I’ve never been an early adopter when it comes to technology. If I gave a single shit about that, I’d blame my parents. We didn’t have Sky as kids, and we didn’t have the latest consoles; even when I persuaded them to let me have a TV in my bedroom at the tender age of 15, it was their old 14″ black-and-white set (bought from my Mum’s brother in the late 70s), rather than anything I could conceivably use to watch soft porn on Channel 5 the Atlanta Olympics.

They’ve never invested in a microwave (Mum: “come on, they’re just for people too lazy to cook properly”), they don’t believe in e-readers (in fairness, I’m with them on that), and any time their broadband goes down, my siblings and I get panicked phone calls from my Dad, who has to be talked down from the ledge with all the skill, tact, and patience of a professional hostage negotiator.

In other words, Luddism is in the blood. Everyone who knows me well has despaired of that at some point, most recently when I clung onto my ailing Blackberry long after it had been surpassed as a method of communication by Apple, Samsung, Sony, HTC, Nokia…(landlines, phone boxes, the telegram, actually talking to people…)

All of which is a roundabout way of covering my arse for what I’m about to post. This afternoon, I downloaded Audacity (initial release: 28/05/2000 …not bad!), and recorded an audio version of my story from Chemical Sex, Flat Warming. My laptop is shit, so take #1 was accompanied by a slightly unnerving whirring sound, but…well, I’m lazy, so take #2 never really happened. I did try to clean up the final document, until it became clear that removing the background noise also meant flattening the main vocal track and making me sound even more like I was reading for a radio broadcast in the 1950s. In the end, I just decided ‘fuck it, we’re good here’.

The editor of Chemical Sex, Oleander Plume, has the full MP3 file, which she will no doubt use at some point for her own devious purposes. Until she does, please excuse (and enjoy!) the excerpt I’ve chosen to post here. It’s my audio debut, and is a scene taken from the middle of the story, just as things are starting to hot up in Nick’s city maisonette…

Anyone who wants to know how that super-gay tale ends can find it buried within the pages of the Chemical Sex paperback, available from Amazon, and full of the very best of British and American erotica…

…or I *guess* you can download it from the Kindle store instead, if that’s more your thing.

If you enjoyed the excerpt enough to want more (Tesco Value) aural delights from me, please do get in touch; maybe I’ll figure out a way to make it happen without giving in to the overwhelming desire I have to stab myself in the throat every time I think about putting my voice online.

C

Few things in 2015 have made me as happy as this tweet from last Thursday, which informed me that Lust Fish had been selected as this month’s Readers Choice post for Molly Moore’s Elust digest. Winning stuff is always great, of course, but it’s even nicer to be recognised for something of which you’re genuinely proud; Lust Fish isn’t the most personal story I’ve written, nor the most polished, but I was really pleased with how it turned out, and it was one of those stories that made me realise just how much I enjoy doing this…most of the time, anyway.

As well as putting a massive smile on my face, Molly’s tweet served as a useful prick to my conscience, and a reminder that back in December I promised to post excerpts from anyone else who took up the Search Term Story challenge. Having resolved to get better this year at highlighting the great work being done by other bloggers and writers, the fact that I’m only getting around to this on January 19th feels like a bit of a failure, but I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that for the people concerned, it will be a case of better late than never. Huge thanks to all of them for getting involved!

(first) fuck of the year, by Ella Dawson

The hallway looks like it’s tilting but that is the Prosecco. She clings to his hand as he marches ahead of her, tugging her along behind him and fishing the keycard out of his back pocket, and his ass is gorgeous encased in so much expensive black corduroy. And then he stops because this is their room, and he flicks open the door and then it’s wallpaper, the lights aren’t on, she doesn’t care, she is shoved up against the wall again and laughs something devilish. She doesn’t recognize them in 2015. The light through the window is blue and pink and it dances across his face: he has such a beautiful mouth. And then that mouth is on her shoulder. She wants more.

The Catalyst, by Jilly Boyd*

He has got a nice face. Actually, scratch that. He’s got a face that, in one click of the finger, I picture between my naked thighs, his hands forcefully holding my legs open as his tongue laps my desperately swollen clit.

