Control (4 page)

When I get up close – so close that I can smell that old-fashioned pine-y aftershave he wears – the full pleasure of his height strikes me, as it did before, when I asked him if there was something he wanted. He must be six foot three, and yet so often he doesn’t seem it. He hunches.

He’s hunching right now. I can see him doing his best not to let me know he’s looking at me out of the corner of his eye. He’s keeping very still, juddery breathing aside.

I have to put my hand on his back. It’s practically a necessity. I need to feel those unsteady breaths, vibrating through his sinewy body. I want to see him jerk when I touch him – and he does. But he keeps still, then, for the slide of my hand – all the way down that glorious curve to the hollow at the small of his back.

He won’t look at me. So I just do my business while his back is turned. I slide my hands over his narrow hips and feel him tremble, then go further yet and pass them over the firm cheeks of his arse.

He makes a little startled sound when I touch him so intimately. His body vibrates with it, but he doesn’t try to escape. So I rub harder, caress him more firmly. I slide my palms over the crease between his buttocks, pressing that tweedy material as deep as it will go.

He’s taking tight shaky breaths, now. When I squeeze one arse cheek, the breathing gets even tighter, and shakier. He even lets out something that’s almost a wavering moan – though not quite.

It definitely becomes a moan when I slide my hand around his hip, and go for the parts between his legs.

My hand immediately encounters the thing that’s making him moan. A rigid erection, thick and pressing out the material of his trousers. It’s so heavy and ready that just a brush of my fingertips makes it clear to me what’s there, and he gasps, for extra clarification. He drops the book he’s still holding, just so I’m sure.

I think he goes to say something then – something like stop. I can’t. Don’t. But when I finger the stiff shape of him through his trousers, the words trail away. He wants this. He’s too eager for it to let propriety or repression or whatever else it might be stop him. I think about all the nights he must have spent with just his own hand for company, urging himself to lonely orgasms while flowery pages flutter through his head. I think about why he wanted this job, why he
must
have wanted it.

Because he’s horny, so horny, even if other things inside him conspire to keep him alone. Just his little breathy sighs and his thick erection tell me how horny he is. Still, I want to hear him say it.

‘Do you want me to give you a handjob?’ I ask. Perhaps it’s the wrong thing to do. He glances to the side, briefly – almost looking at me, but not quite. His teeth are worrying into his bottom lip, again, and there’s a high glorious flush on the one pale cheek I can see.

Finally, he turns his face back to the bookshelf. Puts his hand over mine, suddenly, shockingly. He moans at the extra pressure.

‘Yes,’ he forces out. ‘Yes.’

I think about that point of mindlessness, when suddenly you just have to. When all possibilities open up. I think of him being there, of the book pushing him, of me pushing him, as I slide his zipper down.

Just the feel of his fingers pressing against my wrist, urging me on, is intensely arousing. My clit aches to be touched and wetness eases between my slippery pussy lips, sensation tight in the pit of my belly and ebbing and flowing with every new move I make. But it’s building, and I want to build it higher. It’ll be sweeter if I do. I want to come with the sounds of him going first in my ears.

The cotton of whatever underwear he’s wearing is damp. More than damp. So much so that I wonder if he’s already come, until I get my hands beneath the elastic and feel the slick bursting tip of his cock.

When I finally tug him free of his underwear and his trousers, I’m desperate to look. I need to look around his body and see what I’m holding, because good Christ it feels big. He’s swollen and taut with arousal – of course he is – but I don’t think it’s just him being turned on that’s making his cock a challenge for my circling grip.

I think of his broad shoulders and his large hands. Of course he’s got a big one. It would be weird if he were small. But this is something, even by those standards. It’s something by any standards – heavy against my palm and straining against my grasp.

I map him out as much as I can while he judders and gasps, forming a picture in my mind of his length. No wonder he sometimes walks funny, with something in front of him. It’s probably why he hunches. You couldn’t hide an erection like this.

