Private Research: An Erotic Novella Read Free

use this encounter as another line drawn in the sand. Satisfy that long-held curiosity and desire. Sleep with him even. Hair of the dog, in a way.
    I met him outside the front doors of the archives. He was standing there, legs slightly parted, staring out into the distance, one hand in his pocket and the other holding a folded stack of papers, the results of whatever genealogical research he had done in the afternoon. His stance was so American, but maybe that was the eleven years he had spent in the States.
    He looked as good in his jacket and slacks from the back as he had from the front. Only, from this vantage point I could admire his slim-hipped elegance, the tension of his body hinting at strength. Six-foot-one, if I recalled correctly. Not so tall, really, but he gave the impression of being taller than he was.
    “So . . .” I said when I stood beside him, interrupting whatever thoughts had consumed him. He looked down at me and I was lost for a moment in pale blue eyes that made him so real and so known to me. Despite two years. Despite the past. Or maybe because of the past.
    A pleasurable shiver rushed through my body, settled hot and full between my legs, and I shifted where I stood.
    “Early for food,” he said. “A drink?”
    A drink was exactly what I needed.
    I nodded and followed him to his car. It was a pleasure to be able to stash my bag in the trunk, or rather the boot as he called it and relax into a relatively comfortable seat. As convenient as the underground system was, I’d grown up with wide, open spaces and had an instinctive aversion to small, crowded ones.
    We didn’t drive very far, and in those few minutes there was only idle chitchat: Sebastian asking when I’d arrived and if I’d just been working since, me answering and staring out the window at the landscape, taking in the view I’d missed on the way out to Kew. Then we fell into silence.
    The plan that I had formulated at the archives ricocheted in my head. I’d decided that, since he was the one who had prompted my ill-advised phase of sleeping around and clearly it was fate that had thrown us together once again, I should have sex with him. English major that I had been, I still saw the world in terms of themes and circles, subplots and motifs. Yet, I hardly knew him and had absolutely nothing to say to him. But if there was anything I’d learned in the past two years, it was that casual sex didn’t need a mental connection.
    What it needed was lubrication of the alcoholic kind.
    We ended up at a pub maybe ten minutes from the archives. Sebastian said it was fairly traditional, and at just after five, it was still quiet.
    We sat inside at a corner table. Ordered our drinks.
    “It’s hard to believe . . . two years,” he started, and it was, almost exactly. The last time I’d seen him had been at the very end of the semester, out on the bright green lawn. We hadn’t talked. When he’d seemed like he was going to approach me, I’d averted my eyes and headed off in the other direction. Maybe if I’d known he was leaving only a few days later, I would have waited, braved the awkward conversation.
    “Longer than we even knew each other,” I added with a laugh. Diminishing those conversations and the four months of growing friendship.
    “And here we are now.”
    As far as conversations went, it was hardly scintillating. Instead, it was awkward talking around the subject. I was on edge, wanting to say something, thinking it better that I didn’t. Or thinking that maybe this conversation would be easier after we’d had that drink.
    Did I really want to talk about it?
    Not really. What I wanted to do was breach this strange wall between us, take things physical even though it was still light outside, still afternoon more than evening.
    The waitress brought us our drinks and I reached for mine gratefully. Sebastian ordered another round for us both.
    “So tell me about your research,” he said suddenly, as if we