No, I’m not alright would be the answer to that question. No, I’m desperately horny and would you mind a quick fingerfuck in the bathrooms, kthxbai? would be the truthful answer that’s running through my head like the fucking info bar on Sky News.

I say something about having had a long day, and order my usual tea. Cake-wise, I go for a slice of coffee and walnut and have a tiny orgasm at the sight of the thick layer of icing on top. God, I missed orgasms.

Busy Toilet Wank, by Charlie in the Pool

After what seemed like a life time the train finally pulled into the station.
I almost sprinted off of the train trying to find the nearest toilet. The queue at the turnstile was moving slowly, I fumbled in my purse trying to find the 30pence that would let me finally touch myself.
I locked the door behind me and dropped my bags unceremoniously on the floor. Putting the lid down on the toilet, I sat down and straight away dived my hand into my soaking knickers.

If anyone else wants to join in with this slightly ridiculous meme, I promise I’ll be less tardy in adding your link/excerpt to the three above!

Finally, although only two people voted for it as a story title, I was particularly intrigued by the notion of someone scouring the internet for videos of ‘limp dick to cum shot in one minute’. Intrigued enough, in fact, to see whether I could help them out with future searches. The resulting clip is – for obvious reasons – very, very** NSFW, but if you do want to know whether I was successful, you can find out for yourself here…

—

* Jilly decided to pick one (well, two) of the search terms that people had used to get to her blog, rather than choosing from my list.

** very very very…

First of all, apologies to those of you who come here looking for filth, whether written or photographic. I expect to resume normal posting very soon, but for now I feel it would be useful to try everyone’s patience just a little more by clarifying a couple of the points I made on Tuesday.

Predictably, I’ve kept a close eye on what people have been writing and tweeting in response to what I said. A lot of the feedback has been extremely kind and supportive, though of course there’s been plenty of criticism too; and that’s fine – even when it skews more towards the visceral than the constructive. I’ve largely avoided engaging with the people who strongly disagree with what I wrote – or rather, with how/why I wrote it – not because I’m unwilling to stand behind my words, but because I don’t believe they have a responsibility to publicly defend how they feel about me. If someone thinks I’m a piece of shit for how I went about all of this, they have a right to hold that view; I’m not about to jump into their Twitter timeline and try to persuade them otherwise, especially if they make it clear that they’re talking about me, rather than to me.

One thing that I do think I explained poorly in the original piece, and which has been flagged up by a couple of people subsequently, is the relative importance of relationship-building in erotica, versus other genres. Here’s the key passage on that from Tuesday:

In a world where few mainstream publishers are willing to take a chance on erotica, personal interactions are extremely important, as are the social media networks that enable them . . . In erotica, more than just about any other genre, relationships matter. It really is about who you know, as much as it is about how good you are…

That final sentence rubbed a few people up the wrong way, and I can kind of see why. I ought to have taken a bit more time to explain what I meant by it, rather than leaping straight into my main point about the review culture; I certainly didn’t mean to insinuate that quality isn’t important in erotica, but the way I just left it hanging there probably did at least leave me open to that accusation.

For the record then, no, I don’t believe that personal relationships (or patronage) are the be-all and end-all in erotica. However, nor do I believe that the link between talent and success is directly proportional: no industry is completely meritocratic, and it would be naive to think otherwise about ours. The truth lies somewhere in the middle, and probably varies a bit according to how you approach your own career and what stage it’s at.

Whether this differs substantively from other (fiction) genres is the bit that’s up for debate. My view is that erotica is unusual in three (relevant) respects:

1. As detailed in the first section of the original post, it has a small writing community that’s very close-knit and supportive.
2. It largely exists outside the world of ‘big publishing’, literary agents, and mainstream media; instead it relies heavily on smaller, independent publishers and (increasingly) on self-publishing.
3. A significant percentage of total sales is generated by short story collections and other anthologies.

Ironically, I think that Alison Tyler is 100% correct to attack the way the traditional publishing model has treated erotica, and to assert that the future lies in self-publishing. However, I think that will only reinforce the value of cultivating and leaning on personal relationships and professional networks as a way of getting your product out there and selling it to as wide an audience as possible.

