Equal Opportunities

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Mathilde Madden

  Title Page

  Author’s Note

  Part One: February

  Part Two: March

  Part Three: April

  Copyright

  About the Book

  David struggles as I fix his wrists. ‘Is all that really necessary?’ he says, with a little laugh somewhere in his voice.

  I look at what I’m doing. I’m wrapping extra lengths of chain around his wrists and the bedframe. It looks lovely, but maybe it is slight over-kill. I shrug and pull it all a little tighter, forcing both his wrists up higher.

  He gasps as his body stretches a little more. ‘Well, if you like, but you really don’t need to tie me down so much – I’m not going to run away you know.’

  Left unable to walk after a car accident, David thinks his love-life is over. But then he meets kinky Mary, who finds the idea of a boy in a wheelchair too sexy for words.

  But is their affair just based on satisfying Mary’s curious interests, or the result of something deeper? As David’s scars begin to heal, and a rival for his affections appears, both of them are having to face questions about what their attraction to one another really means, and if their connection can survive.

  About the Author

  Mathilde Madden is a talented young author of erotic romance who specialised in writing stories about contemporary urban culture.

  She is the author of Equal Opportunities, Lust Bites, Mad About The Boy, Peep Show, Possession, The Silver Cage, The Silver Collar and The Silver Crown. All titles are available from Black Lace.

  She lives in Brighton.

  Also by Mathilde Madden:

  Peep Show

  Mad About the Boy

  Lust Bites

  Possession

  The Silver Cage

  The Silver Collar

  The Silver Crown

  Equal Opportunities

  Mathilde Madden

  BLACK LACE

  Author’s Note

  David suffered a T11/T12 spinal crush rather than a complete break. The nerves are difficult to read, meaning the possibility of his recovery is always in doubt.

  This book would not have been possible without the wonderful assistance of Mik Scarlet and his wife Diane, who let me ask them lots of personal questions about their sex life. Although I should also point out that any errors are of course mine.

  I would also like to thank Pluto, Hazel and Seri, who might not even remember but were the first people to tell me that the idea for this book was not completely crazy.

  Part One: February

  Mary

  I don’t normally do this sort of thing, let alone in a place like this.

  But he’s just so pretty. Too pretty to resist. And I’ve been trailing him too long to turn back now. I’ve been acting like some sort of lapdog in the dusty silence, all the way from ‘large print’ to ‘historical romance’ and back again. I just can’t stop staring.

  There’s a lot to stare at. He’s such a symphony of delights, from his slender, but still just-buff-enough, body – biceps and pecs both defined through his white T-shirt – to his hair that is wildly curly and a little bit too long, a little bit out of control, dark glossy corkscrews that almost explode out of the top of his head, looking just as untamable as he does himself. His eyes are dark – brown, I think – but eye colour isn’t so important in the bigger picture of this particular – and particularly perfect – face. His eyes are just supporting players here, crowded out by his loose, over-sized, melting-candy mouth. Oh god, that mouth! It’s a mouth I could easily kiss all day, just to see if it got any more deliciously pink and pouty.

  Maybe this won’t make sense to anyone but me, but there’s another edge to this whole sexy-boy package that really does it for me. I love the way there’s something kind of retro about him. Something a bit man-out-of-time, something sort of 70s-throw-back. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly – and maybe it’s mostly just down to the hair – but he’s got shades of Tucker in Tucker’s Luck, by way of Adam Ant and David Essex, or one of the teenage sons in Butterflies, and even, obliquely, a young Mick Jagger. Basically, he’s everyone I ever fancied when I was aged, like, about eight.

  He also looks rather uncannily like this guy I work with, who I have a kind of pathetic crush on. Proof, if proof were needed, that he has practically bottled My Type.

  So, to sum up what I’m hunting down here: imagine a guy who looks rather like a 70s heart-throb, with slightly too-big messy lips and unfashionably curly hair. In fact, if you can, imagine a boy with that look, a look that is so far from contemporariness and sexiness that it’s actually the last word in both.

