Control. Charlotte Stein
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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 onto 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 lasagna. 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 realize 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 halfheartedly 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 lasagna, 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 lasagna 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 behavior.
He rolls his eyes, as though his “behavior” 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 scrutinizing. I suspect that he doesn’t put his money where