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.
‘Oh,’ I said under my breath. In a strange way it made sense that I should be groped by strangers as I stood feasting on the most intimate fantasies of someone I’d never met. I was boiling with arousal by now, unable to think of anything but the sensations in my flesh and where they were leading. I didn’t resist as the lower hand pulled up the soft fabric of my skirt finger by finger and slipped beneath the rucked cloth to explore the gusset of my panties, before pushing it aside to touch me where I was soft and wet and ready and needy. My head spun. I leaned into the shelving, trying to look as if I were engrossed in the book, quivering in every fibre. Fingertips circled my nipple and my clit like they were two halves of a whole. The fires that had been stoked inside me roared hotter. I couldn’t turn the pages any more so I just read the same shocking words over and over – until finally I came with a blush and a long stifled moan, surging then sagging against their hands and the shelf.
Quietly they withdrew their arms. I glimpsed dark eyes and that smile once more through the gap. I never saw the other guy at all.
Oh, I was late by the time I got back down to the Issues desk that day. Ellen gave me a look that would have killed wasps. Then she came and stood over me silently as I worked. I had to sweep books over the security plate and slam down the stamp and pretend that she was not standing there, vulture-like, at my shoulder. After ten minutes, she moved away, but I could sense her eyes on me all that afternoon, and every time I glanced towards her desk she would look up and glower.
I was nearly at the end of my shift when two students emerged from the stairs, and I took one idle look at the first and nearly fell out of my seat. It was him: the Eyes. I was certain straight away. Slim, with untidy dark curls, his long fingers crooked around an armful of books, his sleeves rolled back revealing a woven bracelet on his wrist. He was talking to his friend, a broad-shouldered blond wearing a red hockey shirt. The first student’s gaze met mine and he stopped talking, and then they both altered course slightly, heading straight for my desk.
I didn’t know where to put myself. My mumbled ‘Thanks’ as Eyes presented his little stack of volumes sounded ridiculous to me and I kept my eyes on the books and the computer screen, though I sure as hell didn’t read a word printed on either. My cheeks burned. Only when I pushed the heap back over the desktop to him did I find the courage to look up. His mouth was tightly pursed as if to suppress a smile and his eyes were bright as he dipped his chin in a conspiratorial nod. Hockey Shirt was watching me too, his expression exaggeratedly deadpan.
‘Hey.’
‘Hi,’ I mumbled.
‘Everything good?’
‘Uh. Yeah …’
I awaited their mockery. But there was none – only, as they turned away towards the main doors, Hockey Shirt looked back over his shoulder at me and flashed a grin. It wasn’t a cruel grin. It just looked cheerful and well pleased.
That evening, I went out and bought lacy new panties and hold-up stockings.
But on Tuesday after lunch Ellen informed me that I wasn’t to reshelve upstairs until further notice: she was putting me on to the Short Loan collection for the whole afternoon. That’s like a library within the library: the books absolutely vital to course essays are kept there and only allowed out on a four-hour loan. It means that reshelving is a near-constant round and, because it’s on the ground floor next to all the staff desks, I couldn’t malinger.
The cow, I thought.
I was furiously searching for the right place for the Handbook of Mucosal Immunology – a book I had no desire at all to open – when a shadow fell over me and there was Eyes, looking unhappy.
‘You should be upstairs now, yes?’
I looked around nervously for Ellen, but shelving blocked every horizon. ‘I can’t. I’m not allowed.’
‘Come upstairs.’
‘I –’ I stopped abruptly. He stood there looking so beautiful, so young and vital. How could I say no to that? ‘We could use the staff lift,’ I said faintly.
There are two ways out of Short Loans: the turnstile, which is guarded and visible from all the Issues and Returns desks, and the staff lift at the back which needs a security code – but then the security code is the same on every one of the staff doors.
‘Come on,’ I said, sticking Mucosal Immunology into a random gap. I led the way to the lift and we slipped inside. I’m fairly sure no one saw us.
You might think that once we were in the lift together we’d have said something, or touched each other, but I looked at the illuminated numbers and he watched me and we were perfectly silent. I didn’t want to ask how his degree
