Category: Sex

For the first time in quite a while, I found myself on a train this morning with no book, no mobile battery, and no filthy friend to stroke and suck my cock as the miles flew by. It was only as I was getting ready to lean my head against the window and doze off for a bit that I remembered my laptop, fully-charged and in my man-bag, complete with the Kindle software I downloaded a few months ago for exactly this sort of emergency.

Ok, that’s not quite true: I downloaded the software because a bunch of my favourite erotica writers have hot, dirty stories that they haven’t published in print form, and if I want to wank to their stuff, I have to download an electronic copy first. Still, two birds, one stone. I was horny, and the train wasn’t that busy, so I slipped my hand down inside my jeans and started to rub my cock, while flicking through my library in search of something I knew would get me off.

This isn’t a story about that though. Train wanks are fun, but unless someone catches you in the act, and either calls the police or drags you into the toilet and begs you to fuck them, they’re not generally much to write home about. At some point during the journey – you can decide for yourself whether you think it was pre-, post- or mid-wank – I read the chapter from Girl on the Net’s book about losing her virginity, and about the joys of teenage sex. Apart from being beautifully written, it made me realise that I’ve never written about my own ‘first time’, or about my early sexual experiences. This, then, is a story about those.

—

I can remember exactly how old I was when I lost my virginity. I was 21 years, 7 months, 5 days, and, if we’re being pedantic, probably about 1 hour. But don’t hold me to that. I know all of this because it happened on Valentine’s Day 2003, at the end of a spectacularly successful – and alcohol-fuelled – blind date.

We went to one of Oxford’s classier restaurants, ate food that neither of us could really afford, drank our body weight in wine, and moved on to a terrible bar, which that night was full of middle-aged couples swaying unsteadily to a succession of cheesy classics. We had the decency to collapse into a corner booth before jumping on each other, but that level of restraint didn’t last long. By the time she guided my hand under her skirt and told me to push my fingers inside her cunt, we were hovering on the edge of the dance floor, visible to anyone who happened to look our way.

Katy was far more experienced than I was, but even then we were apparently equal in our disregard for public decency. I suppose there must have been a moment when we looked at each other and paused, aware of where we were and the fact that we’d only just met, but if so, I don’t remember it. What I do remember is the DJ, who’d spotted us by that point. He was exactly the kind of DJ you’d expect to find in that kind of bar: too keen on the sound of his own voice, and desperately unimaginative in his choice of music. He clearly got a kick out of drawing attention to us, and people were watching more closely by then. When he shouted ‘is it in yet?’, we began to consider our options, and by the time he advised me to ‘take her home and fuck her properly’, she’d decided that I should do just that.

I’d already told her that I was a virgin. I’d assumed it would be a huge turn-off, but instead Katy seemed to get off on taking charge. She pointed us in the direction of her place and we walked through the cold – and suddenly very quiet – streets arm-in-arm, adrenaline still flowing from the bar. We kissed as we walked – I think I needed to keep touching her, to avoid giving myself too much thinking time – and when we reached the rather dilapidated student house she shared with her friends, we were ready to fall through the door and into each other. I was ready, anyway. Katy wanted to take things slowly. At first I thought she was trying to inject a bit of romance into what had otherwise been a pretty sloppy, frenetic encounter, but as she took my hand and led me into the bathroom, she told me that as it was my first time, she wanted to make it special. Special meant taking a bath together. Katy and I defined special in very different ways.

Actually, I have nothing against baths, and nothing against a long seduction. It’s just that slow, lingering foreplay is generally much easier and far more pleasurable when you’re not shaking with nerves. A quick, clumsy, fumbling fuck would’ve done just nicely at that point. The truth is, I was starting to panic a bit, and the longer we sat in the bath, kissing and touching each other, the worse I felt. It took me out of the moment and into the past: back to a time I definitely didn’t want to be thinking about just before trying to have sex.

—

There’s a Sliding Doors moment somewhere in the second chapter of GOTN’s book. It involves tits. She has them; I don’t. Until her tits entered the picture, I recognised a lot of my own slightly depressing teenage existence. Take this paragraph, for example:

‘I wasn’t particularly popular at school. I was the geeky kid, the one who did well in exams but badly with the boys. The ‘good’ one, for whom detentions were so unthinkable that the one time I did get one my mum reacted as if there’d been a terrible miscarriage of justice’

I could have written that. Seriously. In fact, there’s every chance I have written that at some point. You can substitute GOTN’s ‘thick glasses and depressingly lank hair’ for my terrible skin, diminutive stature…and depressingly lank hair, but otherwise I was the same awkward little ball of teenage lust, who shone academically and flunked pretty much every class on the social front. What I lacked was a certain pair of silver bullets. Over to you again, GOTN:

‘The problem with adult men is that they just don’t touch my tits enough. I’ve never met a straight man who says he doesn’t like tits. And yet as grown men they miss out on a million opportunities to touch them up. I can think of no occasion when I’ve been relaxing with a guy on the sofa that wouldn’t have been immeasurably improved if he’d had one hand idly exploring the inside of my shirt. Teenage boys were fantastic, for countless different reasons, but the most fantastic thing of all was their obsession— their pure and complete satisfaction— with touching my tits.’

Aside from doing adult men a bit of a disservice (believe me, we love touching your tits), that hits the nail on the head. As a teenage boy, I wanted nothing more than to play with a pair of tits. For a long time, my ambitions didn’t really stretch any further: I knew what was involved in sex, and I knew it would probably be pretty cool when I got round to it, but it felt like it could wait a little longer. Tits though – they couldn’t wait. They were the Holy Grail, and the more they remained just out of reach, the more frustrated and confused and unattractive I felt. I didn’t have anything of my own to offer in return – that was the fundamental problem – and I didn’t know how to go from helping a girl with her homework, or talking to her about the fantasy novel I was reading, to getting my hands on whatever she had under her school jumper. If I’d ever managed to square that circle, maybe the rest of my sexual education would’ve taken place a lot earlier.

