In Too Deep (15 page)

With molten lead in my gut, I want to scratch her eyes out. She’s older than me, and older than him. Forties, but glowing and prime-time with it. Her hair is expensive, with high- and lowlights, and she’s wearing this gorgeous suit that screams ‘designer’. She ought not to be Daniel’s type, but he returns her fond look with a shrug and a twist of his lips that’s strangely intimate. Now I want to scratch
his
eyes out too.

I wish I could hear what they’re saying, but from their body language I can make out that she seems to be worried about him and trying to reason with him over something, and he’s doing the ‘man’ thing, shrugging it off, even though he pulls off his glasses for a moment and rubs his eyes and the back of his dark curly head.

There’s a bit more of this to and fro, then she leans in and kisses him softly on the cheek. This deposits a touch of soft pink lipstick on his skin, and in another possessive gesture she wipes it away.

As she disappears, Daniel glances towards my desk, but, just as he begins to approach, a reedy and rather worried voice to one side of me asks, ‘Please, can you help me?’

I want to shout, ‘No! Fuck off! It’s my dinner break,’ but I turn and smile. It’s a young and very harassed-looking woman with a child in a pushchair, and she looks close to tears. Haltingly she describes a school project her older kid is doing, which needs to be completed by tomorrow. Not everyone has the internet yet, it seems, and she’s found her way to the public library for the first time in her life, looking for resources. Ten minutes later, and with a deskful of books from the four corners of Lending, she’s thrilled and touchingly grateful. Even her pushchair babe seems to have calmed, sensing the sudden lift in his frazzled mum’s spirits. Her thank-yous are effusive and, despite all my fretting, behind the partition, about Daniel, I too feel better. There’s a solace and a satisfaction in getting to the essence of my job, instead of going through a bunch of bureaucratic motions. I encourage her to come back any time and ask for me.

This feeling of missionary professional wellbeing quickly dissipates, though, when I think of Ms Designer-Suit-and-Lowlights and her divine right to kiss Daniel in public. As there’s one of the library’s perennial rota glitches and nobody to relieve me this lunchtime, I close the desk, make for the staff area, slam my card through the time clock and scoot down the back stairs to the basement.

Nothing like a bit of confrontation to release the growing tension. Well, I can think of better things … and hey, maybe I’ll get them if I don’t pick a fight instead.

My heart bounces like a rubber ball as I bound down the steps at a foolhardy speed. If Old Johnson happens to be around it’ll be a reprimand, for sure. But who cares? I’ve simply got to find out who that woman is.

I know my jealousy is ridiculous. Professor Hottie and I aren’t an item. We haven’t even had sex together, properly. A bit of fiddling about and a blow job do not a steady relationship constitute. Temporary fling, remember? Although the woman in the foyer just now didn’t look temporary or fling-like.

I slow down. I need to cool it. It’s just a game.

He’s not in his cubby-hole. Books and documents are spread out as usual, with the laptop glowing softly to one side. Another of his strategy games is running, I notice. Does he ever actually do any work down here? His tweed jacket is draped over the back of his chair. I wonder if he’s slipped to the washroom and I’m rocked in my flatties by the memory of what I saw last time I followed him there. So elegant. So beautiful. So male.

A tiny sound breaks me out of my lustful reveries. Was that a groan? It certainly sounded like one to me. Is he at it again?

I pad along to the end of the basement where some weather-beaten old furniture is stored, from earlier times and a more genteel library experience. Back then, the library had an elegant reading room with leather upholstered settees for passing gentry to sit and read copies of
The Times
on. These venerable seating arrangements are losing their stuffing nowadays, but I discover Daniel stretched out full length on one of them, his arm thrown across his face, covering his eyes. His other arm hangs down, almost brushing the floor, spectacles dangling from his fingers. He looks like a cross between a fallen archangel and a Victorian poet trashed off his face on absinthe and laudanum.

‘Are you all right?’

At the sound of my voice, he shoots upright, then grabs at his head again.

‘Yes … sort of.’

‘Liar!’

His eyes look like two dark wells in this shadowy, ill-lit corner of the basement, and he’s obviously in pain. This is the second time I’ve caught him down here not exactly in the shining prime of health.

