Exposure

Exposure
Various Various

A hot erotica collection exploring the risky thrills of exhibitionism and voyeurism. ‘Exposure’ features new stories by the best erotica writers including Charlotte Stein, Janine Ashbless, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Sommer Marsden, and Heather Towne.Kelly offers a between-the-shelves service at the local library that only the very lucky receive.Gina can’t stop offering an eyeful to Brad, the boy next door.Charlotte and Rodney get nasty in the dunes even though they know they’re being watched.

EXPOSURE

Those Who Love to Watch and be Watched

A Mischief Collection of Erotica

(http://bit.ly/KqDOG3)

Contents

Cover (#u63ae60ff-32e9-5af7-bfb4-2e19dd8e7c67)

Title page (#u3067134c-5200-5a8a-b533-be6e9fd26a58)

Issues and Returns Janine Ashbless (#uf5389a60-d758-5d38-b8c5-8341f92aca5d)

Missus Sommer Marsden (#u81ad3475-d2d0-5d1e-a04a-5204051934fb)

Thief Charlotte Stein (#uefc4c20c-2c33-51d8-871c-2d538da16ebf)

The Sand Hills Have Eyes Lisette Ashton (#litres_trial_promo)

Tom and Judy David Hawthorne (#litres_trial_promo)

I’ll Have What She’s Having Rachel Kramer Bussel (#litres_trial_promo)

Remote Access Elizabeth Coldwell (#litres_trial_promo)

Revenge Chrissie Bentley (#litres_trial_promo)

Seeing in the New Year Morwenna Drake (#litres_trial_promo)

Show-offs Heather Towne (#litres_trial_promo)

More from Mischief (#litres_trial_promo)

About Mischief (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Issues and Returns

Janine Ashbless

Don’t they say, ‘It’s always the quiet ones you need to watch’? Well, I was a quiet one all my life. With three older brothers, I never had much choice. I wasn’t going to be able to cause as much ruckus as them, and there was always someone saying to Mum, ‘At least you’ve got a nice quiet girl now.’ So being quiet was what I was good at. That’s what I was told.

As I grew up, I was biddable at school too. I was nice little Kelly, always plodding steadily on. But, when I got my first proper job, I discovered that there’s such a thing as Too Quiet.

I ended up working in a university library, you see. I thought it’d be right up my street. I like books, and it was a steady predictable job where you weren’t expected to be extroverted. A quiet job.

Quiet? It was like being buried alive. All day I’d sit at the ground-floor desk dealing with books being issued and returned. I’d scan them and check the computer record and stamp them out. That was it. There were six of us on shift at the desk but we weren’t allowed to chat to each other because we weren’t supposed to disturb anyone. Not that there was much to talk about. Nothing ever happened. All the other library workers were women. The middle-aged ones were dully married and the young ones acted and dressed like they were middle-aged. The highlight of my day was morning coffee, because if it was a staff member’s birthday she’d bring in packs of biscuits to share round.

Seriously, that was the most exciting part of the working day.

The only thing that reassured me I wasn’t already dead was watching the students. At least they were worth looking at – well, some of them – and most were only a bit younger than me. I liked the boys in the hockey shirts best: not as burly as the rugby players but cuter, and with rock-hard calves. And, although there were banks of computer terminals and an online catalogue which they were supposed to be able to handle themselves, the ones in the sports shirts were usually a good bet for coming up and asking for help.

There was one other part of the daily routine that made it bearable, and that was straight after lunch when I reshelved the returned books. I could disappear upstairs among the stacks with my trolley for maybe half an hour. Hey, at least I was walking about instead of sitting behind my terminal. I shelved books under Sociology, Biosciences, Modern American Literature and Spanish. I would snatch a few minutes reading here and there if I came across an interesting title – I’m always curious – but mostly this time mattered because I could stretch my legs and escape from the scrutiny of Ellen, the librarian in charge of Issues and Returns. She had a grey bob and a sour expression, and she thought I needed to buckle down with more dedication instead of watching the clock. She didn’t know that, when I was staring blankly into space like that, inside I was screaming with frustration.

You see, I like being quiet. But I like me being the quiet in the eye of a hurricane. I found that out the hard way. I like to be surrounded by noise, and life, and – let’s face it – by men. Maybe it’s because I grew up with clumping, arguing, messy brothers. In the near silence of the library, I just found myself getting more and more uptight. And horny. Oh, I was bitterly horny. I’d sit behind my desk surreptitiously eyeing up the students, my face composed to blank, feeling the heat itching between my legs. I’d frig myself desperately every day in the staff toilet, snatch a silent hurried orgasm, then pat my flushed cheeks with cold water before emerging again. I sometimes wondered if the others guessed what I was up to in there, or sensed the heat on me, but I didn’t care enough to stop. Some days the jittery arousal was so intense it bordered on the painful; I swear that if I hadn’t blown off sexual steam I would have exploded.

Too much quiet. Like an astronaut dumped into hard vacuum, I could feel the blood boiling in my veins.

Then one Friday I found the book. Well, I didn’t so much find it as have it shoved under my nose on the Returns desk. I’m not going to say what it was titled, but according to the cover it was a collection of lesbian sadomasochistic fiction. Slightly shocked, and feeling a thrill of curiosity, I stacked it on the trolley to be sorted later. But I managed to steal a look at the number on the spine, and felt a clench of triumph and odd excitement as I realised it was in my shelving area.

You’ve got to realise I don’t have any interest in girls. Or pain, either. But the very idea of this filthy book was so outside the normal bounds of my imagination, so taboo, that I had to know more. So that afternoon when I picked up my trolley I was buzzing with excitement. In the lift, I only dared sneak a quick look to check it was still there: white spine, red lettering with a jagged transgressive font. A punk book with a dangerous attitude, that font said. I squirmed inside. That day, I shot through my rounds as quickly as I could, and ended up on the fifth 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.’