He Couldn't Say No Ch. 05

Another work day was over. I sat on the redwood deck behind my house in Walnut Creek sipping a neat Scotch, watching the fog creep over the Oakland hills, and indulging in a good cigar. What a shame you can't get Cubans here, I thought. Canada has them and they're great. I mean hell, if we can have our running shoes made in Viet Nam, why can't we import Cuban cigars? Government is even more fucked up than big corporations and I know a fair amount about big corporations. I have spent a career working for one and selling it's enterprise software to lots of others.

Ah Linda, I thought returning to my lunch time thoughts about a one time lover. But you know, great as Linda was, there were lots of other women, and some of them were very interesting. Very interesting indeed.

For instance there was Louise. Ah yes, Louise the librarian:

I was in my senior year at UC Davis when I met Louise. I was just finishing up a degree in computer science, having learned, first and foremost, that I had no interest whatsoever in spending a lifetime sitting in front of a CRT screen writing code (Remember CRT screens? The rest of the world called them a TV, but nerds have an acronym for everything). I could do it, but god it was boring. You could go days without human contact.

For a lack of a better idea, I was pursuing a minor in English. Maybe it was Lisa that inspired me. I don't recall now, but Dad agreed to pay for an extra year, and I was diligently hacking my way through writing classes and English literature classes—some interesting and some boring. When I got desperate I would go down to Berkeley and get help from Lisa (and usually laid in the bargain).

I was in the library working on a research paper about Dickens' London. Lisa had warned me that Dickens was dreadful stuff, and she was right, but it was better than writing code, and I had all my CS requirements done, the absolute minimum I needed to get my degree. There was a woman working behind the counter, checking out books and occasionally shushing flirting couples that were making too much noise. She was maybe ten years or so older than me. I noticed that she wore essentially the same clothes every day—a dark plaid A-Line skirt that hung loosely from her hips and ended a bit below her knees, flat shoes (black, and polished to a shine that would make an Army drill instructor smile), and a neatly pressed white cotton blouse that buttoned to her neck. Her hair, a thick lustrous brown, was pulled straight back and tied in a serviceable pony tail that reached to the middle of her back. The look was completed by no, or minimal, make-up, no jewelry beyond a pair of simple gold posts in her ear lobes, a pair of reading glasses that hung from a braided gold neck chain when she wasn't wearing them or simply looking over the top of them as they perched on the end of her nose, and a black, library issued, name tag that identified her as Louise.

As I said, the stuff I was working on was just slightly more interesting that writing code in Cobal or C or some other now forgotten language they were teaching in those days, so I paid attention to her every time she came out from behind the counter to shush some errant couple. I couldn't reach much in the way of conclusions about what she was really like beneath those clothes. Her hips were pretty much hidden beneath the loose folds of her skirt as were her thighs. She had very shapely calves below the hem of the skirt, and there seemed to be a bosom that pushed the white blouse out despite her obvious desire to hide it. She had high cheek bones and shapely lips. Her eyes were a grey-blue and not particularly wide, almost cat-like. They reminded me of Lauren Bacall. They moved rapidly as she looked about the room. When we occasionally made eye contact, she always looked quickly away. I suspected that with a bit of make-up her face would have turned heads, but . . . who knew.

As my mind wandered from my efforts to find something intelligent to say about how the culture of Dickens' London had affected his writing (or how his writing had affected London's culture. He was that big a deal), I couldn't keep myself from watching Louise and wondering about her. What kind of person was she? She dressed like an old-maid librarian, but beneath that, was there the beauty of a fashion model? No way to tell. She worked in a library and tried to maintain order amongst college students who were there more for the social potential than for the wisdom of the centuries buried in the books. At least that's how I assumed she viewed her task—casting pearls before swine. As I watched her go about her job I wondered about what her non-work life was like. Did she go home each night to a quiet dinner with her cat and then curl-up with a good book, perhaps Bronte or, god forbid, Dickens, a well-loved tome she had been through numerous times before, but she still re-read to squeeze the last bit of value from it. Yes, I thought. I could see her in her well-worn flannel pajamas and a warm blanket, the purring cat curled in her lap, while she absorbed yet another re-read of Great Expectations. In short, I was obsessing over her.

My old-maid-cat-in-lap assessment couldn't have been more wrong.

Eventually my boredom with what I was working on and my more or less self-generated fantasies about Louise pushed me to the point that I made up an excuse to talk to her.

I approached her work station and, speaking in my best library whisper, said "Excuse me. I'm working on a paper for Professor Smithson's class on Dickens."

"Yes?" she whispered, looking at me over the top of her reading glasses, her grey eyes focused intently on me to the exclusion of all else.

"Well, I was wondering if you could give me a suggestion for some materials describing 19^th century London. See, the theory I'm trying to pursue is that understanding Dickens' work requires the reader to understand the culture he lived in as he was writing."

Louise pulled her glasses from the end of her nose where they normally resided when she was talking to students. She looked at me long and hard, while chewing on an ear piece of her glasses that dangled from a hand. I've always wondered what was going through her mind. Most likely just debating why she shouldn't tell me how sophomoric my idea was, but ultimately, she leaned forward on her elbows and asked, "Who's your professor again?"

