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