I wonder how many quick tight orgasms he’s jerked himself to, out of necessity. In the little toilet off the kitchen, perhaps, while I shop or book-keep. Muffling his cries of pleasure in the sleeve of his jumper or against the back of his hand.

I thumb the slit at the head of his prick, and feel him buck against me.

‘Please,’ he groans. ‘Please –’

I understand. I need it too. I’m rubbing my swollen nipples into his back, by the time I get around to tugging at his cock in rough little jerks.

Of course, I don’t think it will take long. I squeeze and oil the way with all the slippery pre-come he seems to be producing. I twist my palm over all the good spots and work him nice and quickly. It shouldn’t take long at all.

And yet it does. He grunts and rocks his hips into my hand, eventually giving in to leaning against the bookshelf. He rests his forehead on the arm he plants over the other copies of
Passion’s Flame
, and his body trembles and trembles like a live wire, but he doesn’t come.

He only comes when his own hand snaps down over mine, whip quick, and guides me desperately in a different sort of motion. His gasps have turned frustrated and he’s practically whining, but as soon as his own strong hand squeezes mine almost painfully tight around his shaft, it’s clear that he’s getting what he needs.

‘Ah, that’s it,’ he blurts out, body tensing suddenly and his hand speeding up on his swelling cock. My hand speeding up on his swelling cock.

It feels as though I
am
him. Bristling, shameful pleasure rocking through me, jerking at myself like a dirty little slut. More than likely about to spurt all over the books, and with thoughts of such only making the whole thing seedier, better, more.

My legs are shaking, in almost exactly the same way as his. I can’t catch my breath, and I have to press myself right up against him to keep myself steady. Delicious urges thrill through me, and I give in to at least one of them – I turn my face against the bobbly wool of the little olive green tank top he’s wearing, and bite, hard. I bite material, and the jut of his shoulder blade, and flesh.

My eyes open wide, when he cries out in a way that suggests he doesn’t hate a move like that. Not at all. In fact, he squeezes my hand tighter, around his cock. He jerks forward, as though pulled. And then his heavy prick leaps and spurts, thickly.

I know it does, because he cups his free hand around himself in this strange little jerky move, and everything spatters into the hollow he’s made.

My immediate urge, however, is not what it was when Andy came all over my face – to get a tissue. Instead I want to turn him around, and lick my fingers clean right in front of him. I want to make him watch, and then I want to make him clean himself up, too.

Not that I get the opportunity to do either. Instead, he keeps his hand over mine – so that I have to sag forward, when he does. He presses his forehead into the wood of one of the shelves, this time, but the impression I’m left with is the same. Frustration, and a mild sort of despair.

I don’t think this has made him happy. I might have realised something about myself, but I don’t think he’s quite there, yet. In fact, I’m not sure he’s even in the vicinity.

I try to straighten and detach myself from him, but that’s a mistake. The moment I do, he lets me go and jerks around, as flustered and blustery as ever I’ve seen him. He goes to pick up the dropped book, but then seems to realise that he’s still exposed and covered in something that shouldn’t be on books – which only makes him more agitated.

His hair is delightfully mussed. Or at least, it would be delightful if he weren’t so clearly mortified.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. His eyes flash ten types of panic at me, and all ten make my stomach twist in sickly knots.

However, before I can calm him down and reassure him that
I’m
actually the wicked pervert, he barges past me and out the door. He doesn’t even remember to take his coat.

Lord, I hope he remembered to fasten his trousers.

I
LEAVE A SERIES
of messages on his answerphone, but hold out no hope that they’ll reach him. For some reason, I imagine his answering machine as a hand-cranked gramophone type device, in a house full of similar items.

He probably has a mangle.

Either way, he doesn’t call me back. Instead I get three hundred messages on
my
answerphone, from Andy. Some of them are dirty. None of them are as dirty as giving Gabe a handjob in the back of my shop. Though the “I want to come in your ass” one skirts extremely close.