He swings his legs down to the floor, making a space for me on the settee. I sit but he’s making a bit of a thing of replacing his glasses, and still doesn’t look at me directly. Like the elegant woman earlier, I place a hand on his arm. His flesh feels hot and feverish through the dark-blue cotton of his shirt.

‘What is it? Something’s wrong.’

‘Just a headache. It’s nothing. Don’t fret.’

His voice sounds strained, raw.

‘You seem to get them a lot. Have you been to a doctor?’

He squares his shoulders and sits up straight, and now he
does
look at me, the twinkle returning to him.

‘I’m just working hard. It’s nothing.’ He places his hand over mine, his fingertips light, moving slightly. ‘How are
you
?’

In bits now, because he’s touched me. These same fingers drove me to madness yesterday evening, and their delicate movements already have me halfway there again. In the blink of an eye, I’ve flipped from the workaday world of the library and its limited budgets and anxious borrowers and entered the pressure-cooker realm of Nemesis and his playful sexual mind-games.

Here, I can say anything. Do anything. Want anything.

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘Of course. I’m your friend, aren’t I?’

Some friend … I glance at his hands, and imagine them on me. Then I seem to see his fingers holding a pen, or dancing across keys. It’s on the tip of my tongue to demand the truth,
but
instead I simply say, ‘OK then, I’ll tell you how I feel. I feel horny!’ His brows shoot up, but he smiles. ‘There, is that friendly enough for you?’

‘Well, that’s one way of taking a man’s mind off his headache.’ He edges closer, and I take a hit of a luscious cologne. It’s woodsy and spicy, toe-curlingly exotic. Down below, I feel myself flutter in response. ‘Do you … er … want to do something about it?’ His thick dark lashes flutter down. Magnified by the lenses of his spectacles, they look like black velvet fans in the low light. ‘Purely in the interests of friendship, of course. And it would give you something to tell Nemesis about.’

‘Fuck Nemesis!’

I laugh as it dawns on me I’m almost certain that I’m about to do that very thing. He laughs too, and I know I’m hallucinating because I seem to see a salacious sparkle bounce off his even white teeth.

‘Indeed,’ he concurs, his head tilting slightly. Did he wink then? He might have done. It’s quite possible.

Indeed, indeed. He’s so tempting, so delicious, and there’s a quality about him that makes me feel powerful. He might have the upper hand most times, but right now he still looks a little bit frazzled around the edges and vulnerable. I surge forwards, making him start slightly, then grab him by the back of the neck to bring his face to my kiss. At the very last minute he snatches off his glasses and tosses them away across the confined space around the squashed settee. I hear the soft tap of them landing on the thin old carpeting. I hope they’re not broken but the worry’s like a minor tickle a million miles away. I love the feel of Daniel’s curls in my fingers and the moist heat of his mouth around my invading tongue. I love the way he goes ‘Mmm …’ and seems to swallow the very breath of my life.

His act of compliance is just that, an act. Even while I’m kissing him, his clever hands are at work. The tails of my blouse are out of my waistband before I know it, and hot searching fingertips are gliding up my back to the catch of my bra. He flips it open with suspicious deftness and the sensation of the garment sliding free against my skin is odd, but also sleazy and arousing. He compounds the sleaze factor by sliding his hand around, shoving up one of the cups and giving my breast a rough, demanding squeeze. In the same instant his tongue surges forwards, subduing mine, possessing my mouth with far greater assurance than I ever had.

I squeal silently and wriggle my hips when he pinches my nipple. The pain is tiny but acute, and it pierces my heart and my soul. How the hell did he know that would turn me on? I didn’t even know it myself.

He does it again, not hard but with authority, and I feel the warm rush of arousal in my panties. Suddenly, I want to be bare down there. I want his hand again, touching, exploring, pleasuring. I want his fingers inside me, maybe not three but certainly two, pushing, pushing, pushing and readying me for the ingress of his cock.

Reaching down while he’s still playing with my breast, I haul at my skirt, pulling it up, exposing my suspenders and stocking-tops. I pull with both hands, getting the cloth out of the way, bunching it at my waist, and then I start tugging at my knickers. Daniel abandons my breast as he feels what I’m doing, and helps. Between us, we drag my knickers off over my shoes, and then I’m partially naked from my bundled skirt to the tops of my thighs.

