Control. Charlotte Stein
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to switch the channel back to the first applicant, to being pushed down over the kitchen table and shafted hard, but it’s too late now. My clit is jumping against my busy fingers and my juices are running between the crease of my arse cheeks, and I couldn’t stop even if the couple next door banged on the wall and told me to knock it off.
In fact, I think I’d quite like them to do that. There’s nothing like being caught in the act, it seems, even if the act is solo. I have a secret streak of needing-to-be-spied-on, and my mind won’t stop going there. To him, and his too-thick glasses and his tweediness and those hunched shoulders and Jesus, that’s a good image. Oh, that’s so good. I bet we really shocked him—I bet he couldn’t walk straight all the way home.
I bet when he got home he did just what I’m doing right now.
The thought is enough to send me right over the edge, so fiercely that it shocks me. All the sounds I wanted to cry out catch and stutter in my throat and I arch up off the bed, wanting more. I want a cock in my pussy and someone else’s fingers on my clit and when we’re through, I want to start all over again.
As I lie on the bed still shaking and dazed, I realize what I must want: someone to watch. I want to be watched, right now. Or else I want to watch someone else, someone tweedy and uptight. Is that it? I just don’t know. I own a smutty bookstore, and I’ve got no idea.
Could somebody tell me, please?
Jeanette from next door brings me a pie and I have to wonder: Did she hear me the night before last? It’s a possibility. But then again, she often brings me things. I think her and Derek believe that I’m lonely or too young to be running a bookstore or some such.
They’re nice people. She stays and has a chat with me during the before-lunch lull. We sit in the general romance section where I’ve got my comfy chairs and my little antique table so that people can pretend they’re in one of the big chains while they shop for porn.
Of course, I don’t sell erotica alone. But truth be told, that’s why people come to me. The big boys are terrified of being anything but family-friendly, so my store continues to make money. And I feel that I am family-friendly, anyway.
Families are born, after all, because of some of the things I sell. I’ve wanted to do the thing that makes babies plenty of times, after reading something from the erotic romance and erotica sections. Hell, sometimes the paranormal romance section gets me going, too. Sometimes just standing in front of shelves and shelves of reds and purples and flaming silvers gets me going.
I do love my store. Occasionally I’ll take my shoes off, just so that I can wriggle my toes into the thick crimson carpeting.
Jeanette seems to appreciate it, too. She keeps pushing her plain white trainers into the pile and she has that look on her face—the one she always gets when she’s in here. A kind of wonderment, I think, despite her sure and certain knowledge that I am a lonely spinster. She giggles every time she has to say the name of my store: Wicked Words.
Though at least she gets the intention. I honestly didn’t think people could miss it, what with the red lettering on black and all the glossiness, but I get a lot of disappointed Goths and Wiccans, too. Some who are expecting handcuffs, some who aren’t.
Not that I mind. In truth, I thought it would alienate far more people than it actually ended up doing, in such a bustling but twee city as York. And I honestly didn’t think that so many romance fans would be attracted, but I get more romance customers than any other. They like me, because I get in a lot of the big American names that take seventeen years to filter down to us. I get the smaller ones, too, that never appear on these shores.
I fill a niche with my Wicked Words.
“Did you manage to hire anyone yet?” Jeanette asks, just as I’m busy trying to think about books.
At least I can answer no, thank God.
“Really? That chap who came by yesterday looked…interesting.”
I think about his mouth, crushing mine. The wood against my cheek.
“Him? Oh, he was awful. No good at all. Couldn’t hire him.”
“That’s a surprise. He looked just the sort to fit right in here.”
She glances around as she says this—it’s pretty obvious what she means. Big, liquid-sex Andy Yarrow, surrounded by books that feature men just like him, doing plenty of randy things. Yes, I’m sure he’d fit right in amidst all the sex and the horny shopkeepers.
“He didn’t know the first thing about books,” I say, which is perfectly true. He did have plenty of firsthand experience of the kinds of things that go on in my books, however—though of course I don’t say this.
“That’s odd. Maybe he was just nervous.”
As Andy appeared about as inclined to nerves as a robot programmed to kill, I have to start wondering if Jeanette knows him somehow. Perhaps this is some sort of defense of him, which will then be followed by her persuading me to hire him. I can’t imagine why she keeps banging on about him, otherwise.
“I don’t think he was the nervous type,” I say, at which she laughs.
“What, that little mouse? I think we’ve got our wires crossed, Maddie. He was the most nervous I’ve ever seen such a tall man be! He could hardly ask me if you would make a nice boss. I told him yes, of course—”
“Who on earth are you talking about?” I ask, but of course I know the moment the words are out of my mouth.
The nervy guy. The one who watched.
“The chap with the dark hair and the glasses! Didn’t you interview him? Perhaps he took a fright and ran off…”
Of course, of course—he wasn’t some spying customer at all! He was my second candidate.
It’s odd, showing him the ins and outs of the place. I can feel his eyes on me all the way around my store, as though they’re checking me for specks of seediness. My wicked ways are going to rub off on him—poor, sweet, nervous candidate number two.
His name’s Gabriel Kauffman. Gabe, he tells me, but he doesn’t sound convinced about this shortening of his name. Clearly he prefers Gabriel, but that’s a bit too formal for someone who’s probably seen most of my tits and at least some of my pussy.
Or maybe he doesn’t look convinced about the shortening because he’d like things to stay formal—something I can well believe when looking at him. He’s even more tweedy and well put-together than the glimpse had suggested.
He has side-parted his hair so perfectly, I could use the white stripe of his scalp to rule a line under Bargains! on the sign in the window. It’s made even whiter and straighter looking by the perfect coal black of his hair.
I think it should be weirder that I immediately think Snow White, but somehow it doesn’t seem weird at all. The perfect pale skin, the dark hair, the probable fear that seven dwarves are going to do dirty things to him…it’s all there.
Snow White was pretty nervous and unaware of her own beauty too, after all. And she likely thought all sorts of things, before the dwarves reassured her that they just wanted her to keep house.
I tell him his duties in a clear, direct sort of way. No sexual subtext.
He seems to respond well to boundaries. Restrictions. He’s as obedient as a dog, his tongue curling up to his teeth whenever I lay out another rule or duty for him. I explain that the shelves need dusting every Wednesday, that I like the little recommendation cards to lie flush to the wood, that the book of the week stand should be perpendicular to the shelf behind it.
I like right angles, I tell him, and his tongue touches his upper teeth. He has neat