My hand was already under my skirt, toying with the edges of my panties as I watched them. The suspense of his slow movements, her breath rising and falling as he opened the scissors over the button thread and held them there without closing them all the way, was making me feel breathless and on edge.
Slowly, slowly, he closed the scissors all the way, a sound I could hear in my head, the small snick of steel meeting steel. With a delay that seemed to take for ever, the button fell away, rolling and tumbling down the fabric and against her stockinged thigh to finally land on the floor.
Her dress had bloomed open, showing the paleness of her skin beneath the black, an alabaster hollow that was flanked by two beautiful curves. Her chest heaved softly as he guided the scissors to the next button, the movement arching her back just slightly so I could see her nipples peaked against the fabric.
The sight made me bring my free hand to my own chest, fingers slipping under my bra, tweaking one nipple softly. I tugged my panties to one side and slipped one finger along my cleft, stroking myself softly with my fingertip. My clothes were suddenly too restrictive, too cumbersome. I wished I’d taken everything off before I’d slipped the shade up. I wanted full access to myself, to pinch and tug as I pleased. The room smelled of my arousal, sweet and urgent, and I wondered what she smelled like, in that other room.
On the other side of the window, he brought the scissors to the next button, and he must have said something to her, because she looked up suddenly and shuddered, her legs pulling together just slightly. The button was quick to fall, letting the fabric slip away further.
Carefully, he tucked the closed scissor blades between her thighs, waiting until she brought her legs fully together before he let go. The scissors stayed there, upright, their sharp point buried between her thighs.
He ran his fingers over the points of her nipples, sending visible shudders through her with every contact. I sensed that this was a game of power, of how much pleasure he could give her before she opened her legs in want and pleasure, before those scissors went tumbling to the floor.
I closed my own legs, mimicking her, keeping one hand between them. The pressure angled my fingers into a new place and I moaned softly at the unexpected pleasure.
Bending down, he put one hand on each side of her dress, where the fabric had fallen open. In one easy movement, he pulled outwards. Under the strain, the buttons didn’t stand a chance. They went flying, tumbling to the floor, and the dress opened fully to reveal all of her, from her large, pointed nipples down to her lovely V of dark curls. The garter belt fitted the swell of her hips perfectly. I couldn’t take my eyes off the pale strips of her thigh that showed above the stockings, the way the nylon rolled just slightly as if at some point she had begun to roll them off and had been distracted. The scissors between her thighs were the only hard-edged thing about her.
His fingers played along both nipples, causing her to squirm and arch in her seat. My movements echoed hers, as though, by watching, I was gaining a synthesis with her. He held one nipple tightly between his fingers, almost pinching it, and then tugged it, elongated it until it was thin and tight. I could almost hear her gasp, the way her mouth fell open at the sensation. He did the same with the other until he was tugging both nipples as far away from her body as they could possible stretch. The muscles of her thighs clenched, shifting the scissors. He kept his stance until she was panting, uttering words I couldn’t hear.
I feared for a second that she would lose control and drop the scissors. I didn’t know what that meant for her, but I knew it wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted to be very, very good for him. And at that moment, with my own hand clenched between my thighs, my clit pulsing hard and fast against the movement of my finger, I wanted her to be very, very good for him too. I wanted her to get her reward, whatever it might be, so that I could have it too.
He released her nipples, and they sprang back against her body, flushed and rosy. He touched each one again, a tender touch, a finger-kiss, to soothe the ache. Then he pulled the scissors from between her thighs. She shuddered again and let her legs fall open.
I was close to coming, but I didn’t want to, not yet, so I stilled my hand for a moment, watching. He slipped the scissors between her skin and one of the stockings, slicing down the front in irregular patterns. Then he did the other. The torn-open dress and the gashes in the material combined to make her look like she’d spent the night being well fucked, even though I got the feeling that the couple had just begun playing shortly before I arrived. The look was sexy on her, and when he let the scissors drop to the floor so he could catch her hair with one hand and pinch her clit with the other, I felt the first pulse of pre-climax slip through my body.