  Then put him in a wheelchair.

  Because even though the way he looks is rapture-inducing-perfection that demands that I flout the standard library anti-stalking rules, the way he looks is only the start. Only the tip of the iceberg of reasons why I’m not thinking or breathing right now.

  If I saw this guy walking down the street I’d probably look – look and lust, even – but this, this is far, far more than that. Because, well, how can I put this? I have a thing. A bad thing. A perverted thing. A heart-stopping, lust-inducing, bad, secret, kinky thing.

  A thing for boys who can’t walk.

  And, no, I have no idea why. Of course, I’ve tried to work it out. Of course, I’ve got nowhere.

  Is it just the helplessness? Is it the bravery – the heroic, injured-war-hero thing? Is it a macho, cyborgy, man-and-machine-in-perfect-harmony, hard-body hard-steel sort of thing? Is it just a sadomasochistic thing? I expect it is all of those. But it’s also just a pure, hardwired, born-kinky sort of thing.

  But I guess it’s always this way with things like this, isn’t it? I mean, your body doesn’t do ‘why?’ does it? Your blood doesn’t explain why it pumps the way it does. Your heart doesn’t tell you why it beats faster. Your tissue, your bones, they’re not going to scribble you a quick enlightening Post-It about why certain strange things equal certain strange feelings. Your body doesn’t explain the backstory of why some thing turns your head a particular way. Because during those moments your body is far too busy doing something else. Working in a different, more urgent, more real way.

  I guess what I really think is that – for me – if you can explain exactly why something turns you on, pinpoint some life- and lust-changing event that skewed your sexuality one way or another (like some foot fetishist who was once made to shine shoes as a child by a domineering stepmother), then it really can’t turn you on all that much, not if you can analyse it in a clear-headed way like that. It can’t be getting to you in a proper, deep, right-there-in-the-bone-marrow kind of a way.

  Well, that’s my theory.

  So don’t expect too much in the way of cold hard reductionism about exactly why I like boys in wheelchairs. I just do. Like some people like firefighters and some (rather more dubious people) like choirboys.

  And that’s the thing about me, that’s my dirty secret. It doesn’t mean I spend all my time hunting down disabled men to fulfil my twisted desires. Far from it. I try not to encounter disabled men as far as I possibly can. And when I do stumble upon one, like this, I don’t normally pursue them. It’s too much. Too confusing. Too questionable. I know very well that disabled people, in general, are not very keen on people like me.

  So what’s different now? Why am I stalking this guy like a woman possessed? I don’t know the answer to that one – hence my current introspection overload. I guess it’s just that I’ve never seen anything quite like him before. Quite as perfect. Quite as button-pressing. And this time I just don’t think
I am strong enough to resist.

  Oh god. I should speak to him or stop following him around. I have to choose between fight and flight. And there’s really only one choice. I am going to get up the nerve to approach him. (If only to check he is not some kind of library-dust-induced hallucination.)

  And having made that decision I find I’m checking myself out, doing a quick head-to-toe once-over. I really wish I hadn’t borrowed (without asking) my flatmate Carrie’s unbearably homespun, brown shaggy cardigan today, but it’s still so cold and I seem to have made it through the entire winter without owning a proper coat. God, I really am such a student. But noticing my inappropriate clothing isn’t enough to put me off now, and I slip the cardie off and kick it under the trolley of books to be shelved. Sorry, Carrie. I can always go back and get it from lost property. It’s not like anyone is going to steal it.

  Yeti-like cardigan shed, I walk over to my quarry, putting all my acting skills into pretending I haven’t been shadowing him for the last fifteen minutes.

  As I approach, he reaches up for a book on a high shelf, and I sweep in to assist him, driven by anything but altruism.

