Behind the Toy Store

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Bluepen451
Bluepen451
1,399 Followers

Lindy looked around the nearly empty restaurant without seeing someone immediately. Finally, she saw him at a table at the back of the dining room. He had grown a beard, a neatly-trimmed thick, reddish-blonde mix that matched his wheat straw blonde hair. His hair was also neatly trimmed to match the beard, abandoning the Viking look that it had given him when it hung down to his shoulders. Beyond that he looked pretty much like he had seven years ago. Same height (tall), trim broad shouldered physique, same pale blue eyes, and the same overall impact on her. Every time she had seen this man, she had wanted to drag him off to bed. Today was no exception.

Lindy walked across the restaurant floor, her high heels clicking on the tiles. She had switched from her usual ballet flats to heels to make an impression on a potential business client (Okay, Cynthia was right, she still was hot for this guy and now that she had seen him again, she knew that her lust was well placed).

"Professor Jorgenson?" she asked as she walked up to him.

"Yes?" he said with no hint of recognition.

I'm Lindy Pettigrew."

He stood and shook her hand, saying, "Please sit down. I'm pleased to meet you." Apparently he didn't remember her, or wasn't prepared to admit that he did. His eyes sparkled in a very sexual way. The touch of his skin was somehow electric to her. She had wanted to touch so much more of him seven years ago, and it had taken until now to get as far as a handshake.

He waived at a waitress to get menus and they exchanged pleasantries while they waited for the menus—dreadful weather for California, blah, blah, blah.

They studied the menus and placed an order. Both elected iced tea rather than a glass of wine, keeping the meeting on a business level. Lindy would have been perfectly happy if it had turned into an afternoon seduction, but as far as she could tell, Professor Jorgenson did not recognize her.

Once the orders were placed and the beverages served, Jorgenson turned to business. "I am sure you are wondering what it is that I want from your firm. I will be the first to admit that my e-mail was a bit cryptic."

What she thought was, no shit. More like indecipherable. What she said was, "Well, I am curious."

"Let me explain. First a bit of background on me. I just recently accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of English Literature here at Cal Western. It is pretty much the bottom rung of the academic ladder, as far as professors go. Better than a TA, but not much, and maybe less if the TA works for a Department Head. I received my PhD here several years ago and have been teaching at the University of North Dakota since then. More or less purgatory, compared to Cal Western."

Lindy smiled. "But now you're back. What is your area of focus? I hope they haven't got you teaching introductory literature survey classes to undergraduates." She wondered if the hint would trigger a memory for him of the survey course he had taught with the little tart in the sixth row.

"Well, there is a bit of that, of course," he said, missing the point of her allusion. "It goes with being at the bottom of the ladder. But they have given me some time for a bit of research and writing, and I have rounded up a small grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to fund my research, at a very modest level. That's where your firm comes in."

"Well, how can I help?"

"As I said in my e-mail, I understand that you purchase books in bulk from estate sales and then resell those for which there is a market through the Internet?"

"Yes, and I also own a small bookstore specializing in used and rare books. It's on Shannon, just below Main Street. You may remember it from when you were here before. I inherited it from my uncle. But you are essentially correct. The bulk of my business consists of searching through piles of books obtained in bulk to find those that can be readily resold. It actually turns out to be quite profitable, but you have to know what you are looking for. That's where my Masters Degree in English from Cal Western comes in."

"Oh, I didn't realize that you had studied here. When did you graduate?"

So, he doesn't remember me, Lindy thought. I wonder what the hell he wants. He is sure beating around the bush about it.

Responding to his question she said, "About four years ago. I left the state to teach English at the high school level for a couple of years. Absolutely hated it. Then my uncle, who had owned the bookstore for decades, passed away, and I inherited it. The book trading business is something I added to it over the last couple of years."

"Yes, well I suppose that teaching high school students would be even worse than teaching undergraduates, which has its problems." He then launched into a description of the failings of his undergraduate students. He didn't include horny female students who exposed themselves to him in his parade of horrors.

What's he stalling for, Lindy wondered as the food was served.