He stroked her, hard and quick, with two fingers, and I caught his rhythm, echoed it with my own, until an orgasm rose inside me, impossible to resist. I let the pleasure pull my eyes closed, let it pull forward the loud moans that rose from somewhere in my chest and sank into the walls. There was a calm in allowing the orgasm to wash over me like that, in allowing all of the stress of the day to slide away. The pleasure was lovely, but almost secondary to the release of tension that I’d been carrying in my body. I relaxed a moment, hand wet between my thighs, letting my whole weight rest against the chair.
When I opened my eyes, I saw that the man had turned around to stand behind the woman with his hands on her shoulders. Now that he was inside the halo of light, I could see him more clearly. Those hands. That build. And most of all, those impossibly coloured eyes.
It was Davian. And I could have sworn he was looking right at me.
* * *
Now grateful that I was still mostly clothed, I tumbled out of the tiny room as fast as my orgasm-wracked body would let me, breathing heavily, feeling confused and off-balance. The only thing I knew for certain was that I needed to get out of L&L before he saw me.
So much for my respite, for my chance to hide away and recover. Whatever moments of peace I’d experienced mid-orgasm slipped away as I hurried outside and then down the sidewalk, feeling incredibly exposed by the late-afternoon light.
It wasn’t until I was on the street, blocks from L&L and at the very edge of the Sweet Spot, that I let myself stop and breathe and think. I clung to the wall with one hand, panting, trying to wrap my mind around everything.
OK, so it couldn’t really have been Davian, right? That was just too much of a coincidence. That was just too … weird.
And even if it was, there was no way he could have seen me inside the room. L&L was known for its discretion, for its customer safety and privacy. If they said a window was one-way, I believed them.
Why then had it seemed like he’d seen me somehow? Why had it seemed like he’d looked right at me at my moment of orgasm? It was a fever dream born of lust, I was sure. My oversexed mind had cooked up the image of him to add to my pleasure. That’s all it was.
I walked home, still tumbling everything over in my brain. What a day it had been. First Kyle. Then Davian. Then … whatever that was at L&L. People said bad things happened in threes. I wondered if that was true about really weird things as well. I hoped so. If it was true, at least it would mean all the odd things that were going to happen to me were over for a while.
Kyle, thankfully, wasn’t at my place, although there were a number of voice messages from him on my cell when I pulled it out of my pocket. I didn’t listen to them. I promised myself I’d call him in the morning, when I was feeling less Alice in Wonderlandish.
A hot bath. Some food. And sleep. Those were the things I needed, and in that order.
As it turned out, I didn’t make it to either of the first two. To my complete and utter surprise, I got as far as undressing, and then crawled under the covers and slept. Tomorrow is another day.
Just call me Scarlett O’Hara, I thought, as I lost myself in dreamland.
CHAPTER 4
I kept my promise to Lily. I wasn’t late to Leather Bound the next morning. I even
hauled my ass out of bed early enough to stop at Cream for coffee. I saw Stefan in the corner, but he was captured by an overly enthusiastic customer, so I left him to his fate and headed to Leather Bound, armed with a caramel mocha for me and a cinnamon latte for Lily. I smelled like Christmas, all wrapped up with a coffee bow.
I’d slept fine, but I’d dreamed of sex all night long. Some of it was sex with Kyle and Davian, sometimes both of them at once. Sometimes the woman in the shirtdress was there, and sometimes Lily and sometimes even one or two of my exes. But mostly it seemed I’d dreamed of having sex with a faceless stranger, who then kept turning into Davian or a Davian lookalike. I was never sure.
Lily hadn’t arrived at Leather Bound by the time I got there, so I set her coffee on the counter, hoping it wouldn’t get too cold, and spent some time giving Webster chin scratches and breakfast before I headed back to my office.
I needed to tackle two things this morning.