—

Eventually, at the age of 18, I fell into a relationship with one of my best friends. I was just about to go to Oxford, she was taking a gap year before heading to Cambridge, and in the eight months we were together, we had most of our ‘first times’ together. First kiss. First grope (at last – tits!!). First “I love you”. First fingering. First hand job. First time either of us had been naked with another person…

…and that’s where we stalled. She wasn’t ready for more. She would come and stay in my tiny single bed, in my shabby college room, and we’d lie wrapped up in each other’s arms all night, my cock throbbing hard against her stomach till she decided it was time to jerk me off. That went on all autumn, then right the way up to the weekend before she flew to Hungary in January, to teach English till the summer. On the night before she left, we got up to my room and as I shut the door behind us she turned to me and, with an excited flourish, whipped a pair of condoms out of her handbag. It was time.

You’re clever people, so I’m sure you can guess what happened next. Or rather, what didn’t happen. We got naked, we kissed, I put my hand between her legs and felt how wet she was, but each time I tried to put the condom on, my erection disappeared. She tried to help, which only really made things worse, and I retreated several times to the bathroom to swear at my flagging cock and curse whichever cruel God didn’t want me to get laid that night.

I don’t often wish that I could go back and talk to my younger self, but I make an exception for that night, and for the months that followed. There was the month I dutifully flew to Hungary to visit my first love, only to get dumped. Then there was the month two of my friends got back from Budapest, and told the rest of us how they’d had to stuff pillows over their head in the youth hostel at night to drown out of the sound of my first love being fucked hard by her new boyfriend, who was presumably in possession of a fully-functional penis. Finally, there was the month she got back to the UK, and I was so nervous about seeing her at my best mate’s party that I vomited in the bathroom sink, drank all his parents’ booze, and snogged the object of his affections outside his kitchen window. That one took some explaining.

I wish I could go back and tell 18-year-old me that it wasn’t his fault. That it happens, and that just because it happens once, doesn’t mean it’ll happen again. He was a pretty rational kid, but he knew fuck all about actual sex, and I like to think he’d listen to older, wiser me. If he did, he’d have a much happier time of it at university.

—

He would also have been much more relaxed in the bath that night, with sweet, eager Katy running her hand down his stomach and over his cock.

Luckily, this is a story with a happy ending. Katy took me into her bedroom, which I can picture vividly even now, despite having been in it no more than half a dozen times. She invited me onto the bed and pushed my face between her legs, wanting my tongue there. When her mouth found my cock a little while later, I realised that this time would be different. Her mouth got me harder, not softer. The more she sucked, the more I squeezed my eyes shut and willed her to do it now. When she did finally sit up and roll a condom down onto my rigid cock, I was so relieved that I actually laughed. As she straddled my body and sank all the way down, a knot of fear unravelled inside me – the same fear that had lived inside me since that fumbling, awkward night three years earlier.

The sex itself, I would later learn, was nothing special, but to me that night was everything, and I still remember it with a tingle of excitement. I left the next morning feeling a foot taller, and far more confident in who I was, not just in bed but as a person. I carried it round with me like GOTN’s teenage tits – part weapon, part validation, and a memory guaranteed to put a spring in my step whenever I scrolled back over it.

Katy and I saw each other for a couple of months after that, and ticked off a few more of my first times together. First proper blowjob. First time fucking in a car. First time I made a woman come with my cock. In the end she ditched me for the guy she’d later marry, but there were no hard feelings. She gave me a gift so precious that even now I don’t know how I’d go about repaying her. This isn’t a story about Katy, but she’s definitely the heroine – my knight in shining armour. My happy beginning.

I have light red hair and light blue eyes. My skin is pale and freckled. The hair on my arms and legs is fine and soft. I hail from good, solid, Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stock, and it’s evident in every aspect of my appearance, from ginger tip to flour-white toe. My ancestors were sailors, dockers and fishermen; coal-miners, tin-miners and factory-workers. Between them, they ensured that I’m built for cold, biting winds, and the sort of rain that kisses you softly at the start of the day and tucks you into bed at the end of it, without leaving your side in-between.

My last serious relationship was with a Spaniard. We argued about all the usual things – religion, football, Gibraltar (mainly Gibraltar) – but the most heated and vicious rows always circled back to the same divisive issue: the weather. She would come to England in June and shiver as we walked down the street, bundled up in coat and scarf while I gave her side-eyes in my shorts and t-shirt. I would visit Madrid in October and sweat my way through the city centre, darting from one pool of shade to another. I slept with the windows open in December. She slept with them closed in July. Neither of us could imagine living in the other’s crazy country, with its crazy climate. An irreconcilable difference, in the end.

Because as far as I’m concerned, heat is not fun. Heat is certainly not sexy. The cold – the cold is sexy. The cold makes me feel sexy. I have skinny-dipped in a waterfall on Skye in October. I’ve stood naked in the snow in the Sierra Nevada mountains, my cock hard as iron while the rest of me burned with an icy, metallic fire. I’ve fucked in frost-flecked fields under clear, starry January skies, and I’ve fucked in dark alleyways at 2 in the morning with our breath billowing around us in big white clouds.

The cold is sexy because when the rest of the world feels stripped of heat, it’s still possible for another person to come along and set fire to your blood. Everyone knows that power is an aphrodisiac: well what could be more powerful than someone who can banish the bitter, howling wind with one touch of their finger or brush of their lips? Physical contact in the cold means something. Like penguins, we draw closer together as the temperature drops; we hug, kiss, and rub each other’s skin to encourage sluggish arteries and sleepy veins. We find the best ways to move our bodies, and to raise our heart rates. We draw heat from each other, and create it together, in whatever way we know will make us feel good.

It’s not that I don’t like the sun. Give me a warm August afternoon, an ice-cold beer, and the opportunity to doze off on a rug in the park, and I’ll be a very happy man. I just won’t want to fuck you. I’ll still be horny, so fine, maybe we can exchange lazy kisses for a few minutes, or you can sink down onto my cock and feel it twitch inside you. You’ll look beautiful in your summer dress, and I’ll shade my eyes against the sun so I can see your face glowing above me. It’ll be great – we just won’t fuck. Fucking is hot, sweaty, sticky business, and that’s absolutely fine by me, but when I’m already hot, sweaty and sticky, the last thing I want to do is make that worse. What I want is to eat an ice cream, or drink a glass of white wine, or have a nice lie-down in a cool room.