  David

  First things first: I don’t go to the library. I am not a library person. If I want a book – which is a rare enough occurrence in itself – I get it from Amazon, like a proper person.

  But my mum asked me to return her library books and get her some new ones while I was in town. And so I’m just having a vague look round at the same time. I’d feel sort of ungrateful if I didn’t. They are so falling over themselves to make the place wheelchair accessible, with ramps and automatic doors all over the place, so it would practically be a snub if I didn’t take advantage of their Equal-Opps-legislation-following facilities.

  But I’m not going to be writing a glowing letter of praise to the local paper just yet, because about half of the shelves are far too high for me to reach. Oops. No matter how many automatic doors they might boast, it’s not a lot of use if crips like me can’t reach the merchandise. Shame. And they were doing so well, up until that point.

  Typically, one of the books my mum specifically asked me to get is almost out of reach, but I reckon I can probably manage it if I stretch. I twist in my chair and extend my arm to its limit, managing to get a fumbling grip on the spine, and pull.

  And at that moment this woman, who has just popped up out of nowhere, leans over and whisks the book out from my tentative grip. No doubt in an attempt to help me out. Which annoys me – if I need help I will ask for it.

  ‘I can manage,’ I growl at her, all ungrateful teeth.

  But she ignores my complaint and smiles, deliberately keeping the book she has retrieved for me just out of my reach.

  She turns the fat volume over in her hands in an irritatingly smug manner. ‘Ooh, Jackie Collins,’ she notes in a stage whisper, and I can’t tell if she is talking to me or to herself.

  She’s standing very close to me – too close, it’s a bit overwhelming. But I like the dress she’s wearing, tightfitting white cotton with a print of red cherries and matching red buttons from top to bottom. In fact, with her neat button-down frock, heavy framed specs and clumpy shoes, she has a sort of sexy librarian look about her. I’m pretty sure she isn’t really a member of staff, though. The look is just too much to be real. She’s like a parody of a librarian. Too prim-looking, too schoolma’am, to be meaning the look seriously.

  I realise then that, despite my interest in her clothes, I’m mostly staring up at her lips. It might be a trick of the light, but they seem to be exactly the same shade of red as the cherries on her dress. They make me think of other kinds of lips.

  But I can’t just stare at her all day; she’s still looking at the book she’s holding, waiting for me to react to her comment about the type of reading I was so eager to get my hands on. Bitch. ‘It’s for my mum, OK?’ I keep my voice deliberately low, suddenly feeling strangely exposed and guiltily conscious of the desk staff.

  Cherry girl seems far less bound by convention. ‘Well, of course it is,’ she says, levelly. ‘A beautiful man like you wouldn’t need to read about it.’ And then her tongue flicks over her lips turning the matt to gloss. And I have to inhale sharply thorough my nose to keep control of myself.

  Then the conversation takes on a slightly surreal, slightly dreamlike quality. She bends down slowly, so her eyeline is level with mine, and I can see straight down the top of her cherry-covered dress. Her voice drops even lower. ‘You’d be surprised, though, just how dirty these books can be,’ she informs me with flashing eyes. ‘I think it’s quite amazing that you can find the filthiest things right here in the public library.’

  I feel my face start to redden and she suddenly drops the book briskly into my lap and walks away without another word.

  I sit there for several moments, my heart beating fast and my mouth dry, but I don’t move. For a while I don’t even register what has just happened.

  Two years ago – before my accident – I wouldn’t even have questioned such a blatant come-on. I would have known for sure that she wanted me after an exchange like that. I probably wouldn’t have followed it up, though, but for a completely different reason. I would have frowned on her clunky shoes and specs and almost certainly decided that she was not good enough for me to bother pursuing. Didn’t I once tell my mate Larry that life was too short to bother chatting up brunettes?

  But now, when I stay put as she walks away and I don’t even consider following up her offer, it’s because things are different these days. I don’t go after her because I’m in a wheelchair, and girls like her don’t come on to pathetic cripples like me.