One, call Kyle.
OK, wait, three things.
One, figure out what I was going to say to Kyle.
Two, call Kyle.
Three, research Mister Cavanaugh and find out as much as I could about the mysterious man and his equally mysterious book. Yes, I’d turned him down, but I supposed I was like Lily in that way: once something caught my interest, especially something as shiny and intriguing as this, I didn’t let it go easily. Not to mention that I thought I saw him cutting the buttons off a hot girl at the sex store. Yesterday he’d responded to Lily’s comment about L&L with a knowing smirk. ‘I know the place,’ he’d said. If it really was him I’d seen, then he certainly did.
But first, I should decide what to do about Kyle. Second, I should call him.
So I sat down at my beloved desk and got ready to do a little research. Because clearly the best way to do the thing you don’t want to do is to tackle something else instead.
I popped open my laptop and give a couple of light strokes over her keyboard for good luck. Lily says she’s ancient and just needs to be put down, but she’s seen me through a lot of thick and thin, and I get her upgraded every couple of years. She might not even have any original parts by now, but she works like a charm. Mostly.
‘Come on, Clementine,’ I whispered. ‘Gimme something good.’
The internet is everyone’s friend when it comes to finding information, whether you’re trying to find rare books or stalk strangers. But the truth is that most people don’t know how to use it properly, or they find a bit of surface information and figure that’s good enough. My skill is digging deeper, poking into all the little corners of the web to find the hidden books and the dirt that most people don’t even notice.
I figured it would take me five minutes, maybe ten, to find out everything the world knew about Davian Cavanaugh and his non-existent book.
Turns out I was wrong.
I was still digging when Lily showed up twenty minutes later, just in time to open Leather Bound, and I hadn’t found a thing. Not a single mention. These days almost everyone on the internet leaves a trail of some sort, even if it’s accidental. In fact, it’s near impossible to not have at least something about you. Especially with a name like Davian Cavanaugh. If you’re alive in the world with a name that unusual, then the internet knows about it.
Except that it didn’t seem to.
Which meant that he’d either given me a fake name, which was seeming more and more like a possibility, or was a super secret spy. If he was a super secret spy, I was definitely changing my mind and taking him as a client. And I was definitely fucking him.
But I was betting more on the former.
Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice.
‘Hey, thanks for the coffee.’ Lily poked her head in, holding up the drink I’d brought her. As always, she was impeccable, right down to her swingy skirt and her purple toenails peeking out of a pair of black sandals. It was way too damn cold for that. I was in a long wraparound dress, striped tights, and black boots and I was still freezing.
She looked me over. ‘No sex this morning, I see.’
‘No sex,’ I said. ‘Thanks for finishing up yesterday. How did it go?’
‘Steady.’ She draped herself in the theatre chair with a tired ‘oof’. ‘I’m glad we’re almost at the weekend.’
We close Leather Bound on Mondays and Tuesdays, which gives us a sort of weekend without killing our business too much. Our only other option was to hire employees, which got all kinds of crazy and expensive. And no, it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m slightly anal and slightly OCD and I’m not about to turn the store over to a bunch of people I don’t know.
‘Yah, weekend,’ I agreed, although I didn’t feel that way. Mondays and Tuesdays were the days Kyle and I usually spent together. He kicked off at the tat shop early on Monday and took Tuesday as one of his days off. It was something I usually looked forward to, but now it made my chest feel tight. I realised I hadn’t even listened to his messages as I’d promised myself I would, much less called him. I was beginning to feel like a horrible, horrible person.
‘Did you talk to Kyle?’ Lily asked. ‘About the whole marriage thing?’
As if there was something else I needed to talk to him about. Sometimes I hated her knowing me quite so well.
Clearly she saw the answer in my face because she quickly said, ‘Never mind. I’ll go flip the sign.’
