Behind the Toy Store

It was well before daylight on an early January morning as the motorcyclist sped through the darkened streets of the university town on the Central California coast. The streets were wet from the night's heavy rain. She had been riding for about half an hour down from her house, high in the hills above the town, with no regard for speed limits, loving the rush of the wind and the vibration of the powerful bike between her legs. Not as good as a man between my legs, she thought, but . . . almost.

She slowed as she entered the downtown area and soon turned into a dark alley, pulling the growling bike into a parking slot behind one of the old buildings backing up on the alley. A light faintly illuminated a metal door with a small sign that read Thackeray & Co., Used and Rare Books. She shut the bike down, swung her long leather-clad leg out to dismount and then stripped off her backpack and helmet, setting it on the seat of the bike while she pushed her long raven hair out of her face. Tucking the helmet under an arm and grabbing the backpack, she strode quickly to the rear door of the bookstore. An observer, had there been one at this hour, would have been struck by two things—how purposeful her strides were towards the metal door, and how well her lithe body filled out the form-fitting motorcycle leathers she was wearing. Her legs were long and trim, her hips round but obviously not carrying any excess weight, and her upper body similarly trim. There was a hint of an ample bust, but under a leather motorcycling suit, well, who can really tell for sure.

She punched an access code on the keypad next to the door and heard the lock click as it released. Pushing the heavy door inwards, she reached around the doorjamb to flip on the lights and then stepped into the room. She turned quickly to her left to enter the letters L I N D Y on the alarm keypad to disarm the system, thinking as she did so that using her name for the security code was not particularly secure, but had the redeeming virtue of being something she could remember.

With the lights on and the alarm system secured, Lindy turned to survey her workroom. The floor was aged, composed of worn wood planks with no sign of any finish that might have once covered them. The walls were a dull beige and sadly in need of paint. About half the room was filled with steel bookshelves and much of the remainder with boxes of recently received books awaiting her inspection and disposition, either on the shelves, in her remote warehouse on the outskirts of town, or in the dumpster in the alleyway.

In a corner at the far side of the room there was a small desk with a phone and a few papers neatly stacked on it. A computer screen sat on a table adjoining the desk with a docking station for her laptop. A four-drawer filing cabinet sat against the wall to the right of the desk, leaving just room enough to slide into the chair behind the desk. An old wooden desk chair, like that a newspaper editor in a 1930's movie would have used, was pushed against the desk, waiting for its owner to pull it back and go to work, either on the desk or by rotating to the right, to access the computer screen. It made a lovely squeak when she leaned back in it.

Next to the filing cabinet was an old but still functional oak armoire and beyond that a full length mirror. The armoire stored her work clothes. Motorcycle leathers wouldn't do for the portion of her day spent with the public in the bookstore that fronted on the street, and the skimpy underwear she had on beneath the leathers was even less suitable. Opposite the office equipment was the door to a tiny restroom and, alongside the door, a small table where equipment to brew coffee and tea resided along with an assortment of mismatched and generally charmless coffee mugs.

Lindy strode to the armoire, parked her helmet and gloves atop it, and then stepped to the table adjoining her small desk. She set the backpack on the desk, removed her laptop, plugged it into the docking station, and bent over it long enough to type in another anemic access code to initiate the start-up sequence for the machine.

Then she pulled a small bag of freshly ground coffee from the backpack, stashed the backpack beneath the desk, and walked across the workroom to the coffee station, her motorcycle boots thumping on the floor planks. Water came from the sink in the restroom. She preferred the brew of the coffee house in the next block, but they wouldn't be open for another hour, and she needed her caffeine fix now. Good coffee could wait until her assistant, Cynthia, arrived at 8:30, when the bookstore opened. Part of Cynthia's job description was to bring them each a cup from the coffee house, at Lindy's expense, of course. She maintained an account there and paid for their morning coffee on a monthly basis.

