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.
Chapter Four
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.
The memory of which makes me stand up, book in hand.
He looks angry at first, I think. That line appears between his thick brows; his dark eyes flash even da
rker. How dare you, that look says, as his hands ball into fists at his sides. Strangely, however, I feel no compulsion to apologise. I feel nothing besides the pulse between my legs, and the insistent buzz of a thousand heroines, rattling their way through my mind.
‘What are you doing in here?’ he says, and the buzz grows louder, stronger.
‘Looking through your things, dirty boy,’ I reply.
His face drops, the crease-frown and the balled fists forgotten. He blurts out, rather embarrassingly:
‘They’re not mine.’
I love him for trying to deny it – it just makes the whole thing so much less awful, somehow. So much more like a game. Now I get to force him to confess.
‘Really? Old girlfriend’s, then?’
I can practically see him trying to work out the mathematical probability of such a thing being true. The odds do not look good.
‘I’m keeping them here. For a friend.’
‘Did you read the books in my store for a friend, too?’
Even in the one-lamp-lit dimness of his bedroom, I can see that blush creeping up his throat. He fidgets, glancing from the book in my hand, to the open drawer, to me and then back to the book again.
‘No …’
‘Then what?’
‘I haven’t read any of them.’
‘Really? Not even this one: “Layla enjoys anonymous sex with hot young studs”? Or how about this one?’
I reach down and pick up another – a seedy looking thing called Breathless.
‘This looks fantastic. “Before Cathy split up with her husband, she didn’t understand the joy of a hard, healthy cock.” As opposed to a soft, sickly one I suppose.’
I toss it back into the drawer, and have to bite back a laugh when he winces. He’s wincing for his injured, insulted books! As though I really mean it – as though I’m really mocking his taste when I love and sell books like this for a living.
‘And what about this one?’ I start, but he stops me, this time. He lunges forward and snatches it out of my hand, clutching it to him like it’s his dying lovechild.
Control (Xcite Erotic Romance Novels) Page 4