I heard her turn the sign – it was wooden and it clunked against the glass storefront every time you moved it – and then I heard her talking to someone. Her voice carried back, but not her words. Probably a customer, from her tone. That made two early-morning walk-ins back-to-back. What an odd week it was turning out to be.
I pressed Clementine’s lid shut on my myriad disappointing searches, forcing myself to let go of my desire to spend time researching a man I knew nothing about and didn’t need to know anything about. He probably wasn’t the man I’d seen at L&L. He was just some guy – some very sexy guy, granted – who was either looking for a little thrill to fill his boring days or was two eggs short of a sanity dozen. Either way, it was a hassle I didn’t need.
It would have been easier to convince myself that was true if I wasn’t thinking about him constantly. The sexy mystery of him was clearly doing bad things to my brain.
Well, I’d turned down the job, and we were rid of him. I was going to excise him from my brain once and for all.
A second later, Lily rushed into the office, carrying a piece of paper, her blue eyes wide.
‘Janine,’ she said. ‘They want to kick us out!’
* * *
‘Rewind,’ I said. Lily sometimes got overly excited about things and jumbled her words. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I was hoping this was one of those occasions.
‘They want to kick us out,’ she said, a hundred times more slowly. It didn’t help. Her words still didn’t mean anything to my brain and I tried to place them in some sort of context.
‘Some guy just delivered a letter from the landlord.’ She shoved it into my hand, and before I could read it she said, ‘They’re saying they’re going to double our rent.’
I looked at the letter she’d handed me, but I couldn’t read it. The letters were fuzzy, as if typed with a really old typewriter. Then I realised it wasn’t the letters; it was because my hands were shaking so much it blurred the type. I took a deep breath and tried to steady myself. Read it for real this time.
Lily wasn’t kidding; they wanted to double our rent. We could cover it, maybe. Just maybe. If we were willing to go mac and cheese and live in cardboard boxes – or the back room – for the next year.
Some of which I did in college, and I was so not willing to do that again.
‘What the hell?’ I said. ‘I don’t think they can do this. Doesn’t our lease go for at least another four months?’ I tried to count backward, to when we’d opened the place, but my head was doing funny things. Numbers usually liked me, but right now I couldn’t think.
‘Two,’ Lily said. ‘Two months. They’re trying to raise it with the next lease.’
‘So we have two months to either talk them out of this, find a new place or start making a whole lot more money.’
Lily chewed her perfect lower lip and nodded. ‘Yeah,’ she said.
‘Well, that sucks.’ I dropped my ass into my desk chair and let the letter fall into the recycling box. ‘Fuck-fuckity-fuck,’ I said.
Lily didn’t say anything. She just leaned against the doorway, staring down at her painted toenails.
When we moved in here three years ago, we got lucky. Our landlord was a book-lover who quickly took us under his wing. Conrad was the only reason we’d been able to afford the place. He’d rented it to us for way less than it was worth, and he’d made us a rent guarantee, with the promise that he’d keep the rent low as long as we promised to visit with him and to give him a discount on books.
Neither promise was hard to keep. First, he was easy on the eyes. He was just getting to that stage men have where they’re going grey at the temples, and the phrase ‘tall, dark and handsome’ described him perfectly. More importantly, he became a friend. Someone I trusted with every bone in my body. Conrad quickly became a fixture at Leather Bound, and his sense of humour and kindness made it easy to spend time with him.
But Conrad had died two months ago, leaving a hole in lots of places. Sometimes it felt like our entire little community was still grieving for him. I knew that I was. And Lily too.
Our new landlord was no Conrad, but he’d mostly been hands-off. Or at least he had been until now.
‘What a jerk,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to go talk to him. What’s his name? Walter? Weiner?’
‘Wes,’ Lily said. ‘And I think maybe I should be the one to go and talk to him.’
I realised I’d been swearing, rather loudly, and kicking the leg of my desk repeatedly. Trying to let go of the rising anger and panic I felt, I inhaled big and let it out with one last ‘Fucker’.
Leather Bound Page 6