“Have a good day,” I finish before standing to my full height. When I hit my palm against the surface of the circulation desk, she jumps before nodding in response, not saying another word.
Skittish little mouse.
Chapter 2
Evie
I don’t turn my head to watch him exit, but I can’t stop my eyes from following his obscenely tall form as he makes his way to the door of my library before shoving his way through it. My library—I snort. It’s not my library. It’s his family’s library. Nathaniel Black the fourth, heir to the Black throne upon their very own mountain the academy is nestled beside. Because if your family is rich enough to live there, high over the towns surrounding the mountain or in the neighborhoods nearby, then you’re loaded enough to attend the private school his family built over a century ago. That boy… man is going to be the death of me. No really—he’s going to give me a freaking panic attack that leads to my eventual demise.
He’s done nearly everything to taunt me that I could possibly think of aside from actually putting his hands on me. Yet the words he uses along with his tone feel like a caress and a slap at the same time. Since the first day of the school year, my first day as the librarian of Black Mountain Academy, it’s like he’s made it his mission to… not quite bully me, but make me super damn uncomfortable. And what exactly could I do about it? After the first few weeks of it happening, I’d gone to report him to the principal, and he made it very clear that anything written up about a member of the Black family would be brushed under the rug so not to waste my time. I hadn’t even gotten anything but Nathaniel’s name out of my mouth before I was cut off and dismissed.
And as this is my dream job, I figured I could put up with him for a year, seeing as he’s a senior and will no doubt graduate at the end of it. Because that is one good thing about Nathaniel Black IV—he’s brilliant. Top of his class. Star athlete. Everything about him is perfect. Scarily so. Obsessively so. Aside from my degrees to become a librarian and a teacher, I took extra courses in psychology because I found the subject fascinating and even halfway considered becoming a school counselor at some point. It was easy for me to spot the clear signs of OCD in the young man. But having basically been muzzled when it came to this particular student, I kept my observations to myself.
His school uniform is always pristine. I once saw a food fight break out in the cafeteria, and he stormed out after something got on his shirt. He changed into a clean one he obviously kept stowed in his locker for such an occasion. He aligns his textbook, notebook, and three pencils just so at his place, at the same exact seat he sits in every study hour. He wears a pencil behind his ear between classes, as if to always be prepared in case he has to write something down in the hallway. Not to mention he always pushes in all the chairs every day as if he can’t leave the library until it’s back to the way he found it—the way I had it. I thought about testing a theory, leaving chairs out before his study hall group comes in to see what his reaction would be, but I found myself hesitating, as if afraid to catch his look of disappointment in me or something.
Which is utterly ridiculous. He’s an eighteen-year-old high school student. I’m a twenty-two-year-old woman with way more life experience than he’s had. Why should I care if anything I do disappoints him?
I will admit it was quite startling when Reese Trenton mentioned that it’s the quiet ones like me who are the freaks. Quiet, yes, but it’s taken years of therapy to come to terms with the fact that what I am is not freakish. If it weren’t for Dr. Walker, I’d be lost, thinking these feelings and urges inside me made me the freak Trenton spoke about. Thank goodness the bell rang and snapped me out of it before I could correct what I heard. Because speaking about personal and sexual things with my students is obviously a no-no.
I spend the next hour returning books to their shelves and sending out email notices of books being late from students. Today is Friday, and there are no afterhours available to students, so I get to leave earlier—3:30—than every other day at 5:00 p.m. I’ll open again early Monday morning as usual, an hour before school starts.
I love the fact that I get to go home early on Fridays. It gives me a chance to relax and prepare for the night at Club Alias, pretty much my weekly reward for getting through another five days as a functioning adult.
Oh, Club Alias. My happy place, my escape, my oasis. It’s the one place I can go and shed the worries of my daily life and relax. As soon as I walk through that door, it’s like the rest of the world just disappears. I’m no longer scared of my own shadow. All my anxiety fades away as soon as the darkly lit space swallows me up and I inhale the scent of leather and expensive colognes and perfumes. My hesitations disappear when I no longer have to make decisions for myself and allow the Doms to take away the responsibilities that weigh heavily on me. I let them make all the hard choices and just follow their instructions, trusting they’ll make everything good for me. As long as I’m a good submissive, everything always turns out wonderful. I don’t even have to think, just do. And since every single member of Club Alias has been vetted by a team of experts, including my therapist Dr. Walker, who is a co-owner, I trust every member wholeheartedly.
After the hour commute home, I lock my door behind me and hang my purse on the hook on the wall in the little foyer. I’m proud to say at twenty-two I own my own home. It’s a small two-bedroom house in a nice little town I’ve called home my whole life. When my parents passed away a few years ago, they left me a small fortune in life insurance policies. The giant house I lived in growing up held way too many memories and was entirely too large for just me to live in and take care of, so I downsized to this adorable place I’ve slowly made my own. Each room has been a fun project to makeover, with only my yard and the kitchen left to go.
I walk past the first room I ever redid, the formal dining room I converted into my personal library, my dream room. Three of the walls are lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases full of nearly every genre. There’s a writing desk in the center of the room, and an overstuffed chair with a large ottoman in one corner where I spend hours getting lost between pages. A thick rug covers the wood floor that I love to squish between my toes. And there’s a small side table next to the chair that’s only large enough to hold a diffuser and my coffee. Yeah, it probably is weird to fill the room with relaxing lavender-scented steam and then hop myself up on caffeine, but that’s just who I am as a person.
I pass through my living room and past my kitchen, making my way to my bedroom, where I toe off my ballerina flats and nudge them into the closet. I strip out of my blouse and slacks then shimmy out of my panties tossing them into the hamper beside my dresser. I unhook and let my bra fall down my arms, catching it in my hand before putting it in the top drawer where it goes with all the rest. I didn’t sweat today, seeing as it’s air conditioned in the school and a wonderfully mild temperature in the middle of autumn, so no need to wash my bras after every wear and wear them out. Those suckers are expensive. And while I have enough money to live comfortably for years to come if I don’t splurge, thanks to my inheritance, undergarments are not something I want to waste money on.