Control (3 page)

I slide off the desk and down on to my knees with very little fuss at all. I make even less fuss when I come face to face with his prick, as solid and thick as it had seemed in me, pushing out from the parted wings of his jeans like a club.

The urge to touch myself grows very strong indeed, to see this evidence of his arousal. Of course I knew he was excited, but somehow it isn’t real until I can lick the fine trail of pre-come from the tip of his bursting cock, until I’m allowed to palm his tightly drawn up balls and feel his choked groan buzzing through his entire body.

‘Go on,’ he tells me. ‘Go on, slutty little bookworm.’

His hand is in my hair but he doesn’t force me. He just waits for me to force myself.

Though when I part my lips and swallow the length of him down, it doesn’t feel like I’m forcing anything. It feels like I’m hungry for cock, a slutty bookworm who needs teaching some sort of lesson – how could I torment that poor man in such a way?

Maybe Gabriel will walk in, right now, and he can punish me, too. They can take turns in my mouth, Andy urging Gabe on, ordering him to hold my head and fuck my face. He won’t do it, at first, but as things get more urgent and slippery, and all that hunger inside him comes bubbling to the surface and oh God, Gabe, I want to make you surface, God –

I suck greedily, now mindless with dirty thoughts I never know I want to think until they’re right there. But it’s only when I get my hand around the base of him, and jerk him off as I lick and nibble and swirl my tongue just so, that his legs start to tremble. He grunts for me in a way that clasps my whole body, close to orgasm but not quite going over.

My clit is aching, just aching, and I can’t deny it any longer. I have to touch myself – I don’t care how much of a slutty bookworm it makes me.

My finger skids in all the wetness soaking my slit, prompting a frustrated sob from me that apparently goes directly to his cock. Every sound I make forces him to buck forwards, so it’s no surprise that when I finally find my clit and press just once, lightly, my long moan of delight triggers his orgasm.

I’m still shocked, however. He cries out and spurts thickly into my mouth as I frantically rub at myself, but it’s not the sweet-salt taste or the swell of him or his cry of pleasure that wrenches out my climax. It’s him pulling away from me, mid-spurt, to stripe my face with the last of his come.

I
CAN TELL HE’S
seen. It could be that I meant for him to. I’m no longer sure of myself or what I might do at any given moment, and letting Gabriel see my ass-print on that glossy countertop is no exception to this problem.

I’m only surprised that the countertop held the print so well. I thought it might fade overnight, but when I come back on to the shop floor with morning cups of coffee and he’s polishing the top as though devils possess him, it’s fairly obvious that the fading didn’t happen.

I wonder if he knows. His blushing face tells me he does. Though exactly what that restrained little brain of his is conjuring up, I’ve no idea. Me flashing a customer with some ankle, and accidentally riding up a little bit too much skirt so that an arse print gets left? Maybe he imagines that my arse cheeks got a little hot, and I felt the best way to cool them down would be to plant them on the glossy wood.

It can’t be sex. He might be as horny as a horn-riddled dinosaur, but I don’t think he’s capable of processing real, actual, dirty thoughts. He’s probably still stuck on bra straps and snogging as sexual fantasies.

I have a brief flash of delicious pleasure as I leave him to take care of the shop, thinking of him trying to make sense of an arse print in his innocent pigtailed mind. Imagine if he’d forgotten something yesterday, and come back just at the wrong moment! Then seen me and Andy doing terrible things, through the inch of glass not covered by posters and sheltered by book stands.

Poor, innocent Gabriel. I just want to hug him, and make it all better. And maybe when I hug him, I’ll let my hand stray to his neat little backside.

I buy the collected Poirot and a sensible winter coat to calm my fevered brain, and then enjoy a delicious non-sexual lunch at a restaurant that doesn’t have a hot waiter, to further my progress. Of course, the whole time I know I’m just delaying my return to the shop. I mean, that was the purpose of hiring Gabe – so that I could have more time to myself. So that I could shop for things I need, and sleep, and suss out the competition.

I didn’t hire someone so that I could spend my time harassing him. Especially when it’s someone who’s likely only going to be confused by that sort of attention. He needs a nice girlfriend, someone who is patient and sweet and as unknowledgeable about sex as he probably is. They can fumble under the sheets together, in the dark. She’ll be vaguely unhappy for the rest of her life, but become an expert at baking pies. He’ll start stashing gay porn in the toilet cistern.

I’ll fuck Andy until I die of exhaustion. It will all work out for everybody.

Or at least, that’s what I think until I catch him reading
Sins of the Flesh
.

I think I give him an out. And by that I mean – I bustle into the shop overloaded with bags, get a little tangled, and give him the perfect opportunity to pretend he wasn’t reading anything at all. He stands up from his seat behind the counter, with absolutely nothing in his hands and no book anywhere to be seen in front of him.

