Fucked in the Library #5
Extra shifts. Other side of campus. The polite version of a locked door.
She stayed late anyway.
Tuesday she catalogued until the quad lights came on.
Thursday she re-labeled a drawer that did not need it.
The kitchen pot stayed full because she would not go in there and wait for a deadbolt that was not coming.
Her desk blotter still had a faint dent from her cheek.
She covered it with a legal pad and did not fool herself.
The building at 1:00 a.m. had a specific quiet. Pipes. HVAC. The freight elevator thinking about a floor it would not visit. She walked the stacks in Special Collections with the lights on low and told herself she was checking humidity cards.
She was not.
Between G and H she stopped. The aisle smelled like cloth bindings and dust. She put her back to the range, slacks open, and slid her hand into her panties because the alternative was driving to a green door she had not been invited back to.
She was already wet. That made her angry.
Two fingers. Slow. She was still tender if she pressed the wrong way, a ghost of his cock that six days had not erased.
She rubbed her clit with the heel of her hand and tried not to build a picture, which was useless.
It was his mouth she got. The kitchen linoleum.
Water running off his hair in a plastic stall.
The stripe he had wiped through his bathroom mirror.
The sound he made when she told him where to cum.
She bit her own wrist so the aisle would stay quiet.
She came standing up, a tight, unsatisfying jerk that left her worse than before.
Her cunt clenched on her fingers and it was not enough.
She pulled her hand out, wiped it on a tissue from her pocket, and stood there breathing like she had run the stairs.
The humidity card on the endcap read 47 percent. She wrote nothing down.
Friday he was in the annex again. She saw the cart through two sets of doors and did not stop walking.
Saturday the campus was thin. She went to her office because her apartment felt like a room that knew too much. At 10:12 p.m. her phone lit up on the desk.
Unknown number, except it was not. She had saved it under a last name that was not his and had not deleted it when he walked out of her office.
I can smell your perfume on my shirt.
That was the whole message.
She sat in the chair and read it four times. No apology. No extra shifts explained. No maybe we should stop in writing, which would have been easier to answer than the sentence he had left hanging in the air with his cum still in her.
She typed where are you working and deleted it.
She typed come to the kitchen and deleted that too.
She typed nothing.
The shirt would be the gray one, or the work shirt with the patch. He would have worn it after the desk. After he told her they should stop and she gave him silence instead of a yes. Perfume on cotton. Her throat. The place he had bitten through her blouse.
She put the phone face down.
At midnight she locked Special Collections and took the stairs past the third-floor kitchen without turning her head. The ice machine dumped cubes for nobody. She hated that she knew the sound by heart.
In the parking deck her phone buzzed again. She did not look until she was in the car with the doors locked.
Same thread. No new words. Just the first text sitting there like he had known one sentence was the only thing she would allow.
She drove home with the windows down. Spring air. Somebody’s cigarette at a stoplight. She could not smell her own perfume anymore. She could only smell the stacks and the ghost of floor wax, and under that the thing six days had not washed off.
She did not answer him.
She also did not delete the thread.
Sunday night she parked in her usual space and sat in the dark looking at the library’s third-floor windows. A light was on in a hall that was not hers. Could have been anyone. She told herself it was anyone.
She went up anyway.
The kitchen was empty. The pot was cold. She stood in the doorway long enough for the camera at the far end of the service corridor to finish a cycle, then she went to her office and sat on the couch with the emergency blanket still folded wrong from a week ago.
The phone stayed dark.
She fell asleep in her clothes and woke at 4:00 with a crick in her neck and the taste of his name in her mouth, unsayable, unused.
Monday the annex cart was gone from the glass. She did not go looking.
She made a pot of coffee at 2:08 a.m. because she was a 39 year old woman with keys and a job and a body that would not take a hint. She poured a cup she did not drink and left the second mug on the counter, empty, handle pointed out.
Then she went back to the stacks and did not put her hand in her slacks.
She waited.
The second mug was still on the counter when he walked in.
Mara had not moved it. Two-eleven. The pot was working this time, a cheap wet gurgle, burnt smell starting anyway because the burner had one temperature and it was wrong. She stood where she had stood the first night, 39 year old hands around nothing, cardigan buttoned like it could do anything.
Cole stopped inside the door. Work shirt. Wax on the boots. Twenty three year old face that had spent a week in another building.
