Chapter Twenty-Nine
Tess couldn’t even say how long it took for them to recover. To regain their senses, which had temporarily exited, stage left.
She relished the weight of Gabe slumped over her, his head between her breasts, one hand petting her flank absentmindedly but soothingly, like she was a pampered house cat.
But all too soon Tess became aware of their surroundings and of the utter wreck he’d made of her. She was sprawled out, limbs akimbo, on a reference desk, her big voluminous white dress up around her chin, her unfettered breasts flopping in the most unflattering way possible.
She tried to tug her dress down, but Gabe was in the way.
Tess didn’t think she could speak even if she tried and who knows what she’d even say, so she settled for shoving at his shoulders with her hands to get him to move.
‘What?’ he mumbled, raising his head so she could see his face. The furrowed brow, eyes blinking myopically. ‘Oh. Goodness.’
Goodness had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Gabe lifted himself off her, slipped out of her and she quickly tugged her dress down so that it was covering everything. Then he offered her his hand to help her down from the desk, his grip warm and steady as Tess felt the ground underneath her very wobbly legs.
She was embarrassed about what had just happened. Wasn’t even sure why it had happened. Gabe had never given any indication that he felt that way about her.
Yes, when they weren’t bickering, Tess had imagined that they might have some kind of connection. Even when they were bickering.
And yes, she’d found him hot when he was being stern.
Also very hot when he was damaging library property.
Even hotter still rocking his utterly chonky baby nephew to sleep.
But she’d very much kept her thoughts about his hotness to herself.
Because he certainly hadn’t kept his thoughts to himself about how he absolutely wasn’t attracted to Tess.
She was a fig in winter or whatever. She still wasn’t entirely sure about the whole fig thing.
But she was very sure that Gabe was yet another person in a very long line of people who thought that Tess was ridiculous. That she was a wide-eyed dreamer who needed to narrow her eyes, stop her flights of fancy and start living with real purpose and intent.
Well, having sex on a table with a man who, prior to that, had barely even kissed you on the cheek, would certainly bring you back down to earth with a bump.
Not that it was sex. It had started out as sex, maybe even making sweet, sweet love, but it had ended up as fucking. Really good, brain-chemistry-altering fucking, but fucking nevertheless.
Fucking wasn’t forever. It was for one night with someone that you didn’t plan on having other nights with after that, Tess thought, as with one arm clasped tight against her gloriously free breasts, she hunted down her bra.
Or maybe a booty call. But Gabe wasn’t the sort of man who made booty calls.
His lips would curl at the merest thought of a booty call.
Tess located her bra hanging off the corner of a copy of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the symbolism absolutely not lost on her, which hadn’t quite been slotted back into place on the shelf.
Gabe was no longer in the little alcove that housed the library’s collection of poetry and plays.
Tess took her arms out of her sleeves so she could use her dress as a tent to cover herself as she wriggled back into her bra, then slipped on her pants, which were lying under the reference desk.
It was very much a case of slamming the stable door shut after the horse had well and truly bolted because Gabe had now seen every last bit of her.
She flashed back to him staring down at where his cock was tunnelling into her hole, squinting to get a better view without his glasses.
Even the squinting had been unbearably hot then.
But not now. Definitely not now. Tess had to rest her forehead against a shelf of Restoration comedies and take a moment.
And another one.
One more couldn’t hurt.
‘Um, Tess? Can you remember where you put my glasses?’ Gabe called out from nearby.
Tess wanted to curl up into a little ball and stay there for the foreseeable, but she couldn’t do that because she was a grown-up.
Allegedly. Still, she arranged her hair, which was no longer half up, half down, but all down, so it was covering the worst of her blushes and retraced her steps to the fiction section of the stacks to find Gabe groping along the shelves.
Tess went immediately to the little collection of the works of Jane Austen, where she’d been standing when Gabe had kissed her.
‘Here you are,’ she said, her voice short as she held out his glasses.
He stayed at arm’s length as he took them from her then polished them on his t-shirt, so that Tess was gifted the sight of a sliver of his stomach, the golden tone of his skin, the taut delineation of his muscles.
