Author: Exhibit A

Jen winced as the floorboards creaked under her feet. Michael was downstairs in the study, tapping away on his laptop, and she knew he’d have music playing through his headphones as he worked through the night, but she worried about waking Pete. The spare room was uncomfortable enough to begin with, with its fold-out sofa bed and draughty window; further challenging their guest’s ability to sleep by clomping across the landing to the bathroom felt like distinctly inhospitable behaviour.

Jen still wasn’t sure what to make of Pete. He seemed friendly enough, but there was a distance in his eyes, and he rarely sat with them in the evenings, preferring instead to slouch into the tatty old armchair out on the porch and swig from the beer bottles Michael tossed him periodically through the kitchen window. He’d paid for the three weeks up front though, and Jen didn’t believe in turning down good money just to avoid a bit of social awkwardness.

The toilet flushed – why did everything in the house have to be so damn loud?! – and Jen flipped the lid down wearily. A nocturnal husband wasn’t so bad most of the time, but there were nights when she wished he’d go to bed at the same time as she did, so there was someone to snuggle up against after 2am trips to the bathroom. Someone to go downstairs and fill her water bottle each time it ran dry. Someone to roll over and slide a hand between her legs when…

Jen angrily pushed the thought out of her head. She knew she’d struggle to get back to sleep anyway, without reaching for her vibrator and starting something she’d only want Michael to come upstairs and finish. She picked up the bottle from the bedside table and gave it a rueful shake. Laziness battled thirst, and she considered switching on her phone to message Michael, in the hope he’d bring her a fresh bottle; as she reached for it though, her hand missed her own mobile and knocked against his, sending it skittering onto the floor and quickly making her mind up for her.

~

The stair runner beneath her feet muffled Jen’s footsteps as she padded down to the kitchen. Cool air crept underneath her night shirt, tickling the soft wisps of hair above her cunt. Her stomach clenched, and her brain noted with sleep-fuzzed detachment that she was slick and hot; pulsing steadily with a slow-burning need. She glanced across the hallway towards Michael’s study. The door was closed, but pale light leaked out from under it, and Jen thought again about the comforting weight of his body; the hitch in his breathing whenever he shuddered and came inside her.

On the other side of the hall, Pete’s door was ajar. A surge of guilt hit Jen for a second time as she remembered the noise her footsteps had made. Perhaps she’d disturbed him enough that he’d gone back out to the porch to enjoy some silence under the stars; if so, she should take him tea, or even a nip of the Scotch they kept in Michael’s liquor cabinet.

Jen took a step towards the kitchen then hesitated, suddenly torn. Tea was the sensible option, but fetching the whiskey would mean going into the study, and she knew that if he saw her like that, hair tousled and nipples hard against her thin shirt, Michael would find it hard to resist setting his work aside for the night and dragging her off to bed. She summoned a brief, familiar mental image of his eyebrows knotting in mock severity, and felt sure that any exasperation he felt at being interrupted would quickly be replaced by an arousal to match her own.

Her feet pre-empted the final decision, one heel spinning till she faced the study, and propelling her towards it. Jen smiled and reached for the door handle, only registering as she did so that the breathing she could hear against the quiet of the hallway was not her own. It came from inside the room: a low moan that seemed to die as it reached her, raising the hairs on her arms with its quiet urgency.

Jen pressed her finger against the door, half expecting to feel the wood vibrate from the sigh that passed through it. She nudged it off the latch and it eased open just enough for light to stream out. As her eyes adjusted to the change, Jen tried to focus on the source of the sound.

Pete’s head was tossed so far back into the heavy green curtain that it took her several seconds to struggle past the initial, surreal image of a department store mannequin propped up on the wooden desk, being enthusiastically blown by her husband. The grunt he made each time Michael’s head bobbed down to the base of his dick was unmistakably human though, as were the fingers that twisted and flexed in the kneeling man’s hair.

Jen knew she should swing open the door and stop whatever was happening from going any further. She blinked and swallowed hard, but her feet wouldn’t move; instead it was her fingers that jammed hard between her legs, as Michael spread and splayed his hands either side of Pete’s dick, like he was offering up a prayer as he sucked it.

With a flush, Jen remembered the evening she’d caught a glimpse of Pete slipping into the bathroom in just a towel. She’d wondered idly what sort of cock he was packing in amongst the bunched muscles and delicate ridges of his wiry frame. He’d half-turned, almost as if he sensed her presence, and she’d seen him in profile; just for a second, but that was enough to reveal the tight bulge he made in the cotton, and to send her scurrying back up the stairs in a mixture of embarrassment and slightly shocked arousal.