My eyes fly open, and I discover that Daniel’s are closed, those heavenly lashes lying across the top of his cheekbones. He’s savouring me in darkness, employing touch only as he flicks the lace and elastic of my garter belt, then slides his
fingers
along one suspender to the thick dark welt of my stocking. One fingertip slides under the nylon, delicately stroking, his nail hard against the soft bare skin that for so long has only felt my own touch as I wash … and sometimes pleasure myself.

For about a minute he just dawdles around my stocking-top, teasing me. He’s so close to my centre but he’s staying away from it on purpose. I can feel myself oozing and flowing, my honey pooling on the cracked leather beneath my bottom. My sex is pouched and pouting, screaming silently for contact.

I lose my patience, grab his hand and jam it between my legs. I’ve had enough of this shilly-shallying about, and the low sound of appreciation that Daniel breathes into my mouth says he’s not averse to my taking the initiative.

Immediately he assumes the perfect configuration, hand gently cupping my pussy, middle finger surging magisterially between my sex lips and zeroing in on my clit. He presses hard, as hard as he pinched me, and, almost as I register that, his other hand is inside my flapping bra again and delicately twisting my aching nipple. Twist, tug, press, rub. Twist, tug, press, rub.

My vagina flutters and clenches and I almost bite Daniel’s tongue as I come. I’m glad he’s got dominion of my mouth, because without it I’d be screaming – and, even though we’re down here in the forsaken bowels of the library, somebody would be bound to hear me.

He works me right through my climax. He’s merciless. I jerk and jiggle and clench and flow, performing for him. But inside I’m planning retribution. He commands my passion now, but soon I’ll own his.

Still fluttering, I break away, set my hands against his chest and push him back against the settee.

‘Condom? Have you got a condom?’ I rasp, moving over him with little grace but a lot of breathless determination.

‘Yes,’ he gasps back at me, and, as his hands have been dislodged from my body, he scrabbles about in the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out a familiar small foil package.

Now isn’t that convenient?

His eyes open for a moment, and he gives me a wry little smile and a roll of his shoulders.

You devil, you were planning this all along! I want to shake him, reprimand him, tell him he’s an arrogant, presumptuous, teasing bastard of a manipulative pervert. But I don’t, mainly because I want to fuck him.

Fixing him with a stern, admonishing look that he almost misses because he leans back and closes his eyes again, I attack his belt buckle, then his jeans button, then his flies. Astonishingly, he’s wearing no underwear. More arrogant assumption that he was going to get his end away today. I should tell him that he’s got a nerve, but I’m too dumbstruck by the glorious sight of his penis, rising like a rosy spear from between the dark denim wings of his jeans.

I’m almost faint with anticipation. I want him. I want him inside me. I want to have sex with famous television historian and all-round clever devil Professor Daniel Brewster. And I want it now.

‘Give me that!’ I grab the condom and wrench open the packet. The contraceptive inside is slick and silky, but nowhere near as silky as the head of Daniel’s cock. Clear, silver fluid is seeping from the little eye there, his arousal just as eager and revealing as mine.

It’s a while since I put a condom on a man, but it’s one of those skills you never forget, because it comes with the perk of handling a man’s delicious stiffness. I manage to achieve our goal without fumbling, but the heat in his mighty flesh is
unnerving
. As is the agonised beauty of his face as I enrobe him.

Finally, he’s ready. Clad in rubber and even harder and higher than before, if that’s possible. My pussy throbs and purrs in anticipation.

Now, how are we going to manage this? I have a strong urge to be on top. I need to assert myself. Kicking off my shoes, I climb astride, kneeling on the leather with my thighs straddling his. The ancient settee creaks ominously as I adjust my position, holding on to the back, almost pushing my semi-freed breasts into his face. My thighs feel as if they’re creaking too, with the strain of holding myself above him. So I reach down, take hold of his cock and guide him into me.

My descent seems to take a long, long time. There’s a universe of difference between looking at a big cock and having it inside me, and only now, as it’s happening, do I truly apprehend the exquisite distinctions. He feels huge in length and girth, and he knocks my breath out of me. I gasp for air, still descending and still expanding to accommodate him.