Czytaj książkę: «Exposure»

Issues and Returns
Janine Ashbless

Don’t they say, ‘It’s always the quiet ones you need to watch’? Well, I was a quiet one all my life. With three older brothers, I never had much choice. I wasn’t going to be able to cause as much ruckus as them, and there was always someone saying to Mum, ‘At least you’ve got a nice quiet girl now.’ So being quiet was what I was good at. That’s what I was told.

As I grew up, I was biddable at school too. I was nice little Kelly, always plodding steadily on. But, when I got my first proper job, I discovered that there’s such a thing as Too Quiet.

I ended up working in a university library, you see. I thought it’d be right up my street. I like books, and it was a steady predictable job where you weren’t expected to be extroverted. A quiet job.

Quiet? It was like being buried alive. All day I’d sit at the ground-floor desk dealing with books being issued and returned. I’d scan them and check the computer record and stamp them out. That was it. There were six of us on shift at the desk but we weren’t allowed to chat to each other because we weren’t supposed to disturb anyone. Not that there was much to talk about. Nothing ever happened. All the other library workers were women. The middle-aged ones were dully married and the young ones acted and dressed like they were middle-aged. The highlight of my day was morning coffee, because if it was a staff member’s birthday she’d bring in packs of biscuits to share round.

Seriously, that was the most exciting part of the working day.

The only thing that reassured me I wasn’t already dead was watching the students. At least they were worth looking at – well, some of them – and most were only a bit younger than me. I liked the boys in the hockey shirts best: not as burly as the rugby players but cuter, and with rock-hard calves. And, although there were banks of computer terminals and an online catalogue which they were supposed to be able to handle themselves, the ones in the sports shirts were usually a good bet for coming up and asking for help.

There was one other part of the daily routine that made it bearable, and that was straight after lunch when I reshelved the returned books. I could disappear upstairs among the stacks with my trolley for maybe half an hour. Hey, at least I was walking about instead of sitting behind my terminal. I shelved books under Sociology, Biosciences, Modern American Literature and Spanish. I would snatch a few minutes reading here and there if I came across an interesting title – I’m always curious – but mostly this time mattered because I could stretch my legs and escape from the scrutiny of Ellen, the librarian in charge of Issues and Returns. She had a grey bob and a sour expression, and she thought I needed to buckle down with more dedication instead of watching the clock. She didn’t know that, when I was staring blankly into space like that, inside I was screaming with frustration.

You see, I like being quiet. But I like me being the quiet in the eye of a hurricane. I found that out the hard way. I like to be surrounded by noise, and life, and – let’s face it – by men. Maybe it’s because I grew up with clumping, arguing, messy brothers. In the near silence of the library, I just found myself getting more and more uptight. And horny. Oh, I was bitterly horny. I’d sit behind my desk surreptitiously eyeing up the students, my face composed to blank, feeling the heat itching between my legs. I’d frig myself desperately every day in the staff toilet, snatch a silent hurried orgasm, then pat my flushed cheeks with cold water before emerging again. I sometimes wondered if the others guessed what I was up to in there, or sensed the heat on me, but I didn’t care enough to stop. Some days the jittery arousal was so intense it bordered on the painful; I swear that if I hadn’t blown off sexual steam I would have exploded.

Too much quiet. Like an astronaut dumped into hard vacuum, I could feel the blood boiling in my veins.

Then one Friday I found the book. Well, I didn’t so much find it as have it shoved under my nose on the Returns desk. I’m not going to say what it was titled, but according to the cover it was a collection of lesbian sadomasochistic fiction. Slightly shocked, and feeling a thrill of curiosity, I stacked it on the trolley to be sorted later. But I managed to steal a look at the number on the spine, and felt a clench of triumph and odd excitement as I realised it was in my shelving area.

You’ve got to realise I don’t have any interest in girls. Or pain, either. But the very idea of this filthy book was so outside the normal bounds of my imagination, so taboo, that I had to know more. So that afternoon when I picked up my trolley I was buzzing with excitement. In the lift, I only dared sneak a quick look to check it was still there: white spine, red lettering with a jagged transgressive font. A punk book with a dangerous attitude, that font said. I squirmed inside. That day, I shot through my rounds as quickly as I could, and ended up on the fifth floor with only that one left. I even took it as far as the correct shelf. Then I cast a furtive glance around me. I was alone.

The fifth floor is always quiet. I was in a blind corridor formed of bookshelves, with only a padded chair against the far wall. There were no windows, and the grey metal shelves made eight-foot walls and the ranks of books soaked up most sound. The faint hum of a fluorescent light was the only thing that came to my ears. I opened the book.