But I know that’s what he was doing. I can feel a smile pulling at the corners of my mouth even as I play along with his total innocence, that little pink flash of book cover I saw through the glass playing over and over in my mind. I guess his secret porn stash in the cistern is actually my book shop.

The smile pulls at my mouth harder, but I get it under control.

‘Hello, Gabe,’ I say, and, as with all guilty people, he seems to find it hard to make perfectly articulated words. He says something that
sounds
like hi, but could reasonably be anything. His hands go into his pockets – as they often do when he’s having to do something awkward, like make casual conversation.

The problem is that I actually
want
to make casual conversation with Gabriel. I want to chat about the weather! When is he going to talk to me about the weather?

Instead he helps me with my bags, and I spend my time guessing about him. Did his mother make him like this? Some spank-happy teacher, at the Enid Blyton School For Unruly Boys? Nothing at all but his own strange need to be so self-contained? He’s not irretrievably weird, exactly, but you have to be a certain sort of man to feel you have to hide your need to read naughty novels from naughty novel store owners.

God, I’m dying to know if it really was
Sins of the Flesh
he was reading. It’s right there on the stand by the counter, and it’s got a hot pink cover, and it is absolutely unabashedly filthy. It’s just the kind of book you’d read if your draconian parents stopped you from looking at girls’ breasts until the age of thirty.

I stop just short of saying to him – as he puts the teabags away, in the almost-too-high-for-me-to-reach kitchen cupboard – that he can read any book he wants, whenever it’s not busy. I could tell him it’s a good advertisement – that customers often ask about the books they see we’re reading.

But then he turns around, and there’s this look on his face. His eyes are big and sweet and clearly the sort that are easy to wound, but there’s a furtive smile there, too. His mouth is curling – the way I suspected mine was doing, when I first walked in.

It makes me not want to spoil his secret. I doubt he’s been entitled to many in his strange little life.

‘I shelved the books that came in this morning, and watered the plants. Oh, and I got that big cobweb out of the top right corner,’ he says. It’s where we’re stuck – in boring work exchanges.

I never thought I’d be concerned about too much attention-to-detail talk, when I imagined hiring an assistant. And he’s so good at the attention to detail! He polished the little lip of non-carpeted stuff on the step up to the second tier of the shop, for God’s sake! He cleaned the little window at the back – without having to be asked!

‘That’s brilliant,’ I tell him, though I wish I had less patronising and/or dull things to say.

So it’s something of a shock, when he takes a big leap beyond silence or casual conversation or something boring. He does it without warning, too, with his face turned away from mine.

‘I’m used to keeping things neat, you know? My parents were pretty forgetful.’

Something jumps, inside me – a small electric shock. It’s like being given an unexpected gift. It’s like I’ve been digging in the dirt for weeks and weeks, and finally got to the treasure at the bottom.

Though the thought of what sort of treasure it’s going to be makes me hesitate, before digging further.

‘Were you very close?’

Even with his back half to me like that, and his hands busy on a counter that’s already perfectly neat, I can still make out the expression on his face – an almost-grimace, as though he’s just tasted something bad.

‘We were … I took care of them. We weren’t alike, though.’

No sense in stopping now.

‘In what way were you different?’

He shrugs, ever so slightly. A tight nudge of his shoulder.

‘They weren’t particularly sensible.’

It’s ridiculous, but my palms are sweating. I have broken into the Pentagon of him, and now I’m slinking down nuke-laced corridors. I am a Russian spy, interrogating him in a darkened room.

‘So you were responsible for everything?’

‘I … yes.’

‘For how long?’

I can feel him pulling away from me. He goes to the bookshelf adjacent to the counter, and tidies a mess that isn’t there.

His back is fully to me, now.

‘I don’t know. Since I was a boy, I guess.’

For some reason, Quentin Blake’s drawings from
The Twits
comes to mind. Two scraggly, hairy weirdoes, living in a maze of filth. A small, slight Gabriel trying to keep on top of everything.

God, I should never have hired this one. He’s making me feel obliged. I can sense it welling up inside me. It comes up my throat and spills out of my mouth:

‘My father was very strict.’

It’s true. He was. But I don’t know why I’m telling him so, when I’ve never told a soul. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I told anyone anything about myself.

He turns, quite suddenly. There’s a queerly eager look on his face that makes me both sick and something else. Something like excitement.

‘I can tell,’ he says, which should make me even sicker. But somehow, it doesn’t. Not when it’s Gabriel. It would be different if it were Andy, sure of himself and rich with arrogance. But this isn’t the same.

‘How?’

His eyebrows lift, a little shrug of the face.

‘Just something about you. Something so … in control.’

How odd that he should say so, right when I haven’t felt less in control in my entire life. I’m surprised my knees aren’t knocking together. I need to get a hold on myself. I need to –

‘Maybe that’s just what you want to see. Maybe you like that about me.’

