Control. Charlotte Stein
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horny as a horn-riddled dinosaur, but I don’t think he’s capable of processing real, actual, dirty thoughts. He’s probably still stuck on bra straps and snogging as sexual fantasies.
I have a brief flash of delicious pleasure as I leave him to take care of the shop, thinking of him trying to make sense of an arse-print in his innocent pigtailed mind. Imagine if he’d forgotten something yesterday and came back just at the wrong moment! Then seen me and Andy doing terrible things through the inch of glass not covered by posters and sheltered by bookstands.
Poor, innocent Gabriel. I just want to hug him, and make it all better. And maybe when I hug him, I’ll let my hand stray to his neat little backside.
I buy the collected Poirot and a sensible winter coat to calm my fevered brain, and then enjoy a delicious nonsexual lunch at a restaurant that doesn’t have a hot waiter to further my progress. Of course, the whole time I know I’m just delaying my return to the shop. I mean, that was the purpose of hiring Gabe—so that I could have more time to myself. So that I could shop for things I need, and sleep, and suss out the competition.
I didn’t hire someone so that I could spend my time harassing him. Especially when it’s someone who’s likely only going to be confused by that sort of attention. He needs a nice girlfriend, someone who is patient and sweet and as unknowledgeable about sex as he probably is. They can fumble under the sheets together, in the dark. She’ll be vaguely unhappy for the rest of her life, but become an expert at baking pies. He’ll start stashing gay porn in the toilet cistern.
I’ll fuck Andy until I die of exhaustion. It will all work out for everybody.
Or at least, that’s what I think until I catch him reading Sins of the Flesh.
I think I give him an out. And by that I mean—I bustle into the shop overloaded with bags, get a little tangled, and give him the perfect opportunity to pretend he wasn’t reading anything at all. He stands up from his seat behind the counter, with absolutely nothing in his hands and no book anywhere to be seen in front of him.
But I know that’s what he was doing. I can feel a smile pulling at the corners of my mouth even as I play along with his total innocence, that little pink flash of book cover I saw through the glass playing over and over in my mind. I guess his secret porn stash in the cistern is actually my book shop.
The smile pulls at my mouth harder, but I get it under control.
“Hello, Gabe,” I say, and, as with all guilty people, he seems to find it hard to make perfectly articulated words. He says something that sounds like hi, but could reasonably be anything. His hands go into his pockets—as they often do when he’s having to do something awkward, like make casual conversation.
The problem is that I actually want to make casual conversation with Gabriel. I want to chat about the weather! When is he going to talk to me about the weather?
Instead he helps me with my bags, and I spend my time guessing about him. Did his mother make him like this? Some spank-happy teacher, at the Enid Blyton School for Unruly Boys? Nothing at all but his own strange need to be so self-contained? He’s not irretrievably weird, exactly, but you have to be a certain sort of man to feel you have to hide your need to read naughty novels from naughty novel store owners.
God, I’m dying to know if it really was Sins of the Flesh he was reading. It’s right there on the stand by the counter, and it’s got a hot pink cover, and it is absolutely unabashedly filthy. It’s just the kind of book you’d read if your draconian parents stopped you from looking at girls’ breasts until the age of thirty.
I stop just short of saying to him—as he puts the teabags away, in the almost-too-high-for-me-to-reach kitchen cupboard—that he can read any book he wants, whenever it’s not busy. I could tell him it’s a good advertisement—that customers often ask about the books they see we’re reading.
But then he turns around, and there’s this look on his face. His eyes are big and sweet and clearly the sort that are easy to wound, but there’s a furtive smile there, too. His mouth is curling—the way I suspected mine was doing, when I first walked in.
It makes me not want to spoil his secret. I doubt he’s been entitled to many in his strange little life.
“I shelved the books that came in this morning, and watered the plants. Oh, and I got that big cobweb out of the top right corner,” he says. It’s where we’re stuck—in boring work exchanges.
I never thought I’d be concerned about too much attention-to-detail talk when I imagined hiring an assistant. And he’s so good at the attention to detail! He polished the little lip of non-carpeted stuff on the step up to the second tier of the shop, for God’s sake! He cleaned the little window at the back—without having to be asked!
“That’s brilliant,” I tell him, though I wish I had less patronizing and/or dull things to say.
So it’s something of a shock when he takes a big leap beyond silence or casual conversation or something boring.
He does it without warning, too, with his face turned away from mine.
“I’m used to keeping things neat, you know? My parents were pretty forgetful.”
Something jumps inside me—a small electric shock. It’s like being given an unexpected gift. It’s like I’ve been digging in the dirt for weeks and weeks, and finally got to the treasure at the bottom.
Though the thought of what sort of treasure it’s going to be makes me hesitate before digging further.
“Were you very close?”
Even with his back half to me like that, and his hands busy on a counter that’s already perfectly neat, I can still make out the expression on his face—an almost-grimace, as though he’s just tasted something bad.
“We were…I took care of them. We weren’t alike, though.”
No sense in stopping now.
“In what way were you different?”
He shrugs, ever so slightly. A tight nudge of his shoulder.
“They weren’t particularly sensible.”
It’s ridiculous, but my palms are sweating. I have broken into the Pentagon of him, and now I’m slinking down nuke-laced corridors. I am a Russian spy, interrogating him in a darkened room.
“So you were responsible for everything?”
“I…yes.”
“For how long?”
I can feel him pulling away from me. He goes to the bookshelf adjacent to the counter, and tidies a mess that isn’t there.
His back is fully to me, now.
“I don’t know. Since I was a boy, I guess.”
For some reason, Quentin Blake’s drawings from The Twits comes to mind. Two scraggly, hairy weirdoes, living in a maze of filth. A small, slight Gabriel trying to keep on top of everything.
God, I should never have hired this one. He’s making me feel obliged. I can sense it welling up inside me. It comes up my throat and spills out of my mouth:
“My father was very strict.”
It’s true. He was. But I don’t know why I’m telling him so, when I’ve never told a soul. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I told anyone anything about myself.
He turns, quite suddenly. There’s a queerly eager look on his face that makes me both sick and something else. Something like excitement.
“I can tell,” he says, which should make me even sicker. But somehow, it doesn’t. Not when it’s Gabriel. It would be different if it were Andy, sure of himself and rich with arrogance. But this isn’t the same.
“How?”
His eyebrows lift, a little shrug of the face.
“Just