Repeating herself, she said, "What can I do to help you?"

He chewed slowly, very slowly, on a mouthful of food and then said, "Let me tell you about my research."

Another stall, Lindy thought. He's obviously uncomfortable about something. Her mind had been drifting while he had gone through his spiel about the difficulties of teaching undergraduates, indulging in a brief fantasy about how hot it would be to be sitting in an empty restaurant with her legs spread widely and his face smashed against her sex while she held him firmly in place to insure he didn't stop munching on her pussy.

As her mind snapped back to reality she heard him say, "I have been working with a couple of people in the computer science field and we have developed a piece of software that will analyze the word choices, syntax, grammar, and overall style of any piece of writing. Give me a thousand-word sample from each of any two books, short stories, or essays and I can tell you, with 98 percent certainty, whether they were both written by the same author. We tried it on the winning pieces in twenty years worth of the Bad Hemingway clone contest last year and it rejected every one of the winners when compared with something actually written by Hemingway."

"Have you tried it the other way?" she asked. "What happens when you compare two pieces that you know where written by the same author?"

"Works just the same," he said. "Give me two, thousand-word samples written by the same author, and I will reach the correct conclusion, 98% of the time. Give me two samples written by different known authors and I can tell you they had different authors. We tried it on dozens of authors, dating back to the beginning of the 19th century. I have a data bank on about two hundred authors from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I can take an unknown and run it through the computer, and it will tell me which of my known authors wrote it or that none of them did." He was very excited about his software.

"Wow!" she said, thinking, "He is still stalling. What the hell does he want?"

"So how does this relate to me?" she asked.

"Well," he said, looking more than a little uncomfortable. "I have moved on to the second stage of my research, which involves using the software to prove a hypothesis."

"I see, and what is your hypothesis?" This was like pulling teeth, and he looked almost as uncomfortable as he had when she had flashed him seven years ago. Thinking about that was making her pussy wet.

"Well," he went on, "as you know, most authors, just like artists and performers, don't usually strike it rich on day one. In fact they often labor in obscurity and poverty for years until some publishing house picks up their work."

"True," she said. "Like they say, 'Don't give up your day job'."

Still stalling, she thought. He is obviously uncomfortable about something. He's so cute when he's squirming.

"Well, I am interested in using my software to demonstrate that certain publications written under a pen name or not attributed at all, were written by a subsequently famous author." He paused and then continued. "For example, certain pieces of Ann Rice's early work were published under the names Anne Rampling and A. N. Roquelaure. Now everyone knows about that, because Ms. Rice has chosen to disclose it, but I suspect that many famous authors may have chosen not to disclose their early works."

Bingo, Lindy thought. He wants access to the smut. No wonder he has been beating around the bush!

"Yes," she said, encouraging him to go on.

"Now," he continued. "I am sure that there are significant quantities of material that you acquire that winds up in the dumpster as unsalable."

"Yes," she agreed, telling herself, "but it's not the smut. There is always a market for smut, and then there is of course my private collection behind the toy store."

"Well . . ." he said with a long pause, my thesis is that one thing that any number of competent, but not yet successful writers may have written, to keep the ship afloat, so to speak, was . . . erotica."

There, he finally said it. God, he was uncomfortable. She smiled in spite of herself and then, just to pull his chain, she said, "Really? So F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote porn?"

"Yes, yes," he said, his excitement rising to the bait she had thrown out. "What I am trying to do is to get access to vintage porn so I can compare it to the computer profiles I have established for successful writers of the same or a slightly subsequent era to provide attribution to them. I have been assuming that there is always a certain amount of erotica in the major book collections you buy and that it is part of the material you discard as unmarketable."

"And you actually got someone to fund this research?"

"Well, you know how the National Endowment for the Arts is. They will fund anything. But really this could be important research. Imagine finding whole new additions to the cannon of Fitzgerald, or Dos Pasos, or Hemingway, or even Mark Twain. My problem, of course, is that I don't have a big enough grant to go and buy this material from the smut dealers who trade in it."

