Author: Exhibit A

Susie leaned in close and pressed her lips against mine. I relaxed into the kiss, letting her settle in my lap and bring her hands up to my face.

“God, I love doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“Kissing you the way you go down on me. The way I used to go down on her.”

I brushed loose strands of hair away from Susie’s eyes. They were brown, but in the glow of the reading lamp her irises and pupils blended to form a deep, shimmering black.

“Show me again,” I said.

Susie’s mouth curled into a smile. Gently, she brushed her lips over my cheek, and kissed the corners of my eyes; the tip of my nose. I tilted my head back, trying to catch her, but she dipped past me and took my earlobe between her teeth.

“You always make me wait for what I really want,” she whispered. “What makes you think I’m going to give this to you right away?”

My fingers scratched along the sofa cushions, but I didn’t move. I closed my eyes and felt her breath on my neck, and in the dip of my collarbone. Her teeth were small and sharp; I could picture her pixie grin as she nipped at the base of my throat, her hair skimming along my chin.

I flexed my thighs under Susie’s arse, and she moved to the beat they set, bouncing back up to plant tiny kisses on every crease and dimple she could find. The side of my nose, the stubbled scar just above my jaw; the crow’s feet and laughter lines that had slowly started to snake across my skin. There was no urgency in the way she explored my face; when I opened my eyes, her expression was calm but focused, as the pink bow of her lips found each new target.

Susie shucked her vest top, leaving just the plain black bra beneath. I fanned one hand out over her back; it was hot and slick with sweat, and I shivered, despite the warmth already spreading through my own body. She ran her fingers through my hair, twisting and pulling just enough to make me wince.

As my lips parted, she surprised me with the sort of soft, deep kiss I’d started to fear would never come. Her tongue eased into my mouth, only to dart back out before I could find it with my own. We moved together, and I marvelled again at how each kiss from a lover is both a single snowflake and a fresh blanket of snow: as unique and beautiful, as it is comforting and familiar.

I sighed when Susie pulled away. My lips tingled; swollen and sensitive to the cool air, after the heat of her mouth. Like two boxers, our heads bobbed and weaved around each other, but she was too quick for me, and her lips eluded my desperate, clumsy chase.

“Do you get it now? It’s almost painful sometimes, when you take your tongue away. I can’t help pushing my hips up to try and find it again.”

Before I could answer, Susie swooped down and sucked my bottom lip between hers. My fingernails dug into her back, and she pressed hard on my shoulder, forcing my arm away from her. She kissed me hard, and my mouth opened in response. I was pinned and pliant, and I let her tongue flick across mine, coaxing it to follow as our lips meshed together. There was a rhythm to the way she pushed and pulled; to the give and take of her kiss. I could feel her pulse through my tongue as surely as if I’d laid two fingers on the inside of her wrist.

My cock was painfully hard against the button fly of my jeans. Susie ground against it, her cotton shorts thin enough that I could feel her pelvic bone, and the heat of her cunt. I broke the kiss and pushed her away from me, both of us gasping for air as she fell back onto the sofa.

I reached for a cushion and wedged it under Susie’s arse. She propped herself up on the padded arm of the sofa and watched me slide my thumbs under the waistband of her knickers. She wriggled out of them, her eyes already half-closed in anticipation.

I settled down between her legs and looked up.

“Now…how did that go again?”

Besides its general comedic brilliance, the recent ‘EuphOff’ meme showed very clearly that in erotica – as in life generally – words matter.

‘Cock’ is sexy. ‘Throbbing manhood’ is not.

‘Cunt’? Hell yeah! ‘Orchid of love’? Well…no.

So when the adorable Jade A. Waters let slip the other night that she has an actual list of favourite words, I was immediately intrigued. That list – cultivated over the best part of 20 years – has evidently stood Jade in good stead, because she’s a beautiful writer, equally (and devastatingly) capable of tugging your heartstrings and just plain turning you on.

With Jade’s kind permission, I’ve decided to use her list of favourite words as the prompt for a mini fiction contest.

The brief is pretty simple: pick one word from the list below, and write a piece of erotic fiction with that title. Your story should be no more than 1500 words, and you can be as creative as you like with how you approach it. I’ve already got my word of choice lined up, and will be posting my entry at some point next week.

I’m probably not going to award a prize for this one, so there’s no deadline per se, but if I get enough submissions by Easter Monday, I might randomly send chocolate to the ones I really like. Emphasis on ‘might’ (words matter, after all…).

Whether it’s parabola, pretension, or profusion; fastidious, flamboyant, or forbidden; just choose the word that stands out to you, and email, tweet, link or DM me with your story.

And even if you don’t fancy taking part, definitely do go check out Jade’s site, for more evidence of her linguistic talents!

Planes are sexy. Trains are really sexy. Buses? Buses are not sexy. Buses are warm, sweaty and cramped, or they’re cold and draughty, with virtually no scope for anything in-between. Most of them seem to be driven by angry, angry men, whose misanthropy and general hostility seem to spread through the fetid, vomit-stained upholstery and up into the previously placid passengers.