Once the coffee was brewing, she strode back to the office area, passing on her way a lengthy worktable with one side abutting the wall opposite the door through which she had entered. There were boxes of books stacked on the worktable and on the floor throughout the room. "Wow, that last estate sale purchase got me a lot of books to sort through," she said, thinking aloud. "That cost some serious money. I hope there is something good in this pile of books. I hope there are some orders coming in, too," she continued, her mind wandering a bit.

An additional computer sat on the worktable that was used for cataloging the purchased books as they were initially reviewed. It was the starting point for her inventory management system. The retail bookstore on the other side of the wall was really not the main portion of her business. The bulk of the business consisted of buying books in bulk from estate sales throughout the country, and then sorting through them to find items valuable enough to resell either in the bookstore or, most of the time, through her website.

The only reason she still had the storefront operation was that she had inherited it from her uncle and felt an attachment to it. It didn't really make much money, given the competition from e-books, but she tried to focus on old, out-of-print titles that weren't available from Amazon and its ilk. It was a strategy that would have failed miserably in a modern shopping mall, but it sort of worked in a university town where there were still people who wanted hard copy books and were interested in old, out-of-print titles. It at least covered the salary of her assistant, and she didn't have any rent expense, since she owned the building and the rest of the block,.

The leathers were beginning to get warm, so she stood in front of the mirror and began to undress. First the heavy motorcycle boots, which she parked neatly alongside the armoire. Next she unzipped the heavy jacket and shucked it off, hanging it on a hook mounted on the side of the armoire. Finally, she stripped off the leather pants, which was always a bit of a chore, as they really were form fitting. She folded them neatly and set them atop the armoire. This left her standing naked except for her bra and a pair of thong panties. The bra was a half cup that supported, but didn't really cover her medium-sized breasts, and the thong of course, covered hardly anything at all. She wasn't naked, but it was close.

She stood before the mirror for several moments looking at the nearly nude image it reflected. Then she cupped her breasts with her hands and began to massage them, pushing the bra cups aside. Umm, that feels good, she thought as she watched herself play with her tits, and it's so sexy to watch myself do this in the mirror.

Then she dropped one hand down to cup her sex as she continued to rub one tit with the other. She could feel warmth coming from her aroused pussy. Lindy pushed the thong aside and began to slide her fingers up and down her slit, tantalizing the opening at the bottom without entering and just grazing her rapidly swelling clit.

Then she stopped herself, thinking, no, I'd better wait. I have work to do this morning, and I need to focus. She reluctantly pulled the bra cups back where they belonged and adjusted her thong

Without bothering to get her work clothes from the wardrobe, she pulled out her office chair and swiveled to the right, facing the computer. It squeaked loudly as she leaned back and used her outstretched arms to open Outlook. Lindy glanced quickly at her calendar for the day, and then turned to her e-mail, which she rapidly scanned without reading in detail. Good, looks like several orders, she concluded, along with the usual quota of junk, friend-me requests, etc. She noticed an e-mail from a name she dimly remembered, but couldn't quite place. "Who is that guy?" she asked herself.

By now the coffee was ready, so she rose from the computer and padded in her bare feet across the room to the pot, enjoying the feel of the old worn planks beneath her feet. The air was pleasantly cool on her bare skin. She filled a mug and took a careful sip, trying to avoid burning her tongue.

Lindy wrapped the mug in her hands and walked slowly to the door alongside the worktable, which led to the front of her little bookstore. As she took a second less-cautious sip, she opened the door and walked down the three steps leading into the storefront. It was considerably darker than the fluorescent-lit back room, with only the fugitive street lighting that leaked in through the big windows in the front of the store.

The darkness was fine with her, since she was still mostly naked. She just liked to wander through the little bookstore she had inherited before it opened each morning. Truth be told, she was a person who still liked her books, that is the books she bought for her own reading and pleasure, in hard copy. She walked to the counter at the front of the store, continuing to sip her coffee, but what she was really enjoying was the musty smell of the old books that filled the shelves. One of her favorite things about books, beyond their content, was the feel and the smell of the paper and the binding materials. If it ever occurred to Amazon to add old-book odor to the Kindle, her business would be done for.