It’s been hot this week in Warsaw. High 20s (low 80s for those of you reading in ‘merica), with only a bit of a drop-off once the sun goes down. I’ve spent a lot of time on my balcony, reading, drinking, and generally taking in the view. It’s been glorious, in a quiet, soporific sort of way, but for the most part I’m glad I haven’t had to share it. When the weather’s like this, I want to be quiet and still. I want to avoid excessive movement – walking is fine, but anything more feels like a luxury. I want to sleep naked and alone, duvet thrown onto the floor and sweat-soaked pillows pushed to one side. I want to take cold showers, not because I’m frustrated, but because I’m fucking hot.

There are always things you can do to warm up in winter, and most of those things are very enjoyable. Running around. Sitting by the fire. Taking a bath. Drinking tea. Eating big meals. Holding someone close and kissing them. Getting into bed together and rolling the duvet around you, then feeling for each other in the darkness. Fucking. Fucking hard. Fucking often. Fucking to keep the heat in and the cold out, and damn everything and everyone else. You can’t do that in summer. Summer is more civilised. Summer is about keeping cool – literally and metaphorically. Summer isn’t sexy, which is a terrible irony given how amazing women look in their sundresses and beach clothes. Summer isn’t sexy…until the storm breaks.

When it comes to sex, I’m a Celt and a Saxon. I’m a Stark of Winterfell. Winter is coming? Fucking bring it on.

I’ve been living in Warsaw for nine months now, but until recently I’d never woken up in a bed here that wasn’t my own. When it finally happened, I was completely unprepared: no toothbrush, no change of underwear, no toiletries, and a sudden moment of panic when I realised that I had no idea where to find the kettle.

Luckily I was close enough to my flat that I could get back without having to hop on a tram, so after saying goodbye and stepping out into the sunshine, I was able to enjoy that most deliciously filthy of sexual experiences: the walk of ‘shame’.

When it comes to sex – and to pretty much everything else – the English language is full of misleading terminology. As far as I can tell, cottaging rarely takes place in a cottage. When done correctly, blowjobs involve very little blowing (as a rather sheltered teenager, that one left me with some strange ideas about oral). And as far as I’m concerned, the walk of shame ought to be a walk of pride.

Let’s break it down:

1. You went out for the evening, not expecting to get laid.
2. You got laid.
3. The other person – often a stranger – had the decency to let you stay over, which means that
   1. You didn’t have to get a bus/taxi/etc home late at night
   2. There’s a decent chance you got laid the next morning too
4. And you’re meant to be ashamed of that??

Sure, it’s not always quite so smooth, but for the most part what other people call a walk of shame, I call a pretty fucking good result.

And yet, and yet… It might be misleading, but a part of me likes the idea of a walk of shame. Personally, when it works it’s because it puts the cherry on top of the night of filth I’ve just enjoyed when I embark on one. I like feeling dirty – literally and metaphorically – especially when I know that other people can tell I’ve been out all night. I like opening the front door and emerging onto an unfamiliar street in an unfamiliar neighbourhood, the morning sun a little too bright for my hungover, sleep-deprived eyes, and the taste of someone else’s toothpaste in my mouth.

If I’ve been really lucky, there’s also that ache – the one that comes from sex that’s too rough or too plentiful or, ideally, both. My thighs will burn as I walk down the steps outside her house. My sweat-stained shirt will be buttoned up to the neck to hide the bite-marks. I’ll still be able to feel her hand on my cock, wanking me back to hardness again and again, leaving the skin raw and sensitive; she doesn’t realise that my poor circumcised cock needs lube, and I’m too caught up in the moment to stop for a quick Hand Job 101. I just want to fuck and fuck and fuck and FUCK, and apparently so does she.

The caveat, of course, is that I’m a (straight) man. I get to put on or shrug off sexual shame as I please, because for the most part society doesn’t judge me harshly if I’m promiscuous or driven by desire. No-one wolf-whistles when I dare to show some skin, and I only get called a slut as a joke (or by women bearing down on me with an 8” strap-on). Whether I want it or not, I carry that privilege around with me, not least on the mornings when I stroll through town wearing last night’s clothes and a sloppy, satisfied smirk.

So let’s be clear on one thing: sex is not shameful. Sex is something to celebrate, whether we do it with our partner of 20 years or the person we met last night in the queue for the pub toilets. It doesn’t matter if they looked like Maggie Gyllenhaal when we went to bed and Maggie Thatcher when we woke up the next morning. It doesn’t matter whether the sex was fantastic or terrible – it doesn’t even matter if we were too drunk when we got to bed to do anything other than roll around together before passing out semi-clothed with your head buried in my crotch.

None of that is shameful at the time. None of that is shameful the next morning…unless we want it to be. Like anything else when it comes to sex, shame should be consensual – something for people to adopt as they please (to whatever degree) and to shape to suit their needs. It isn’t – yet – and we need to work on that.

I like to feel dirty, slutty, and well-used; so do lots of people I know, male and female. But when I’m at the counter in M&S, buying a two-pack of boxers and a new shirt before I head into work, and I catch the sales clerk’s eye, I really don’t give a flying fuck what he or she think of me. The shame is a conscious, personal choice, and should only serve to enhance the experience I’ve just had.

Walk of shame: internal fetish, not external label. That’s the only form in which I want to preserve it.

I’ve just got back to Warsaw after a couple of days in Berlin. I went there as a treat to myself: Berlin is my favourite European city, and the opportunity to spend some time exploring Kreuzberg, ticking off some more of the (excellent) museums, and drinking beer in the sunshine was too good to pass up.

On the first afternoon, I went for a walk in the Tiergarten, and was quickly reminded of another awesome thing about Berlin (and about Germany in general): they have an incredibly relaxed attitude to public nudity, at least in comparison to other countries. In the UK, a man lying naked in the park would be viewed as some sort of sex pest, but as I turned off one of the main avenues that runs through the Tiergarten, there he was.

And then there they were. Sprawled out on a lush green lawn, alone, in pairs, or even in small groups, the men and women of Berlin basked in the warm April sun, their clothes piled neatly beside them. No-one stared as they walked past, and there were no signs to warn tourists that they were about to enter an area where – gasp – it was ok to strip off and let it all hang out. It felt relaxed. It felt normal.

It’s not just Berlin, either. In Munich’s Englischer Garten, there’s a large area down by the stream where nudity is encouraged. In Hamburg, no-one bats an eyelid at the sight of someone casually disrobing outside their building. German saunas expect you to be naked during treatments – swimsuits are considered unhygienic and, frankly, a bit ridiculous, given what you’re there for.

