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 something about you. Something so…in control.”
How odd that he should say so, right when I haven’t felt less in control in my entire life. I’m surprised my knees aren’t knocking together. I need to get a hold on myself. I need to—
“Maybe that’s just what you want to see. Maybe you like that about me.”
“Why would I like that you’re in control?” he asks, and even tilts his head to the side—for all the world like a curious little boy.
But I think he secretly knows. I think I know too—of course I know. I’ve been playing this game ever since I hired him.
“So is it all right if I go?” he says, quite abruptly. It sounds as though he’s waiting for something—or looks like it, at least. But he’s so closed and tightly wound, how can I know for certain what it is?
“Of course.”
He flashes me that smile, the one with the pointed incisors and the curling tongue. The one that makes him boyish and not so weighed down by whatever he’s weighed down by. And then all at once I know what he was waiting for.
Permission.
I flick through Sins of the Flesh, looking for all the things he will have seen. He strummed her clit with thick fingers, that sort of thing. I want to get inside his brain and swim around in it, understand all the things he thought and felt when reading words like that.
It’s not like with Andy. Andy’s brain runs on one track; it’s obvious he reads those words and gets an erection. It’s a simple reflex.
But I remember what it was like to know nothing about words like that, to uncover a whole secret world one page at a time and be both baffled and awed. Is that the way Gabe thinks? Or has this always been his little furtive habit, while dodging around his crazy parents? If he reads this sort of stuff all the time, likely he knows more about fucking than Andy does.
That thought pulls me up short.
As does the scene in Sins of the Flesh where the heroine tells the hero to get on his knees. Though it’s not the fact that the scene is hot that pulls at me. I think of Gabe liking it, instead, and feel my sex grow warm and plump. I’m supposed to be catching up on a little bookkeeping, but somehow the room has grown dark and my receipts have gone untouched and I’ve got this book in my hand while thoughts of Gabriel, downstairs in the shop, fill me up.
It’s