"Smithson," I repeated.

"Hmm," she said, obviously continuing to think.

I waited in silence.

Apparently reaching a decision about me, she drew herself upright, pushing her chest out a bit (yes, she did have a bosom under that white blouse after all) and said, "No that won't do, won't do at all."

"No?" I questioned her.

"It's a thesis Smithson's heard a thousand time before, and critics have hacked it to death. The best you will get, matter how good a job you do, will be a B."

A B sounded fine to me, I thought. My standards for success weren't very high. But I didn't think she would be very impressed with that attitude, so I said, "Oh, I see."

"I have an idea though that might be a more productive approach for you, if you're interested."

"Okay."

"My shift ends in half an hour. Meet me downstairs in the cafeteria. And your name?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I'm Andrew. I forgot I'm not wearing a name tag like you are."

She smiled, amused at my clumsiness. It was the first time I had seen her smile. Her teeth were even and white, and the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkled a bit. It was a smile that lit up the room—or at least it did for me.

Half an hour later I was sitting across a table from Louise sipping a coffee, as was she. She had released her hair from the ponytail and it hung down her shoulders and back. I also noticed that a couple of the buttons on the white blouse had been released. The skin of her throat and the small part of her chest that was exposed was a delicious creamy white.

"So you're an English major, are you?" she asked.

I smiled. "Not exactly. I'm actually a CS major. English is my minor."

"Oh." She thought for a moment. " Odd combination. The general view is that computer science majors can't read, and English majors can't count. If you can't do either one, how did you get in here and survive to your senior year?"

"I can do both, quite easily and comfortably," I responded. "Maybe the general rule is incorrect." She was so confident, I felt a need to challenge her—just a bit.

"Hmm. Interesting. Anyhow, here's the point I didn't have time to explain upstairs. What you are trying to do is what every senior English major has done since books were invented. Of course authors and their writing are a product of their environment, their culture if you will. It's so obvious that it merits a grade of 'Duh' which is somewhere well below the A,B,C,D,F scale. But somehow the University has to push its undergraduates through, so that thesis is written up again and again, and as long as it's not too inept, we push the student on through with the University's seal of approval."

"I see," I said, feeling more than a bit intellectually deflated.

"I have another idea that you might want to pursue. I have to be honest though. I'm not sure whether it will really turn into a paper you can turn into Smithson or not. He's an odd duck. It'll be fascinating to research, but a paper—maybe, maybe not. Right now I have to go. Meanwhile go back upstairs and check out this book." She wrote briefly on a slip of paper and handed it to me. "It will give you everything you need to write your paper for Smithson. You'll only get a B, but hopefully that's good enough. Let me take a look at what you write when we get together again. I'll help you fix anything you screw up. Meet me at the main checkout desk on this level at 5:30, day after tomorrow and I'll explain about our new project. Now go get the paper written. I have to go."

With that she was gone and I was sitting staring at the name and author of a book on 19^th Century England. I liked the idea of this woman taking a look at my paper. She was a little wound up, but she seemed to know what she was talking about. I had no idea what I was getting into with her alternative idea, so I decided I better knock out a quick B-grade paper on Dickens' London and have that ready to turn in if her other idea didn't work out. But that meant I was going to have to get to work right away to get it done.

By the time of our appointed meeting I had a pretty good draft of my paper done, and I was waiting for Louise at the main checkout desk. She walked up, and I handed her a folder with a 12 page paper in it.

"Wow! You're quick." Again with the high voltage smile. "Let's go upstairs into the stacks. I'll show you the alternative project you can pursue if you find it interesting. While you take a look at some of the materials, I'll review this and mark it up for you."

We took an elevator up a couple of floors and walked to a back corner of the building where there was an unmarked door guarded by a card key system. She had the necessary card key and took me through the door into a restricted set of stacks filled with books accessible only to the faculty. We climbed through a couple of additional floors. The stairs and the floors were made of metal grid—the kind you can see straight through when you look down, or up or that matter. At one point Louise got a little ahead of me and I realized I could see through the floor grate and up her skirt. The light was dim, but I saw enough to confirm that she had a pair of very lean, sexy thighs to match her shapely calves.

She looked back at me and said, "Keep up. I don't want to lose you up here. You'll never find your way out."

I hurried and caught up with her. She was standing and waiting for me with an odd look on her face, sort of a wry smile. I was worried that she had seen me looking up her skirt. "Sorry," I said in my best library whisper.

"No need to whisper here," she said. "These are restricted stacks. There's never anyone up here." She turned and strode away, saying, "This way." The metal grated floor made a clanking noise as we walked across it.

She was right. I never would have found my way out of the labyrinth she led me through without her as a guide. As we walked she reached behind herself and released her pony tail. She shook her head and her long hair fell down her back.

Eventually we came to a back corner where there were a pair of carrells side by side across an aisle. The floor around the carrells was concrete rather than the metal grid used elsewhere in these ancient stacks. Louise flicked on the lights in the area, dropped my paper on the desk in one carrell, and told me to sit in the other while she got me some materials I would want to look at. She was back shortly with a stack of books, which she deposited in my carrell. They were obviously 19^th century or older from the condition of the leather binding. There were no titles, just quality leather binding, weathered with age.