There are restrictions, of course. A little digging reveals that, in fact, Munich has only very recently made public nudity fully legal, and has created six areas around the city specifically for that purpose. In most places, you will still raise eyebrows (and almost certainly a few complaints) if you stroll casually through the town centre in your birthday suit. However, my German friends inform me that as long as you’re not forcing your nudity onto other people in an aggressive or political way, you’re largely free to strip off in most big city parks, in the forest, or on both coastal and inland beaches.

I didn’t join the naked sunbathers in the Tiergarten – the hot weather had caught me slightly by surprise (and without suncream), so I was desperately trying to cover up every inch of my pale, freckled skin – but as I left them behind and headed for the Grosser Stern in the centre of the park, I thought about how good it felt to be in a country where, to some extent, nudity is considered normal. We tend to forget that the evolutionary reason for clothing is to protect us against the elements; modesty is a social (and religious) construct, as is body-shame. There is nothing wrong with wanting to cover up, but equally there’s nothing wrong with the desire to be naked, and the Germans (and Scandinavians) understand that better than most. They realise that nudity doesn’t have to be sexual – one you acknowledge that, the reasons for criminalising it begin to seem mildly ridiculous.

Nudity doesn’t have to be sexual, but I’m pretty sure that in addition to creating a more open and tolerant environment, a relaxation in nudity laws (or in attitudes towards nudity) would have a positive impact on our sex lives. That’s not rocket science, of course: the more comfortable we are with our bodies, and with the idea of bodies in general, the better we’re likely to be in bed.

I was 15 the first time I went naked in public. It was on a beach in France, in the middle of a family holiday; on our first day there, I’d noticed that a lot of the bathers didn’t bother with swimsuits, either in the sea or on the sand, so the next morning I sneaked off the campsite, heart thumping in my chest, and went down to the beach to join them. I don’t really know why I did it, except that I was curious, and felt liberated by the time away from school and my hometown, where I was negotiating the most awkward phase of pubescent change, and couldn’t imagine being naked in front of anyone. On the beach, away from my family, and even further away from the girls (and boys) at school, it was different. I only stayed down there for 20 minutes or so, but as I walked along the sand, self-conscious at first and sort-of proud by the time I finished, I realised some pretty important things about myself and my body – things I’d forget many times over the years, of course, but which at the time made me feel a lot better about life.

It was also the first time I really thought about nudity. When I was a kid, they used to draw the big, heavy curtain across the viewing gallery windows at the swimming pool before the weekly naturist session, so I’d been conditioned to view it as something that shouldn’t be public – something to hide away and protect people from. When I took my clothes off down on the beach, all that went away somehow. Suddenly naturists weren’t weird or creepy or perverted – they were just people who enjoyed being naked. If French families in their shorts, t-shirts, bikinis and swimming trunks could relax on the beach next to their naked compatriots, rather than shunting them off to a separate, secluded stretch of sand, maybe people who enjoyed being naked shouldn’t be defined by that at all.

I thought about most of that much later. At the time, and in the immediate aftermath, I was mainly just incredibly horny. Not at the sight of other naked people – it was more the knowledge that they could see me. It was a little embarrassing getting hard in public, but no-one seemed to care, and that felt amazing too. I mean, I was 15, so I did a lot of wanking on that holiday anyway, but for about 48 hours after my trip to the beach I could barely keep my hand off my cock. That was mainly the novelty, I think, mixed in with the first real emergence of the exhibitionism I wrote about the other day.

In Berlin, and in other places where I’ve seen people relaxing naked, with no fear of being stigmatised or shamed for it, I’ve always felt very happy, but I’ve also usually gone away with a bit of a buzz between my legs. Maybe that’s because I grew up in a country where public nudity was considered taboo, so it still carries with it that thrill of the forbidden. If so (and as much as I’d like to have my cake and eat it), the unselfish part of me would like to see that fade with time: yes, being bad will always be hot, but as long as taking your clothes off in public continues to push that button, it will be a sign that as a society we’re still not ok with something that ought to be seen as perfectly normal.

I live at the top of a seven-storey building, right in the centre of Warsaw. It’s quiet – just three apartments on each floor – and right next to a park, two supermarkets, three tram stops, and a bunch of restaurants. My flat has a cosy bedroom, a well-equipped kitchen, a fancy shower, a big living-room, and a log fire. It costs me a fraction of what I’d pay in London for the same amount of space; actually, it costs me a fraction of what I’d pay for half the space.

I love all of those things about this place. None of them are what I love the most though.

Next to the living-room sofa there’s a glass door. It opens out onto my balcony. If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ll have caught a glimpse of my balcony before. It’s where I keep logs for the fire and the mini barbeque that I’ve sworn to myself I’ll use before I leave. It’s covered, so I can go out there even when the rest of the city is getting wet, and it’s big enough that it feels like a proper outdoor space, rather than an architectural afterthought.

I really love my balcony.

—

Like a lot of people, I reluctantly accept the need to attach labels to my sexuality. Labels are a shortcut – a way to avoid having to explain everything to everyone – and they also help to make us feel less isolated in our desires. We get to put on whichever hat we think suits us best and head out into the world in the knowledge that we’ll find others wearing it too. The hat – the label – is how we recognise them, and how we narrow down the vast pool of potential partners.

My reluctance stems from the fact that quite a few of the labels I apply to myself come with a caveat. Straight? Yeah, sure, but I do like looking at other dudes’ cocks, and occasionally I want to do more than that. Switch? Absolutely…with the right person. With others, I’m a full-on top, and then there are those I only really want to sub for: it’s complicated. Am I monogamous or polyamorous? Vanilla or kinky? Am I a hedonist? A slut? A tease? The answer to all of those is almost always ‘it depends’.

That’s a problem, because with a lot of the hats we put on, we’re not just telling other people ‘I am this’, we’re also telling them ‘I’m not that’. I’m not always comfortable with that level of certainty – I usually prefer to hedge my bets, and leave some of those doors open. Usually…but not always…

I am an exhibitionist. I am not a voyeur.

