Category: Erotica

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.”

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.

I sometimes think that I like the idea of writing guest posts for people more than I enjoy the reality. On the one hand, it’s lovely and flattering to be asked; on the other, my writing is rarely structured or disciplined, and committing to sending someone a story or op-ed piece at a specific time invariably leaves me anxious and guilty about the prospect of letting them down.

Both of those demons have struck over the last week or so, as I’ve battled to put together a guest post for the lovely Malin James. “It’s not finished yet,” I’ve muttered time and again, and with saintly patience she’s told me not to worry, not to force it. “It’ll come when it’s ready,” she said, and in the end she was right.

Last night it came.

When I write short stories, the scenario generally comes before the plot or the action. I don’t set out to write about blowjobs, or threesomes, or femdom. Instead, I start with the back room of a bookie’s, or an aeroplane on a night-time flight, or even just a title. That’s simply how my brain works, and for the most part I trust it to find the right combination of people and events to suit the setting.

With this story, Strong Foundations, I really struggled. I had workmen in for three days last week to re-tile my bathroom, and while I knew immediately that I wanted to write something about them, I just couldn’t decide which angle to take. It felt like a canvas on which I could paint all manner of different things.

The occasional Dom in me wanted to watch as my female character was forced to suck them off, kneeling naked on the living room floor and letting them use her mouth. Letting them bend her over the arm of the sofa.

The part of me that gets glassy-eyed and weak at the knees whenever it thinks about guys with nice big dicks wanted to put the male character at the centre of the action. To have him go down to lend a hand, only to find his cheek pressed against the freshly-laid tiles as the workmen take it in turns to fill his arse from behind with their thick cocks.

My inner exhibitionist thought about having them walk upstairs to find the two characters going at it right there on the kitchen table. Maybe they’d just watch from a distance, or maybe they’d move closer, dicks clutched firmly in their hands. Maybe when they came, she would turn her head to catch their spunk on her lips and chin, and let it drip down into the hollow at the base of her throat.

I started writing all of those stories, and none of them quite worked. It was only when I started thinking more about my audience that the pieces started to fall into place. Today is Malin’s birthday, and birthday girls deserve stories that push all of their buttons. Malin may be lovely, but she also has a wicked streak a mile long, and that’s what I ultimately aimed to tap into.

Hopefully it’s a case of better late than never.