Read Control for Free Online Page A

mortified.
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. His eyes flash ten types of panic at me, and all ten make my stomach twist in sickly knots.
    However, before I can calm him down and reassure him that I’m actually the wicked pervert, he barges past me and out the door. He doesn’t even remember to take his coat.
    Lord, I hope he remembered to fasten his trousers.

Chapter Four
    I LEAVE A SERIES of messages on his answerphone, but hold out no hope that they’ll reach him. For some reason, I imagine his answering machine as a hand-cranked gramophone type device, in a house full of similar items.
    He probably has a mangle.
    Either way, he doesn’t call me back. Instead I get three hundred messages on my answerphone, from Andy. Some of them are dirty. None of them are as dirty as giving Gabe a handjob in the back of my shop. Though the “I want to come in your ass” one skirts extremely close.
    I wonder if Gabe would dare to say words like that. I bet he’s never even thought of such an idea, though I’m guessing his erotic romance education is getting him close. I bet it’s making him want to pick up the phone, and call me.
    All I have to do is wait. Be patient. Don’t force him.
    Why do I want to force him so badly?
    Because I can still smell him on my skin – that sweet clean scent, like pine so strong and fine it’s almost mint. Because when I think of his lean body strung out so taut and trembling against me, I go weak.
    Because he needs a push, and maybe some tender loving care. And though I’m not that sort of person – or at least, I don’t think I am – I can at least bake him a lasagne. If there are ulterior motives beneath the lasagne, like dirty fucking and not getting sued, well. At least he’s getting a delicious pasta meal into the bargain.
    I still feel foolish, however, when standing outside his over-varnished door, clutching food like some desperate-for-attention old lady. And, somehow, I’m sure he isn’t going to open up. I can practically feel him peering at me through the peephole.
    So it’s a shock, when the door practically lunges open. I almost take a step back, and then again when I see what sort of state he’s in.
    He has the tense harried look of a man who’s about to be punched, in the face. Or of a man who’s been forced on to a ride he couldn’t handle, and now he’s about to throw up. His tie is slightly askew. A lick of hair dangles over his broad pale brow.
    In his book, I’m pretty sure that’s enough to indicate extreme stress. It makes me glad I brought the lasagne. It also makes me greedy to smooth that hair back into place, which is one of the strangest impulses I’ve ever encountered. I don’t think I’ve ever smoothed a man’s hair back into place, before. Like I’m his mother, or something!
    Why doesn’t it feel like a mother-y sort of thing?
    ‘How did you find me?’ he asks, like some gasping maiden, talking to her awful stalker. Though to his credit he seems to realise he sounds like a gasping maiden, and finishes with this: ‘I mean – what are you here for?’
    I come very close to saying to fuck you , but luckily he gets in there before me.
    ‘It’s just that … my apartment is a mess and I … I don’t usually have visitors.’
    It comes as no surprise to me at all that his apartment, far from being a mess, is almost unbearably clean and tidy. Reluctance skitters all over him, but he lets me by into the laboratory beyond. The one which he then tidies some more.
    Despite the aroma of coffee wafting in from the undoubtedly sterile kitchen, the place smells like him: of that pine-y, soapy thing. And then there’s the tang of furniture polish – of course there is. He’s spraying some right now. On his books. Which are lined on shelves in so rigorous and orderly a fashion, it looks as though they’ve been covered in plastic.
    Maybe they have been covered in plastic. The furniture certainly has been, after all. No word of a lie – the furniture