I enjoy watching people have sex. I enjoy watching my partner masturbate. However, it’s not the act of watching itself that turns me on: it has to have context, and it has to tap into other areas of my sexuality. Tie me to a chair and fuck another guy in front of me, and I’ll be so achingly hard that I might come before you even touch my cock. Not because I get to watch you, but because the kinky submissive in me has a massive boner for that particular kind of power game. I want to hear you moan as you slide down onto his dick, and listen as you tell me how big he is, how perfectly he fills you up. I want to see the look on your face as you come. You can flip it round too. Maybe instead of being tied to the chair, I’m the one in control. Maybe I’ve told you to pick someone up in a club, and now you’re on your knees in front of him, sucking him off while I tell you what to do, his cock deep in your throat, hating and loving it all at the same time.

Watching without context does nothing for me. It’s one of the reasons why I rarely bother with porn. I worry that if I went to a sex party on my own, it would be just like every other party I go to without knowing any of the other guests; I’d end up spending the first couple of hours skulking around the fringes, too awkward to start a conversation with someone and not bothered about watching a bunch of strangers fuck each other, however hot they happen to be.

I’m an exhibitionist because when it comes to being watched, by and large I couldn’t really give a fuck about context. It doesn’t matter whether I’m stripping for someone (or for a group of people), masturbating for them, or fucking when I know we have an audience, I get off on being naked and sexual in front of others. It’s one of the few hats that I’ve tried on, and found to be a perfect fit.

—

By the end of the Second World War, 95% of Warsaw had been razed to the ground. It was rebuilt in fairly piecemeal fashion: first by the Soviets; then by the socialist government Moscow left behind; and finally by the investors and corporations that flooded into Poland after the Berlin Wall fell, and especially after EU membership was achieved in 2004. It means that the skyline is an odd mix of just about anything and everything you might imagine. Warsaw is not a beautiful city – not in the conventional sense – but it’s a city I’ll never tire of walking around or looking at.

My building dates from the 1980s, as do most of the residential blocks around it. The handful closest to my flat are a couple of storeys shorter, so when I go out onto the balcony, all I can see in the foreground are rooftops. As well as a great view over the city, that gives me a lot of privacy: I can do pretty much whatever I like out there, without having to worry about other people seeing me. Not only that, from my lofty vantage point I can peer down into literally dozens of the surrounding apartments.

A voyeur’s dream; an exhibitionist’s nightmare. I often stand naked on my balcony, and while it’s liberating to be able to do that completely consequence-free, there are times when I’d prefer to imagine that someone might be watching me, especially on those occasions when I get hard and start to touch myself.

For that, I have to direct my gaze a little further out, to a building roughly 200 metres away from mine and 15 storeys high. It’s a building I noticed on the day I moved here, because it immediately brought to mind one of my favourite bits of album artwork, from one of my favourite albums: Original Pirate Material, by The Streets.

 

I love the pattern of lights in the photo; the knowledge that it would be completely different the following night, and different again the night after that. I have the same thing here. When I go out onto my balcony in the evenings and stare across at that building, I see a new picture each time.

It’s too far away for me to know what’s behind each of the windows. It’s also too far away for anyone who lives there to see me…unless they’re actively trying. If they are, I’ll never know about it. I’ll never know who’s standing next to the window with a pair of binoculars, watching me walk around naked. It could be a woman. It could be another guy. It could be a couple, fucking up against their own balcony as they pass the binoculars between them and stare down at me. It could be a group of women, drinking wine and giggling at how soft and small my dick looks in the chilly evening air.

It could be anyone. I find that really hot, because it allows me to project all of my own fantasies onto them. The woman watching me? She’s shy and sexually inexperienced, but since the first time she saw me out on my balcony, pumping my hand up and down over my cock, she hasn’t been able to get me out of her head; each night she takes up her post at the window in the hope that I’ll do it again, so she can mirror my rhythm on her own clit and come with one hand clutching at the curtain to hold herself upright.

The other guy? A top, and probably an experienced one. He casually jerks off while he waits for his boyfriend to come over. They talk about it in bed after they’ve fucked, and the top suggests tracking me down to see whether I’d be interested in joining them. He likes the look of my arse: it would feel good around his dick, he says. As they discuss it, both of them start to get hard again.

The couple? Well they’ve been talking about spicing things up in the bedroom for a while. She quite fancies going to a sex club, while he’d much prefer just to go to a bar and bring someone back home with them. She thinks he wants to see her with another woman, but when he fucks her from behind on the balcony and it’s his turn to squint through the binoculars, what makes his cock twitch inside her is the thought of watching her suck me off, right there in the bed they share.

And the group of women? That taps right into the CFNM fetish that I got so preoccupied with last night. They’re fresh out of university, and drunk on cheap wine and the thrill of being out in the big wide world. There are four of them. One’s gay, but hasn’t told the others, while the rest bounce from one guy to the next, too young to worry about settling down into anything serious. They laugh about sex together, and swap stories about the guys they’ve been with. Who was great in bed; who couldn’t get it up; who lasted all of 30 seconds and then cried when he came. They spotted me by accident, but now they’re having fun inventing a whole history for me and making crude jokes at my expense.

I know I’m an exhibitionist because the idea of being watched is what acts as the foundation for all of those fantasies. It’s the only common theme: it can turn me on whether I’m feeling dominant, submissive or neither; whether I’m thinking about women, men, or a combination of the two.

When I’m naked on my balcony, I get so aroused by the idea that people might be looking at my body, and working it into fantasies of their own, that I often have to make myself come while I’m out there. Sometimes I have my eyes closed, but usually I stare straight over at the pattern of lights, pick a window in my mind, and think about who might be standing behind it.

I wrote the first two parts of this a couple of months ago. You can find them here and here. If you haven’t read them, I suggest checking them out before going any further.

—

Going right back to the original set of questions, the hardest to answer is the one concerning all the things I’d like to do with other guys. In large part, that’s because it carries with it the thrill of the unknown: on the one hand, there are so many possibilities, scenarios, and even small-but-oh-so-sexy variations on scenarios that I barely know where to start; on the other, almost all of them are accompanied by the caveat that I only think I’d enjoy them. Yes, it’s a lot of fun to lie in bed with my cock in my hand and a butt plug filling my arse, fantasising about being tied up on my knees and forced to suck half-a-dozen cocks one after the other, but without any real reference point to draw on, I have no idea how I’d feel about that if someone did want to try it.

