In Too Deep (5 page)

There’d be far more creative scope for self-indulgence if I had a man beneath the duvet with me, of course, but Nemesis is only available via his perverse literary offerings, and the odds of getting Daniel Brewster here have lengthened considerably since I behaved like a complete imbecile in the garden at lunchtime, not to mention cannoning into him and flashing my boobs at him earlier.

I suppose we still might be friends, sort of, but only in the strictly-no-funny-business, professional-workplace sense.

That kiss was so ravishing and wonderful, it
ought
to have led to more. If only I hadn’t grabbed his crotch … but I just couldn’t help myself. And in my defence, he did seem to be giving out signals that he wanted me to. Sticking his tongue in my mouth was a green light in anyone’s language.

Bloody man, he’s just as perverted and manipulative, in his
own
crafty way, as Nemesis is. What about that bashful academic shtick for a start? Hell, the man’s been on television enough … he must have more than his share of thespian skills.

Is
he
Nemesis?

If he is, the performance was pretty impressive. Those blushing ears – surely nobody can make that happen to order?

But then again, maybe all he has to do is imagine a picture of me with my curves just clad in sexy scraps of hot red silk?

My heart thuds hard inside my chest, and suddenly there’s that strange sensation again. The reality shift from the garden. It’s like a hidden door opening just a crack to show something bright and irresistible beyond it. A game. A wild game. A challenge of wits – and of sex.

It could be just a figment of my imagination but it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before, or even thought. I get a sense of the unreal, the surreal, as if I’d suddenly wandered into the middle of an art film or an existential novel.

But, draining my glass, I want the unreal to be real. I want an end to self-imposed ruts. I need to expand my horizons, both intellectual and sensual.

The Kettle Chips are gone now. Another appetite remains to be satisfied. With a weird canvas of Daniel Brewster and a dark faceless figure drifting in and out of focus before my eyes, I slither down in the bed and lay my hand on the rounded curve of my belly.

Now, I have time. Now, there’s zero likelihood – alas – of being discovered. Now I can touch myself and do all the things I couldn’t do in the library or the garden. Whether it’s the truth or not, my mind coalesces Daniel and Nemesis into one totem of dazzling male fantasy.

We’re back on the bench again and, wordlessly, he reaches for me, taking the hand that I’d been touching myself with in his. His eyes sly as sin behind his glasses, he raises the tips of my fingers to his lips, and then kisses them, one by one, his tongue swooping out to scour away the last remnants of my nectar. His lush, wily mouth curls archly as he conveys my hand to the stunning bulge that interrupts the smooth line of his jeans.

No flinching away like an outraged Mother Superior this time. Gently, but with authority, he folds my fingertips around the hot, sharply defined ridge, then leans back against the bench and closes his eyes. His cool, intelligent face, dark with manly stubble, relaxes. He looks like a fallen angel who’s accepted the kiss of sin.

I give him a light squeeze and he drags in a long, ragged breath. I squeeze again, and his powerful hips bump upwards, inviting more attention to his cock. Unbidden, I reach for the buckle of his belt, then attack the button on his jeans. Within seconds I’m dragging down the zip, careful not to snare him. My caution was apposite, for beneath it he’s bare and rampant.

His superb cock bounces into view, and my mouth first goes dry, then begins to water with sensual hunger. As does his glans. A pearly drop forms in the eye of his penis, sweet pre-come oozing to welcome and encourage me. Not daring to taste it yet, I reach for him instead, and smear the silky fluid over the hot head of his cock. The solid flesh is hard, like polished wood, the superfine skin stretched by his extreme arousal. This magnificent organ is a thing of raw, physical beauty, the very expression of primal maleness, the essence of man.

It’s hard to look away from his rearing shaft but, when I do, I see his head tipped back to exhibit the heart-breaking
line
of his throat. He swallows hard as my thumb slowly circles, and his hands, beside him on the bench, curl into fists.

His body is a gift, a living sex toy, an object of worship. I fall to my knees on the gravel. Gravel that in fantasy is powerless to pain me. I kneel like a supplicant between his outstretched legs and go to my eager task with both hands now, intent on pleasing.

