I’ll keep this brief, as I’m about to cover the Smut Marathon more broadly in a separate post. If you want to read my stories from Rounds 1-8, you can do so here and here.
In Round 9 (Start your story with these words: The wind howled around the corners of the cabin…), I came 3/10. After it worked so well in Round 8, I again decided to try and play with the prompt a bit, which this time meant setting it in a ship’s cabin. I feel like the law of diminishing returns kicked in a bit – and the comments certainly weren’t quite as positive – but the scenario is still really hot to me, so I enjoyed writing it.
The assignment for Round 10 was very simple: ‘Write an erotic story with WWII as the time setting.’ I went back and forth over a couple of ideas, but ultimately put them all aside in favour of an F/F romance set at Bletchley Park. I finished it at 10:59pm on deadline evening, and despite the last-minute rush I think it stacks up well against almost everything else I’ve written. I like these characters, and I’m really glad other people did too.
~
Boat Show
The wind howled around the corners of the cabin, and the floor shifted under my feet. I grasped ineffectively for the balcony door handle, trying not to turn my head towards the cold spray gusting through the open French window and soaking our bedroom floor.
Georgina shrieked and ducked into the bathroom, only to emerge almost doubled over in shaking, silent laughter.
“Fuck off, Georgie,” I yelled over the wind. “I told you to shut that door before we left.”
With fingers almost numb from exposure to the storm, I finally secured a firm grip on the door handle and pulled it towards me. It mounted one final resistance then slammed shut, sending a shower of droplets all over my dress shirt.
The room fell silent. I stared accusingly at my smirking, sun-kissed friend and reached for one of the beach towels hanging alongside our swimming costumes on the back of an armchair.
“Oh, I’m sorry Finn, I really am, but I also wouldn’t have missed that for the world! Besides, you of all people can’t complain. You’re getting a free sodding cruise out of me – I’m allowed to use you as entertainment!”
I unbuckled my belt and stepped out of the suit trousers Georgie had insisted I wear to dinner. Looking around the mini suite – by far the most expensive room I’d ever slept in – I had to concede her point. Even with the first squall we’d seen since Southampton raging outside, the forecast was clear for the rest of the week, and I planned to make the most of it.
Georgie raised an eyebrow and nodded towards my crotch. Through the thin white boxers, my dick looked obscenely plump, and she sighed dramatically.
“You’re going to spend the whole trip teasing me with that, aren’t you? I guess I’d better find myself one to play with before I just jump you and have done with it.”
I quickly pulled on some jeans and blew her a kiss. When Georgie’s boyfriend had walked out on her two weeks before their trip of a lifetime – the luxury cruise on which she was convinced he’d finally propose – I’d been wary of stepping into the breach. Childhood friends turned casual lovers, we’d learned quickly the extent of our ability to drive each other crazy at close quarters, and even though things had been much calmer between us since she’d met James, it didn’t feel like the best time to test the stability of our current, decidedly platonic arrangement.
“But Finnie, it’ll be so much fun,” she’d said, over a post-work pint one evening. “Get away from this dreary autumn weather, live by the pool for a couple of weeks, flirt with cute barmen – what’s not to like?”
By the second pint, I was seeing cocktails with little umbrellas dancing in front of me, and by the third, she’d changed the name on the tickets and booked me a train down to Southampton.
“You won’t regret it,” she’d called over her shoulder as I shooed her towards the Tube. “I really fucking need this, ok? Fuck James – I never want to think about him again.”
“After madam, of course.”
The pianist had already started his set, so we shuffled towards one of the only free tables at the back of the room and sat down. In a simple green cocktail dress, cut low enough that I had to drag my eyes away from her tits every time she leaned forward, Georgie hummed along to the music and I thought once again about her pre-trip vow. She seemed to be enjoying herself, and I certainly hadn’t noticed her mooning over James or crying into a pillow at night, but there was a restlessness under the surface that I knew wouldn’t stay buried for long.
Without turning her head, Georgie tugged my sleeve and jabbed a finger towards the bar.
“You see that guy over there?”
“Uh huh.”
“I’m going to fuck him tonight.”
I set my drink down carefully and peered through the crowd. In profile, I could see his appeal right away – he looked absolutely nothing like James. No more than 5’8”, he was tanned and wiry, with dark curls rolling down to a close-cropped beard. Next to her blonde bear of an ex-boyfriend, your eye might have drifted over him, but in the soft light pooling around the bar he made quite an impression.
“Shall I head back and leave you to it?”
“No, I need a wingman! Besides, it’s your round. Go talk to him.”
