the men, and you'd have to do things you aren't interested in. Women do it because they're poor, I think, or someone's forcing them. There's no way to know for sure if she was really loose like your step-mom said, or just having a hard time. There was a depression.”
It was the strangest thing anyone had ever said to him about his mother. He noticed his mouth hanging open, and closed it. Stared at her.
The most he'd hoped for was acceptance, sympathy. But instead...
“Where do you get this stuff?” he asked, not unkindly.
She shrugged. “I really like sex,” she said, “but I'd never want to be a prostitute, and I'm guessing it's that way for most women who like sex. The two things aren't connected.” It didn't exactly make sense, but she added, “I think Sally will be fine.”
Don finished his cigarette and his drink as they sat there, staring out the windows at the city lights.
Time to change the subject. Time to go home. "Don't worry about this," he said, gesturing at the portfolio of Tampax ideas. "We're not on a tight clock right now."
"I know,” she replied, shifting gears just as easily. “I just want it to be over with."
He decided it was the right time to say something more reassuring. "We just need to take some time to think about it. Come back fresh. From what you've said, it's going to need a light touch," he finished.
And then felt appalled. It was going to need a light touch, for crying out loud! He felt a moment of empathy for the boys in creative. The bad puns wrote themselves.
Peggy laughed. She must have seen his mortification. "That's one of the nicer ones I've heard."
He thought about feeling the way she'd described earlier, and having a bunch of men go at her about it day after day.
He was amazed she hadn't taken a pair of scissors to the sons of bitches.
"You're not wrong, you know," he said.
"It's just a feeling," she replied. Her left hand was clenched in her lap.
Don set his glass down, wiped the condensation off on his pants, and reached out. He put his palms around her fist, embracing it with his fingers.
"There's nothing wrong about you," he said. She said things he needed to hear, and he thought she believed most of them. Or tried to. He hoped that he could give her some of that back.
Her fist loosened, freeing her fingers to stroke his palm. Her hand was cool.
"It's strange," she said. Her lip curled into a half-smile. "You say that and I believe you."
He felt wonderful for a moment. It must have showed on his face because there was a sudden, heated tension.
Peggy withdrew her hand from between his palms. He thought she was going to call it a night, but she was just shifting so his palm came to rest against her knee. She rested her hand on top of it, giving it a squeeze.
She held his gaze.
He stroked his hand up the smooth material of her blue skirt. She didn't object, so he kept pushing it back up over her nylons. He got it pushed back, and then released her left garters, pulling her stocking down and off her barefoot. She'd toed her shoes off hours ago. He felt her breath catch as he touched her bare skin. Her legs parted, her back arching.
He bent down, kissing her inner thigh, his hands stroking her calf.
"Don," she said, placing a hand on his shoulder.
He looked up.
"You have a rule," she said, a little breathless, but as sharp as ever. "Don't fuck people from work."
Don rested his chin lightly on her knee, looking up at her winningly. "Peggy," he said, "we're not going to fuck."
She rolled her eyes. "That's a technicality, Don."
"Don't you read the papers, Peggy?" he asked, eyes wide. "People get off on a technicality all the time!"
Peggy laughed. She ran her fingers over his shoulder, back and forth, thinking. "Okay," she said. "But I want you to know," she added, her face serious as she leaned back, "that if I ever have to throw something at you, I won't miss."
He expected as much. "I like that about you," he said, meaning it.
She brightened. "Really?"
"Oh, yes." He nuzzled her playfully, then looked back up. "Yes, ma'm," he said, trying to look the very model of a good boy.
She was beautiful when you got her laughing. "Stop that," she scolded as she pulled off her other stocking, "you look about ten years old when you do that."
He slid onto his knees in front of her, and brushed forward past her bare legs to pant a kiss on the crotch of her peach colored panties.
She gasped, squirming. "Help me out of these," she said, lifting her ass up out of the chair as he slid her panties down.
When they were gone, he leaned forward again, kissing up and down her inner thigh.
