Fish & Chips

I’ve always enjoyed fish and chips. When I lived in Oxford, there was a great fish bar at the top of my road, and I used to stop by there every month or so to pick up a nice meaty fillet of cod, cased in batter and served with a generous portion of salted, vinegary chips. It wasn’t quite a ritual, but my visits there were regular enough that I never really thought about fish and chips outside of them; I’d be walking down the road after work every now and then, and would veer right instead of left, having decided almost on the spot to head into the chippy and scratch an itch I barely realised I had.

Fast forward to Tuesday last week, when I was browsing the Guardian website and clicked on an article about the best fish and chip restaurants in the UK. I’ve been living in Poland for nearly six months, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I was hit by this intense desire – a craving, really – for the dirtiest, saltiest, greasiest fish supper imaginable. I was at work at the time, with a full afternoon of meetings ahead of me, but that meant nothing: five minutes later I dashed out of the office, jumped on a tram, and went in search of a place I’d found on Google, which might, might still be in business.

The (fairly laboured) point is this: yes, we want what we can’t have, but we also want – obsess over – the things we don’t get to have, or that we haven’t had enough of. I love having sex first thing in the morning, spooning sleepily in the precious minutes before the alarm goes off; I love going down on my partners; I love the feeling of kneeling behind someone, nudging her legs apart, and slowly sliding my cock inside her. However, those aren’t the things I fantasise about when I’m really turned on – when I’m craving sex, rather than just wanting it.

Instead it’s the expat fish and chips on which I tend to fixate. That’s why, when I’m tapping my feet against each other under my desk like I was this morning, or finding every excuse possible to brush my fingers over my crotch like I was in a meeting this afternoon, it’s not oral sex or missionary that’s driving me crazy; no, it’s sex parties, and public nudity, and, today at least, pegging.

For a while, as I read through a report on who-the-fuck-cares, it was all I could think about. The first time it happened. The last time it happened. The next time it might happen. Take the middle one of those.

Scene: we’ve fucked before, but only once, and we’ve kinda, sorta discussed this by email since then; I rock up at her place one weekday afternoon with a harness and dildo that I’ve just bought in Soho – there’s been no real planning, just the blood-rush and head-thumping as I quickly scan the shelves of some seedy sex shop and pick out the one that looks the biggest, the most obscene; I go down on her first, like we agreed, but within minutes she’s yanking my head up and pushing me back onto my stomach; she figures out the harness quickly, with fumbling, frantic fingers, and slaps my arse when I try to turn around and watch; when it’s done, and her cock is in place, I expect her to explore me gently with her fingers, but instead she just goes for it; she pulls my hair with one hand and lubes up the dildo with the other, then shoves it inside me, almost all the way with one thrust; she takes me like that for a bit, really just getting used to the idea of having something long and hard to fill me with, then suddenly something clicks, and she pulls me to the edge of the bed, stands up, and starts to really pound my arse.

It didn’t end there, of course. It ended, after a lot of experimentation – most of which involved my legs slung over her shoulders – with me riding her cock and shooting come all over her tits. She then clamped my mouth tight against her cunt and held it there for the 30 seconds it took her to come too. And all of that came back to me today. I thought about how good it felt to push back at exactly the same time as she thrust inside my arse. I actually groaned out loud in the kitchen while making tea, as I remembered the noise she made – part surprise, part arousal – when she realised how completely she filled me. I wondered how it would have looked to anyone filming us from above, with her strong arms pinning my legs far apart, and my arse wide open for her to use. I savoured each and every filthy thing we said to each other that afternoon, and I craved the intensity I felt there with her.

I wouldn’t want to experience that kind of pleasure every day. It was physically and emotionally draining, and after leaving her flat a while later I went home and slept for the best part of 12 hours. It was a few weeks before I felt like doing it again, and that’s been true every time someone’s fucked me in that way. Today though…today I would have killed to feel a couple of lubed-up fingers pushing inside my arse, and a long fat dildo following them a few seconds later. Today, fish and chips was the only thing that could satisfy me…and today, just like last Tuesday, I didn’t get what I wanted.