"Do you know what these are?" she asked as she took a seat on the desk of my carrel, her legs, split by the corner of the desk top but still demurely covered above her knees by her plaid skirt. She pushed the skirt down between her thighs. I could see their long, slim shape but no more. Her feet were swinging just short of the floor. I was beginning to doubt my spinster librarian theory.

She didn't wait for me respond. "These are the part of Dickens' culture that doesn't get written about by Dickens or anyone else."

"Unpublished volumes of his writings?" I asked.

"No . . . or at least we don't think so." A trace of a smile drifted across her face. She opened one of the books to its cover page. "They have several elements in common. They are all very finely bound. Books like these weren't offered for sale to the masses. These were custom bound for some rich gentleman's very private library."

"Or a gentlewoman?" I asked.

"Possibly, but not likely in 19^th century England. She would have to be very rich and have a man fronting for her to get her hands on these books."

"You'll also note," she continued, "that none of them have a publisher credit or an author credit. The most they may say is 'Anonymous' although many of them give no credit at all, as though the ink had just sprung onto the page by itself." She opened a book and pushed it towards me, leaning forward, . . . and, in the bargain, giving me a view down the front of her white blouse showing me her breasts rising above her bra cups.

"Here Andrew, here," she said tapping the book's cover page. She could see the distraction the view down the front of her blouse created, no doubt having intended it, and while she reprimanded me, she maintained her posture, more or less daring me to look again.

"The other thing you will find is that all of these books are pornographic. These books appear to have come from some gentleman's private collection of 19^th century erotica. When you compare the writing in these to the writing in the porn that was widely available on the streets of London you will see this is much better. We think these books were commissioned from some quality 19^th century writer by a rich man. They are one-offs. Each one is unique and no other copies have ever been located."

"So now I am going to go sit in that carrell and read your paper, and I want you to sit here and read these books. Then we can talk about your project. She was still leaning forward and another button had been released, so I could see even more of her breasts, if I dared to take a brief additional look. She caught me looking again, but did no more about it than give me a sly look through her cat like, grey eyes. She would have been disappointed, after releasing another button, if I hadn't looked, and she didn't mind me knowing that. I was beginning to think that this woman might want more from me than just help with a pet research project.

I began to read, and it was indeed, kinky stuff. Not just plain vanilla sex, but also all manner of sodomy, masochism, dominance and submission, exhibitionism and voyeurism, and other sordid perversions. The participants seemed inordinately fond of handcuffs, whips, gags, dildos, oral sex, and buggering. I had previously read some classic, widely distributed 19^th Century erotica (The Pearl, The Romance of Lust, and a couple of others) and Louise was right. The writing in these books was much better.

In fact the writing was good enough to have been Dickens. I paused for a moment and let the idea run through my head. Perhaps Dickens, before he reached commercial success, had to write porn to keep the rent paid? Who knew and how could you prove it. The other thought that crossed my mind was who was the "we" that Louise was referring to. Was she working for a professor on this project?

I couldn't answer either of these questions so I settled down and began to read the porn in earnest. I have always liked porn, especially the rare bits you find that are well written. I got seriously into a story about a young man being seduced by his lecherous aunt. The author spent a whole page describing her generous bosom in excruciating detail, but it was done from the young man's perspective, interspersed with graphic descriptions of how hard his cock got as he enjoyed his aunt's' "titty play" as he called it.

I was so engrossed in the lurid material I was reading I forgot about Louise until I heard her slap down my paper and say, "Not bad. Smithson will give you a B. I've marked a few places that you could work on and maybe get it to a B+. I'll be back in a minute or two." With that she stood and disappeared into the stacks.

I hope she comes back I thought. I'm not sure I can find my way out of here. Then I returned to my reading. The young man's aunt had just titty fucked him until he squirted cum all over her face and tits. It made me think of doing that with Mrs. E. I felt my cock stirring as I thought about my summer with Mrs. E.

I had just started a new chapter in which the aunt was going to teach the young man how to eat her pussy. After the prior chapter, I'd found it necessary to adjust the shorts I was wearing to make room for my swelling cock. That was when Louise reappeared. Had she seen me adjusting my shorts? I was worried. Given the way she chastised the couples in the reading room, I expected she had very little tolerance for oversexed undergraduates.

She said nothing to me as she took her seat in the carrell across the aisle from me. She had brought a book back with her and was sitting primly in her seat, her back erect, her knees pressed together, and the book opened flat on the desk top before her—every bit the prim and proper librarian.

I continued to read the chapter in which the young man is trained in the art of cunnilingus by his aunt, but I couldn't help but be distracted by Louise's occasional movements across from me. For the first ten minutes she did little but periodically turn a page—not too quickly. She was obviously reading the book slowly. She wasn't taking notes so the conclusion my lecherous mind reached was that it was also porn and she was savoring it. I liked that idea. It fit with my notion that there was an interesting woman concealed beneath her spinsterish garb and that she wanted more from me than just help in a research project.