Control by Charlotte Stein Read Free Book Online

turn back around on embarrassingly shaky legs. By this point I’m fairly certain that the barrier he puts up between himself and his desires is making a haze of tension drift between us, and I’m swimming in it. I’m drowning in it.
    I think he’s drowning, too. His gaze is foggy and his hair looks mussed, again – he must have straightened his tie in the kitchen, but the echo of that disarray still remains. I watch him fold my coat over his arm and an image floats up behind my eyes – him, putting my coat wherever he’s going to put it. But pressing it to his face, before he does so.
    ‘The lasagne will be a while,’ he says, voice hoarse and oddly regretful. Though maybe it’s not really so odd, when you consider that my mind has already progressed to him putting my wet knickers to his face, too.
    He has to regret all the time we’ve got, all that while , when things like that are probably going to happen. Hell, maybe I’m going to make them happen, and then he can go ahead and not answer my messages for another hundred years.
    ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you – before.’
    I think he’s reading my mind.
    ‘I just … I mean, my behaviour …’
    He rolls his eyes, as though his “behaviour” was just that mind-boggling.
    ‘I don’t know what came over me. I’m not usually like that.’
    I raise one eyebrow, but don’t contradict him. I don’t really have time to – he darts back into the kitchen before I can say another embarrassing word.
    Not that I mind. It gives me the opportunity to look around his tart little apartment without his nervous eyes holding me back. The books, in particular, need scrutinising. I suspect that he doesn’t put his money where his mouth is, and of course I’m proven right:
    There isn’t a single smutty book to be seen, on any of his many shelves. There are dry tomes on World War II and tasteful works of contemporary literature – you know, the sort that everybody likes – and the occasional manual on toy-making. But nothing that even feathers against the boundaries of naughtiness.
    No one would ever guess that there’s porn in his toilet cistern.
    Even if there isn’t, in reality. And I know this, because I check once I’ve invited myself into his immaculate bathroom. The one that’s so immaculate that I bet myself he’ll change the towels, after I’ve gone, before washing the entire place down while wearing a biohazard suit.
    And no, I’ve not a single clue as to why such an idea thrills me so. Even as I’m laughing to myself, I’m crackling with this strange sort of energy. The compulsion to do him wrong. I mist up the bathroom and write suck my cunt on his pristine mirror, then watch the words dissolve away into a little secret message, just for him.
    For when he next has a shower, with all of his clothes on.
    Unfortunately for Gabe, I don’t feel like stopping at dirty words. The bathroom is en suite, with one door that leads to his living room, and another that I’m almost deathly certain lets a person through into the Fort Knox of his bedroom. The bedroom that’s almost begging me not to stop, at dirty words. The bedroom with the hotel-neat bed, and the weirdly drawn curtains, and the picture of Jesus over the headboard.
    OK – not that last one. But even so.
    The room smells of expensive air freshener, as though he’s been doing bad things in here and needed something to cover them. However, finding what he’s needing to cover proves almost impossible. The wardrobe is imposing and masculine, but there aren’t any dead bodies inside – I know because I open it and find only rows and rows of identical shirts and trousers, with glossy shoes standing beneath.
    The drawer at the base yields piles and piles of tank tops – his uniform of choice – while further bedside units are only filled with underwear, most monochrome and dull. I’m not even sure why I would expect anything else, and yet the more I search through his boring things,