CHAPTER 20 - GLASS WALLS

The library study rooms at Ashworth have glass walls, which is a design choice made by someone who clearly never anticipated that a student would need to maintain a neutral facial expression while her stepbrother ate her out under the table.

Knox and I booked Room 4 for Dominic’s partner project – the irony of his father literally assigning us to spend time alone together is not lost on me and I’m certain it’s not lost on Dominic either, which raises questions about his motivations that I’m not prepared to examine in a library.

The room is a glass box on the second floor overlooking the main reading area, and every student at every table below can see directly into it if they look up, and Knox chose this room specifically and I know he chose it specifically because he scrolled past three available windowless rooms to book this one.

We sit across from each other and I open my laptop and pull up the assignment and Knox leans back in his chair with his legs spread and watches me like the assignment is me.

Five minutes of actual work pass before his hand lands on my thigh under the table.

I grab his wrist. My fingers close around the bones of it and I hold him exactly where he is, and I don’t push his hand away and I don’t pull it higher and the indecision is so loud in the space between us that he tilts his head and waits to see which direction I’ll go.

A student walks past the glass wall two feet from my shoulder and I shove his hand off my thigh so fast that my elbow hits the table and my pen rolls onto the floor, and Knox watches it roll with the expression of a man who has all the time in the world and plans to use every second of it.

He stands up. Clears the table – laptop, textbooks, papers, pen – pushes everything to the far end in one sweep and picks me up before I can protest and sets me on the table facing the glass wall. My back is to the interior of the room and through the glass I can see the entire second floor of the library – students at desks, a girl on her phone by the shelving, a guy walking past with a stack of books – and any one of them could look up and see my face.

Knox drops to his knees between my legs.

“Knox, the walls are–”

“Glass. I know.” He pushes my skirt up to my waist and his mouth is on the inside of my knee, and his lips drag a slow path up my inner thigh while his hands spread my legs wider on the table, and a boy at the desk directly below our room is highlighting a textbook and if he tilts his head back even slightly he will see me sitting on a table with a man kneeling between my open thighs.

Knox pulls my underwear to the side and his tongue drags flat up the center of me and my hands slam against the table surface behind me to keep myself upright, and the challenge now is that I am facing a wall of glass in a public library while Knox Voss works his mouth against my pussy with the same focused precision he brings to everything, and my face has to remain completely neutral because anyone could look up at any second.

His tongue circles my clit in slow passes and my lips press together so hard they go white, and I’m staring through the glass with an expression that I hope reads as “studying” rather than “being devoured from below in a glass box.” His hands grip the backs of my thighs and pull me closer to the edge of the table and the angle deepens and his tongue pushes inside me and curls forward and my hand flies up to my face to cover my mouth because the sound that almost came out of me would have carried through the glass and into the reading room below.

A girl walks past the window. She glances in. She makes eye contact with me and I am looking directly at her while Knox’s tongue is sealed around my clit sucking in rhythmic pulses that are making my toes curl inside my sneakers, and I smile at her – this weak, trembling thing that probably looks deranged – and she smiles back and keeps walking, and Knox’s hand reaches up from between my legs and pushes my smile wider with his thumb against my cheek like he’s enjoying the performance.

His tongue speeds up and I grab his hair with both hands and pull him harder against me because the pressure is building faster than I can manage my expression, and his mouth seals over me and his tongue flicks rapidly against my clit while his fingers push inside me and curl forward, and I cum looking directly through the glass at a library full of students who have no idea that the girl in Study Room 4 is gripping her stepbrother’s hair and clenching around his fingers while her mouth forms a perfect O that she turns into a yawn at the last second.

He stands up and wipes his mouth on the back of his hand and sits back down across from me like nothing happened, and my legs are shaking so badly that I stay on the table for a full minute before sliding back into my chair.

We do the assignment. Actually do it – I open the textbook and start building an argument about confinement as metaphor in Victorian literature, and Knox is quiet while I talk, and something in his expression shifts into a register I haven’t seen before. He’s not looking at my body.

He’s looking at my face while I explain the parallels between Brontë’s use of domestic space and the psychological imprisonment of female protagonists, and his head is tilted and his eyes are focused and he’s LISTENING, and the thing I see on his face isn’t lust or possession or hunger – it’s interest. Real interest. He likes my mind, and the realization hits me somewhere softer than I expected.

“You’re smart,” he says, like he’s just noticed, and the simplicity of it does something to my chest that’s more dangerous than anything his mouth has done between my legs.

Then he pulls me into his lap.

His hand slides between my thighs from behind and finds me still swollen and sensitive, and his other hand clamps over my mouth because the walls are glass and anyone walking past could look in, and his fingers push inside me and start working me with that wolf-sense precision while I sit in his lap facing the glass trying to look like a girl who is simply studying on her boyfriend’s lap and not cumming around his fingers in a library while students walk by on the other side of the glass oblivious to the fact that I’m biting his palm to keep from screaming.

My phone buzzes on the table. Knox’s fingers don’t stop. I reach for it with a shaking hand and the screen lights up with an unknown number and a message that makes every nerve ending in my body fire simultaneously for a completely different reason.

My office. Now.

It’s from Dominic.