Even his belt buckle made her heart do a skippy dance and her vagina, which really should have needed some serious downtime, pulsed out a ‘Well, hello, there!’
‘Are you all right?’ It was impossible to know what Gabe was thinking from his neutral tone.
Tess didn’t answer. Instead, she took the middle book of the three-volume set of Pride and Prejudice down from the shelf again. It was locked now so she couldn’t open it but that didn’t matter when the words were seared into her heart and soul.
‘There are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement,’ she whispered so quietly that she was sure that she was the only one who could hear.
‘No, Tess, enough now!’ Gabe said from where he was standing right behind her. He took the book from her hand to reshelve it roughly. ‘That isn’t real.’
Then he turned her round to face him with the same uncompromising movements. ‘I know it’s not real,’ she muttered, staring down at the floor.
Gabe took her chin between thumb and forefinger so Tess had no choice but to look at him. He appeared to be not even stern, but angry.
‘Do you though?’ he demanded. ‘Do you really? Because what we have, what we’ve just done, that was real.’
The last thing that Tess wanted or needed right there and then was a post-mortem. Not when her overriding emotions about what had happened were doubt and embarrassment. Especially when it was still impossible to know how Gabe felt about it.
If Gabe ever took up poker, he’d make a killing. His resting stern face was in situ as he stared down at Tess. ‘That,’ he flicked the spine of the book almost insultingly, ‘is just make-believe.’
‘Yes, thank you, Gabe, I do know what fiction is,’ Tess said a little tartly as embarrassment started to give way to irritation.
‘I don’t think you do,’ he said. ‘I think you need to stop going on dates with people from books …’
‘Oh my God, you are unbelievable!’ Tess breathed. The irritation doubling down now because … ‘Now I know exactly what this was all about.’
‘Well, yes.’ Gabe managed to look a little bit shamefaced but not that much. ‘It wasn’t how I planned to go about things but you have to admit that we both enjoyed the outcome.’
‘It wasn’t enough that you, once again, ruined a date that I’d been looking forward to my entire adult life …’
‘With someone who wasn’t even real …’
‘… you then fucked me to … what? Really drive home the point that Darcy wasn’t down for a dicking?’
Gabe frowned like he didn’t know what she was talking about. ‘No. You’re very much mistaken about that.’ He smiled. He had the actual nerve to smile at her. ‘Tess, look …’
‘And you’re very much despicable,’ she told him bitterly, which wiped the smile off his face instantly. ‘You’ll do anything to make sure that The Love Library fails and you don’t care who you use to do it. I bet that sort of behaviour is frowned upon by all your stupid dead philosophers.’
He looked confused, taking off his glasses to polish them again. ‘That’s not why I did it. And you wanted it too, Tess. You wanted me,’ he said earnestly.
That truth hurt most of all. She couldn’t even deny it. ‘Yeah, well I want a lot of things that are bad for me,’ she said, grabbing her bag. ‘We both know about my track record for picking the very worst kind of men.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Gabe said, his posture stiffening as it always did when he was about to get lofty with her. ‘Please, I’m asking you to think about this rationally because if you would do that then …’
‘Oh, fuck being rational!’ Tess snapped. ‘And fuck you, except I am never fucking you again, and fuck your stupid library. I don’t care if it falls down. In fact, nothing would make me happier.’
That was wrong. There was one thing that would make Tess as happy as she could possibly be in that particular moment and it was to remove herself from this situation and from the bloody library, never to return.
Her last venomous words had rendered Gabe speechless and slack-limbed, so Tess was free to tear through the stacks. Over the blood rushing to her head, she was sure that she could hear whispered voices, a chorus of them, clamouring in her wake.
The books. The worlds and the people contained within them.
Tess had never understood the magic that took them from paper to flesh, but now she could imagine them escaping of their own free will to pull her back and never let her leave.
Doomed to spend the rest of her days, and beyond that, eternity, forced to live in their stories because she didn’t have one of her own.
Which was ridiculous. There were no fictional characters grabbing at Tess as she ran through the huge, majestic central room and out into the grandiose hall, her feet slapping against the faces of the Virtues immortalised in the floor tiles until at last, she was tugging open the heavy door that led out into Soho.
The real world.
And her very real life.