The Typewriter Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

caught her breath in surprise, because men didn’t come after Betsey Dobson once they’d got what they wanted. To her credit, she never asked them to.
    And now she listened to him explain, wondering if she would hear stay but hearing mostly I : I need to be where I can take my opportunities when they arise. This clerking is dreadful, but now that I’m writing again, I need tolerate it only a few months more.
    “Good luck, then,” she interrupted.
    He fell silent and then coughed, but it didn’t go into a fit. “Good luck.”
    She rolled to her other side. Her cloak came with her. Avery’s presence in the bed seemed to expand, his elbow pressing her shoulder blade as he lay on his back and crossed his arms. He twitched, one hard contraction of his entire body.
    “Where is our blanket, pray tell?”
    “I gave it to Grace.”
    She supposed he realized his error in using the word our, fornot even a grunt of displeasure escaped his lips. She added, “She moved to her new place tonight, she and Sammy.”
    “That explains the quiet.”
    He shivered again and coughed, and then, in a gesture so sudden and unlike him that it brought tears to her eyes, threw his arm over her waist and pulled her close to him. She had tied what remained of her hair into two sections, and she felt his breath on that bare space of her neck, warm, whispering, “I do believe I shall miss you.”
    Her eyes shut. She thought of Avery in the lecture hall at the Institute, Avery in his flat, Avery with all the answers and his own type-writing machine and a nymph-shaped lamp with a mother-of-pearl shade, and she wondered if she wanted the wrong thing, this job that could end with the turn of a season, this life in a place she’d never seen. She found his hand, thin yet from his illness, and nestled her fingers between his.
    “I haven’t enough for rail fare.” She whispered this confession even more softly than he had his, for she hadn’t intended to speak it at all. Richard would be the last man she would be beholden to, she had determined some time ago. And Avery—well, she had never given him the chance to offer, not really. But with his arm tight around her, the words slipped out.
    His chuckle vibrated against her neck. “Is that the going rate?”
    The question obliterated all the tenderness of the moment. Betsey curled her hand back inside her sleeve. As swiftly and surreptitiously as possible, she swiped all the dampness from her cheeks, removing the evidence of her weakness from herself as well as Avery.
    He massaged her hip. “It isn’t unreasonable, I suppose. And, as always, your practical nature beguiles me.”
    He nuzzled his face against the skin exposed above the neckline of her nightdress, suckled at the side of her neck. And all the while, he pressed her hip, urging her onto her back.
    “Be good to me, Lizzie,” he said when her resistance could nolonger be mistaken for something else. It makes me feel so wicked, going to bed with a Lizzie, he had explained once after she had corrected him.
    He pushed her cloak off of her, onto the floor, and slipped a hand beneath her nightdress, between her thighs, promising to be good to her in return, promising, “Good Lizzie, every coin in my coat pocket for a wicked farewell.”

They have no idea of the possibilities of their writing machine, of the beauty and variety of the work it is capable of doing. All they know is what they have ‘picked up’ in somebody’s office while working for practice with little or no pay.
    —How to Become Expert in Type-writing
    T he going rate. Her desperation wasn’t so deep as that, no. She turned onto her back and let him settle between her thighs, keeping her face from his kiss. Her hands skimmed along his bare back, then slipped between the two of them, and Avery laughed and groaned as if he quite enjoyed the sensation of her chilled fingers curling round his cock. Admittedly, his warmth was better than any pair of mittens she’d ever