Chapter 4: The Morning After
The dried streaks on her stomach had flaked into a faint, ghostly map by the time Catriona managed to sneak back to her room. She’d scrubbed at them with a damp flannel until her skin burned pink, but the sensation remained—a phantom claim she felt all through her shower, under her crisp blouse, on the silent bus ride to the library.
Work was a cathedral of quiet. The hush of turning pages, the soft click-clack of her keyboard, the distant echo of a trolley’s wheels. She filed, she stamped, she answered polite inquiries in a measured tone. Every ordinary action felt like a performance. Her body, usually a forgotten instrument, was now a live wire of remembered sensation: the grip of his hand on her throat, the brutal fullness, the muffled screams into his palm as Dave’s footsteps faded down the hall.
The risk of it curdled in her stomach, a thrilling sickness. He’d known. He’d calculated Dave’s routine—the shower, the six-minute window—and used it as a tool. It was the most terrifying and arousing thing she’d ever experienced.
Her phone buzzed in her cardigan pocket at half-eleven, a sudden viper against her hip. She flinched, knocking a pencil off the reference desk.
Aidan: 12:34. Forgot to ask colour after. You good?
She stared at the words. The clinical check-in amidst the filth. It made her eyes prickle. She typed, deleted, typed again.
Catriona: Green. Very green.
Aidan: Knew it. Your face when you heard the shower stop. Nearly finished me right then. Fucking breathtaking.
Catriona: I have to stamp returns.
Aidan: Stamp this: you’re mine today. All day. Think about what I’m going to do to you tonight. While you stamp.
She put the phone away, her hands unsteady. She picked up the date stamp, pressed it into the pad, thumped it onto a book’s flyleaf. THU. 14 MAR. The sound was obscenely loud. Mine today. The stamp became a promise. Thump. Mine. Thump. All day.
The hours bled. Each mundane task was imbued with a secret significance. Straightening a row of novels was an act of discipline. The heavy, sweet smell of old paper was an aphrodisiac. She caught her reflection in the dark monitor of a public computer: hair in a severe bun, prim blouse buttoned to the throat, hazel eyes wide and dark. A liar. A glorious, desperate liar.
She was closing up, shuttering the computers, when her phone buzzed again.
Aidan: Pick up milk. And whipped cream. The kind in a can. Not for dessert.
A bolt of pure, undiluted lust hit her low in the belly. She leaned against the circulation desk, breathing hard. The journal. She’d written something about that, once. Scenario Fourteen. A idle, silly thing. He’d read it. He’d remembered.
Catriona: Dave?
Aidan: Football. Pub. Gone by seven. We have the house. My room. 7:15. Don’t be late.
She bought the items at a corner shop, her face a mask of polite indifference as she placed the can of cream on the counter beside the milk. The elderly cashier didn’t blink. The walk home was a blur of greying sky and electric tension.
Dave was indeed bustling by the door, pulling on a jacket adorned with his team’s badge. “Off out, Cat! Don’t wait up!” he called, all bluster and good cheer.
“Have fun,” she said, her voice miraculously steady.
The door clicked shut behind him. The house settled into a profound silence. She stood in the hallway, holding the plastic bag, listening. A floorboard creaked upstairs.
She didn’t go to her room. She went straight to his, the bag hanging from her hooked finger.
He’d made an effort. The bed was roughly made. The worst of the laundry was shoved into a black bin bag in the corner. The lamp was on, casting its weak, intimate light. He was sitting at his desk, tinkering with a small, metallic component, a magnifying visor pushed up on his forehead. He looked like what he was: an engineer solving a problem.
He didn’t look up as she entered. “Door. Lock it.”
She turned the old key. The click echoed.
“Milk in the fridge,” he said, his attention still on the tiny screw in his tweezers. “Cream on the desk.”
She did as she was told, the mundane errand now a sacrament. She placed the cold can next to his toolbox. He finally set the component down, lowered the visor, and swivelled to face her. He looked her up and down, from her sensible flats to her pinned-up hair.
“You thought about it,” he stated.
“Yes.”
“What did you think?”
She clasped her hands in front of her. “I thought about your hands. And the cream. And… the journal.”
He stood slowly. He was wearing a faded grey t-shirt and jeans. He approached her, not with the predatory heat of the morning, but with a considering calm that was worse. He stopped a foot away. “You’re still dressed like the librarian.”