Ah, and that’s fairly crucial: the ‘someone’. It’s also where this issue ties in with my wider sexuality, and in particular with my feelings on power, control, and submission. All of my hottest guy-related fantasies unfold either through the eyes of a female partner, or at her instruction/command. I’ve written four pieces of erotica that focus on M/M sex (Brother Simeon, Ruled, Your Turn and Room 317): two of them feature a female protagonist, and three were largely shaped by conversations I had before I wrote them with women I was seeing at the time. I wanted to know what they found sexy about the idea of guys doing stuff together, and when they told me, I built that into the action; I’ve always been turned-on by the idea (and the reality) of being watched and directed, so tapping into that kink produced super-charged versions of the M/M fantasies that already existed in my head.

For that reason, any honest account of the things I’d genuinely like to do with other guys in the future probably has to include the assumption of some sort of female involvement. If I’m alone in my flat on a Thursday night and feeling horny, I’m unlikely to head down to the local gay bar in search of someone to suck off; nor is there much chance of me turning to Grindr rather than OkCupid if I decide to look for a new partner online. However, chuck in a dominant – or just incredibly kinky – woman who I’m eager to please, and things might be a little different:

“I want you to do something for me – think you’ve got the balls to try it?”

“Yes…yes, please tell me and I’ll do it”

“Good boy. I want you to go down to The Castle Tavern – no, don’t pretend you don’t know where that is, you little slut – I want you to go down there and find a guy to take you out into the alley, push you to your knees, and fill your mouth with his cock. Get him to take a photo of you sucking him, so I can see you gagging on his big dick.”

Then…well, I certainly wouldn’t rule it out, put it that way.

Girl on the Net wrote a fantastic piece last week about great sex being more than just the sum total of a bunch of basic physical sensations. It needs context – not love, necessarily, I’m not saying that – but something tied up in the person or people you’re with, to lift it above your morning wank, and make it worth all the time, effort and emotional baggage. M/M sex for me is about that woman too, whoever she might be, and about the dynamic between us.

With that presence of someone who I trust with both my physical and mental limits, and who cares (in a wider sense) about my pleasure as well as her own, there are lots of things I’d like to try. Some of them are obvious: I’ve written before about how much I enjoy receiving anal, and I’m pretty sure that even the best dildo, in the hands of the most skilful woman, can’t compare to the feeling of a real cock pushing inside my arse. Why wouldn’t I want to find that out for myself? Or to discover what it’s like to have someone come inside me. After all, I’ve been told by various women over the years how good it feels when my cock thickens inside them, right at the end, and leaves them with an arse full of cum – that’s got to be a pretty fucking universally awesome sensation, right?

Right. So there’s that. But there’s also the glorious prospect of the unknown. I’m on familiar terms with my own body at this point. I know what my dick looks like and how hard it gets. I know how I fuck. How my cum tastes. What noises I make. How much I sweat. The way my body responds to different forms of pressure or stimulation. I project all of that onto my mental picture of M/M sex and onto the M/M scenes I write, as well as borrowing liberally from the porn I’ve seen and the erotica I’ve read. However, as Cara Sutra pointed out when she debunked the various myths about lesbian sex, seeing isn’t doing. Fantasizing isn’t doing. Writing about a bunch of horny monks having a gang-bang certainly isn’t doing. Sex with another guy is something I have a set of ideas about, but there’s every chance the reality is different – and maybe, just maybe, better – than the hypothetical version I carry around with me. It’ll feel different, and taste different, and look different, and new stuff will happen. Stuff I’m not prepared for, or which pushes my boundaries in ways I hadn’t considered before. Stuff I’ll like. Stuff I won’t. Stuff I’ll have to go away and think about afterwards, because hey, I just don’t know how it makes me feel.

Yes, newness in sex is routinely overrated. Your first time might have been really good, but it probably wasn’t the best you’ve ever had. Same goes for the first night when you decided to tie someone up, or have sex on the beach, or try that new position you saw in Cosmo which, it turns out, requires an advanced degree in Engineering and a partner who medalled in Gymnastics at the London Olympics. Newness is exciting and fun, and gives you the same butterflies you had as a teenager when your high-school crush walked past you in the corridor, but in sexual terms it’s not what pays the bills.

I like the stuff that pays the bills. A lot. I love gentle missionary sex with someone I’ve known for years. I can think of few things better than waking up next to a woman I care about, yanking down her PJ bottoms, curling my body round hers, and having sleepy Sunday morning sex that lasts all of five minutes before we both doze off again. It makes me happy to know my own body inside-out, and even happier when I have a partner of whom I can say the same. All of those things are great. The best, in fact. And yet…

I don’t want to die wondering. When I was a horny 21-year-old virgin, I wanted to have sex not for the status it gives you, or the stigma it removes, but to know, to really know what it felt like. I’m as insatiably curious now as I was then, so when people say to me “hey, you fantasize about taking another man’s cock in your hand/mouth/arse, right…well what would you want to do if you actually had one in front of you?”, my answer is “EVERYTHING”.

It would require context, trust, and ideally the presence of a female partner who could push all the right buttons and really make me crave it, but ultimately what I want is to take all of the hot ideas in my head, chuck them into a soundproof room, strip naked, and dive right in. If you want to know what that looks like then please, come in and take a seat. Just shut the door behind you. This could take a while…

There are lots of words I enjoy hearing during sex.

Hard, dirty words: Fuck. Cock. Cunt.

Softer words, full of aching need: Please. Now. Yesssss.

Words that command and words that beg. Words whispered and words pitched somewhere between a shout and a scream. Words strung together with a precise, casually devastating elegance, and words forced out in a jumbled, incoherent mess.

Words are good. All of them. Almost all of them. Because there’s one word I really don’t want to hear during sex: my name.

Before sex, yes, fine. When I’m kneeling naked on the floor and you’re in front of me, tossing out instructions: absolutely.

But not when everything is hot and smudged and blurry. Not when I’m pounding into you and there’s a buzzing in our heads, and both of us are struggling to remember our own names, let alone anyone else’s.

Not even if we’re draped naked around each other, a soft-focus tangle of limbs and sheets, barely moving because it’s enough to stay still and feel. When you say it then, it drags me out of the moment; I feel it float between us and cut at the natural intimacy that our bodies have created.

