Control Read Online Free PDF Page A

particularly sensible.’
    It’s ridiculous, but my palms are sweating. I have broken into the Pentagon of him, and now I’m slinking down nuke-laced corridors. I am a Russian spy, interrogating him in a darkened room.
    ‘So you were responsible for everything?’
    ‘I … yes.’
    ‘For how long?’
    I can feel him pulling away from me. He goes to the bookshelf adjacent to the counter, and tidies a mess that isn’t there.
    His back is fully to me, now.
    ‘I don’t know. Since I was a boy, I guess.’
    For some reason, Quentin Blake’s drawings from The Twits comes to mind. Two scraggly, hairy weirdoes, living in a maze of filth. A small, slight Gabriel trying to keep on top of everything.
    God, I should never have hired this one. He’s making me feel obliged. I can sense it welling up inside me. It comes up my throat and spills out of my mouth:
    ‘My father was very strict.’
    It’s true. He was. But I don’t know why I’m telling him so, when I’ve never told a soul. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I told anyone anything about myself.
    He turns, quite suddenly. There’s a queerly eager look on his face that makes me both sick and something else. Something like excitement.
    ‘I can tell,’ he says, which should make me even sicker. But somehow, it doesn’t. Not when it’s Gabriel. It would be different if it were Andy, sure of himself and rich with arrogance. But this isn’t the same.
    ‘How?’
    His eyebrows lift, a little shrug of the face.
    ‘Just something about you. Something so … in control.’
    How odd that he should say so, right when I haven’t felt less in control in my entire life. I’m surprised my knees aren’t knocking together. I need to get a hold on myself. I need to –
    ‘Maybe that’s just what you want to see. Maybe you like that about me.’
    ‘Why would I like that you’re in control?’ he asks, and even tilts his head to the side – for all the world like a curious little boy.
    But I think he secretly knows. I think I know too – of course I know. I’ve been playing this game ever since I hired him.
    ‘So is it all right if I go?’ he says, quite abruptly. It sounds as though he’s waiting for something – or looks like it, at least. But he’s so closed and tightly wound, how can I know for certain what it is?
    ‘Of course.’
    He flashes me that smile, the one with the pointed incisors and the curling tongue. The one that makes him boyish and not so weighed down by whatever he’s weighed down by. And then all at once I know what he was waiting for.
    Permission.
    I flick through Sins of the Flesh , looking for all the things he will have seen. He strummed her clit with thick fingers , that sort of thing. I want to get inside his brain and swim around in it, understand all the things he thought and felt when reading words like that.
    It’s not like with Andy. Andy’s brain runs on one track, it’s obvious, he reads those words and gets an erection. It’s a simple reflex.
    But I remember what it was like to know nothing about words like that, to uncover a whole secret world one page at a time and be both baffled and awed. Is that the way Gabe thinks? Or has this always been his little furtive habit, while dodging around his crazy parents? If he reads this sort of stuff all the time, likely he knows more about fucking than Andy does.
    That thought pulls me up short.
    As does the scene in Sins of the Flesh where the heroine tells the hero to get on his knees. Though it’s not the fact that the scene is hot that pulls at me. I think of Gabe liking it, instead, and feel my sex grow warm and plump. I’m supposed to be catching up on a little bookkeeping, but somehow the room has grown dark and my receipts have gone untouched and I’ve got this book in my hand while thoughts of Gabriel, downstairs in the shop, fill me up.
    It’s not the book, it’s Gabriel. It’s not that someone was watching, it’s not the idea of being watched. It’s the