He locked the deadbolt.
No hey. No I got your empty cup. He crossed the linoleum, put his mouth on hers, and kissed her like the six days had been an argument he had already lost.
She fisted his shirt. He tasted like coffee he had stolen from a different floor. His stubble scraped the place on her throat that had finally faded. She bit his lower lip and he made a sound into her mouth that the ice machine had no business hearing.
“Counter,” she said, when he let her have air. “Don’t take me anywhere else. I didn’t come here to talk.”
“Wasn’t going to.”
He lifted her onto the same stretch of laminate. Her slacks came off in a yank that popped a stitch at the hip. Panties with them. He shoved her knees apart and looked at her pussy like he had been thinking about it in the science annex with a mop in his hands.
He did not go to his knees.
He opened his belt, dragged his cock out, and rubbed the head through her folds, up over her clit, back, again, until she was dripping on the counter and reaching for him.
“Cole.”
“I know.”
He pushed in standing between her thighs, one hard slide to the root. She was wet enough that it should have been easy. It still knocked the air out of her. Soreness from a week of wanting and one bad orgasm in the stacks. She wrapped her boots around him and pulled.
He fucked her like he had clocked out.
Deep strokes. The cabinet doors rattled.
Her ass squeaked on the laminate. He got a hand in her hair and tipped her head back so he could get at her throat with his mouth, sucking a mark she would have to hide again, while his cock dragged over the spot that made her vision skip.
She came first, fast, mean, her cunt grabbing him while she swore into his shoulder. He rode it and did not follow.
The ice machine dumped cubes. Neither of them laughed.
He pulled out, turned her, bent her over the counter with her tits on the cheap wood and her feet barely on the floor.
He shoved back into her from behind and the angle made her grab the sink edge.
His belt buckle tapped her ass. His hand found her clit, two fingers, sloppy, and he talked now, low, filthy, the week coming out of him in pieces.
“I mopped halls that didn’t need me. I went home smelling like your perfume and I jerked off in that shower thinking about you watching yourself take my cock. I almost came here every night and I didn’t, because you didn’t answer me.”
“I left the mug.”
“I saw it.” He snapped his hips. “I saw it and I still stood in the doorway like a coward.”
“You’re not in the doorway now.”
He reached up and put two of his wet fingers in her mouth.
She sucked them. Tasted herself. He groaned and fucked her harder, the counter edge biting her hipbones, her cardigan still on, bunched under her.
She came again with his fingers on her tongue, messy, shaking, a sound she swallowed around his knuckles.
He still lasted.
She spat his fingers out. “In me. Don’t you pull out. I want your cum in my pussy on this counter. That’s what I came here for.”
He draped over her back, one forearm beside her head, and gave her the long last stretch of it.
She felt him start to break and then fight it one more stroke, 23 year old habit, and then he slammed home and came with his mouth open against her shoulder blade, cock pulsing, heat flooding her in thick jerks.
She pushed back to take it. He held her there and emptied into her like he had been saving it for the lock on this specific door.
He stayed in her after. Breathing. The pot clicked off behind them, scorched. His cum leaked around him immediately, down her thigh, toward the linoleum they had used the first time.
He pulled out slow. She felt the drip and did not close her legs.
Neither of them spoke. He tucked himself away like someone might still knock. She pulled her slacks up over the mess and felt it smear. The second mug sat by her elbow, empty, handle out.
He looked at it. Then at her.
She buttoned the cardigan. Her mouth felt used. Her throat would show tomorrow.
“I’m on this floor the rest of the week,” he said. Not a question. Not maybe we should stop.
She picked up the second mug and poured coffee into it. Black. She set it in his hand.
“Then mop something that needs it,” she said.
His mouth twitched. He drank. The cameras at the far end of the service hall were still on their slow cycle. He unlocked the deadbolt, checked the corridor, and went out with the mug like it belonged on his cart.
Mara stood in the kitchen with his cum in her panties and the pot making the burnt smell she was never going to unlearn.
She did not go back to the stacks.
She wiped the counter.
She left the first mug where it was.
The student worker heard it first.
Thursday, 4:40 p.m., loading dock. A dolly of donor boxes and a sky that looked like rain.
Cole had the west door propped with his cart because that was his job again, this floor, this wing.