Does that product still have to be good? Of course. But the way the industry is set up – a small and supportive pool of editors and writers, active on social media and often only loosely affiliated to major publishers – gives new authors the opportunity to build and leverage the sort of access that seems much harder to come by in other genres. Acknowledging that is not the same as questioning the integrity or professionalism of the individual editors who give them that access, nor is it a way of suggesting that quality doesn’t matter.

Maybe a simpler way to put it is this. To get your work seen and taken seriously by the people who count is easier in erotica than it is in Crime Fiction, or Sci-Fi, or Literary Fiction, or whatever. That’s partly because the decision-makers are more visible and more accessible – they’re the people who edit anthologies, and run competitions, and engage with Twitter followers – and partly because the industry is much smaller overall. Add the two together, and you’re left with fewer hoops to jump through before someone who really matters will read your stuff. If you’ve already built up a decent rapport with that someone before s/he reads it, the chances of them taking it seriously increase even more, because, y’know, that’s how human nature works.

Unfortunately, the flip side appears to be that if you piss off one of those people by posting a negative review of their work, or by writing unfavourably about publications in which they appear, it can have an even more dramatic impact on your professional prospects, and that’s the bit I take issue with.

In conclusion, does knowing the right people in erotica guarantee that you’ll be published? No. Are personal relationships with editors and publishers also important in other genres? Yes – they’re just much, much harder to form, especially if you’re starting from scratch.

Just to finish off, I’d ask any of you who genuinely believe that the only criterion for success in erotica is the quality of one’s work to ask yourselves this question: do you think that my chances of having a short story accepted for publication in a major anthology have increased, decreased or remained the same as a result of what I wrote the other day? If you truly believe that it will have no impact whatsoever – that the professional and the personal are completely unrelated – then your view on the industry is very different to mine.

This is almost certainly going to fall into the category of blog posts that lose me followers/friends. It’s also one that for weeks I told myself I wouldn’t write: not because it constitutes professional suicide (for one thing, I’m not a professional writer), but because while I think it needs to be written by someone, it would probably have more impact if that person was female. As a man, I’m well aware that this risks coming across as privileged, patronising, pompous, or some combination of the three.

I’ll take that risk.

Erotica has always been the Jon Snow of the literary world. A stunningly attractive bastard of a genre, it is forced to live with the knowledge that nothing it does will ever make it respectable or credible to popular opinion, nor to the establishment it longs to join. Instead, it ploughs its own furrow, with determination, imagination, and a stubborn refusal to be beaten down by those who would mock or suppress it.

Like any decent countercultural movement, it succeeds and survives in large part by fostering a friendly, supportive environment within which its artists can work. I’ve lost count of the people who have said to me – half in admiration, half in wonder – “I can’t believe erotica writers are so nice.” Nor does it surprise me: I’ve been both stunned by and incredibly grateful for the access that authors like Kristina Lloyd, Lexie Bay, Oleander Plume and others have given me since I first expressed an interest in writing smut. Events like Eroticon just hammered home the extent to which people who write about sex are willing to give their love, time, support, and kindness to anyone who engages them, whether as peer, disciple or enthusiastic reader. There’s a solidarity that perhaps doesn’t exist in other genres; people aren’t just aware that a rising tide will lift all, they’re willing to roll up their sleeves, grab a bucket, and help push the water up the beach.

In a world where few mainstream publishers are willing to take a chance on erotica, personal interactions are extremely important, as are the social media networks that enable them. The more Twitter followers you accumulate, the more blog hits you get; the more blog hits you get, the more readers you’re able to reach with your published work; the more Amazon reviews those readers write, the more books you sell overall. In erotica, more than just about any other genre, relationships matter. It really is about who you know, as much as it is about how good you are…

…and that’s great…that’s gr…wait a minute: that’s REALLY NOT great.

Look, not every artist is a nice person. Not every artist will share his or her toys, and not every artist will play nicely with the other children. Some artists are – for want of a better word – arseholes…and that’s fine. More to the point, some of us (nice or otherwise) would rather live and die by the value of the content we create, rather than by the butt we’re willing to kiss in order to promote it. We don’t want to scratch your back, just so you’ll scratch ours at a later date; because every time we settle for that, we’re tipping over the credibility line: we’re passing from supportive and encouraging into sycophantic and false, and that’s where the danger lies.