It’s not a horrible name, nor an ugly one. I like to hear it in the street, when a friend catches sight of me and shouts a hello, or to read it written down in a card from someone I care about. I’m identified by it – called by it – addressed by it, and that’s just fine.

In bed, though, I don’t need it for those things. Identify me by smelling my skin, or running your fingers through my hair. Call me by moving my hand down between your legs – or by placing yours between mine. Address me with your lips and your fingers, then press our bodies close together – believe me, I’ll pay attention.

Tack my name onto any of those and it suddenly feels out of place – a little porny, and not in a hot way. Like you’ve added it consciously – too consciously – to show that it’s me you want.

There are other ways to do that. Better ways. Hotter ways.

“Baby, say my name.”

Baby…please just don’t.

Last week I had a drink in a London pub I’d last visited a couple of years ago, with a woman I was seeing at the time. Her name was Nathalie, and although the relationship was both short and fairly casual, sitting in that pub immediately brought her face to mind.

We ended up there after dinner one night, on what must have been about our fourth date. We’d certainly already slept together a couple of times, because halfway through a very good bottle of red wine, it was the sex that we started to discuss. Both times we’d fucked, Nathalie had asked me to stop just as I was about to come, then had got me to peel off the condom, lie on my back, and jerk off all over myself (“Pretend I’m not even here”) while she knelt next to me and watched. Just watched, mind: she hadn’t wanted to touch either herself or me, and each time I came she gave a contented little sigh and snuggled down next to me with her head on my shoulder.

As far as I was concerned that was all just fine – I have no problem with being watched – but I’m nosy by nature, especially when it comes to sex, so I felt compelled to ask her about it. She told me that it was something she asked all her boyfriends to do for her: not as a power trip, nor because she disliked the sensation of someone coming inside her – it was purely a visual thing. When she was younger and still a virgin, she’d watched a porn clip in which the camera had hovered over a guy as he lay supine, then pulled back to film him masturbating from the same position she’d occupied each time we’d re-enacted that scenario. I tried to get her to describe what made it so hot, but she shook her head and told me that although it was the source of her fetish, it was no longer the clip itself that turned her on; instead it served as a visual prompt for the various memories she had of watching lovers wank for her like that.

Watching a guy touch himself made her wetter than anything, she said. Her voice got softer and lower as she described the sense of anticipation she felt when she sat back on her heels, post-orgasm, next to her lover’s thigh. She watched because she wanted to see how he gripped his cock, and whether he stroked it slowly or with short, urgent jerks; but most of all, she wanted to listen to his grunts, and watch his hips pump upwards, pushing his cock through his curled fist. She liked the way most dicks seemed to twitch just before orgasm, and she said that when she knew for certain that a guy was about to come, she could never decide whether to watch the spunk shooting out over his stomach and chest, or whether just to stare at his face as he lost himself in the moment.

At the time, Nathalie’s description of her voyeuristic fetish turned me on so much that 20 minutes later we were back at her place, fucking on her kitchen table. When I thought about it again the other day, I realised that although Nathalie’s devotion to that one specific image may have represented an extreme, her general interest in watching was something she shared with most of my other partners.

The “men like pictures, women prefer words” nonsense has been beaten down with far bigger sticks than mine, but what my sexual experiences over the last few years have shown me is just how varied, and clearly defined, our visual preferences can be. Even with something as simple as watching me masturbate, every woman who’s asked to do that has wanted something different.

One liked me to straddle her chest, so she could look up and see everything above her, all the way up to the look on my face as I touched myself. Another preferred me to kneel on the floor and do it, while she sat on the bed and stroked my hair: she would pull me forward just as I was getting close, so the cum would always end up all over my thighs and the floor in front of me.

I have one ex who sometimes asked me to wear her knickers while I wanked. She used to get me to put them on about half an hour beforehand, then tease me till I was so hard that the material stretched painfully around my cock. Only then would she let me touch it, standing in front of her with the knickers pulled down just far enough for me to wrap my hand around the shaft.

More recently, I was in bed with a woman who asked me to show her how I masturbate when I’m on my own. I lay on my side and she spooned me, her breasts squished against my back and her chin resting on my shoulder, so she could watch it from my perspective.

Different angles, different positions. Different power dynamics too, because sometimes I’m the one in charge, taking my pleasure and using the sight of her body to get myself off, while she just lies there and watches. Different ways of getting started, and different ways of finishing – on me, on her, or, with one lover, in her mouth…she used to swoop in just as I was about to come, and that would be the only time our bodies touched during the whole process.

Porn has its issues, but one positive thing it’s done for the way we fuck is to expand the library of hot visual images that we carry round in our heads – images that we can feed into what we do with our partners. A lot has rightly been written about the negative impact of porn on sexual expectations among young men, but with the women I’ve dated or talked to about it (especially those without much sexual experience of their own to fall back on), porn has helped to crystallize and enhance the specific visual triggers for their arousal. That, in turn, has given them the confidence to ask for what they want, and the clarity to describe it in detail.

I’m not sure there’s a wider point to this post. I started off with the intention of framing it in the context of routines, and how even when we’re watching someone else do something, we all have particular details or scenarios that turn us on. It irritates me that ‘routine’ is a word often used in a negative way, because as great – as bloody amazing – as variety can be, the reality is that most of us find comfort and an easy satisfaction in our sexual bread-and-butter, whatever that happens to involve.

In the end though, it wasn’t routine I thought about as I typed. Instead I thought about each of the women who’ve asked me to wank for them, and about how hot it is to have a specific scenario described or requested. It’s hot because in asking for something in that much detail, the other person is not only showing that they’re confident and positive in their own sexuality (a real turn-on in itself), they’re also opening up a part of their brain – a really fucking sexy part of their brain – and letting me peek inside. I get to see exactly what she fantasizes about, and I get to know that when I masturbate with her eyes on me, I’m tapping directly into one of those fantasies – tapping into it, and creating more images for her to file away and use at some point in the future. It basically makes me think about her wanking, and desperate, frenzied girlwanking is a whole other level of hotness.

Last week, I asked the lovely – if eternally self-deprecating and geographically-challenged – Charlie Powell to tag me into this literary blog-hop business. It felt like a great idea at the time, and like most things that fall into that category it gradually unravelled over the following few days, as I realised that I have pretty much nothing of interest to say about the process of writing. To wit:

What am I working on?

