Control. Charlotte Stein

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       Chapter Five

      The timer’s going off, somewhere in the kitchen. Of course I’m amazed I can hear anything what with this clanging alarm bell of arousal clamoring away inside me, but there it is.

      I’m torn. On the one hand: extreme horniness. On the other: I don’t want him to burn to death with his trousers around his ankles and spunk splattered all over him.

      It just skirts way too close to dying of horniness.

      While he’s still immersed in bliss and not thinking too hard about what he’s just done, I snap to a decision—quick to the kitchen, all heating appliances off, then back to appease the nagging harpy between my legs.

      It takes longer than I had anticipated, however—mainly due to the fact that his cooker is three hundred years old. Immaculate, but still—most likely hand-cranked. The lasagna’s probably being reheated by a lightbulb.

      Plus there’s the fact that I get distracted, by the photos that aren’t on the front of his fridge, and the post-it notes that aren’t stuck to his neat little cork notice board. He has a cat calendar, and the only thing on it for this month is begin work, in his tense handwriting.

      I wonder if he ever wears the vaguely flowery apron hung on the back of the door. I wonder if I’m ever going to get satisfaction from a man who owns scented notepaper.

      I’m guessing not, judging by his appearance when I make it back to the bedroom. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed he jerked off not moments before. Would not have believed it. It looks like he’s just finished chapter seven of Uninteresting Books for Boring People. He looks tidied, cleaned, put back together again. His trousers are zipped and his hair is smoothed, and he goes to say something that won’t be explanatory—something light and irrelevant, I imagine, like shall we eat?

      I’ll tell him what he can eat, all right.

      I can feel tension creeping up my back. My lips, pinching themselves together. I want to kick his legs out from under him, but instead words force their way up before he can talk about lasagna.

      “Gabe—you weren’t going to leave me like this, were you? How rude.”

      On the word rude, his lips part. He looks startled, uncomfortable.

      “Of course not!” he blurts out.

      “Then why are you dressed again?”

      He searches the room for inspiration, and I’m pretty sure I can actually see his mind working. Figuring out the ratio of immorality to sex. If he puts a hand on my tit, is hell just around the corner, or down the next street?

      But it’s me who’s too immersed in hell thoughts, it seems, because when he does step to me, it’s so sudden that I start. He reaches out—almost wary, I think—and then strokes one hand down my arm. Just that. Nothing more.

      Though it’s still entirely possible that I gasp. I feel as though I haven’t been touched in a decade, and if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s Gabe who’s doing the touching. Gabe, who often seems too terrified to make eye contact.

      Even if he’s not too terrified to do this. He rubs his hand up and down, up and down—almost like a friendly reassurance, if it were not for my trembling response. I shudder as I watch him watching himself touching me, his too-dark and too-intense eyes following his own hand over the shivering sensitive inside of my arm. He follows it all the way up to my shoulder, where his fingers pinch and rub the material of my shirt in the most weirdly lewd way.

      And then the lewdness flickers over to something else, as quickly as it had arrived. Something else worse, because I think he might actually be about to kiss me. He’s very tall, so it’s not hard to miss. He has to lean down, and come so close to me, and I think of all those cheesy movies with the hero going in finally, finally for a kiss. The heroine swooning, hardly able to believe it.

      This wasn’t what I had in mind when I started this. And yet I find myself tilting my face up to his, as his parted lips get closer and closer, and all I can think of is the utter hilarity of an odd backwards movie kiss.

      That doesn’t make me want to laugh. By God, I think I might actually be swooning—at the very least, I don’t think I’ve ever closed my eyes before on feeling someone’s mouth pressed to mine. And he’s so tender and so gentle that it makes me ache, in a hundred odd and completely unused places. Unfortunate, really, that I don’t have all day.

      I want to touch his body and I want him to touch mine, and I want to be naked and writhing with him, immediately. So I worm one sly hand beneath the prison of his olive green tank top. And maybe I also curl my tongue around his earlobe.