Season's Beatings

By L. A. Witt

Working in retail is brutal, especially during the holidays. For Sam, it means his back and knees are killing him, his patience is wearing thin...and his own holiday plans are probably getting canceled. Again.

As Sam's hopes dim for a relaxing Christmas with his family, he also misses Austin, the man he loves and who makes him kneel. He misses submitting, and he craves everything Austin gives him and makes him do. Shame he barely has the time or energy to faceplant in bed these days.

But Austin always takes care of his submissive.

And no matter what, he's going to give Sam a Christmas he won't forget.

Season's Beatings is a standalone holiday-themed short story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: GallagherWitt
• Release date: May 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781642301014

L. A. Witt

L.A. Witt is the author of Back Piece. She is a M/M romance writer who has finally been released from the purgatorial corn maze of Omaha, Nebraska, and now spends her time on the southwestern coast of Spain. In between wondering how she didn’t lose her mind in Omaha, she explores the country with her husband, several clairvoyant hamsters, and an ever-growing herd of rabid plot bunnies.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Every time another person or group of people strode in through the doors of the giant box store where I worked, I hated the holiday season a little more.

At least we had several registers open. As it was, I had a dozen people waiting for me to ring them up, and of course, my current customer had decided to write a check. Yes, in this modern era of debit cards and practically being able to do a telepathic contact-free insta-pay just by giving the machine an intense look, there were people who insisted on writing checks. And they were inevitably not in any great hurry to do so while the people behind them were inevitably frantic like they were buying fire extinguishers to battle an actual blaze-in-progress.

Suppressing the 24/7 frustration that came with this time of year, I smiled at her and spoke in my customer service voice: Your total is ninety-eight twenty-two.

Thank you. Then she started writing the check. Started. Most people who wrote checks at least got a jump on it while they were in line or while I was ringing everything up, but no, she waited until now.

While she took her time painstakingly filling in every blank, I kept my well-practiced smile in place and finished bagging everything.

She looked up from the check. What’s the date?

It took so much restraint not to point to the plastic display right in front of her, and I just said, December twenty-second.

Thank you. She added the date. Then she flipped to her register and carefully entered the same information before pausing to do the math manually despite her smartphone sitting right there. Once that was complete, she tore off the check and handed it to me.

I tried not to judge. I really, really did. People had their routines and their reasons behind them, and God knew some of mine probably drove people up the wall. This was the holiday shopping season, though, and my feet hurt, I hadn’t had a break in six hours, three people had yelled at me in the past hour for things that were beyond my control, I really needed to pee, and as it was, the only thing in shorter supply than patience were those butt-ugly plushies that were The Gift this year. Just put your shit on the belt, pay for it, take your shit, and go away. Merry fucking Christmas, everyone.

The lady eventually gathered her things and, in the kind of hurry usually reserved for glaciers, moved along. She’d barely stepped out of the way before the huffy red-faced dude with a wind-ruffled combover practically shoved her so he could take her place.

Hello, sir, I said, another little piece of me dying at the sound of my customer service voice. Did you find everything you were—

This store is a disgrace. He noisily tapped the edge of his credit card on the place where the lady had been writing her check. The shelves are a mess, and there’s barely anything on them. Doesn’t anyone take pride in their work anymore?

I ground my molars behind my cheerful