Chapter 76: The Reading Room
The moving truck had come and gone, leaving Ryan’s life in boxes stacked against Channah’s bedroom wall. The apartment smelled of pine disinfectant and their shared sweat from the night before. She’d been true to her word; he’d fallen asleep buried inside her, waking at dawn to find her still wrapped around him, her breath soft against his neck.
“I want to go somewhere today,” she said over coffee, her bare feet propped on his lap.
“Where?”
“The scene of the crime. The original one.”
So they took the subway downtown, the rhythmic clatter feeling like a countdown. The university library was a Gothic monstrosity of carved stone and leaded glass, a secular cathedral to forgotten knowledge. As they pushed through the heavy oak doors, the hushed air, thick with the smell of dust and decaying paper, closed around them like a time capsule.
“They haven’t changed a thing,” Ryan whispered. His voice was absorbed by the silence.
“Not a single thing,” Channah agreed, her fingers lacing with his.
They walked through the stacks, their footsteps echoing on the marble floor. Here was the philosophy section where they’d debated Kant until sunrise. There was the narrow aisle where he’d first kissed her, the taste of stolen coffee and ambition on her lips. The memory was a physical weight, a ghost between them.
She led him to the old reading room, their reading room. It was deserted, a vast space of dark wood and green-shaded lamps casting pools of weak, nostalgic light. Velvet drapes, threadbare in places, were tied back from tall windows. They chose a table far in the back, secluded by a high bank of shelving loaded with unread volumes of 19th-century parliamentary records.
She pulled out a heavy tome on Byzantine iconography, opening it with practiced reverence. He found a volume of Celtic mythology. They sat side by side, not reading. The pretense was fragile, ludicrous. The only text they were deciphering was each other’s body, the tension thrumming in the sacred quiet.
Under the vast oak table, her hand found his knee. Then his thigh. His breath hitched as her fingers traced the growing bulge in his trousers. He was hard in seconds, achingly so, the combination of memory and her deliberate touch overwhelming. She unbuttoned his fly, her movements slow and precise in the shadowy space. She freed his cock, her cool fingers wrapping around his hot, rigid length.
She leaned her head close to his, her lips brushing his ear. Her voice was a breath, a secret for the ghosts. “Remember the night you fucked me against the ‘Nietzsche’ shelf? I came so hard I saw stars. I want that again. But dirtier.” She stroked him slowly, up and down. “I want you to fuck my ass right here on this table. Then I want you to feed it to me. I want to taste where you’ve been inside me.”
Her words were a match to gasoline. He nodded, a jerky movement, unable to speak.
She stood up smoothly, the legs of her chair scraping softly on the stone floor. The sound was dangerously loud. She looked around the empty room, then back at him, a challenge in her eyes. She turned, hitching her summer skirt up around her waist. She bent over the table, pressing her palms flat on the cool, scarred wood. The pale expanse of her ass was offered to him, a silent, brazen invitation in the hallowed silence.
He stood, his movements urgent now. He pushed her thong aside, spitting into his hand to wet her and himself. He guided the broad head of his cock to her tight hole. It yielded slowly, a delicious, burning resistance. He pushed forward, a single, deep, wet thrust that buried him completely. She gasped, a sharp sound swallowed by the room’s dense quiet. She dropped her forehead to the book on Byzantium, her body shuddering.
“Fuck,” she whispered into the page. “Yes. Hard.”
He set a relentless, short-stroked rhythm, his hips slapping against her flesh. Each impact was a muffled slap, a secret percussion in the library’s heart. She bit down on her own arm to stifle her cries, her body jolting forward with every drive. He watched, mesmerized, as his cock pistoned in and out of her, glistening and obscene. The risk was electrifying. A librarian could round the corner. A student could wander in. They would be seen, a raw, carnal stain on this place of pure intellect.
His balls tightened, the pressure coiling unbearably. She felt it, the impending rush.
“Not inside,” she hissed, pushing back against him. “My mouth. Now.”
He pulled out with a wet, sucking sound. She sank to her knees on the cold stone floor between the table and the shelves, her skirt still bunched at her waist. Her face was flushed, her lips swollen from biting them. She grabbed his cock, slick with her own ass, and took him deep into her mouth.
The heat was staggering. She sucked with a frenzied, greedy hunger, her tongue lapping at the head, tasting the distinct, musky flavor of herself on him. She moaned around his shaft, the vibration making his legs tremble. Her eyes, gleaming up at him in the lamplight, were wild, triumphant. She pulled off, leaving him wet and throbbing.
“Cover my face,” she breathed, opening her mouth wide, sticking out her coated tongue. “Do it.”
He fisted himself, his other hand clenching in her red hair. Two rough, quick strokes was all it took. With a choked, guttural groan he tried to swallow, he came. Thick, white ropes erupted across her skin. The first burst painted her chin. The second streaked across her cheek and the bridge of her nose. The third landed squarely on her outstretched tongue and dripped from her lips.
She held still, her eyes locked on his, a canvas of his release. Then she closed her mouth, swallowing audibly. She licked her lips clean with a slow, deliberate swipe of her tongue, then used her fingers to gather the cum from her cheek, sucking them clean with a filthy, satisfied obscenity.
The click of a door echoed through the vast room.
They froze. Footsteps, casual and unhurried, tapped across the distant marble. A student with a backpack rounded a distant shelf, head down, scrolling on a phone. He wandered along the far wall, utterly oblivious to the scene in the shadowed corner.
Channah slowly, silently, rose from her knees. She pulled her thong back into place, smoothed her skirt down. A silvery strand still glistened in her bangs. She slid back into her chair, picking up the Byzantine book as if studying a particularly interesting mosaic.
Ryan tucked himself away, his hands trembling as he fastened his trousers. He sat down, the mundane act feeling surreal. The student passed within twenty feet of their table, never looking up, and exited through another door.
The silence returned, deeper now, pregnant with what they’d done.
Channah turned a page, a small, secret smile playing on her perfectly clean lips. “I think,” she said, her voice steady, conversational, “the moving boxes can wait until tomorrow.”
He could only stare at her, at this woman who had just rewritten their past with the visceral ink of the present. The library, once a monument to what they had lost, was now consecrated to what they had become. He reached for her hand, turning it over to kiss her palm. It tasted of salt and skin and something irrevocably, perfectly theirs.