Noah turned out to be French, but to my relief his English was flawless. An off-duty steward, he liked to spend his free evenings listening to music (“he’s good, no?”) and mixing with the guests in one of the ship’s dozen bars. He needed little encouragement to join us for a drink, taking the seat next to Georgie who flashed her best Cheshire Cat grin and offered a cheek to kiss while I searched for an extra chair.
Watching her put the moves on Noah with barely a pause for breath, I was reminded of the first time we’d fucked. We’d drifted back together in London after years apart, finding that the misery of mis-sold graduate schemes did indeed love company – though not as much as it loved breathless, back-alley sex outside Camden dive bars, or furtive hand jobs at house parties with her boyfriend in the next room. Georgie was a woman who knew how to get what she wanted, and looking from her face to Noah’s as she laid a perfectly-manicured finger on his wrist, I had no doubt that remained the case.
20 minutes later, the pianist finished his first set and I made a beeline for the bathroom. I returned to find Noah helping Georgie up from her chair, a smile on his face. Be cool, she mouthed at me, before spinning round to face us both.
“Finn, you don’t mind if we take the party back to our room, do you?”
“Every night I feel your cock pressing against my arse and you still won’t give it to me – so I think you should watch me play with Noah’s instead. Might remind you what you’re missing. Sit!”
I fell into an armchair, unable to verbalise a suitable response. Georgie deftly slipped out of her dress, then pushed Noah flat on the bed, a broad, white-toothed smile on his face. She yanked his jeans and boxers down over his thighs, just far enough to free his cock. It fell heavily onto his stomach, already semi-erect, and she curled a fist round it, pumping experimentally.
I waited for her to turn and look at me, but she didn’t take her eyes off Noah. His narrow hips rolled and lifted off the mattress as she lifted his cock away from his torso and eased it into her mouth. I unbuttoned my jeans and took out my own cock, stroking it in time to his thrusts. With her nose pressed against his pelvis, Georgie reached inside her knickers and moaned; nothing got her wet quicker than giving head, and her whole body started to shake as she crouched over him.
“Condom,” Noah gasped, his hand searching the nightstand without success. I dug into my pocket and tossed one over to him. Never hurts to come prepared, right?
Noah tried to lever himself off the bed, but Georgie forced him back down and took the condom, ripping the foil with her teeth. Slowly she peeled off her knickers, and I gave myself over to the gut-punch memory of her taste – of her juice on my lips and tongue, and the flecks of sweat I licked from her body after we’d fucked.
Georgie rolled the condom onto Noah’s length and waited, her cunt poised over the tip as she rubbed her clit. For the first time she looked right at me. I knew exactly what she was about to do – why she was holding back – and she must have seen it in my eyes because she smiled in response. Yes.
As Noah screwed up his face, Georgie jack-knifed forward and started to come. With the orgasm still tearing through her, she straightened enough to squeeze down onto Noah’s cock, riding out each ripple of pleasure until he slid his hands round to grip her arse and hugged her tight against his chest.
In the silence that followed, I heard the French door rattle as the wind picked up again. Georgie rolled over to face me and blew a kiss of her own.
“See Finn – what’s not to like?”
Enigma Variations
Before I’d even kicked the snow off my boots, I saw the slip of paper on my desk. Torn from a standard-issue notepad and folded neatly in half with my initials printed in the top-left corner, its lack of ostentation or ceremony tugged at my stomach.
Straightforward. Unlike her. Plain. Unlike her. Bold.
Well, yes. Quite.
I opened it with fumbling fingers. Six lines.
9. 29. 167. 14. 12.
24. 5. 245. 17. 4.
46. 31. 37. 3. 22.
48. 6. 89. 21. 1.
59. 12. 402. 8. 15.
66. 18. 222. 16. 4.
And under them a single word: ‘Tonight?’
I half-fell into my chair, her note clutched tightly in one hand. I glanced around the office, sure that someone must have observed my agitation; worried that they might have mistaken it for something other than sudden, soaking arousal.
I peered again at the numbers and felt a smile lift the corners of my mouth. It was time to visit the library.
~
Joan started at Bletchley three weeks after me, in August 1940. A London girl – born and bred – she’d spent the first year of the war working as a typist at the Foreign Office, until she was quietly reassigned by a Section Head who clearly knew talent when it sat in front of him each day.
I believe she’d never seen the countryside before her train rolled out of Euston and into leafy Hertfordshire. She was terribly homesick, anyway – that much was clear. In fact, I thought her the most dreadful bore during those first few weeks. Mousy and pale, even as the rest of us basked in early September sunshine, she squeaked only when spoken to, and scurried away at the end of each shift to her boarding house in Steeple Claydon without lifting her eyes from the faded brown carpet.