She leaned over the counter at the front of the bookstore sipping on her coffee, savoring the aroma of the books for several minutes. As she leaned forward, her tits spilled out of her bra. It didn't bother her that she was nearly naked. In fact, the possibility that there might be someone passing on the street who could see her if they looked carefully was giving her a bit of a thrill. She spent much of her time in and around her home up in the hills wandering about naked, so standing at the counter of a darkened bookstore in a thong and non-functional bra was hardly a change for her. Nudity was a part of her lifestyle.

She took another sip of the coffee and reflected for a moment about how she came to be where she was at this moment. She had worked in the bookstore for her uncle since she was a teenager. It was a part-time job for her while she was in high school and throughout her years at undergraduate school and the two years of graduate school it took for her to get her Masters in English. She felt she had learned as much about books and authors from her uncle and the job in the bookstore as she had in her six years of college and grad school. Her relationship with her uncle had been far closer than that with her parents, who had moved to Florida shortly after she started college.

After finishing her Masters, she moved out of state for a job teaching high school English, which, it turned out, she really hated. Studying the great literature of the English language was one thing, and trying to get hormone-riddled teenagers to read it and appreciate it was an entirely different matter. The unfortunate death of her uncle in a car accident saved her from an occupation she hated. He had been a life-long bachelor and had bequeathed his entire estate to her.

Even before her uncle's estate was settled, Lindy quit her job and hurried back to her hometown as fast as her motorcycle could carry her. Returning to the little bookstore was like salvation after two years of purgatory in her job at the high school. She was devastated by her uncle's death. It took time to get over, but returning to the rituals of working in the bookstore provided comfort.

Initially she expected that her inheritance would be limited to a money-losing bookstore in a small university town, but it turned out that she not only inherited the bookstore, but also the rest of the block (profitably rented to a variety of tenants), her uncle's lovely old house in the hills behind town with a couple of hundred acres of vineyards adjoining the house, and enough liquid securities to insure that she would never again have to try to teach sex-obsessed teenagers the virtues of Lord Byron's poetry.

The rare books trade carried out from the back room was something she had developed on her own, and it had grown dramatically to the point where she had rented a warehouse on the outskirts of town to store books pending sale and shipment. The stuff downtown was mainly recent acquisitions that needed evaluation, plus, she thought with a smile, a collection of erotica that she culled from each collection purchased.

It was amazing how many people with big libraries had an erotica collection included in some discreet portion of their library. She chuckled as she thought about it. Many of those she didn't sell. There were now a couple of thousand volumes stored on bookshelves in a storage room behind the space she leased to the toy store next door.

Her tastes in erotica retained for her private collection were eclectic, ranging from cheaply published pulp erotica with lurid covers and even more lurid descriptions within of every sex act imaginable, to leather-bound private collections which were likely one-off privately commissioned pieces and similarly bound books of erotic pictures and drawings.

Sometimes when business was slow, or she was just feeling horny, she would leave the shop to her assistant and go next door to read materials from her growing collection of erotica. She had a couch and a large overstuffed chair in the toy store storage area, which she would sit in to read her book of choice while she masturbated herself to a climax. She kept a cigar box with a couple of vibrators in it tucked away on a bookshelf behind a row of books.

All in all, life was really pretty good right now. She owned a money-making business she loved, a beautiful old house in the hills with a vineyard that cash-flowed nicely, a collection of vintage erotica, and a Ducati racing bike (plus her uncle's old Ford pick-up for occasions when the Ducati wouldn't get the job done). Not married and no steady boyfriend, but that wasn't anything she was desperate for, and there were enough men in her life so that she never felt starved for sex.