What I’m trying to say is this. Erotica has a positive review problem. We exist in such a wonderfully supportive, mutually encouraging environment that we’ve apparently forgotten how to impart, digest, and discuss negative feedback in a sensible fashion. We review each other’s work with agonised, tortuous care; desperate to avoid causing offence, but hating ourselves for pulling punches and leaving the things we want to say unsaid. We’re not just glass-half-full about the novels and anthologies we’re given to read: we chuck out the water and fill it to the brim with vintage champagne, because that’s the easiest substitute for honest, nuanced commentary on the writing of our friends and (in some cases) professional colleagues. We’re not critics: we’re cheerleaders.

Here’s the thing though. After a while, all we’ll succeed in achieving is the destruction of erotica’s ability to punch above its weight, both creatively and commercially. If every review offers up five gold stars, and every tweet or blog-post showers fulsome praise on the slightest or most banal piece of writing, then all of that support – all of that love – will cease to have an impact. We’ll eventually turn the whole thing into one great big circle-jerk…which might make a small number of people feel a little better about themselves, but will stop them hearing the honest feedback they need on their work, and will also further alienate erotica from the sorts of people who might otherwise be open to buying into it.

The other depressing consequence of the positive review culture is how readily –and viciously – people are ostracised for failing to toe the line. I’ve watched with dismay over the last few weeks as an erotica author and editor for whom I otherwise have a huge amount of respect – Alison Tyler – has used her blog and Twitter feed to lay into those who have the temerity to criticise either her work or the people and publications she chooses to work with. Her line of attack is not just immature and cowardly in its preference for snide innuendo and vague allusion over actually addressing these ‘douchebags’ by name, it lacks any sense of perspective about what it is to be a professional writer.

Look, I take absolutely no pleasure in writing any of this. Alison Tyler is someone who donated prizes to a contest I ran last year; she’s someone who was kind enough to give me feedback on a story I submitted for one of her anthologies; and she’s someone who, from what I’ve seen and heard, is typically generous with both her time and expertise to many people throughout the erotica industry. She’s forgotten more about writing smut than I will ever know, and has more talent in her little finger than I do in my entire body…and yet, on this particular issue, she could not be more spectacularly, damagingly, and insultingly wrong.

Cutting people out of your (professional or personal) life and passively-aggressively smearing them online when they express ‘strong negative feelings’ toward the magazine you work for isn’t principled and doesn’t give you access to the moral high ground. Furthermore, writing a review that’s critical of something you’ve written is not the same as attacking you personally – it’s not even equivalent to saying that all of your work is mediocre/bad/etc.

A well-written, well-argued negative review is its own thing, and deserves to be treated as a valid response to the art that we put out there, whether we agree with what it says or not; by questioning the motives of the person who writes it, and by dismissing their entire point-of-view simply because we don’t like what they have to say about us, we don’t demean them – we demean ourselves. We’re essentially claiming that the critic’s perspective on our work is invalid, for no other reason than the fact that they don’t see it in the same way as we do, and that they therefore haven’t appreciated or understood what we were trying to do or say with it. And that’s bullshit.

Reviews (and reviewers) don’t qualify as malicious or unfair simply because they’re negative or ambivalent. If Alison Tyler has a problem with people who’ve reviewed her work, she should take that up with them directly and in private, rather than using her position of influence within the industry to try and scare or bully other people away from writing critical reviews in the future. By telling the world that she’s willing to blackball anyone whose opinion she doesn’t like, she’s sending an incredibly damaging message, whether she means to or not: namely ‘if you’re asked to write a review of my work, and if you want to continue associating with me on a professional level afterwards, say something nice, or don’t bother saying anything at all.’

And I’m not ok with that. I’m not ok with it when it comes from an individual author, and I’m certainly not ok with it becoming the prevailing attitude within the wider erotica culture.