This time though the instinct to flee refused to kick in, and as Michael rocked back on his haunches she finally saw it properly, dark and heavy against the white of Pete’s stomach. It was so hard that her cunt ached at the sight of it, and at the thought of her husband’s mouth, hot and bruised from its fierce, swollen throb.

Jen rubbed frantically, and recalled the gentle, careful way that Michael’s tongue had flicked over her clit earlier that evening. As always, he’d been precise and softly percussive in his movements; likewise, whenever she sucked him it was done with a finesse guaranteed to make his toes curl long before she coaxed him to deep, shuddering orgasm.

The contrast with the frantic hunger she saw on Michael’s face as he leaned forward to take Pete’s thick cock deep in his throat once again was enough to make Jen gush all over the palm of her hand. She slumped against the wall, her thighs tight and shaky but determined not to buckle. Inside the study neither man gave any quarter, and Pete’s moans as he thrust up from the desk were matched by the soft hiss of air that escaped Michael’s mouth each time the head slipped back out across his lips. Jen felt a second spasm knifing through her. She squeezed her eyes shut, and opened them again in time to see Pete curl a hand around his cock, using the other to hold Michael in place on his knees.

“Yes,” she heard her husband whisper, so loud that Jen thought for a second he must be talking to her. “Yes, fucking do it. Fucking come all over me.”

Pete pumped his length with rough, jerky strokes. Jen could see the strain in his hand as it bumped up over the ridge and covered the head. He kicked a heel against the desk with a violent thud and pulled Michael closer, forcing his mouth open again. Everything seemed to blur for one agonising second, before snapping back into sharp, forensic clarity. Jen bit down on her lip to stifle a gasp, as blurred ropes of cum flew between the two men, coating Michael’s stubbled skin. He sucked in air, chest heaving and eyes wide in what seemed to her a mix of shock and uncontrolled lust. Pete’s dick still oozed cum, and he brushed it over Michael’s lips like a make-up artist, painting them once, twice, with a sticky smear.

Jen waited, unsure what else to expect. The care with which Pete nuzzled his cock against her husband’s cheek made her wonder how many times they’d played out this scene while she slept. It also fired her curiosity: what else had they done together? And why hadn’t Michael said something?

Pete reached for one of the two glasses that sat side-by-side on the desk. He raised it in a silent toast and tipped his head back, draining the contents in one long pull as Michael looked on, seemingly too exhausted to move. Jen wrenched her gaze away from Pete’s cock – still somehow hefty and solid, even resting limp against his thigh – and crept back across the hallway. She felt like she was intruding on something she didn’t yet fully understand. Perhaps answers could wait for daylight.

~

Bundled up in her duvet, Jen fiddled with the alarm on her mobile. She set it for 02:00 the following morning and put the phone back on the nightstand.

Perhaps answers could wait for daylight. Or perhaps some things were only understood by embracing the darkness.

In fiction writing, repetition – of character, plot and language – is both the most natural and the most maddening of habits to slip into. On the one hand, it’s inevitable (and heartening) that as your style develops, you’ll pick up certain idiosyncracies that will mark it out as unequivocally yours, and repetition is a big part of that. “Oh yes, so-and-so writes such wonderfully dark and bitter female leads” is, on the face of it, a compliment, rather than criticism of the author’s lack of internal originality. Likewise, “I dig how her love stories never have happy endings”, or even “he really knows how to use the word ‘cunt’ to great effect.” When we talk of someone’s writing having hallmarks, or identifiable and distinctive features, we’re essentially talking about effective use of repetition to build a pattern.

On the other hand, nothing gives me fits when I write quite so much as finding a casually, clumsily repeated word somewhere, or realising that I’ve used a particular expression three times in the same story. It bothers me to the point that I get an actual flush of shame if I spot it – or, worse, someone else points it out – after I’ve published something online. I constantly worry about just re-writing the same scenarios or the same characters, and was recently horrified to re-read a couple of old stories and discover that my closing line was almost identical in each.

All of which is a long-ass way of saying that repetition is an instinctive part of writing that most of us have to closely manage in order for it to have a positive effect on our work. The problem is that it’s also often subconscious. I was reminded of that today, when I got an email from one of my friends. She’s known for a while that I write erotica (though not that I post it online or blog about sex), and has been bugging me to let her read it. Last week I cracked, and sent her four relatively carefully-chosen pieces from the last year or so. This morning she replied with her thoughts on what she’d read, which included this observation:

“I noticed the way that three of the women have jaws that jut – a description that stood out for me because I’d only ever think to use it if I was wanting to depict someone as unattractively obstinate or belligerent, but for you it perhaps seems to be a sexy manifestation of will?”