Turning away from her thoughts, she noticed a number of things. First she was nearing the bottom of her coffee cup; second, it was beginning to get light outside; third, her watch was telling her that her assistant would be showing up with their coffees shortly; and oh yes, her boobs had spilled out of her minimal bra while she had been leaning over the counter contemplating her good fortune. It was time to get dressed and begin work. She tucked her tits back into the bra cups and walked slowly, nearly naked, back through the bookstore, pausing occasionally to check the shelving of an item here and there and enjoying the feeling of the worn wooden floors on her bare feet and the smell of the old books.

Once in the back room again, she went to the wardrobe, selected suitable clothes for the day and dressed. Her outfit consisted of a dark knee-length skirt and a white blouse, which she buttoned all the way to her throat. For shoes, she wore a pair of ballet flats. She twisted her long dark tresses up in a conservative knot atop her head. Reviewing her handiwork in the mirror, she decided that, all in all, she looked the part of a conservative librarian, which was hardly the case, but appropriate she thought, given her occupation.

At the last minute she pulled up her skirt and yanked the thong panties she was wearing down to her knees, let them drop to her feet, and kicked them into the bottom of the wardrobe. This conservative dress thing could be taken too far, she thought with a smile, and she liked the feeling of the air on her nearly naked, neatly trimmed pussy. It wasn't as good as wandering naked through her vineyard with a glass of wine in hand on a warm evening after her work crews had left, but it had the same flavor to it.

Having dressed for the day, she sat down before her computer and began to seriously address the e-mail she had skimmed half an hour earlier. First, there were several orders for books she had advertised on her website that needed to be filled. She forwarded each of them to the manager of her warehouse with instructions to ship the order. Payment was assured through the PayPal arrangements she used, so all she had to do was to confirm to her intermediary that the order was shipped, and PayPal would release the funds to her account.

She had just finished up that chore when Cynthia came breezing in, their morning coffees in hand.

"Good morning. Here's your coffee, Lindy," she said as she set the coffee on Lindy's desk.

Lindy noticed that Cynthia was wearing the same outfit she had been wearing the day before. Hmm, she thought. Must have had a hot date last night. I can't criticize her though. God knows how often I have shown up here wearing the day before's clothes, often without my underwear, which was somehow lost in the course of the evening. She wanted to ask, but decided not to.

Changing the subject, she looked at her watch, and said, "It's time to open. Can you get the lights on out front and unlock the door?" She successfully resisted the temptation to add, "And, who did you fuck last night?" Knowing Cynthia, the girl would eventually find an excuse to tell her about it anyway.

Lindy took a sip of the coffee, thinking, oh yes, that is so much better than what I brew here, and turned back to her computer. First, she quickly dumped the junk mail. "Got to get a better spam filter," she told herself. Then she waded through some less than obvious spam, including friending requests and the like.

Eventually she came to the e-mail she had noticed earlier. It was a straight up e-mail. It didn't come through her book marketing website, it didn't come through any of the social media sites she was involved with, and it didn't have the kind of suspicious subject line that suggests that someone's address book has been co-opted by a virus. It looked legitimate, but she couldn't remember who the sender was, even though his name sounded familiar.

Then she remembered. He had been a graduate student, teaching a 19^th Century English Literature survey class when she was a sophomore in college. Oh, I did the worst thing to him, she remembered, and it was such fun! She laughed out loud as she recalled that day. Just thinking about it, rekindled the fire in her pussy that she had tried to put aside when watching herself begin to masturbate in the mirror earlier in the morning.

He was tall, with broad shoulders and long blonde hair that hung down to his shoulders and glittering blue eyes. She had thought he was very cute and really had a crush on him, but she couldn't get any response from him when she flirted with him after class. So before class one day she had shaved her pussy and put on the shortest skirt she owned with no panties. The class was taught in a medium-size lecture hall with the seats stacked above the lectern in an amphitheater arrangement. There was a desktop in front of each row of seats, but the desktop had no panel in front of it, so her legs were fully exposed to anyone below her. She took a seat a several levels up, where she thought the lecturer would have a good view of her legs, and more if she let him.