“I am the librarian.”
“Not in here.” He reached out, and with a terrifying gentleness, pulled the wire-bound knot from her hair. Honey-blonde strands unraveled, falling around her shoulders. He tucked the pin into his own pocket. “Better. Now, the cardigan.”
She shrugged it off. The room was cool on her arms.
“Blouse. Skirt. Tights. Everything. Fold them. Neatly.”
There was a perverse courtesy in the command. She undressed with methodical slowness, her fingers fumbling only slightly on the buttons. She folded each garment as she had been taught a lifetime ago, placing the small, tidy stack on the wobbly chair. The air prickled against her naked skin. She felt more exposed than she had that morning, stripped of both fabric and frantic passion.
He watched, his arms crossed. “Beautiful,” he said, and the word wasn’t tender. It was an appraisal. “Now. On the bed. On your back. Ankles on the edge.”
She moved to the bed, the sheets cool against her spine. She slid down until her hips met the edge, and placed her heels on the rumpled duvet, knees bending, falling open. The position was profoundly vulnerable, an offering.
He picked up the can of cream. Shook it. The rattle was obscene. He came to stand between her splayed legs, looking down at her. “You wrote that you wanted to be treated like a sundae. Remember?”
She flushed, humiliation heating her face. It had been a late-night fantasy, absurd and vivid. “Yes.”
“Silly thing to want,” he mused, his thumb pressing the nozzle’s tip. “But we’re following the manual.” He aimed. A fat, white spiral landed on her inner thigh, shockingly cold. She gasped. Another, on the other thigh. One directly over her navel. Then, with a painter’s deliberation, a long, curling line from her sternum down to the thatch of blonde hair below.
The cold was a shock, a tease. He tossed the can aside. It clattered on the floor. Then he leaned down, his hands bracing on the mattress on either side of her hips, and lowered his mouth to her thigh.
He licked. A long, slow, deliberate stripe from knee to crest. The sensation was impossible—the chill of the cream, the heat of his tongue, the scratch of his stubble. A broken sound escaped her. He moved to the other thigh, cleaning it with the same thorough, unsentimental efficiency. He took his time, lapping at her stomach, the cold melting under his mouth, dripping in rivulets down her sides.
By the time his mouth finally found her centre, she was shaking, her fingers twisted in the sheets. He didn’t use his hands, just his tongue and lips, working her with a focused expertise that had nothing to do with worship and everything to do with consumption. He was eating the dessert he’d made of her.
It was degrading. It was ridiculous. It was the most intensely erotic thing she had ever felt. The orgasm built not in a wave but in a sudden, violent crest, tearing through her with a silent, breathless intensity. She arched off the bed, a strangled cry caught in her throat.
He rose above her, his lips glistening. He unbuttoned his jeans, freed himself. He was fully, impressively hard. He didn’t ask for colour. He just guided himself into her, the easy, wet slide a result of his own work. He fucked her there, at the edge of the bed, with a steady, deep pace, his eyes locked on hers.
“This,” he grunted, sliding a hand under her lower back to lift her into his thrusts. “This is what you’re for. My clever, filthy girl. Writing it down. Making me do it. This is you.”
They were the words from her journal, but they were also more. They were an understanding. She came again, quicker this time, a shimmering, continuous unlock of pleasure that mirrored the relentless push and pull of his body. He followed, his rhythm shattering, pressing his face into the curve of her neck as he spent himself inside her with a low, drawn-out groan.
For a long time, the only sound was their breathing, syncopated, slowing. The smell of fake, sugary vanilla hung in the air, mixed with sex. He stayed buried in her, his weight a comfortable burden.
Finally, he pulled out and straightened up. He looked at the sticky mess on her belly, the melted cream, the mingled evidence of them. He handed her the box of tissues from his desk.
“Clean yourself up,” he said, his voice rough but normal. Casual. “Then get dressed. I’ll order a pizza. I’m starving.”
He turned and walked toward the door, pulling up his jeans. As if they’d just finished a workout. As if her world hadn’t cracked open and reassembled itself in the last twenty minutes.
She lay there, tissues clutched in her hand, staring at the water stain on the ceiling. The rules, the manual, the checks—they were the scaffolding. But inside it, something else was being built. Something that felt dangerously like trust. And that was more frightening, and more exhilarating, than any fantasy she’d ever written.