Page 71 of The Exquisite Torment of Loving Your Enemy
She proceeded through the stacks. Osric followed. Several times she stopped without warning, causing him to walk into her. She carried on with the brush of her arse against the front of his trousers. He wished she wouldn’t; his cock was on high alert for any reason to get hard. The fourth time it happened, it occurred to Osric that she might be doing it on purpose.
She came to the bust of Pliny the Elder and followed the curve of his cheek with a fingertip. Osric was savagely jealous of Pliny the Elder, who was a harlot.
She stopped at a cluster of books apparently by a famous mentor of her father’s and gave Osric a brief overview of the woman’s legendary contributions to the cytology of plants.
No. She was not teasing him.
Fairhrim spotted another series just behind Osric and squeezed behind him to exclaim over it. Silky skirts whisked by; a breast brushed at his back. She smelled like his soap again.
Yes. She was teasing him.
An earnest talk on a moderately famous lepidopterist followed.
She was not.
Now she was in raptures over the collected works of a microbiologist, but Osric wasn’t listening; he did not care about amoebas; he caredabout the moderate bulge at the front of his trousers. He discovered a pleasurable new form of suffering, which was to stand as near to her as he could and not touch her. Fairhrim spoke. He watched her lovely lips form syllables, thought of kissing her, of pushing her into the shelves and biting his way down her neck, of lifting up her skirts, of making her pant and squirm the way she had last night.
All of which was a mistake, because he was now erect, and the only saving grace was the relative penumbra of the stacks.
“Itwouldbe hard, wouldn’t it?” asked Fairhrim.
Osric had not been following the discussion culminating in this statement, to which he haphazardly replied, “Yes.”
“Thought so,” said Fairhrim, and she, diabolically, brushed past him again.
Itwas certainly hard; if she’d had any doubts about it, she couldn’t now.
He snatched her arm.
With bright-eyed innocence she turned and asked, “What?”
“You know what you’re doing.”
“Exploring?”
Her expression was such that he wasn’t certain that he hadn’t severely misinterpreted the situation. But she was also a mistress of self-command.
“Mordaunt?” prompted Fairhrim.
“Call me Osric.”
“Absolutely not,” scoffed Fairhrim. “That is far too familiar.”
“Too familiar?Really? After what we’ve done?”
The innocence persisted. “What have we done?”
“You don’t remember last night?”
“What did we do?” asked Fairhrim. “Dinner?”
He stared at her. When she saiddinner, he thought he’d seen the faintest pull of amusement at her lips. It was no longer there.
“Perhaps it’s for the best,” said Osric, releasing her wrist. “Have you explored to satisfaction?”
“Not quite to satisfaction, but you may walk me out.” Again, that half-imagined ghost of a smile. “I really ought to be going.”
Osric, tight about the jaw, escorted Fairhrim to the kitchens and thence to the waystone. She thanked him with devastating detachment for the library tour, which she called “uplifting,” and stepped towards the waystone.
