After the Last Customer

The last customer wanted a signed first edition we did not have. I walked him to the door with the kind of smile you can feel in your back teeth.

He had talked to my chest while he said it. I had still helped him look. That was the part I would not be proud of later, except that pride was not what I came to Vic for.

Vic locked the door behind him.

"We're closed," he said, to the empty shop, and then to me.

I was thirty-seven. I had been managing this bookshop for six years. Vic was forty and did the accounts and the rare stock and, twice a month after closing, the version of me I did not take onto the shop floor.

The afternoon had already been a long slide. A woman asking me to kneel for a title on the bottom shelf. Vic passing behind me with a crate and saying, very lightly, good girl, so that only I heard it. I had stood up too fast and dropped three paperbacks. He had looked at me over the crate and I had known we were doing this tonight.

He leaned on the counter. "You dropped a stack of paperbacks when he asked if we had the signed one."

"He was rude."

"You liked that he was rude."

I looked at the dark window. Our reflection stood in it: me in the black knit that always pillowed, him with his sleeves pushed up. "Don't start."

"You started when you bent over the low table in that skirt."

"Vic."

"Say what you want."

This was the arrangement. I did not get to hide behind jokes once the lock turned. I had asked for that. I had sat on his sofa four months ago and told him, wine in my hand, that I got wet when I was spoken to like I was small and obvious and a little bit cheap. He had listened like it was inventory.

"I want you to be unkind," I said.

"Be specific, Tessa."

My name in that tone did something immediate and humiliating between my legs.

"I want you to tell me what I look like. I want you to make me ask for your cock. I want you to use my mouth first so I can't pretend this is sophisticated."

Vic nodded once, as if we had agreed a delivery date.

"Come round here. On your knees. Keep the skirt on."

The wood was familiar. Dust and floor wax. I went down. He watched me arrange myself and did not help.

"Look at you," he said. "Manager of the month. On the boards because you can't keep your head when a man talks down to you."

Heat crawled up my throat. "Vic,"

"Quiet. Undo me."

I fumbled his belt. His cock was already thick when I got it out. I knew the weight of it. Knowing did not make the moment less raw.

"Ask."

"Please let me suck you."

"Worse."

I closed my eyes. "Please let me suck your cock. I spent all afternoon thinking about it instead of doing my job. I'm wet and it's embarrassing. Put it in my mouth."

"Good."

He put it in.

No easing. He held my jaw and used my mouth the way we had practised, which was not gently. I drooled immediately. He told me so. He told me I looked better like this than I did recommending novels. He told me the little sounds I made were greedy. Each sentence landed in my cunt like a finger.

I reached down. He caught my wrist.

"No. You don't get to touch yourself while you're being useful."

I made a noise around him that would have ended me if anyone from the reading group had heard it.

He pulled out. A thread of spit connected my lower lip to the head of his cock.

"Stand up. Hands on the counter. Facing the street."

The street was dark enough. Not dark enough that the idea of it didn't twist. I put my palms on the wood. Vic flipped the skirt up. My underwear was a joke by then. He dragged it down to mid-thigh and left it there so I had to stand with my knees awkwardly bound.

"Soaked," he said, almost conversational. "You really are a cheap little thing when the door's locked."

"Yes."

"Yes what?"

"Yes I am."

He rubbed the head of his cock through the mess of me. Not in. Just enough to make me push back.

"Ask."

"Please fuck me."

"Like you mean it."

"Please fuck me. I need it. I'll say whatever you want. Just put it in and don't be nice."

He pushed in to the hilt in one long shove.

I cried out. The counter bit my hips. Vic held still, buried, and put his mouth near my ear.

"There. That's all you are right now. A wet cunt bent over her own till."

I came from that. Humiliatingly fast. No warning. I clenched around him and shook and hated how much I loved the sentence.

He laughed, low. "Already? Christ, Tessa. I barely started."

He fucked me through it anyway. The underwear at my thighs made my stance ugly and perfect. He kept talking. Not a script. Observations. How loud I was. How I kept trying to close my legs and couldn't. How I would have to open the shop tomorrow and pretend I hadn't begged for this against the loyalty-card display.

"Colour."

"Green," I gasped. "Don't stop talking."

He didn't. He told me I was going to come again if he kept filling me like this, and he was right. The second one hurt in the sweet way. I sobbed into my own wrist. Vic's rhythm went ragged. He pulled out, turned me, and came across my mouth and chin with his hand in my hair, watching my face while he did it.

I stayed there, painted, breathing, skirt still up.

He thumbed his come across my lower lip.

"Swallow."

I did.

Then, because this was also the arrangement, he crouched, fixed my underwear, smoothed the skirt, and got a tissue for the rest with a care that would have looked like a different man to anyone walking past.

"Water?"

"Please."

He brought it. I sat on the stool we used for reaching high shelves. My mouth tasted like him. My pulse was stupid.

"Too far?" he asked.

I shook my head. "The till line was good. The reading group line was better."

Vic almost smiled. "Noted."

"Don't put it in the minutes."

"Wouldn't dare."

I drank. Outside, a bus sighed at the stop. Tomorrow I would recommend fiction to strangers with a clean face and a composed voice.

Tonight I licked the last of him off my teeth and asked, because I was still in that place, if he wanted me on my knees again before we set the alarm.

Vic looked at me for a long second.

"Ask properly," he said.

I slid off the stool. The skirt was still wrinkled from his hands. I went to my knees on the same patch of wood and looked up at him with my mouth already open, because that was the true shape of the night and we both knew it.

"Please use my mouth again," I said. "Please talk while you do it. Please don't call me by my job title."

Vic's hand found my hair. Not hard yet. The promise of hard.

"There she is," he said. "That's the girl who runs the shop. Open."

I opened.

He was slower the second time. Meaner with the words, kinder with the pace, which somehow felt worse and better. He told me I would taste him on the first customer tomorrow. He told me I could close my eyes if I needed to, and I didn't. When he came it was quieter, a held breath, his fist tight enough in my hair to mean I was staying until he finished.

I swallowed. He let me rest my cheek against his thigh for a minute that did not belong to the shop.

Then he set the alarm, because someone had to, and we left by the staff door like two people who had only been doing the accounts.