Guest posts on my blog have been – and will continue to be – sporadic. As tempting as it can be to use them as a way of plugging the inspiration gaps that open from time-to-time, I feel like that does a bit of a disservice to the people who supply them. If someone whose work I love takes the trouble to write something for me – or asks me if I’ll publish a piece they’ve already written – I want them to know that I’m hosting it because I think they’re awesome, not because I couldn’t think of anything to write that week, and not because I had a regular guest slot that I needed to fill.

Today’s guest post comes from Ella Dawson, whose work I’m always delighted to feature here. The story she sent me back in August, Slush, was cold, hard and intense, and I loved how skilfully Ella inhabited that style; her versatility is evident in the fact that today’s piece, Camille, is none of those things, but still stands up as both a compelling read and an accomplished (and deeply personal) piece of writing. If you enjoy it as much as I did, do check out the rest of Ella’s work, or hit her up on Twitter to let her know what you thought.

—

Camille

He had never been in love before but had heard enough about it to know he wasn’t capable of it. It didn’t seem appealing, characterized as it was by an utter lack of control. Falling in love meant falling and hoping that the other person would catch you. There was no guarantee that they would. That was why there were two types of love songs: the glowing, poppy ones that bordered on nauseating, and the slow ones riddled with heartbreak. Being broken didn’t sound fun. He worked too hard to keep himself together to risk some rogue agent barging into his psyche like a bull in a china shop.

But Camille wore her battered, throbbing heart like armor. This was a woman who had been in love and never collapsed under its weight. He remembered sitting next to her on some park bench and listening to her talk about Ben and how messed up everything was becoming. “Loving him is like cupping polluted water in my hands,” she said, kicking at some crispy, fallen leaves with the toe of her ballet flats. Only Camille could get away with saying something like that. She earned those confessions that bordered on lyrics by sending him blunt, demanding text messages about their lunch plans.

When other people made pretentious declarations they always sounded like they were lying, but her mouth sung around what he would otherwise deem weakness. Months later when she finally kissed him, he imagined he could taste her whole life, every split lip of betrayal and chap of tenderness. They had a way of seeing through each other. It was a friendship he didn’t understand but knew he couldn’t lose.

There was a long, exposed zipper on the back of her dress and he tugged it down slowly, tooth by metal tooth. Most women he just fucked, but sex was something different with her. Sex with Camille had a way of peeling his skin back until his hands shook as he touched her. He guided one sleeve off her shoulder, and then the other, and she turned to stare at him with big, gray eyes that burned even when she cried—he knew, he had seen it. She had an elegance that disguised so much force. Sometimes she wrote her anger into his bones and wanted it to hurt but tonight wasn’t one of those nights. She reached out with one of her tiny hands and brushed his hair out of his face, and she smiled as she poked some of the freckles littering his cheek. He grabbed her wrist and kissed her thumb. That was how they worked: she gave him her time, and he allowed her to see him like this. And she had the decency to never point out how afraid he looked of her polite invitations to sleep over afterward.

For some reason this was the night he finally took her up on the offer—something about the weather, or maybe how warm she was—and she fell asleep first, almost immediately. Camille seemed so tiny, this weird assortment of fragile bones and confidence. He wasn’t tired but closed his eyes and absorbed her sleep-twitches, listened to her breathing deepen. It was the quietest revolution, the softness chaos, having this woman in his arms. He didn’t like knowing what this feeling was. It meant he was just like everyone else after all: a brooding kid caught up in a dimpled hurricane. Which was a pretentious, unearned way of admitting he might love her someday if he wasn’t careful.

Sometimes I wake up in the morning and know exactly what I’m going to write that day. This was not one of those mornings. Today I woke up knowing that I wanted to write something…but without any real idea of what that something might be. It was only when I scrolled through my Twitter timeline, and saw this and this, that an idea started to form…

—

The Bookie

It was dirtier, way back when. Not sleazy, exactly, but there was sort of a grubbiness to the whole place. Formica worktops, stained with God knows what, and wallpaper that actually looked better in the areas where it had faded away or started to peel off the wall. Strip lighting. Fast food wrappers strewn all over the lime green carpet. It smelled terrible, of course. You could still smoke inside in those days, and the heavy tobacco fug formed one part of a lethal, toxic trifecta, alongside the stale sweat from Jimmy’s regulars, and the stench of piss from the toilet he never bothered to clean.

