Control. Charlotte Stein
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If Andy asked them, I’d be nervous. They’re the questions of a thief, a meddler, a pain in the arse.
“So, while I’m working in the shop, where will you be? Will you be here with me?”
He looks away while he says it, too. I’d think he was planning something, if he wasn’t so wound tight and reined in. He probably just wants to make sure he doesn’t fuck everything up.
“At first, I’ll be with you. There’ll be a short training period, and then you’ll be on your own for three mornings and two afternoons of the week. Maybe less at first, if you’re not quite ready.”
He turns and flashes me the first smile of this entire interview and hiring process. It makes his face different—much less somber, obviously, but it gives him a boyish air, too. His application told me he’s thirty, and he looks it until he smiles. It’s the heavy eyebrows, I think, and the tweed.
“I think I’ll be fine. Everything seems really straightforward,” he says, and then there’s a moment. It’s not exactly the kind of moment that tells me he’s going to use what he saw against me in some way, but it’s definitely one that gives the impression that he hasn’t forgotten. The whole thing hasn’t just slipped out of his head, as his behavior until now had almost suggested.
I think the event embarrassed him. But not enough to make him block it from his mind.
I stick out my hand, and he hesitates before shaking it. As though maybe sex is coating my palm, or girl cooties, or something similarly nerve-firing. It’s weird enough that I imagine, for a second, that he’s never actually shaken a woman’s hand before.
But then he steels himself, and grabs ahold of me, and shakes until my teeth rattle.
I need to get Gabriel on his own as soon as possible. I know this, because while we’re in the store together, stuff happens. Stuff that isn’t within the boundaries and restrictions and rules. And it’s entirely my fault and it’s nothing to do with him, it really isn’t.
It’s just that I keep thinking: watch me.
I keep bending over, right when I shouldn’t. In much shorter skirts than I’d usually wear for work. And stockings with seams, that I absolutely never wear for work. It’s much too delicious and addictive when he reacts as predictably as a puppet whose strings have just been pulled.
He gets flustered. Blushes are really obvious on his face, because his complexion is that perfect milk-pale—he can sometimes compose himself by the time I turn around, but he’s never able to hide that flush high up on his cheeks. Sometimes it even gets him around the throat and at the tips of his ears, and then I just want to lick it off him.
By the end of the fourth day, I’m beginning to suspect that hiring him was as much a mistake as hiring Andy would have been. Apparently I’m not allowed to hire any men at all, because I’m a sex maniac.
Not that he knows it. I mean, obviously he knows I have sex with men in my kitchen. But I don’t think he has any idea that I’m delighting in driving him up the wall. He tells me that he was largely homeschooled. That until a year or so ago, he still lived with his parents. When I ask him if he has a girlfriend, he goes even redder than he did for my shirt with one too many buttons undone.
“No,” he says, but it’s after a long, long, putting-books-on-the-shelf pause.
I’m absolutely dying to ask if he’s ever had a girlfriend. The urge to run my hand down the strange arch of his back is more overwhelming, however. I settle for a pat, but even that startles him. I’m not sure he knew I was directly behind him, and now he hurriedly stuffs the book in his hand onto the shelf—as though he’s been caught reading something he shouldn’t.
Which is odd, because he was only looking at the back cover. What’s wrong with the back cover of Temptress in Time?
For the first time I wonder: What on earth is a man like him doing in a shop that sells erotica and erotic romance novels? They must be like alien spaceships to him.
“You know, you get a twenty percent discount on anything in the store,” I say, half-laughing. His expression stops me from taking it to the full laugh.
It’s a perfect mixture of both utter terror and starving hungry eagerness. I’ve never seen a man look so famished—not even Andy. Not even carb-free-dieting Kevin. It makes me do something very odd, indeed.
As he’s watching, I lift my hand and sort of place it casually on my chest. High up—not in a suggestive way at all. But then…then I guess it becomes suggestive. More suggestive than I was with Andy. More than I’ve ever been with anyone, as though his reserved nature somehow permits me an excess of freedom.
He’s not going to say anything, after all. He’s not going to do anything. He just watches as I slide my hand down over my plump left breast, tugging my shirt just ever so slightly as I do, so that a curving upswell of flesh is revealed. And when I get to my nipple—stiff beneath the lace clasp of my bra—such a surge of tingling sensation rolls through me that I go weak in the knees.
I think I come very close to sitting down suddenly, on the floor. My heart is vibrating its beats through my body. I can’t stop staring him down—I want to live in those big chocolate eyes of his. I want him to look at me forever, watch me touching myself like such a dirty, wicked girl. He seems paralyzed, but that’s fine by me. I want him perfectly still and taking me in, every nuance and shudder, and is he holding his breath?
I think he is.
“Is there something you want to ask me, Gabriel?” I say, though I know he couldn’t ask if he was forced to with hot pokers. I shiver just thinking about his restraint. I shiver thinking about Andy, who would have grabbed me and fucked me up against the bookcase ten steps before this moment.
I don’t know which is better—this exquisite tension, this waiting, this teasing. Or just getting.
“I…” he begins, but he doesn’t really seem to have the necessary breath for it. “I think that…”
I’m holding my breath, now. The lids have drooped down over his eyes. You could almost mistake it for sleepiness, if it were not for his hoarse voice and the fact that my hand is fondling my tit.
“I think that…” he says again, and this time I lean right in. I’m the eager one, now.
But he just finishes with:
“…we should keep the Regency romances in a separate section to general historicals. Don’t you?”
Of course, by the time Andy comes sniffing around my patch again, I’m ravenous. I’m as hungry as Gabriel probably doesn’t know he is. A week of talking to him about clockwork toys (it was the family business, until his parents died), the books of Charlotte Bronte, and exactly what I’d like for lunch, right down to the kind of pepper and how many times I’d like my coffee stirred—and all as I’m dressing too sexy and being very inappropriate, employer/employee-wise—would be enough to drive anyone bonkers.
And I’m not anyone. I’m someone that, for the last five years, has been living largely in a sex drought. While managing a sex book shop.
Anyway, it’s raining when he turns up on my doorstep. We’re closed, but I have to let him in. He’ll catch his death. His clothes will get soaked and then he’ll put on a wet T-shirt competition through the glass of my shop door.
When he steps inside, I think of Gabriel, staring at me. I try to hold on to that power.
“So—you hired that other guy, huh?” he says, as he shakes the rain out of his hair—all over my shop! Does he think he looks sexy doing that?
Because fuck, he does.
“I hardly think you’d have been appropriate, Mr. Yarrow,” I say, but he just grins.
“Because of all the sexual harassment that would have gone on in the workplace?”
There’s already