The scenario seems to shift and morph, and suddenly I’m in a darker place, an opulent room, scented with leather and lavender polish and lit by candles and the flickering glow from an open fire.

Whoa, where did this come from? It’s popped into my head fully formed, perhaps materialising from images in certain books that are kept on the restricted shelves down in the library’s archives. Pornographic volumes that masquerade as art photography, and are often pored over by us naughty library girls when we’re shelving or cataloguing down there. The general public never get a chance to get to look at them.

I’m kneeling still, but now I’m naked – and bound, my hands behind my back so I can’t touch the man I’m adoring. The heat from the banked-up fire licks over my body like a giant caressing tongue and, instead of looking up, I’m now staring at the carpet, my head bowed out of respect for my master.

My master? Am I a sexual submissive? It never occurred to me before that I might be. If asked, I would have said that was the kink furthest from my psyche.

‘You may approach.’

His voice is strange, echoing, as if filtered. Is it Daniel? Or is this the way I imagine Nemesis might sound? It could be both of them, overlaid, or neither. Outside my fantasy world for a
moment
, I make a note to buy more of this wine I’ve been drinking. It’s primo stuff. It packs the wildest of punches.

‘On your knees.’

Tapping into knowledge from other books I’ve perused from time to time on the restricted shelves, I know it’s important to be graceful. But that’s a tough call when shuffling along on the carpet, trembling like a penitent in the grip of religious ecstasy.

He’s wearing leather. A man – Nemesis? Daniel? Some other figment of my imagination? – is sitting in a great throne of a chair, his long thighs parted as Daniel’s were a moment ago, but now clad in gleaming black leather jeans that are tucked into tall polished boots.

In my mind-world, I’m grovelling naked on the floor. In my real world, I’m wriggling about frantically, my hand in my pyjama bottoms, the velvet throw, the duvet and the Kettle Chips bag on the floor. I can’t believe how wet I am, but suddenly noting this real, tangible manifestation of excitement disconnects me somehow. The fire-lit room fades and I moan in frustration as the orgasm I was reaching for drifts just a little way out of my reach.

‘Fuck it!’ I growl, and quickly roll sideways to fish around in my bedside cabinet drawer, searching for the last item in my self-indulgence kit. Ah, yes! Faithful vibe, there you are! Cheap and cheerful and effective, and, as I push down my pyjamas and slide the black plastic bullet into the red zone, my errant orgasm flits and flutters like a butterfly. Dancing from image to image, it returns to me and I sigh.

And as I lift my face from the dream carpet, and see the dream face of Daniel Brewster gazing solemnly down on me, my climax alights on the tip of my clit like a kiss of burning gold.

* * *

Being back in the library today is going to be embarrassing. Big time. The prospect of facing Professor Hottie after that kiss – and the concomitant grope – makes my ears blush ten times as pink as his did, and I haven’t even set eyes on him yet.

And not only that. Even if the fumble and the kiss
don’t
get my ears and cheeks simmering, how am I going to be able to look at him and not remember that I fantasised about him as I climaxed last night? Not to mention the fact that I’ve subconsciously assigned him – and me – a leather fetish.

It seems important to face my fears and potential embarrassment without acting like a shrinking wimp, though. It’s also necessary to look hot. Or as hot as it’s possible to look when you’re a chubby chick in your thirties and you work in a public library.

Courting the Devil a.k.a. Nemesis, I pick a crisp white blouse that’s slightly fitted and actually makes my bosom look pretty sensational in a tasteful sort of way. I team this with a slimmer skirt than usual, knee length, with a slight nineteen-fifties vibe, and, even though we can’t wear heels in the library, I pick a pair of black flatties that have a classy Audrey Hepburn look.

And stockings. Yes, stockings. I don’t know who these are for. Me, for my own self-esteem? Nemesis, who even now may be lurking around the corner and will probably go ballistic when he sees a hint of a suspender button through the fabric of my skirt?

Daniel, who might well pretend to cringe with embarrassment at the thought of such a suspender button and use that as an excuse to hide downstairs in the basement all day, to get away from the pathetic vamp librarian who had the effrontery to grab hold of his tackle?