I loved it though. Way before I was legal, I’d stop in there after school, hoping in vain each time I pushed open the door that my glasses might protect my eyes from the sting of the smoke. I was terrified of the men who gambled there. Hard men. Drunks, some of them, and even the ones with clear eyes and clean clothes all seemed to have fists the size of hams. We weren’t really part of the community in those days either. We were recent transplants – my Mum had joined the board of a big pharmaceutical company based just outside town – and I was still nervous whenever I walked the estate after dark, even if most of the kids who kicked the shit out of me at school each day lived up the other end of town.

I guess I was a bit of a loner, and even though the men in the shop had all known each other for years, it felt like a good place for loners to go. No-one talked much. Grunting was the main form of communication, broken up by the occasional heavy sigh whenever a sure thing failed to come through. Jimmy presided over the whole thing with magisterial indifference, whether he was raking in fistfuls of notes, or counting out cash from the till and handing it to the person triumphantly waving a betting slip in his face. He didn’t care that I was only 16 the first time I shoved a couple of quid across the counter: money was money.

I was good, even back in those days. I had my copy of the Racing Post – my bible – just like the other guys, but I also had a whole series of spreadsheets running on the PC in my bedroom, and the sort of flair for Maths and Statistics that would carry me all the way through a degree at Cambridge and into the world of academia. I made good money from Jimmy, but I never pushed it. Bookies don’t like it when you clean them out, and I knew that no other shop in town would have me if I got barred from Jimmy’s place.

That wasn’t the only reason, of course. If it was the gambling that hooked me in the first place, it was Alice Taylor who reeled me in; Alice Taylor who I thought about on the bus to school, in the library at lunchtime, and every night in bed when I curled my fist around my cock and made myself come over and over again. Jimmy’s daughter was a year older than me, but several decades more worldly. There was nothing delicate about her – she had big tits, big hips, big hands, and a mouth that would make a sailor blush – but she was always sweet to me, and that only made it harder not to stare as she wiped down the tables, or swigged one of the beers that her Dad let her take from the fridge behind the counter.

To this day, I wonder whether Jimmy knows that I did more than stare. He was fiercely protective of his daughter – she could handle herself easily enough, but I still saw more than one regular booted out for looking at her the wrong way – and while he was always pretty friendly with me, I don’t think it would have sat well with him, what we did, that summer before I went off to uni.

It started innocently enough. She was thinking about going back to college to get her A-levels, and I offered to tutor her in the weeks after my exams finished. Maths, Physics, a bit of English Literature: hell, I’d have taught her Swahili if she’d asked me to. She smelled of cheap cider and the perfume that her boyfriend had given her for Christmas, which even the mix of smoke, sweat and piss out on the shop floor couldn’t quite permeate.

We sat elbow-to-elbow in Jimmy’s office for one hour every afternoon, a gloomy, stuffy cupboard where he used to nap whenever business was quiet. I’d grown up and filled out a bit by then, but I was still desperately awkward around girls my age. Alice knew that, and exploited it mercilessly. If she wasn’t casually brushing her fingers across my thigh, or shifting in her seat to reveal even more cleavage, she was talking to me about her boyfriend troubles, most of which seemed to be rooted in the fact that they never wanted to ‘do it’ as often as she did.

In the end, I never really stood a chance. All it took was her fingernails lingering in the grooves of my corduroy trousers for just a few seconds longer one day, and suddenly both of us were staring at the tented bulge that formed quickly and irrevocably between my legs. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I glanced up and checked the shop floor through the one-way mirror on the wall opposite. Busy, very busy. Maybe Jimmy would need her out there. Maybe…

Coherent thought – already difficult by that point – became impossible once she unzipped my trousers and carefully slid her hand inside. She yanked down my briefs just far enough to press her warm, thick fingers along the shaft of my cock, and I nearly came right there and then, just from that first touch of another person’s skin against me. She pulled it out and stared for what felt like minutes, then looked back up at me, her eyes wide and playful.

“What do you want me to do with it, David?”