I was sufficiently bowled over both by the fact that I’d described three different characters in that way, and by her interpretation of it, that I actually stopped halfway across the railway bridge I was crossing at the time to let it sink in. This is not a friend who I ever really talk to about my love life, but I realised very quickly that just by joining the dots across three short stories – by spotting the repetition – she’d formed an incredibly accurate insight into one of the main things I find attractive in a woman. The repetition was unintentional, and until her email I was unaware it existed – if I’d noticed it while writing those stories, I’d almost certainly have removed it – but by virtue of that it ultimately told me something about myself that I might not otherwise have given conscious consideration.

As it is, the choice of imagery makes perfect sense when I think about it. I’ve always sort of shrugged my shoulders when asked whether I have a physical type. My ex-girlfriends, and the women I’ve dated for any length of time, are a mix of the tall and the short, the curvy and the skinny, the fair and the dark, and the profile becomes even more varied when extending the sample to people I’ve seen more casually. If I plotted them on a graph, a tenuous pattern might emerge, with a slight skew towards the tall, the dark-haired, and the curvy, but with enough outliers across each axis to make it shaky at best.

Instead, I’ve typically tried to answer by pointing to other characteristics. “I’m attracted to women who are active rather than passive,” I’ll say, or “I tend to fancy women who aren’t afraid to stand up for themselves, or to ask for what they want.” Ambition, appetite, intelligence, drive, determination – all words I have used in response to the question, and all qualities perhaps embodied in one form or another by that defiant jut of the jaw in the female characters I write.

Repetition can tell us something about the authors we read, but in our own writing it can also add to the way we understand ourselves. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to obsessively check that I haven’t re-used the word ‘subconscious’ at any point in this post…

Having set a writing challenge a few weeks ago, it would have been remiss of me not to respond to it myself, and when an idea for a story popped into my head on Monday, it seemed like a good fit for the only non-English word(s) on the list, ‘tout ce qu’on veut’. I did consider making the female character French, just to make the link clearer, but in the end decided that it was the sound and meaning of the words themselves that was important, not the language they were written in.

My story can be found below. Before reading that though, why not check out some of the other (brilliant) responses to Jade’s list of favourites. They’re so good, in fact, that I’m slightly relieved I decided not to make this an actual contest, as picking a winner would have been a thankless task. If I’ve missed your story, or if you’d like to link in at a later date, just get in touch and I’ll add you ASAP!

• Bite Me, by Charlie Powell
• Myopia, by The Other Livvy
• Tortellini, by Oleander Plume
• The Adventures of Gumdrop, by Charlie in the Pool
• Cerulean, by The Shingle Beach

Tout ce qu’on veut

I put the beard-trimmer down on the side of the wash basin and reached for my razor. As I turned on the tap, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. Already my face looked different, and I stared into my own eyes, wondering why the man who gazed back felt like a stranger.

“I don’t understand why you need to shave it all off,” Hayley said. “It’s only an interview, and it’s not like you even really want the job.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but the words wouldn’t come. How could they? She was right. I didn’t want the job; but nor did I want to wake up each morning and think about the sun rising over the Andes, or the way the clear, cool mountain air felt on my skin as I walked from my tent to the river to bathe. I didn’t want to remember the life I had out there for those few short months, because all it did was make London feel small and dirty; the sky oppressively low and the horizon blocked off by buildings, rather than stretched out in front of me.

No, taking this job was the only way to close off that chapter in my life

I scooped shaving cream onto one palm, and slowly rubbed it into a lather. Hayley crossed the room, her ponytail swinging behind her, and laid a hand on my forearm.

“Will you at least let me do this bit for you?”

I shook her off and pointed at the sink.

“That’s a cut-throat razor. You don’t exactly have much experience with this sort of thing.”

Hayley picked up the razor and turned it over in her hands.

“It looks pretty straightforward to me. And I have plenty of experience. Maybe not with faces…”

I looked again in the mirror, at my cheeks hollowed out and burnt brown by the weeks spent hiking in the sunshine. I rubbed my thumb over the hair that remained, and suddenly realised how naked I’d feel without it. Not a stranger so much as a lesser, smaller version of myself.

Hayley kissed the fuzz on my cheek and pressed her body against mine. I didn’t turn my head, but flicked my eyes away from my own reflection to study her properly. She wore my old Red Sox t-shirt, with a comfort that confirmed my suspicion that I was unlikely ever to regain ownership of it. It still smells of you, she’d written in her email, three months after we waved goodbye at the airport, and I’d loved her for the lie.

