Control Read Online Free Page B

I know that’s what he was doing. I can feel a smile pulling at the corners of my mouth even as I play along with his total innocence, that little pink flash of book cover I saw through the glass playing over and over in my mind. I guess his secret porn stash in the cistern is actually my book shop.
    The smile pulls at my mouth harder, but I get it under control.
    ‘Hello, Gabe,’ I say, and, as with all guilty people, he seems to find it hard to make perfectly articulated words. He says something that sounds like hi, but could reasonably be anything. His hands go into his pockets – as they often do when he’s having to do something awkward, like make casual conversation.
    The problem is that I actually want to make casual conversation with Gabriel. I want to chat about the weather! When is he going to talk to me about the weather?
    Instead he helps me with my bags, and I spend my time guessing about him. Did his mother make him like this? Some spank-happy teacher, at the Enid Blyton School For Unruly Boys? Nothing at all but his own strange need to be so self-contained? He’s not irretrievably weird, exactly, but you have to be a certain sort of man to feel you have to hide your need to read naughty novels from naughty novel store owners.
    God, I’m dying to know if it really was Sins of the Flesh he was reading. It’s right there on the stand by the counter, and it’s got a hot pink cover, and it is absolutely unabashedly filthy. It’s just the kind of book you’d read if your draconian parents stopped you from looking at girls’ breasts until the age of thirty.
    I stop just short of saying to him – as he puts the teabags away, in the almost-too-high-for-me-to-reach kitchen cupboard – that he can read any book he wants, whenever it’s not busy. I could tell him it’s a good advertisement – that customers often ask about the books they see we’re reading.
    But then he turns around, and there’s this look on his face. His eyes are big and sweet and clearly the sort that are easy to wound, but there’s a furtive smile there, too. His mouth is curling – the way I suspected mine was doing, when I first walked in.
    It makes me not want to spoil his secret. I doubt he’s been entitled to many in his strange little life.
    ‘I shelved the books that came in this morning, and watered the plants. Oh, and I got that big cobweb out of the top right corner,’ he says. It’s where we’re stuck – in boring work exchanges.
    I never thought I’d be concerned about too much attention-to-detail talk, when I imagined hiring an assistant. And he’s so good at the attention to detail! He polished the little lip of non-carpeted stuff on the step up to the second tier of the shop, for God’s sake! He cleaned the little window at the back – without having to be asked!
    ‘That’s brilliant,’ I tell him, though I wish I had less patronising and/or dull things to say.
    So it’s something of a shock, when he takes a big leap beyond silence or casual conversation or something boring. He does it without warning, too, with his face turned away from mine.
    ‘I’m used to keeping things neat, you know? My parents were pretty forgetful.’
    Something jumps, inside me – a small electric shock. It’s like being given an unexpected gift. It’s like I’ve been digging in the dirt for weeks and weeks, and finally got to the treasure at the bottom.
    Though the thought of what sort of treasure it’s going to be makes me hesitate, before digging further.
    ‘Were you very close?’
    Even with his back half to me like that, and his hands busy on a counter that’s already perfectly neat, I can still make out the expression on his face – an almost-grimace, as though he’s just tasted something bad.
    ‘We were … I took care of them. We weren’t alike, though.’
    No sense in stopping now.
    ‘In what way were you different?’
    He shrugs, ever so slightly. A tight nudge of his shoulder.
    ‘They weren’t