The first time I really noticed Joan, she was also looking at the ground, but for very different reasons. In the dewy verge of a lane two miles from Bletchley Park, on the Monday morning after the clocks should have gone back, she knelt over the twisted frame of an old pushbike, muttering in frustration. I stepped off my own bicycle and joined her on the grass, barely stifling a gasp of shock when she turned to face me with blood running freely from a gash on her chin.
“Rode over a fucking pothole, didn’t I? Every fucking day I take this road to work. Dunno what I was thinking.”
“I…oh gosh, I don’t know what to say. Here, use my hankie.”
It felt like the feeblest gesture imaginable, but Joan took the handkerchief with a smile. After wiping mud from her hands and dabbing experimentally at the facial wound, she stood up and closed the gap between us.
The sun had barely made it over the horizon, and her dark eyes glittered in the milky half-light. Beneath the dirt and dried blood, her skin was perfectly smooth, with only a light dusting of freckles colouring her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. At work, she scraped her hair into a tight bun, but by the side of the road it fell loose around her shoulders, revealing flecks of gold and copper running through the deep chestnut. I felt like a giant next to her, and shifted awkwardly from one foot to the other, unsure how to break the silence.
“Thank you for this,” Joan said, balling my hankie into a fist and stuffing it into her pocket. “And thank you for stopping. I know it means you’ll be late too, but would you mind awfully if we walked the rest of the way together?”
I shook my head as she continued to stare at me.
“Of course not.”
So we did.
~
The following day, I arrived at my desk to find a note tucked under my typewriter. I turned it over and frowned at what appeared to be a string of nonsense.
‘SQWHZ UQW HKGE PQ EAP HWJYD SKPD IE? K OPKHH DARE UQWN DAJGKE’
I didn’t recognise the handwriting and the note was unsigned. I put it to one side, oddly shaken by the disruption to my routine, and picked up the fresh sheaf of papers sent overnight by the War Office. Each long list of Italian ciphers would take hours to puzzle through, and I could already feel my lower back complaining at the prospect of another long day with minimal movement.
But as the morning went on, my mind kept drifting back to the paper now buried under a mound of foolscap. Finally I pulled it back out and looked properly at the jumble of letters. Grabbing a pencil, I started scribbling different combinations till I found the key.
Variation on the Caesar Cipher, with each letter moved four steps forward rather than three. Vowels jumped another step, so A became E, etc. Neat, but designed to be solved without much difficulty. I wrote out the full message and stopped, pencil hovering above the page.
‘WOULD YOU LIKE TO HAVE LUNCH WITH ME? I STILL HAVE YOUR HANKIE’
~
Over beef stew and boiled potatoes, I learned more about Joan’s early life. The youngest of five, she’d been sent by her father to a private girls’ school in London, where she’d excelled.
“I was a star pupil. My teachers were talking about university – maybe even Oxbridge. And then…”
She trailed off and shook her head.
“Another time. Things didn’t end well for me there. I was asked to leave.”
Our hands rested against each other on the cafeteria bench. I took Joan’s in – well, in solidarity I suppose. Or compassion. It felt small and warm as I curled my fist around it. I stroked her wrist and she sighed.
As we got up to leave, Joan held onto my hand, rubbing her finger across the palm in small circles.
“I like puzzles,” she said. “And I like you.”
Something in her tone went straight to my cunt. I nodded, silently urging her to say more. Instead she blinked at me – a slow, solemn movement even as the rest of her remained perfectly still – then turned smartly on one heel and walked away. I sat back down and squeezed my legs together.
~
Over the next two months, more notes appeared on my desk. There were transposition ciphers and elegant variations on Morse code; basic substitution puzzles and fiendishly complex asymmetric key algorithms. Her messages varied from the practical (‘Meet me by the gatehouse at 6’) to the personal (‘I’m so lonely in Steeple Claydon. I feel as if my heart may simply wither and die.’), and occasionally a hint of something I’d always longed to hear from another woman (‘I dream of you at night and wake with the smell of your hair in my nostrils’).
I began to look for Joan on my ride to Bletchley Park each morning, and to find excuses to visit her desk. She rarely spoke to me about anything other than work, and even then there were limits to what we could both say. Still, it was enough to push her into my dreams too. I’d been with boys before – of course I had – but the erotic images that carried me through sleep each night went far beyond anything I’d either experienced or conceived before her.
Joan’s lithe body on top of mine. My lips on her neck and breasts. Her fingers slipping over my clit.