I wonder if Gabe would dare to say words like that. I bet he’s never even thought of such an idea, though I’m guessing his erotic romance education is getting him close. I bet it’s making him want to pick up the phone, and call me.

All I have to do is wait. Be patient. Don’t force him.

Why do I want to force him so badly?

Because I can still smell him on my skin – that sweet clean scent, like pine so strong and fine it’s almost mint. Because when I think of his lean body strung out so taut and trembling against me, I go weak.

Because he needs a push, and maybe some tender loving care. And though I’m not that sort of person – or at least, I don’t think I am – I can at least bake him a lasagne. If there are ulterior motives beneath the lasagne, like dirty fucking and not getting sued, well. At least he’s getting a delicious pasta meal into the bargain.

I still feel foolish, however, when standing outside his over-varnished door, clutching food like some desperate-for-attention old lady. And, somehow, I’m sure he isn’t going to open up. I can practically feel him peering at me through the peephole.

So it’s a shock, when the door practically lunges open. I almost take a step back, and then again when I see what sort of state he’s in.

He has the tense harried look of a man who’s about to be punched, in the face. Or of a man who’s been forced on to a ride he couldn’t handle, and now he’s about to throw up. His tie is slightly askew. A lick of hair dangles over his broad pale brow.

In his book, I’m pretty sure that’s enough to indicate extreme stress. It makes me glad I brought the lasagne. It also makes me greedy to smooth that hair back into place, which is one of the strangest impulses I’ve ever encountered. I don’t think I’ve ever smoothed a man’s hair back into place, before. Like I’m his mother, or something!

Why doesn’t it feel like a mother-y sort of thing?

‘How did you find me?’ he asks, like some gasping maiden, talking to her awful stalker. Though to his credit he seems to realise he sounds like a gasping maiden, and finishes with this: ‘I mean – what are you here for?’

I come very close to saying
to fuck you
, but luckily he gets in there before me.

‘It’s just that … my apartment is a mess and I … I don’t usually have visitors.’

It comes as no surprise to me at all that his apartment, far from being a mess, is almost unbearably clean and tidy. Reluctance skitters all over him, but he lets me by into the laboratory beyond. The one which he then tidies some more.

Despite the aroma of coffee wafting in from the undoubtedly sterile kitchen, the place smells like him: of that pine-y, soapy thing. And then there’s the tang of furniture polish – of course there is. He’s spraying some right now. On his books. Which are lined on shelves in so rigorous and orderly a fashion, it looks as though they’ve been covered in plastic.

Maybe they
have
been covered in plastic. The furniture certainly has been, after all. No word of a lie – the furniture is covered in plastic. The couch and chairs are what looks like a lovely and tasteful white and blue striped silk, but they’re still covered in giant condoms.

There’s not a speck of dust to be seen. Everything is at perfect right angles to everything else. Instead of a TV, he has a giant graph, plotting the space used by each item in his living room.

OK – perhaps not that last one. But it’s a close thing.

‘What a lovely apartment,’ I say, and I think he flinches – as though expecting sarcasm.

‘Oh, well, I …’ he begins, then gestures half-heartedly at nothing. ‘I know most men don’t keep things this neat.’

I get the impression that other people have not approved of his lifestyle choices.

‘Who cares what most men do?’ I say. He looks startled. Clearly the idea of not giving a shit has failed to occur to him.

I try to communicate my not-giving-a-shit-ness to him, with just my gaze. Unfortunately, I think I send him extreme horniness, instead. He flushes from collar to eyeballs and looks down quickly, but there’s no respite there. We’re reflected back up at him in his over-polished floors.

I’m afraid to walk on it, this mirror floor. He’s now looking at my shoes and it’s reasonably obvious that he wants to ask me to take them off – but of course he can’t. It makes me wonder how many people he’s had in here, and been too terrified to ask them to remove their footwear.