‘Why would I like that you’re in control?’ he asks, and even tilts his head to the side – for all the world like a curious little boy.

But I think he secretly knows. I think I know too – of course I know. I’ve been playing this game ever since I hired him.

‘So is it all right if I go?’ he says, quite abruptly. It sounds as though he’s waiting for something – or looks like it, at least. But he’s so closed and tightly wound, how can I know for certain what it is?

‘Of course.’

He flashes me that smile, the one with the pointed incisors and the curling tongue. The one that makes him boyish and not so weighed down by whatever he’s weighed down by. And then all at once I know what he was waiting for.

Permission.

I flick through
Sins of the Flesh
, looking for all the things he will have seen.
He strummed her clit with thick fingers
, that sort of thing. I want to get inside his brain and swim around in it, understand all the things he thought and felt when reading words like that.

It’s not like with Andy. Andy’s brain runs on one track, it’s obvious, he reads those words and gets an erection. It’s a simple reflex.

But I remember what it was like to know nothing about words like that, to uncover a whole secret world one page at a time and be both baffled and awed. Is that the way Gabe thinks? Or has this always been his little furtive habit, while dodging around his crazy parents? If he reads this sort of stuff all the time, likely he knows more about fucking than Andy does.

That
thought pulls me up short.

As does the scene in
Sins of the Flesh
where the heroine tells the hero to get on his knees. Though it’s not the fact that the scene is hot that pulls at me. I think of Gabe liking it, instead, and feel my sex grow warm and plump. I’m supposed to be catching up on a little bookkeeping, but somehow the room has grown dark and my receipts have gone untouched and I’ve got this book in my hand while thoughts of Gabriel, downstairs in the shop, fill me up.

It’s not the book, it’s Gabriel. It’s not that someone was watching, it’s not the idea of being watched. It’s the fact that it was someone so dark and strange and potentially pliable watching.

The realisation makes me cover my face with the book.

I like it. I like teasing him and tormenting him, peeling away all his layers and giving him permission. I could have chosen the girl, if I wanted. I could have chosen Andy, to be my assistant. But I didn’t. I chose Gabriel Kauffman.

Probably because of my strict father, thanks so much Dr Gabriel Freud.

Fuck knows what I’m going to do, from here.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
my brain sings, and I hate myself. Why can’t I just be satisfied with Andy?

Because I’ve been satisfied with Andy all my life, maybe.

I throw the book aside and stand, straighten my shirt, smooth my trousers. I look neat and professional, which should help with the firing of my almost perfect assistant. I can tell him that we’re just not busy enough – which is a lie – or that the economy is biting too hard, or some such nonsense. And then I can go back to the way things were and the way I was.

Straight, simple, professional.

Unfortunately, even before I get to the shop I know something’s going on. I know the way I knew when I saw that little flash of hot pink and he stood up too hurriedly. The kitchen door opens out almost on top of the counter, and he’s not there. He’s not anywhere in the main space of the shop – though I suppose that isn’t too unusual, considering that it’s closing time. It could be that he’s just tidying the second tier, the little alcove at the back of the store that made me buy the place.

And yet I know he’s not tidying. I don’t do anything as clichéd as keeping the filthiest books back there, but it’s where I catch the most embarrassed-looking men in macs. I don’t get all that many, however – I think because I sell so much romance, too. It’s hard to lick the pornography amidst the hearts and flowers.

I like Gabe, a lot, for not seeming to mind how many hearts and flowers flutter around his smut. In fact, I think he prefers it that way. He’s standing right in the corner, in front of the bookcase beside the window, reading
Passion’s Flame
. I can tell it’s
Passion’s Flame
, because it’s one of my all time favourites.

I can also make out his teeth, biting deep into his lower lip. That furrow he sometimes gets between his heavy black brows, as though he’s uncertain how to proceed. But then his head turns slightly – I think so he can look at the right-hand page – and I can no longer see the lovely slant of his face. His back is almost completely to me – though that’s not exactly an unpleasant sight.

He isn’t big, like Andy. But that curve, to his back. The narrowness of his hips – so clear in those tidy grey trousers he always wears – contrasting giddily with the broadness of his shoulders …

I don’t want to alert him to my presence, just so that I can keep looking at his back. I don’t want to alert him to my presence because then he would stop reading, and biting his lip, and acting like a 19th-century maid who’s doing something she shouldn’t.

I think I know when he becomes aware of me. His back stiffens ever so slightly. He doesn’t turn the page when it comes time to.

My heart thuds, low and long. I’m not going to fire him. Oh my God, I’m not going to fire him. He’s wrong, he’s wrong – I’m not in control at all. I’m taking the step up. I’m strolling across the lovely plush carpet towards him.