“I…please…”

Her chuckle was low and throaty, as she clamped her hand over my mouth.

“Yeah, pretty sure I’m going to be the teacher on this one.”

She bent down and took me in her mouth, slowly and with a delicacy I hadn’t expected. It was different from the porn I’d watched; different from the scenes I’d constructed in my head. She held me there on her tongue, just the head of my cock, before closing her lips around it and sucking gently. Maybe she was trying not to overwhelm me with everything all at once, I don’t know. I did multiplication exercises in my head to try and distract myself from the sensation of her tongue gliding and flicking across me. ’14 squared is 196, 16 squared is 256, 18 squared is 324…’

I came before I could reach 20, and through the static fuzz of the explosion that ripped through my brain, I could hear the legs of my chair squeaking across the floor as I bucked and tensed in her mouth. Half an hour later, she took me in her mouth again, and my life felt like it had changed forever.

We kept up the lessons. She was serious about college, and I wanted to help her – wanted to show that I was more than just the geeky kid who hung around the shop in trousers two inches too short for him. Sometimes we’d go through a full hour before she reached for the hard-on that never quite seemed to disappear around her, but for the most part we’d do it at the beginning, before she opened her notebook. She’d lock the door, and I’d sit in the chair facing the window, my thighs already tense with anticipation and desperate, teenage lust. She got off on the fact that I could see out into the shop, and as I learned to control my orgasm, to last longer in her mouth, she’d find ways to tease me as she worked my cock.

Sometimes she’d unbutton her blouse and let me slide it between her tits, or just rest it there, in her cleavage, as she sucked me. Once she wet her fingers and rubbed them over the head of my cock, pressing it down till her tits surged up and over it, locking it in place. I shot cum all over her neck and down into the well of her collarbone, and she laughed at the way I shuddered against her.

She let me finger her a couple of times, and even that – the feeling of her soft, hot cunt getting wetter with each thrust – used to set me off. It would be a race to see which happened first: her orgasm, or the desperate fumbling as we tried to switch positions in time for her to press her tongue against the underside of my cock as I came.

Mostly though, she just sucked me. I taught her trigonometry; she taught me to push my cock down her throat, and to time my thrusts in a way that would ease her lips all the way down to the base of the shaft. Once we set aside our books and she just spent the whole hour teasing me, her tongue a flickering blur as it traced every vein, and dived into all the nooks and crannies, the crease between my balls and my thigh, the puffy, sensitive fold where the head of my cock met the shaft. Other days she’d attack me with brutal efficiency, and even after weeks of practice I was still helpless whenever she decided to make me come quickly; I’d squeeze my eyes shut, and count up in square numbers, but none of it could stop the flow of jizz, or wipe the satisfied smirk from her face as she swallowed every last drop.

We never had sex. Not that summer, and not in the years that followed. I always went back to the shop during the uni holidays, even as my trips home became shorter and less frequent, and she would still suck me off in her dad’s office; but somehow it would have seemed wrong to do anything more, especially once her boyfriend became her fiancé, and then her husband.

Nowadays all the cash is online, so that’s where I do most of my gambling. I make a decent living from it – more money than I get from teaching, that’s for certain – and I’ve moved way beyond horses and dogs. You can bet on pretty much anything these days. The shops that have survived are clean and well-lit, verging on the sterille; they serve coffee and pastries, and your feet don’t stick to the floor when you walk across it.

Jimmy retired a couple of years back, and with Alice’s daughter old enough to start school, it made sense for her to run the place full-time. I teach at a university a couple of hours down the road, and when I do pop back to see my parents, I always go in to say hi, and to put a couple of bets on for old-time’s sake. She teases me with the sort of easy warmth that only people who’ve known each other forever can pull off.

“Ah, here he is, Mr Big Shot! What’ll it be today, Professor? Who are you going to lay tonight? How does the spread look to you?”

It doesn’t matter how good the air-conditioning is, and it doesn’t matter how many times they paint the walls or wipe down the tables. With Alice Taylor, I’ll always smell cider and cigarettes; stale sweat and cheap perfume. With Alice Taylor, my mouth will always be dry and my cock will always be hard. With Alice Taylor, I’ll always be 18.