When he meets my eyes again the flush that had died down returns, and he looks away. It’s like a shove, to the small of my back.

‘Was there something you wanted to ask me?’ I say, but he goes in a completely unexpected direction. He blurts out, in a rush:

‘Did you bring that for me?

Instead of anything about shoes. I don’t know – I give him an inch, and he takes a mile!

Unfortunately, I love his mile. I want to run it, right now. I want to shout at him: of course I brought this for you!

But I just give him the barest flicker of a smile, instead, and hold the dish out to him.

‘Why don’t you go put it in the oven?’

His shoulders drop a little, but not in disappointment, I’m sure. It looks like relief, and the smile trying to curl the corners of his mouth suggests the same. When he reaches forward – from the waist, rather than actually taking a step closer to me – to take the lasagne, his tongue touches his upper teeth in that sweet and unintentionally lascivious way he has.

Or at least, I’m assuming it’s unintentional. It certainly holds on to unintentional, when he stops halfway to the kitchen, and turns – all big chocolate eyes and open mouth and oh my word, does he have little pointed incisors on the bottom row of teeth, too? Like a vampire, in reverse? How lovely he is. How lovely, and unsure of everything.

‘Are you … were you going to stay and have some, too?’

He sounds so hopeful that my heart suddenly expands and devours my entire body. I think part of me had intended to punish him in some way for not answering my messages, but oh, that’s not going to happen now. No no no.

I think he’s going to get a treat, instead.

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘Why not?’

He smiles properly, then, and when he comes back from the kitchen he even gets real close, to take my coat from me – like a gentleman.

His hands skim my shoulders, once I’ve turned for him. They do slightly more than skim, however, when his fingers curl under the collar – I can feel him getting a sneaky stroke of my skin, at the nape of my neck beneath the dark fall of my hair. And then he slides the coat down my arms as slow as humanly possible, knuckles brushing me through my crisp shirt, all the way to the wrists.

Even sweeter and more sensuous than this strange repressed sort of touching: he leans forward, and breathes in the scent of my hair. I know he does. I can feel and hear him doing it – just this side of obvious. Just enough so I’ll know, without him having to say. That’s Gabriel.

I turn back around on embarrassingly shaky legs. By this point I’m fairly certain that the barrier he puts up between himself and his desires is making a haze of tension drift between us, and I’m swimming in it. I’m drowning in it.

I think he’s drowning, too. His gaze is foggy and his hair looks mussed, again – he must have straightened his tie in the kitchen, but the echo of that disarray still remains. I watch him fold my coat over his arm and an image floats up behind my eyes – him, putting my coat wherever he’s going to put it. But pressing it to his face, before he does so.

‘The lasagne will be a while,’ he says, voice hoarse and oddly regretful. Though maybe it’s not really so odd, when you consider that my mind has already progressed to him putting my wet knickers to his face, too.

He has to regret all the time we’ve got, all that
while
, when things like that are probably going to happen. Hell, maybe I’m going to make them happen, and then he can go ahead and not answer my messages for another hundred years.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you – before.’

I think he’s reading my mind.

‘I just … I mean, my behaviour …’

He rolls his eyes, as though his “behaviour” was just that mind-boggling.

‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m not usually like that.’

I raise one eyebrow, but don’t contradict him. I don’t really have time to – he darts back into the kitchen before I can say another embarrassing word.

Not that I mind. It gives me the opportunity to look around his tart little apartment without his nervous eyes holding me back. The books, in particular, need scrutinising. I suspect that he doesn’t put his money where his mouth is, and of course I’m proven right:

There isn’t a single smutty book to be seen, on any of his many shelves. There are dry tomes on World War II and tasteful works of contemporary literature – you know, the sort that everybody likes – and the occasional manual on toy-making. But nothing that even feathers against the boundaries of naughtiness.

No one would ever guess that there’s porn in his toilet cistern.