She smiled again. "There really are people who specialize in vintage smut?" she asked, pulling his chain a bit, while she thought about how many of them were among her good customers.

"Oh yes," he said.

"Let me see if I have this straight," she said. "You want me to give you the erotica I find as I sort through the various bulk book buys I make?"

He squirmed when she put it bluntly, "Uh, yes, assuming, of course, it is just going in the dumpster anyway."

God he was so cute and sexy. He was really making her hot and she hated to burst his bubble, but business was business.

"Well Anders, I need to explain some things to you about my business. First you are right. Most big book collections contain a small but significant percentage of erotica. Second, you are also correct, that no one has ever heard of any of those authors, except, of course for that well known Victorian, 'Anonymous'."

They both chuckled at the reference.

"There is a fair amount of it that has no publication data at all—not even an author identification. I have always assumed that material was custom written for a specific customer. Possibly by one of your starving authors, although I never really thought about that possibility before."

"Now, here's where your assumption is wrong," she continued. "I don't throw it in the dumpster. There is a very nice market for that material, either with the dealers you are aware of or direct to individuals through my Internet site."

"Oh," he said, recognizing the problem. He was silent and looked disappointed.

She sipped her coffee in silence as she thought. She hadn't yet told him about her private collection behind the toy store.

Finally she said, "But I may be able to help you."

He looked at her with hope, but then said, "I can't afford to pay you what the dealers pay for the material."

"I know that," she said, "but I have, how shall I put it, a small private collection of material that I have chosen from time to time to retain rather than remarket."

"How small?" he asked.

"Oh, it's a couple of thousand volumes," she responded.

"Really!" he said, visibly excited, "And you would let me have access to your collection? I assure you that all I would do is scan a few pages from any book that seemed promising. It would be totally non-destructive."

Shit, she thought! Why did I bring this up before I had decided what I wanted to ask for in return? What I really want is to fuck him, but I don't think I have the cojones to ask him straight out for that. Hmmm. What can I ask for?

"Let me see if I understand this, Anders. Your objective is to prove through your computer program that some of the erotica I own was written by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Pasos, Twain, Sinclair, Melville, or some other famous author included in your data base?"

"Uh, . . . right."

"And you plan to publish those conclusions, if you are able to reach them?"

"Absolutely. You know what they say about academia. It's publish or perish."

"Well, you won't perish if you pull this off," she said, as she thought, and I will get rich selling the smut he identifies as having a famous author. Imagine the price I could get for first edition smut from F. Scott Fitzgerald. And, even if he finds nothing, I'll have him in my toy store storage room reading erotica for weeks. Somehow or other I'll get to fuck him as a part of this deal.

Finally she said, "Okay, I'll let you look at it, but you have to let me see your conclusions and use them to support my resale of the material."

"Fair enough," he said, looking relieved. They agreed that he would come to Thackeray & Co. the next afternoon to take a look at her collection.

As they concluded their business, Anders reached for the check saying, "The National Endowment for the Arts, will buy this lunch."

Lindy laughed. Free lunch for agreeing to loan smut to a government-sponsored research program. The world is a strange place. She could think of some conservative legislators who would be apoplectic if they had listened in on this conversation.

* * * * *

When Cynthia came in the next morning her first statement was, "Well, how did your lunch with Professor Jorgenson go yesterday. Did you fuck him? Do you have a date with him?" Cynthia could be very crude sometimes, and she had a one-track mind that always focused on sex. She was standing, holding the two morning cups of coffee high in the air, as though keeping them as ransom until Lindy told her a story she was dying to hear.

"Cynthia!" Lindy responded, with feigned anger (She knew better than to expect anything different than Cynthia's comments. It's just who she was.). "No, I didn't fuck him. It was a business lunch, not a date, and no, I don't have a date with him for today or any time in the future. It's purely business." Mostly true, she thought.

"Oh," Cynthia said with disappointment. "Does that mean he is not as hot as he used to be?"

"No!"

"Oh, so he's still really hot?" Cynthia asked, cleverly turning Lindy's response against her.