Buses are not sexy. But they are hot. If trains are a long, slow seduction in the buffet car, buses are a quick, drunken hand job on the back seat. Maybe it’s the staccato rhythm; the traffic lights, pedestrian crossings, and roundabouts, as it takes off from one stop and helter-skelters its way to the next. It lends itself to dirty sex, in a way that planes and trains instinctively don’t. Doing it on a bus means a rough, stripped-back fuck – and all the fumbling, groping, and fingering that leads up to it.

For all that, there is a halfway house between buses and more comfortable modes of transport. I enjoyed one of those earlier this week, when I took the Oxford Tube back to London, after a couple of days with my parents. Inter-city coaches marry just enough of the creature comforts of train travel (proper seats, reading lights, power sockets…), with the noisy, seedy, slightly chaotic experience of riding the bus. Like planes, they’re perfect for anything up to about three hours, beyond which you become increasingly aware that you’re trapped in a giant, unstable tin can, with a bunch of strangers and inadequate ventilation.

My journey on the Oxford Tube made me think back to a story I wrote in 2005, for someone I was dating at the time. It had already been on my mind, actually, when reading through (and thoroughly enjoying) some of the ‘EuphOff’ pieces last week. Not because I think it’s quite so spectacularly bad; more that in querying my own reluctance to write a story in response to Jane’s challenge, I’d concluded that I’m probably still sufficiently neurotic about my own writing that the idea of sending up the genre more broadly makes me just a little nervous.

It’s sort of the same feeling I get when trying to take ‘funny’ Sinful Sunday photos – the part of me that used to worry about people laughing at my body for less kind reasons kicks in, and I hang back, scared of making myself look ridiculous. For that reason, I hugely admire the people who are happy to invite that sort of response, and to be so open and generous in how they allow others to look at them, or to read their work.

Anyway, I dug out that 2005 story last night, and read all three parts. I didn’t cringe as much as I’d thought I might, but it still left me itching to do a full rewrite on the whole thing. Instead, as my own sort-of contribution to the bad erotica meme, I present it here in its full glory, 2,400 words of ‘chalky, gargantuan rises’ and ‘long, hot stream[s] of liquid soul’. And no, I won’t be doing an audio version of this one.

Her mouth is a thin slash of pink against the startling white of her skin. She doesn’t pout; her lips naturally set in the sort of straight line that reveals itself as a smile only to those who know how to look for it.

Dark smudges paint the hollows under her calm, brown eyes. She makes no attempt to hide her tiredness, nor to tame the hair that tumbles wildly around her shoulders. The jut to her jaw is equal parts pride and defiance. Pride in the strength they said she didn’t have; a deep, defiant anger at the men who tried to stop her finding it.

She is less pretty than he remembers. Less pretty and more beautiful.

He watches as she curls herself into the window seat and looks down onto the Plaza de España. He wants to scoop her up in his arms and take them back to a time when she still needed him. Needed him in a way he understood.

His fingers clench into a fist and relax again. He doesn’t know her any more. She is older and he is not, because he doesn’t need to be; his world is safe and small, neat and tidy. It is everything that her world left behind when she landed in Madrid.

He is in her world now.

She turns to him and he lifts his head, expectant.

“Talk to me, Daniel.”

As the words leave her tongue, she knows that they’re not the ones he wants to hear. She knows, and she lets them go anyway. She is tired of sending out a sheepdog to fetch every stray thought; to round up all the things that Nice Girls Don’t Say and bring them back, soft and pliant, ready to be sheared of anything that might cause him pain.

He steps toward her. He is close enough that she can smell him again. He is wearing the cologne she bought him for Christmas, three months and half a lifetime ago, back when this made sense to both of them. Back when it felt right.

He doesn’t know that there have been other men since the morning he dropped her outside the terminal at JFK, and watched the breath billow from her lips in soft, giddy clouds. He doesn’t know that even then, he smelled of the past.

Nostalgia, like teenage boys and the end of a good date, often comes before we want or expect it to do so. She let the wave sweep over her that day and closed her eyes, the hard words in her head crumbling away; with each kiss she planted on his lips, another truth went untold.

She doesn’t remember their names. She remembers clubs and neighbourhoods – Chueca and Huertas, La Latina and Lavapiés, Salamanca and Sol. She remembers the way they kissed her, with rough, red wine lips and no shame or hesitation. She remembers their hands on her body. How their cocks tasted in her mouth.

His cock is hard – she knows that. It would be so easy to pull him inside her and pretend, just for one night. To root and centre him in the soft swell of her cunt. But she doesn’t owe him that; she doesn’t owe him anything, least of all the comfort of a happy lie that she no longer aches to tell.

He takes her hand and squeezes it, a gesture profound only in its desperation. He doesn’t speak her language; the words she needs are now beyond him, so he tries to press them into her skin, leaving a red flush that fades as soon as she pulls away from his touch.

The square below her window is full of people. She sees splashes of colour, dipping in and out of the streetlights. She hears their easy laughter, and wonders again at this life she’s found, on the right side of 20 and the wrong side of an ocean. Her fingers spread out against the glass.

Madrid makes her wet. It caught her at a crossroads, and stretched her till she was open and hungry; lean and fierce. It rubbed all her soft curves down to sharp, predatory edges.

She belongs here, in a way that still takes her by surprise.

He stares at her reflection. Her mouth looks softer now, and her eyes glitter against the night sky.

“Talk to me,” she whispers, but this time she doesn’t turn her head. The answers lie out there, in front of her.

They always did.