Control by Charlotte Stein Read Free Book Online Page A

the sweatier my palms get. The more I anticipate his secret hiding places, his stash of the good stuff; after all, it can’t just be a vice he indulges in while working at my shop.
    I stand up, hands on hips. Frustrated and sure he’s going to come in any minute, to make me feel guilty for rummaging through his stuff – though it’s not as though he doesn’t have a right to. This is a terrible invasion of his privacy and I should get guilt-stomped for it, I should feel bad, I’m an awful awful person, to do a thing like –
    There’s a drawer beneath his bed. There is a drawer beneath his bed, pretending to hide. I know there is because I had one just like it, and it makes those fat lines in the otherwise smooth underside of the frame. He’s got a valance covering it, but really – he didn’t think such a thing was secret, did he? Like a safe, for his valuables!
    I crouch down, and drag it out – so sure of myself that when there’s nothing there, my disappointment is total. It’s just more tank tops, more endlessly grey tank tops and so much monochrome that I wonder if the movie of my life has switched from colour to black and white.
    But oh my lad, you didn’t think you were going to get away with it that easily, did you? Everyone knows that you have to check under the disguising items of clothing, too – like checking the layer of real notes, to find the Monopoly money beneath!
    And he has more than Monopoly money in his secret safe drawer of naughtiness, I tell you what. He has books, lovely books, of course he does – all the books I had under my own bed, back when I was far too innocent for this sort of stuff. Crimson Silk books, books by authors who disappeared into the wilds of “legitimate” fiction and never returned, books with bad girls on their covers.
    He has my favourites: Threesome , The Loner , All Business , World Without End . Spines laced with cracks, pages almost falling out. Exotically named authors like Felusia De La Ray. And all the scenes I still remember whenever I close my eyes and my body hums: the yellow scarf and the river and the tennis-playing girls.
    I wonder if he remembers the tennis-playing girls. The ones who live on in infamy in my mind, apparently. Though I’m guessing it’s more about the strong female protagonists in all of these books, doing things like writing the word cunt on bathroom mirrors.
    Despite the fact that none of those amazing heroines ever do anything like that – mainly because they’re strong and brave and cool. Whereas I’m just wicked and awful, and turned to water by desires I didn’t even know I had, five minutes ago.
    Plus I jump and my legs don’t want to help me stand, when Gabe finally discovers me and my many, many transgressions. If I was like them I’m sure I wouldn’t feel conflicted about doing this, or nervous about hurting his feelings, and this would definitely be the moment where we continued what I shouldn’t have started, back at the shop.
    The memory of which makes me stand up, book in hand.
    He looks angry at first, I think. That line appears between his thick brows; his dark eyes flash even darker. How dare you , that look says, as his hands ball into fists at his sides. Strangely, however, I feel no compulsion to apologise. I feel nothing besides the pulse between my legs, and the insistent buzz of a thousand heroines, rattling their way through my mind.
    ‘What are you doing in here?’ he says, and the buzz grows louder, stronger.
    ‘Looking through your things, dirty boy,’ I reply.
    His face drops, the crease-frown and the balled fists forgotten. He blurts out, rather embarrassingly:
    ‘They’re not mine.’
    I love him for trying to deny it – it just makes the whole thing so much less awful, somehow. So much more like a game. Now I get to force him to confess.
    ‘Really? Old girlfriend’s, then?’
    I can practically see him trying to work out the mathematical probability of such a thing being true. The