"I mean that whether he is hot or not is not relevant. This is about books and, hopefully, money." Another half-truth.

"Oh," Cynthia said pretending to understand something that Lindy knew was totally unintelligible to her. "Well," she said, "is he hot or not?"

Lindy laughed giving up on Cynthia. "Yes, yes. He's still hot, maybe even sexier than he was seven years ago. He's grown a beard. It's a thick mixture of red and blonde, but trimmed very neatly just like his blonde hair. He looks very professorial now. He used to look like a Viking."

"Oh, good. Then keep me posted on how it goes," Cynthia said, as she handed Lindy her morning coffee. The answer was close enough to what Cynthia was looking for. She was willing to stop holding the coffee as a hostage.

"Actually," Lindy said, "he will be here at five thirty tonight to look at the books in the toy store storage area, so if you want to see him, all you have to do is work late."

"What! He wants to see those books? Those are the dirty books, right?"

"That is what he wants to see," Lindy confirmed. "He thinks some of them may have been written by famous authors."

"You two are made for each other," Cyndi said. "You both love dirty books. You can read them to each other and then screw."

That was more or less what Lindy had in mind, but she wasn't going to admit it to Cynthia.

"I hope you're not going to tell me you don't like dirty books?

"Of course not. Everyone likes dirty books, don't they? But you've never let me see what you have stored behind the toy store."

"Well, maybe someday, if you're a good girl. Now take your coffee and go open the bookstore. I'm sure there's a line of customers waiting at the door."

"Yeah, right," Cynthia laughed as she turned and walked towards the door leading to the bookstore.

As she reached the door she turned and, returning to the subject of Anders, said, "I'd love to hang around and see this stud tonight, but I have a date with the new barista at 5:30, so it will have to be some other time."

Lindy laughed as Cynthia walked through the door.

She spent most of the day sorting through the latest shipment of books, but she had to admit she wasn't giving the task the attention it deserved. She couldn't get her mind off Anders. She was just as obsessed with his tall lean frame, his blonde hair and his twinkling blue eyes now as she had been seven years ago, when she had flashed him in his survey class. The addition of his neatly trimmed red and blonde beard just made it worse, or better, depending on how you looked at it, and she looked at it both ways at least fifty times during the day.

By the end of the day, Lindy had come around to Cynthia's point of view. Business be damned! She really wanted to fuck this guy. Having reached that conclusion, she spent a goodly part of the afternoon fanaticizing about how she was going to seduce him. By four she had developed a plan and began to execute the first steps by adjusting her wardrobe appropriately. She would still look like a prim and proper librarian when Anders arrived, but she was not going to be wearing a bra or panties, and the ballet flats would be replaced by the heels she had worn the day before. The rest of the plan was a lot more vague. She would just have to play that part by ear. Not really much of a plan, but it was the best she could do given her rapidly diminishing ability to concentrate on anything other than the possibility of fucking Anders.

Cynthia left at 5:00, and Lindy moved to the front of the bookstore, waiting for Anders to show up. She really didn't believe she could seduce him today, but she was so fucking horny, she couldn't think about much of anything else. She was surprised that her juices weren't running down her legs from her naked pussy.

Anders walked in the front door of the bookstore, promptly at 5:30, wearing tan slacks and a tweed sports coat. He had an open collared shirt beneath the sports coat—the first time she had ever seen him without a necktie. God, she thought. He is so fucking sexy!

"Good afternoon, Ms. Pettigrew," he said. "Thank you for staying open late to accommodate me. I had a busy day today, but I wanted to get a look at your collection so I can get started on the project."

"Please, make it Lindy," she said with a smile. Lindy had a smile that could light up a room when she chose to use it.

He smiled and his eyes twinkled. "Of course, Lindy."

"The materials you are interested are in a back room. Let me close up the store and I'll take you there."

He wandered around the store looking casually at the books on the shelves while she locked the doors, hung out the closed sign, and shut off the lights. She was so obsessed with him that her nipples were like rocks poking out through the thin fabric of her blouse. She hoped he would notice them.

Bluepen451
Bluepen451
1,399 Followers