Exposure

I tried to hide my fear that my playing about had been reported to her, but it wasn’t that. Instead, she gave me a lecture on responsibility and good timekeeping, without ever actually accusing me of anything, and I just nodded along to the drone of her voice. In the end, I had to promise to improve my work rate, and she finally let me go.

That night, I lay in bed and feasted on the mental images from that book. As for my voyeur, I’d worked out that the books on the other side of the shelf would have been the Spanish Literature section. Those dark eyes might have been Spanish, I supposed – there were a lot of overseas students on our campus of course, as there were at every university. But remembering how he’d watched me was disturbing in a way that even the most outrageous acts in the book were not, and I shied from the mental picture. It was far too shameful. He’d watched me come. And I didn’t want to be the object of sordid male attention like that, did I? I mean, I never had. I’d always passed through life unremarked.

I was careful on Monday to be punctual and keep my nose to the grindstone. I didn’t even use the bathroom until my lunch break. And I kept my ears and eyes open for every whisper, any strange look that might mean my co-workers had latched on to some gossip about me. But nothing seemed to have changed.

That still left me a choice, when my reshelving shift came round: what was I to do about that BDSM volume? If I was being sensible, I told myself, I should just forget it existed. It was too risky to read it at work and there wasn’t any other option short of stealing it. The book was better off dismissed.

But it was preying on my mind. I hadn’t even finished that first story, and there were others I was just as desperate to peruse. So, half-cursing myself, I went back to the scene of the crime. I had five minutes, I told myself, and that was all. And before I even laid my hand on the volume I checked through the shelves to make sure there was no one standing on the other side. Which of course there wasn’t, and why should there be? What would students know of library routines?

So I started reading again. This time I kept my hands on the book. I finished the story and started the next. And once again I was lost, drawn in over my head, sucked down by the undertow into a realm far from the airy bright world of my own reality. My pulse thumped in my ears like the surge of waves and my skin ran damp with heat. I turned page after page.

A small noise woke me from my private world. I looked up, and there they were: the eyes were back again. I think I made a little gasp of dismay. He shifted, lifting his head; I saw a nose and lips and a 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 course was going or whether he had a girlfriend – of course he would have a girlfriend – or whether he was in the middle of an essay crisis. None of that had anything to do with me. I just wanted my naughty book and his clever fingers and my time out from my life. I was shaking with anticipation.

But I got a bit of a shock when we reached our secret alcove among the stacks. There was a murmuring, a furtive shifting, from behind the shelves on either side. And many pairs of eyes watching through the spaces between the books.

It seemed I had a fan club.

‘Oh,’ I said nervously. But my pussy was suddenly so full and wet that the juices were soaking my panties.

Eyes looked sheepish. ‘Read it,’ he said as he took the book from the shelf and put it in my hands. ‘Just read.’

I was burning. Wet and yet burning. I couldn’t think straight. All those young men looking at me? Quiet little Kelly? The thought charged me with extraordinary sensations I’d never felt before.

I put my finger to my lips in a warning gesture all my watchers could see, then went and perched on the leatherette edge of the chair. This was in the days before phone-cameras, you understand, so I wasn’t worried about being all over the internet before teatime. I knew how bad I was being but my recklessness only fed my excitement. Eyes stood uncertainly, then started to sidle away.

‘No,’ I whispered. ‘Stay. Watch me.’

So he went to his knees on the floor in front of me, and with a deep intake of breath I managed to lift and open the book. My gaze fell on words of enchantment and terror. Studiously ignoring Eyes – ignoring all of them – I scanned the paragraph, tugging up my skirt with my free hand. Underneath I was wearing sheer hold-ups the colour of smoke, with lacy tops. Not my usual style at all. But this was a special occasion.

I parted my legs.

My panties matched my stockings: dark and delicate and insubstantial. I knew that the tops of my thighs presented two creamy strips of bare and vulnerable flesh between the lace panels; I could only hope the sight lived up to their expectations. I ran my fingers over my mound and between my legs, and found that my pussy was already so swollen that my sex-lips were peeking out around the narrow strip of my gusset. I eased the cloth aside and started to caress the wet slipperiness within.

Honestly, I tried to read. I tried to keep some focus on the page as I stroked my sex and teased my clit. But I wasn’t really concentrating on the words, let’s face it. It was the awareness of the men watching me that was making me hotter and wetter and more daring with every moment – Eyes kneeling before me, a look of rapt attention on his face and a huge bulge in his pants; and the men hidden behind the books too, staring at my spread snatch, doing who knows what, as they watched me play with my wicked pussy.

But I kept the pretence up. Leaning back, I held on to that book, one-handed, and kept my gaze upon the page as much as humanly possible, while I stroked my glistening pussy until I couldn’t keep my hips from writhing and my breath was coming in tight quick gasps. Impatient, then, I hitched my hips and tugged my panties down, stretching them across my thighs.

Eyes leaned in, his pupils so dilated that his eyes looked black. He groped his crotch with one hand. I opened my fingers wide for him, spreading my pussy lips to let him see, and bucked my hips invitingly. His tongue flicked across his teeth.

That was too much for me. My arousal was at such a pitch that I couldn’t pretend to be oblivious any more. I reached out and gestured him to me with a frantic clawing motion, and he understood. Catching at my panties, he pulled them down past my knees, parted my thighs and swooped. I felt the heat of his breath as he ducked in and planted his mouth on my open pussy, lapping at the bead of my clit, kissing and sucking and licking at me. Maybe that wrecked the view for everyone else; I was past caring, I was so turned on. And with a man taking care of my pussy I had a hand free to tug down my top and bare my right breast.

My nipple felt swollen and hot as I tugged it. I arched my back, lifting the book with a hand that shook wildly. One last go at reading: I still tried to make sense of the words even as he pulled one of my thighs over his shoulder so that he could get his mouth in good and tight to my sex, so that he could tilt me to the correct angle to delve his tongue right into my wetness and taste that honey. But I certainly can’t recall now what I read then; just the incredible sensation of being kissed and sucked and licked into a squirming abandon so absolute that I lost my footing and just surrendered to his mouth, my gasps recklessly loud in the silence and my body arching and my limbs spasming, under the glowering ranks of books and the eyes of my unseen audience.