As the days passed, it took me longer and longer to leave bed in the morning. I’d wake up with the sheet already soaked under me, and would spend as much time as I dared taking pleasure in the thought that one day Joan might be the cause of that wetness. It took all the composure I had not to flush scarlet in front of her when our paths did cross during the working day.
After a glum Christmas at my parents’ in Norfolk – there was still no word of my cousin, missing presumed dead in Egypt with the 7th Armoured Division – I’d wondered whether things might fizzle out on my return. Joan didn’t reappear till the 4th January, and I heard nothing from her for a full week after that. I’d almost given up hope – until I found those six neat rows of book key code waiting on my desk.
~
Trying to appear nonchalant, I walked into Bletchley Park’s staff library. With its collection of Boys Own fiction, classic literature, and guides on everything from fly fishing to Greek philosophy, the library offered some small measure of relief from the tedium of decryption by day and village life by night. More importantly, I knew it would help me find the answer to Joan’s latest riddle.
Counting from left to right, I started at the first stack and quickly located the 9th shelf. It was full of sporting almanacs, and I pulled the 29th out from the rest, then flicked to page 167. Scanning down to the 12th line, I moved my finger across the words:
‘…England completed a narrow 6-3 victory, forcing the Scottish manager to eat his pre-match words.’
Word number 12: eat! I had my first clue.
From there, I worked my way methodically through the rest of the stacks till I’d found all six words. Together they made my heart thump with anticipation:
Eat me like a summer peach.
Tonight…
~
At 5.30, she appeared at my desk. She watched me gather my belongings without comment, then led me down the corridor and into the entrance hall. We loitered by the front door as men and women weaved around us, grimacing at the leaden skies gathering overhead. I was intensely aware of Joan’s body, so close to mine and radiating enough heat that I wanted to pull her coat around me, trapping us both inside.
“There’s more snow coming and I’ve lost my gloves,” she said, taking my hand. “Let’s leave our bikes here. Come on, I figure we can make the next train. And then…”
~
A bitter wind chased us down the road from Steeple Claydon station, whipping at the hem of my dress and making Joan shriek with laughter. The temperature had dropped significantly since we’d left Bletchley and a light snow fell, landing on our cheeks and noses with a thousand tiny pin-pricks. I followed her through increasingly narrow streets and down an alley behind a row of terraced houses, all the way to the end. She stopped there and turned to kiss me.
“Sure you’re ok with this?”
I nodded and she flashed a mischievous grin.
“Oh I am glad. My landlady is a dry old stick, but she won’t be home for a good while yet. Come on.”
We crept through the gate and up a short garden path. The back door was unlocked, so I pulled Joan through it and drew her frozen fingers into my mouth. They clenched reflexively, her stubby nails dragging at my lower jaw as they dug into my gum. I winced and sucked harder, conscious of her eyes fixed on me throughout. She tasted of ink and machine oil, a mix that ought to have been unpleasant, but instead only made me take her fingers deeper, greedy for more.
With her other hand, Joan unfastened my coat and flicked open the buttons fastening my blouse. I squirmed as she laid her palm flat on my belly, pressing lightly on skin freshly exposed to the cold air; it made me double over, forcing her fingers to the back of my throat.
Without warning, she eased them back out, killing my gasp of protest with a fierce kiss. Knocked off-balance, I clung to her, and she drew me into an embrace that seemed to last forever as her tongue danced over mine.
“Time to show you why they kicked me out of school,” she murmured, steering me towards the kitchen table.
I hopped up onto it and Joan lifted my skirt up around my waist. As she leaned up to kiss me again, she jammed my thighs apart, and I felt thin cotton stretch tight across my cunt. I looked down as she moved one hand between my legs, and was pleased to see the white marks her fingertips had left on my skin.
“I want you to mark me,” I whispered. “I want you to make me yours.”
Joan carefully nudged my knickers to one side and traced a line up between my labia till she reached my clit. Behind her, a clock ticked loudly on the wall. I closed my eyes and counted silently, feeling myself get wetter with each passing second. My cunt was butter-soft under her fingers, and when I rocked my hips forward to get more – more of her – I landed in a puddle of my own juices.
As my orgasm built, Joan’s feather-touch got lighter and lighter, as if the slightest misstep might send me tumbling over some invisible waterfall. I reached for her then, begging shamelessly for her body against mine as I came; for a heat I’d known only in my dreams.
And still she held me at arm’s length.
Only later – much later – after I’d had my heart and soul ripped from my body by her skilful fingers did I remember our original purpose that night. Rolling over to face her on the blanket we’d tossed hurriedly onto the kitchen floor, I pulled her face close to mine.
“Like a peach, you said?”