  So it couldn’t have been a come-on, no matter how it seemed. I must have been mistaken. No doubt she just feels sorry for me and thought she’d talk to me for a few moments. Brighten up the day of the poor boy whose legs don’t work any more.

  So I just get on with it. I push the girl out of my mind, find the rest of the books on my mum’s extensive list and check them out. Then I exit through the automatic doors and wheel my way down to pavement level on a shiny ramp, a new addition to this ancient building.

  But it’s not over yet, because as I zig and zag downwards – the library is set a little way up and back from the street – I see her again. Cherry girl. She’s sitting on the low wall at the bottom of the steps, eating an incongruous ice cream. A 99. God knows why, she must be freezing. It’s really cold today, and she doesn’t even have a coat on, in February. I can practically see the goose pimples on her bare arms from here.

  She doesn’t seem to have noticed me though and I wasn’t planning on speaking to her, but as I roll past her she says, ‘Hey.’ So, not wanting to be rude, I stop right in front of her.

  ‘Oh, hi,’ I say, pretending to be cool. Pretending that her weird behaviour in the library hasn’t shaken me one bit. I try not to find her sexy, which shouldn’t be too hard. I try to concentrate on her plain brown hair, her heavy spectacles and her strange, slightly studenty, slightly geeky mode of dressing. I insist, quite firmly, to myself that this type of girl, this type of quirky, dowdy, hard-worky type of girl – woman, even – really isn’t my type, which is weird, because I don’t think of myself as having a type any more.

  ‘Come to the park with me,’ she says and winks – actually winks – and jerks her head towards the iron gates over the road.

  ‘I can’t,’ I mutter, ‘I’m in a hurry.’ I gesture at the books in my lap and then wish I hadn’t, as they are all embarrassing mum-friendly titles and I cringe inwardly that I have just implied that I can’t wait to get home and read them.

  She raises her eyebrows at me, then stretches her leg out and sticks the chunky high heel of her so-not-my-type-of-girl brown shoe into the spokes of my wheel. ‘Go on,’ she says, pulling the ice-cream-smeared chocolate bar slowly out of her 99. ‘I’ll let you have my Flake.’

  I don’t reply. I look down at the chunky heel jammed in my spokes, trapping me. What can I do?
Well, tell her to fuck off, I suppose, but somehow my mouth is not doing that. My mouth is too busy hanging half open.

  I look at her cherry-print dress and her cherry-red lips. I meet her eyes and something in her expression seems to break through my million and one reasons why I shouldn’t do this and become the one reason why I should. The not-my-type rationale I had been clinging to seems to be twisting out of my reach, away like the leaves blowing up and down the road.

  It really is far too cold for ice cream.

  I nod my head.

  As she leans forward and slides the chocolate bar into my mouth, I feel as if I’m falling under a spell. Somehow I have no choice but to obey when she whispers hoarsely, ‘Don’t bite it now.’

  Part of me wants to close my eyes, but I don’t. I watch her expression as she inches almost the entire Flake into my mouth, a fraction at a time, and then slowly begins to pull it out again. Then in it goes again, then out, gradually picking up speed. My breathing quickens. It’s unbelievable really, I haven’t had so much as a chaste kiss from a girl in months and now, suddenly, I’m fellating a chocolate bar for this one, outside the public library.

  I can’t remember the last time I was this turned on. I didn’t know I could still get this turned on.

  All the time we stare at each other. Stare and stare. And I find I’m trying to will her on with my gaze, begging for more – wanting nothing in the world except to let her fuck my mouth for ever with her makeshift chocolate phallus.

  But then the wind seems to change direction. She sighs and shifts. I hear her heel click against my spokes and the sound somehow breaks the spell. I remember in a rush why things like this don’t happen to me any more. I remember that I’m sitting outside a library in a wheelchair. I remember what is wrong with this picture. I bite down through the Flake and pull my head away.