I was lost, at once. This was a whole new world to me, and I was carried away. I didn’t understand all of the vocabulary: it was an American book and I didn’t know what Crisco was, or a douche, and I could only guess at the weight of meaning in the term ‘leatherman’. I was a bit shocked by the hard-edged characters in the stories too, having naively expected that a sub-culture of women would be somehow, well, nicer than the norm. Nice? That was a joke. These characters were whipcord-tough, strutting tattooed dykes who played rough. So rough that my cheeks were soon blazing with heat and my eyes wide with shock. I’d never come across the concepts that pain could be necessary to someone’s pleasure, that there was power in submission, that sex could be something requiring so much effort and commitment and sacrifice. My mind reeled under the impact of each new image. But I kept reading. Avidly. And as I did I became conscious of a thick wet heat blossoming between my thighs, a tingling ache in my clit, a sensation of opening up and needing to be filled. My hands were sticky on the book’s shiny cover. I shifted my hips uncomfortably, over and over. My bra suddenly felt too tight, as if my breasts were swollen, and when I looked down I could see my nipples poking through the soft cotton top I was wearing.

I lifted my hand to my breasts and circled a nipple with my fingertip, finding myself exquisitely sensitised. Even through two layers of cloth I could feel my areola pucker. Experimentally I pinched a nipple, gently at first, then harder.

At that point, my natural wariness resurfaced and I checked around me, but nothing had changed. Satisfied, I turned my attention back to my nipple and tried flicking it this time, hard. The little shock was surprisingly pleasant. But all this was just distracting me from the contents of the book. I settled my gaze back on the page. My hand drifted down and brushed my pubic mound, intending to soothe the itch there. It was then that I finally realised how aroused I was, because once I’d touched myself it was almost unbearable to stop.

Discomforted, I squeezed my legs together. What I really needed was to take the book into a toilet cubicle and finish what it had started, but the restrooms were on the ground floor, their doors in full view of the main desk. What I ought to do, I supposed, was shelve the book and get on with my work, since I was already running late. But that was just too frustrating to contemplate. And what, I thought with horror, if someone else took the book out on a three-week loan? Technically, I was entitled to borrow it on my own card, but there was no way I was going to expose my new reading habits to my fellow employees. I stroked my mound again through my skirt, pinching my outer lips gently. It felt so good that I sighed. I checked the exit between the rows of shelves again, for the twentieth time. No one.

I wouldn’t take long, I told myself.

I think I was drunk on my new discoveries, high on the glimpse of a freedom from normality, because I wouldn’t normally have contemplated getting myself off in a public place like that. But it was easy when it came down to it. I just rested two fingers on my clothed mound, one either side of my clit, and rocked them back and forth while I read. Soon I was sunk in the fiction, more present in the story than in the real world. My clit seemed to burn under the pressure of my fingers. My juices were making a hothouse of my panties and my legs quivered with strain. I didn’t have time to wait, I had to do it now, I had to –

I came. My head full of alien dreams, my hand full of pussy, my sex clenching around air. Sliding down the long sweet slope behind the summit, I let out a long gasp and lifted my gaze from the book. And it was then that I saw the eyes watching me. Not from the exit between the shelves, but through the shelf right in front of me. Dark eyes with darker brows. Masculine eyes. The shelves stood back to back and, through two racks of books, through the gap at the top of a row, somebody standing on the other side was watching me strum off.

I’d no idea how long he’d been there. I flushed brick red, feeling like I was about to burst into flame and leave only a pile of ashes on the carpet.

The eyes narrowed as he smiled. There was a glimpse of brown curls as he tilted his head.

I did what any librarian would do in the circumstances. I rammed the dirty book into its space on the shelf, turned on my heel and pushed my trolley out of there, my head held high and my eyes fixed firmly on the distance, as if nothing had happened. As if I hadn’t just been caught fiddling with myself, and my pussy wasn’t full of slipperiness and need. I marched straight to the staff lift and rode down to the ground floor with my lips primly pursed. I think by the time I reached my normal workstation I had convinced myself that, if I could just expunge the whole episode from my mind, it wouldn’t have happened.

But as I sat at my desk my clit throbbed, wanting more.

Just my luck that that was the day Ellen decided to get on my case. I suppose I’d pushed my luck just that little bit too long, lingering upstairs. She called me in to her office that afternoon and fixed me with her glare. ‘Is everything all right, Kelly?’

‘Yes. I think so.’

I tried to hide my fear that my playing about had been reported to her, but it wasn’t that. Instead, she gave me a lecture on responsibility and good timekeeping, without ever actually accusing me of anything, and I just nodded along to the drone of her voice. In the end, I had to promise to improve my work rate, and she finally let me go.