The last seems likely. Our pet professor has an improvised carrel tucked away in the archives, and even though sometimes he comes upstairs and searches for items in the general lending area, and in the local collections that are available to the public, we haven’t seen so much as a sniff of him so far today, and it’s already halfway through the afternoon. After yesterday’s debacle, it seems he’s either not coming in or he’s spending the day safe below ground.

Well, screw you, coward! I’ve got other things to occupy me.

I decide to open the suggestion box again. There was nothing in it this morning. Well, not of the flavour I was looking for.

Emptying the box involves coming round to the front of the Enquiry Desk and crouching down slightly to unlock a door in one of the wooden panels. It’s all a bit antiquated in these days of computerised lending and multimedia this, that and the other, but we have a lot of older borrowers who like things traditional and old school. Being an old-fashioned girl myself a lot of the time, I know how they feel.

Anyway, dipping down as gracefully as I can, I feel as if there’s a ten-thousand-watt searchlight beaming down on me. And that a thousand avid eyes, not just those of Nemesis, are greedily following my every move, my every breath, my every twist. I can almost hear a salacious collective grunt of approval as the gabardine of my skirt tightens across my bottom and outlines its well-rounded shape.

Sweat breaks out between my breasts as I reach in and pull out the wire basket. I’ve got one of my best bra-and-panties sets on today too. Not crimson satin, alas, just crisp white lace with delicate embroidery on the bra cups and accenting the knickers in a sort of ‘Here it is! Get it here!’ style. Why on earth I’ve gone to this trouble I don’t know. Well, not consciously. My nasty subconscious is probably even now working out how
I
can let slip a glimpse of this semi-fabulous underwear to Daniel Brewster – or even Nemesis, if I should happen to find out who he is.

But the contents of the basket knock the wind out of my sails. No blue envelope. Is it over so soon? All that talk about the pervs losing interest if you don’t respond to them
is
true.

Oh shit, I really want this, don’t I?

After locking the box again and retreating behind the desk, I stare blindly at requests for more shelving space to be returned to books and ‘why do we have to have so much audio-visual crap these days instead of real literature’. Complaints about long waiting lists for the top romance authors. What about more Children’s Book Club events? The usual stuff.

But it’s like a foreign language, and the only tongue I want to read is the one that’s written in copperplate on eggshell-blue paper. I feel like crushing all the legitimate, bona fide but irredeemably boring library communications and hurling the crumpled balls across the room at the tedious and most likely non-kinky browsers amongst the shelves.

I want excitement, something huge and breathtaking, a taste of dark compulsion I fantasised about last night. Nemesis hasn’t shown that particular card yet, but my every screaming instinct says he will. Or he might have done, if I’d had the bottle to reply to him. His email address was at the bottom of each note, inviting me. But I was too chicken to answer. And now it might be too late.

I tear all the suggestions into tiny, tiny little pieces and then realise this is really not on, because we
are
supposed to read them and raise the issues at library development meetings. Will anybody discover my crime? I decide to cover it by slipping the bits into the shredded-paper recycling bags, down in the basement. I decide to raise at least some of these issues at the next meeting myself, to assuage my guilt. I jot down
everything
I can remember, but all the while there’s the tick, tick, ticking of a compulsion gathering.

The shredded paper bags are in the basement, where the archive is. The archive is where Daniel Brewster’s workstation is. If I can’t have Nemesis, at least I can be proactive on the Professor McHotstuff front. He can only reject me again, and then, at least, I’ll know for certain that fancying him is a dead end.

As one of the readers’ advisors, I have carte blanche to secure my desk and go down to the stacks in search of books for subject requests. So I roll down the cover and walk smartly to the ‘No Entry’ door that leads downstairs. The Borough Library archives and the area housing the stacks are a strange place, much of it bearing no resemblance to the more modern buildings upstairs. These are cellars belonging to old houses that were bulldozed to make way for the library complex. The lighting is odd and yellowy, and there’s an atmosphere part gentleman’s club, part abandoned nuclear bunker. A lot of the staff don’t like coming down here and will do anything to avoid it. But I’m rather fond of the place, especially lately.