With her all around him, he could feel her tensing. He wanted her good and wet before he got started, so he kept on, with kisses and featherlight touch. When she felt tight as a bowstring against him, he finally kissed her cunt, the springy hairs tickling his nose and lips, and darted his tongue out to stroke her silky, slick pussy.
Peggy let out a whimpering sound, panting. Her hand came forward to run through his hair. As he went on, fucking her with his tongue, he felt her grip tighten. He swirled figure eights against her clit, wanting her to tug harder. She did, and it felt wonderful.
To eat pussy well, you have to love getting wet and being low. Don relished it. She was all over him, and he felt like she could hurt him while he was down there. He kept working her, surrounded by her smell, tasting her. He thought about her pulling his hair hard, forcing his head where she wanted it with her hands, forcing him down. Without losing rhythm, he reached down and touched himself through his pants and came hard, groaning into her cunt, not letting himself slow down.
He felt breathless, and a little dizzy.
When she came, she bucked upward, and her hand tightened enough that it finally hurt. It was almost enough to make him hard again. It would have been in his youth.
Soon she started relaxing, her touch turning gentle. He rested his head against her soft stomach, and closed his eyes, remembering the peace he felt that night he slept in her lap.
Too soon she shifted, and he backed off, thinking she wanted to get herself together.
Instead she held him there, her hands framing his face and leaned forward to kiss him. His mouth was still wet from her, but she didn't seem to mind. She touched his lips with her tongue. He opened his mouth.
When she was done kissing him senseless, she pulled back, looking him in the eye.
"Your turn," she said with a wicked smile.
He felt embarrassed that he wasn't ready again so soon. He wasn't in his twenties anymore, like her boyfriend had been.
"I'm fine," he said, scooting backward. He started to get up and found that his knees really didn't like what he'd been doing to them. They hurt like a son of a bitch. "Can I get a hand?" he asked, shamefaced.
Peggy stood, helping him onto the couch. "Are you sure?" she asked. She made a strangely adorable picture, looking down at him with concern, her skirt still half hiked up.
He closed his eyes, leaning back into the couch. He wished it would swallow him whole. "I, uh, had my turn while you were busy."
"Oh," he heard her say.
His eyes still closed, he pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his face.
He heard the rustling of her skirt as she straightened it, and then the padding of her feet and the click of the door's lock.
She padded back over and tapped his hip. "Scoot over," she said.
He opened his eyes. "What for?" he asked as he nonetheless moved his ass in the direction she wanted.
"I want some sleep," she said. She sat down next to him, arranging them into a sort spooning position. It was awkward; the couch was too small. She was on the inside, facing the cushions, so she didn't notice it, but he was half hanging off the front of the damn thing. And he felt sticky from earlier. But she'd let him sleep on her reeking of vomit and alcohol, so he guessed he owed her one.
"You can't wear the same clothes tomorrow," he said.
"I don't have to," she replied, yawning. The yawn turned into a smile that, he swore, made her look like the cat that had gotten the cream. He wasn't sure where the image came from, exactly, except that she was loose-limbed and cozy as a kitten leaning against him.
He rested his palm against her warm stomach, rubbing soothing circles with his thumb.
"You're assuming I'll let you come in late?" he asked.
"Hmm?" she murmured, half asleep. "Oh, no," she said, stirring. "I started keeping a change of clothes at the office after last time."
That was telling. He started to make a comment, and then noticed that she was already asleep.
Despite his uncomfortable position, he fell asleep soon after.
They both woke up when the office's automatic lights clicked on, sleepily greeted each other and then went off to freshen up separately.
By the time everyone came in, they were a picture of professionalism in their respective offices, nothing untoward to be seen.
When she had stumbled out of his office earlier, she'd left her stockings and panties on the floor. He'd picked them up and tucked them into his lower right desk drawer. The thought of them being in there made him feel good all day.
-end-
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth-ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss
-e.e. cummings