That night, I lay in bed and feasted on the mental images from that book. As for my voyeur, I’d worked out that the books on the other side of the shelf would have been the Spanish Literature section. Those dark eyes might have been Spanish, I supposed – there were a lot of overseas students on our campus of course, as there were at every university. But remembering how he’d watched me was disturbing in a way that even the most outrageous acts in the book were not, and I shied from the mental picture. It was far too shameful. He’d watched me come. And I didn’t want to be the object of sordid male attention like that, did I? I mean, I never had. I’d always passed through life unremarked.

I was careful on Monday to be punctual and keep my nose to the grindstone. I didn’t even use the bathroom until my lunch break. And I kept my ears and eyes open for every whisper, any strange look that might mean my co-workers had latched on to some gossip about me. But nothing seemed to have changed.

That still left me a choice, when my reshelving shift came round: what was I to do about that BDSM volume? If I was being sensible, I told myself, I should just forget it existed. It was too risky to read it at work and there wasn’t any other option short of stealing it. The book was better off dismissed.

But it was preying on my mind. I hadn’t even finished that first story, and there were others I was just as desperate to peruse. So, half-cursing myself, I went back to the scene of the crime. I had five minutes, I told myself, and that was all. And before I even laid my hand on the volume I checked through the shelves to make sure there was no one standing on the other side. Which of course there wasn’t, and why should there be? What would students know of library routines?

So I started reading again. This time I kept my hands on the book. I finished the story and started the next. And once again I was lost, drawn in over my head, sucked down by the undertow into a realm far from the airy bright world of my own reality. My pulse thumped in my ears like the surge of waves and my skin ran damp with heat. I turned page after page.

A small noise woke me from my private world. I looked up, and there they were: the eyes were back again. I think I made a little gasp of dismay. He shifted, lifting his head; I saw a nose and lips and a finger pressed against those lips to signify silence and I was too stupefied to react. I just stood there in the grip of my heat, awash with the helplessness of the story’s protagonist. I heard a quiet scrape, a sound of books being moved. He was pulling them from the shelf on his side, I realised. One shifted abruptly on the shelf in front of me, at chest height, than fell aside creating a gap. Through the gap emerged a hand. Long tanned fingers. A bare wrist and forearm, the hairs brown but bleached by sun. A little multicoloured bracelet of braided thread, looped twice about the wrist.

‘Read,’ he whispered.

Obediently I lifted the book again, and fastened my eyes on the page. I didn’t protest as he stroked those long fingers down my breast, softly, to the jut of my aching nipple. I sighed, but I didn’t pull away. He traced the pert little bump of my nipple and then he plucked softly at it with his fingertips.

I shifted a little closer, following the tug on my tit, right up to the metal shelf so as to make it easier for him. I didn’t look. I’d glimpsed mobile, rather full lips, a scattering of immature beard-hair, warm brown eyes. That was sufficient. I wanted to read. I wanted to be quiet. My eyes paced the lines, trying to concentrate on the meaning as he gently tugged down my top to reveal the orb of my cupped breast nestling in its lace. He stroked the skin softly as if petting a small animal. I could hear his breathing, slow and steady. I leaned into the shelf, shivering with pleasure at his touch. While the heroine of the story suffered through agonies, my own flesh responded to his gentler caresses. I only took a deeper breath, momentarily distracted, when he pushed my bra-cup aside and slid his fingers in to heft my breast into the open. He thumbed my nipple, enjoying the play of the engorged point against my soft orb.

Trusting my body to him, I read on. I read while he watched me, tugging and teasing me, with never a word spoken and the only obvious movements those of his hand, though he must have been able to see the pink of my tongue-tip through my parted lips, the flutter of my lids, the glazing of my eyes. Then I heard a whisper and I looked up.

The faintest of murmurs and the turning of his head told me that there was someone on the far side of the stack with him; instinctively I tried to shrink away, but he closed his finger and thumb around my nipple to hold me captive.

‘Sshh!’ he breathed, as if he were the librarian, not me.

I froze in place, my heart thudding wildly under my disordered bra and tingling breast. There was more scraping of books, lower down this time, and then a second hand appeared through the rows. Broader and paler than the first, it clearly didn’t belong to the same man; a red cotton sleeve cuffed with white clasped the strong wrist. Fingers reached slowly towards me at the level of my thighs. With an incongruously delicate touch, they found the junction of my legs through my skirt. Ripples of pleasure shivered through my body as they began to tickle my pubic mound.