Even if there isn’t, in reality. And I know this, because I check once I’ve invited myself into his immaculate bathroom. The one that’s so immaculate that I bet myself he’ll change the towels, after I’ve gone, before washing the entire place down while wearing a biohazard suit.

And no, I’ve not a single clue as to why such an idea thrills me so. Even as I’m laughing to myself, I’m crackling with this strange sort of energy. The compulsion to do him wrong. I mist up the bathroom and write
suck my cunt
on his pristine mirror, then watch the words dissolve away into a little secret message, just for him.

For when he next has a shower, with all of his clothes on.

Unfortunately for Gabe, I don’t feel like stopping at dirty words. The bathroom is en suite, with one door that leads to his living room, and another that I’m almost deathly certain lets a person through into the Fort Knox of his bedroom. The bedroom that’s almost begging me not to stop, at dirty words. The bedroom with the hotel-neat bed, and the weirdly drawn curtains, and the picture of Jesus over the headboard.

OK – not that last one. But even so.

The room smells of expensive air freshener, as though he’s been doing bad things in here and needed something to cover them. However, finding what he’s needing to cover proves almost impossible. The wardrobe is imposing and masculine, but there aren’t any dead bodies inside – I know because I open it and find only rows and rows of identical shirts and trousers, with glossy shoes standing beneath.

The drawer at the base yields piles and piles of tank tops – his uniform of choice – while further bedside units are only filled with underwear, most monochrome and dull. I’m not even sure why I would expect anything else, and yet the more I search through his boring things, the sweatier my palms get. The more I anticipate his secret hiding places, his stash of the good stuff; after all, it can’t just be a vice he indulges in while working at my shop.

I stand up, hands on hips. Frustrated and sure he’s going to come in any minute, to make me feel guilty for rummaging through his stuff – though it’s not as though he doesn’t have a right to. This is a terrible invasion of his privacy and I
should
get guilt-stomped for it, I should feel bad, I’m an awful awful person, to do a thing like –

There’s a drawer beneath his bed. There is a drawer beneath his bed, pretending to hide. I know there is because I had one just like it, and it makes those fat lines in the otherwise smooth underside of the frame. He’s got a valance covering it, but really – he didn’t think such a thing was secret, did he? Like a safe, for his valuables!

I crouch down, and drag it out – so sure of myself that when there’s nothing there, my disappointment is total. It’s just more tank tops, more endlessly grey tank tops and so much monochrome that I wonder if the movie of my life has switched from colour to black and white.

But oh my lad, you didn’t think you were going to get away with it that easily, did you? Everyone knows that you have to check
under
the disguising items of clothing, too – like checking the layer of real notes, to find the Monopoly money beneath!

And he has more than Monopoly money in his secret safe drawer of naughtiness, I tell you what. He has books, lovely books, of course he does – all the books I had under my own bed, back when I was far too innocent for this sort of stuff. Crimson Silk books, books by authors who disappeared into the wilds of “legitimate” fiction and never returned, books with bad girls on their covers.

He has my favourites:
Threesome
,
The Loner
,
All Business
,
World Without End
. Spines laced with cracks, pages almost falling out. Exotically named authors like Felusia De La Ray. And all the scenes I still remember whenever I close my eyes and my body hums: the yellow scarf and the river and the tennis-playing girls.

I wonder if he remembers the tennis-playing girls. The ones who live on in infamy in my mind, apparently. Though I’m guessing it’s more about the strong female protagonists in all of these books, doing things like writing the word cunt on bathroom mirrors.

Despite the fact that none of those amazing heroines ever do anything like that – mainly because they’re strong and brave and cool. Whereas I’m just wicked and awful, and turned to water by desires I didn’t even know I had, five minutes ago.

Plus I jump and my legs don’t want to help me stand, when Gabe finally discovers me and my many, many transgressions. If I was like them I’m sure I wouldn’t feel conflicted about doing this, or nervous about hurting his feelings, and this would definitely be the moment where we continued what I shouldn’t have started, back at the shop.