The Second Drawer

Fetish The second drawer stuck, the way it always did in damp weather. Greta put her hip into it. The leather inside smelled the way good leather does when it has been sitting in the dark: clean, animal, a little sweet.

She was forty-one and had been making gloves for other people for sixteen years. Most of them wanted warmth. Paul wanted something else, and he had never once said the word.

He was thirty-eight. He came in on Thursdays after the shop had flipped the sign. Always the same order on paper.

Black. Unlined. Wrist length.

Then, once the door was locked, he would ask if she had anything that had already been worn.

"These," Greta said, and laid a pair on the counter. He looked at them the way some men look at a mouth.

"Whose." "Mine. Yesterday. I wore them to pull hides.

I haven't cleaned them." His throat moved.

"Can I." "You can. Sit." He sat on the stool she used for fittings. Greta stayed standing.

She had learned, over four of these Thursdays, that he did not want a performance. He wanted the ordinary fact of the gloves and the ordinary fact of her deciding what happened next. She pulled the left one on.

The leather was still faintly warm from the drawer, or she imagined it was. It creaked at the knuckle. Paul watched her flex her hand and made a small, helpless sound.

"Tell me," she said.

"I want them on me." "Where." "My cock. Then my mouth. I don't want you to take them off." Greta nodded.

She had heard worse asks in this shop, and none of them had made her wet the way this one did. She liked the focus of him. She liked that a whole man could be undone by a piece of work she had cut herself.

"Trousers." He opened them. His cock was already hard, flushed, the head wet. Greta did not touch it with skin.

She wrapped the gloved hand around the shaft and stroked once, slow, so he could hear the leather. Paul's head went back.

"Fuck." "Language." "Sorry." "Don't be sorry. Be still." She worked him with the glove the way she worked a hide: pressure, then a pause, then pressure again. The leather took the slick from him and went darker at the palm.

Every time her bare wrist brushed his thigh he flinched, as if skin were the wrong material and the glove were the point.

"Look at it," she said. He looked. Her hand in black leather, his cock pushing up into the curl of it.

Greta tightened her fist under the head and he swore again, quieter.

"I think about this on the train," he said.

"You think about more than the train." She stroked him again, leather whispering.

"Last week you stood outside for six minutes. I watched you from the upstairs window. You had your hand in your coat." "I didn't - " "You did.

And you didn't come. You saved it. That's why you're shaking." Paul shut his eyes.

"I didn't want to waste it before I saw you." "Good boy. Eyes open." "You stood outside for six minutes," she said, after a moment, glove still moving.

"Tell me what you were doing in your head." "You. On the counter. The black pair from March.

I had my cock out in my coat like a teenager." "And you waited." "I wanted the real thing to be worse." "It will be." "I know. You get off two stops early and walk." "How do you - " "You arrive flushed and you smell like rain. Open your mouth." He opened it.

She fed him two gloved fingers, the same hand that had been on his cock, and he sucked them like he had been waiting all week to be allowed. Leather and salt. His eyes stayed on hers.

Greta felt the pull of it low in her stomach and did not pretend she was only doing him a favour.

"Good," she said.

"Keep them wet." She took the fingers out, shone, and went back to his cock. The stroke was messier now. He leaked over the seam.

She rubbed her thumb along the underside, leather dragging, and he grabbed the edge of the counter.

"I'm close." "Not yet." She stopped. He made a wounded noise. Greta peeled the glove off with her teeth, slow, and held it out.

"Put it on." His hands shook. The leather was tight on him, damp inside from her. When it was seated she turned, lifted her skirt, and bent over the cutting table.

No underwear. She had stopped wearing it on Thursdays.

"Fingers first," she said.

"Glove stays on." He pushed two leather fingers into her. The drag was obscene. Greta dropped her forehead to the table and laughed once, wrecked.

"That's it. Don't be delicate. You've been staring at my hands for a month." He fucked her with the glove until she was pushing back for it, then replaced the fingers with his cock.

Skin at last. The contrast made her gasp. He held her hip with the bare hand and kept the gloved one spread on her lower back, as if he needed the leather in the picture or it would not count.

"Harder." He gave it to her. The table inched. A roll of thread fell and neither of them looked.

Greta reached back, caught his gloved wrist, and dragged that hand up to her mouth. She sucked two leather fingers while he fucked her, and the sound he made was close to pain.

"I'm going to come in you," he said.

"That's the order." She came with her mouth open against the wood, cunt gripping him, the smell of leather everywhere. Paul followed three strokes later, buried, the gloved hand fisted in her skirt, her teeth still on the knuckle of it. They stayed there.

The shop hum. A bus outside. Greta straightened her skirt.

Paul looked at the glove on his hand like it had become a problem he was glad to have.

"I can't give this back clean," he said.

"Then don't." She nodded at the second drawer.

"Leave it. I'll wear it again next Thursday. You can tell me if you can smell yourself on it." He swallowed.

"I'll be early," he said.