The t-shirt was faded and shapeless, but as Hayley shifted her feet I saw it cling to the swell of her breasts, her nipples forming a brief impression in the blue cotton before ghosting out of sight again. She wrapped an arm around my waist, and I closed my eyes as a tender bruise of emotion coloured my skin. Just the casual familiarity in her touch felt like coming home.

Hayley knelt behind me and hooked her thumbs under the waistband of my briefs. She eased them over my arse, and let them fall to the floor around my feet. I turned to face her, and watched as she ran her fingers through the dark curls above my cock.

“You can’t change who you are just by shaving off your beard or getting a new job. If you could, I wouldn’t love you as much as I do.”

I let her words hang between us, almost visible in their reassuring weight: they coalesced to form an oxygen mask, strapped round my head just as the air threatened to thin out and leave me gasping, beached and stranded on my own rocky peak.

I swallowed hard, my mouth dry and my voice suddenly high and strained. “So, um, what do you suggest?”

“Well I said I wanted to do this for you, and I’d like to follow through on that.” Hayley frowned, her nails dragging one final time through the coarse, wiry hair. “Scissors please. These have to go first, I think.”

I twisted round to find the scissors, but as I scanned the shelf above the sink I had a better idea.

“Here, use this instead. Should work just as well down there as up here.”

I passed Hayley my beard trimmer. She pushed the button and it whirred into life, hair instantly spraying out in a fine rain as she held it against my skin. She worked carefully upwards in neat lines, from the crease around the base of my cock to the top of the hairline, thinning it out one strip at a time. I felt myself being lulled into a deep, calm silence, transfixed by the look of concentration on her face.

“This is the smell I really missed,” she sighed, pushing her nose into my groin. “When you were gone, I mean. I missed the way it always smells of sweat and sex down here. Of you and me.”

I waited to feel her tongue on my cock, but she pulled away and stared up at me.

“Do you trust me, baby?”

I bent down to kiss the top of her head. My hand was still covered in shaving cream, and I dabbed it against her nose, leaving a fleck of white foam. I pressed my palm into hers till I felt the cream slide between us, catching on the grooves and lines, and covering her knuckle joints like a fresh snowfall. I took her wrist and guided it towards my remaining hair.

“Just be gentle, ok?”

Hayley nodded, her fingers already methodically smoothing the lather around my cock. She picked up the razor and flicked it open, then swished it across my skin with an experimental flourish. It picked up hair with brutal efficiency, and Hayley gasped.

“Try doing that at altitude, with just a bucket of cold water to grease the wheels,” I said. “Why do you think I came back looking this hairy?”

There was a jut to Hayley’s jaw as she took a second pass with the razor. I flexed my thighs, letting them absorb the full force of the tension I felt. The unprotected blade dragged all the way down to the base of my cock, and left only soft, smooth skin in its wake.

Slowly, Hayley stripped me bare. I held my breath, inwardly flinching each time the cold steel flashed in the neon bathroom light, and pressed against my body. In minutes I went from a full summer bloom through to the scorched earth of winter. Her final, satisfied sigh hit me like a spring breeze, even as I fought to focus on the steady rhythm of the dripping tap behind me. To count the splashes into the sink below.

I opened my eyes, ready to inspect Hayley’s work. Instead she frowned, and bounced up on her haunches.

“There are these wispy hairs on the underside of your cock. May I?”

Without waiting for an answer, she wrapped her fingers around me. I felt blood surge through the vein that snaked along the shaft; my cock twitched involuntarily, but Hayley held it tight and nicked each hair in turn with forensic skill.

Her hand remained steady – there was none of the tremble I’d felt each time I’d tried to use the razor. To me, it was like putting my foot to the floor on a busy highway, in a car I could barely control, but Hayley never faltered.

Perhaps that’s why it took me a few seconds to spot the blood. It bloomed a bright, shocking red against my pale skin. Hayley caught my eye and we watched it together, my eyebrows arching up in surprise as hers knotted together in a terse frown.

She set the razor to one side and moved in closer, her face dipping back down towards my cock.

“Do you trust me, baby?“ A whisper this time, cut off by my hand on the back of her head. She responded quickly and fiercely, and I buckled at the knees as her tongue swiped across the wound, lapping at the fresh blood.

I tasted salt, just as Hayley skimmed up to the tip of my cock and sucked the first pearl of pre-cum from the slit.

“Turns out neither of us are perfect,” she said. “I’m ok with that. Are you?”

Her fingers stroked over the head as she waited for my response. I tried to focus, but her silken touch blurred the world in front of me into a hazy, golden glow.

“I don’t know. I don’t know much right now. I guess there’s one thing I’m sure of though…you are everything I want.

“Oh. And I’m going to keep the beard.”