Absolutely bugger-all. For starters, I don’t really ‘work on’ things. It’s why despite the fact that I’m sure I have several novels in me, none of them are likely to find their way out; I lack the discipline to pull together the various strands of a longer, more complex piece of work, so I content myself with churning out blog-posts and short stories, as and when the mood takes me.

Right now I have a couple of ideas in my head , but they’re liable to find themselves on the back burner at any given moment, as there’s every chance I’ll find myself standing in the middle of the street tonight, or tomorrow lunchtime, overcome by the need to bash out 800 words on, say, the etiquette of checking out another guy’s dick in the showers at the gym. Seriously, it could happen.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

That’s a hard question to answer without sounding like a bit of a wanker. Ah, ok, so a good friend recently said this about my work: “you’re writing has a direct, gritty male edge to it, but it lacks the cock-swinging vibe.” It was so lovely a compliment that I even forgave her the superfluous apostrophe, and while I can certainly swing my cock with the best of them, I’d agree that I at least aim for a harder, more pared-down style than a lot of other writers. It can work in my favour, but it also sits alongside my chronic lack of focus as a barrier to writing longer pieces of fiction; I’m not all that interested in dealing with back story, expository dialogue, or fully fleshed-out characters. I tend to zero in on the sex, especially if I’m writing ‘pure’ erotica.

When it comes to blogging, I write in large part to explain and understand various elements of my own sexuality and body image. That tends to result in pieces that reveal a lot about my past, as well as some of what other people might consider my more intimate thoughts and feelings about myself. However, in that respect I’m not sure I’m really that different to various other bloggers who write about sex.

Why do I write what I do?

I misunderstood Charlie’s tweet about taking part in the bloghop, and replied to it with what could probably serve as my full answer to this question: ‘everyone needs a hobby’. I’m not a professional writer, nor have I been bitten by the bug to the extent that I can’t imagine a life without writing. Right now, I write because I enjoy it. I feel like it’s a good way of keeping my brain busy, and I get a kick out of trying to create something that other people will find arousing or thought-provoking. I write about sex specifically because that’s what feels most natural and compelling when I sit down at my laptop.

A lot of the stuff I write – the fiction, in particular – revolves around M/M sex, male submission, and threesomes. Set against that is the fact that in my own sex life, I identify as a switch, who would rate as, at best, a 1.5 on the Kinsey Scale, and has very little experience with group sex. My writing skews one way because most of my personal experiences skew the other: with the majority of my sexual partners, I’ve been cast in a very clearly dominant role, and my same-sex encounters could be totted up on one hand, with digits to spare. Writing helps me to explore – and to some extent satisfy – the desires I have that otherwise go largely unfulfilled.

How does my writing process work?

I’ve probably answered this question in bits and pieces already, but I’ll try to distil those into a quick summary.

At some point, I get an idea in my head, or I’m asked by someone to write about a particular topic. Occasionally I’ll sit down there and then, and tap away at the keyboard till I’ve poured all my thoughts out onto the screen. More typically though, I’ll wait for the evening to come, then set up at the table in my living room with a glass bottle of wine. If the words come easily, I’ll almost always finish what I’m writing in one session, but I know myself well enough by now to stop and do something else if it’s just not flowing, rather than stay in front of my laptop getting ever more frustrated.

When I finish a story, I sometimes ask for feedback from someone whose input I value, but even if it’s just a short piece that I want to whack up on my blog, I’ll always at least check for spelling, grammar, clumsy or repetitive vocab, and obvious errors. I may not take this very seriously overall, but I have enough pride in my work not to send it out into the world looking shabby and dog-eared.

I recently submitted a couple of pieces to Alison Tyler for her Kink anthology, and putting those together did make me reconsider certain aspects of the writing process. If either gets published, perhaps it’ll be a sign that a more structured approach is worth persevering with.

—

Like Charlie, I haven’t got as far as finding three bloggers to pass this onto. If you would like me to tag you, or are willing to accept a hefty bribe in order to make me look like less of a Billy No-Mates, please drop me an email.

A couple of weeks ago, Girl on the Net posted a great piece about her three magic sex words: I’m gonna come. Those definitely do it for me too, both for their simple hotness and, I think, because when I first started having sex they always came as the most wonderful surprise. You’re going to have an orgasm? Really? And I did that to you?? Even now that I’ve got used to that feeling, “I’m gonna come” remains an aural trigger for something that’s happy and joyful, as well as arousing.

That’s not what I want to write about today though. I’ve made it pretty clear in previous posts that I identify as a switch: I get to top far more regularly than I get to bottom, but in an ideal world the split would be close to even. However, that doesn’t mean I enjoy the same things in both roles. Nipples, for example: biting yours – yep, great, bring it on; having my own bitten – I’d really rather not. Same goes for stripping: when I’m feeling submissive, not much turns me on more than having to strip slowly at another’s command, but as a top, watching you strip does far less for me than a bunch of the things I can do once I’ve got you naked and vulnerable. There are countless other examples, and that makes total sense; we like different things with different people, and in different power scenarios too.

There is also plenty of crossover though, and one of the biggest areas involves my four magic sex words, the ones that always make me feel light-headed and shivery.

“Don’t come. Not yet.”

A bit of background. A few years ago, I was involved with a married woman. She lived in a different part of the country, and we only got to meet up in person a handful of times, but we spoke on the phone almost every day. She would get home from work, go to her bedroom, and call me; some days I’d be home too, but often I’d still be at the office, or on the bus, or even just walking around town.

On the days when we were both feeling horny, we’d get each other off over the phone. I would always take the lead in those conversations, and they usually built up in roughly the same way.

“Please…I’m so close. I really want to”

“No. Don’t come. Not yet.”

It didn’t really matter what fantasy I was describing, or what filthy words I was whispering to her while she touched herself. The point would always come where her breathing got ragged and desperate, and she would ask me – beg me – for permission to come. And I would always say no. It would be “no” the first time she asked, “no” the second time, and probably “no” for a fair while after that.

Sometimes I made her listen to me come before I allowed her to do so. I would tell her to thrust her vibrator all the way inside and just hold it there, then I’d stop talking for a bit and just stroke my cock, knowing how much harder the sound of my orgasm would make it to keep her own in check.

I mostly let her decide what to do with her fingers and toys, though not always. What I was really interested in was controlling her orgasm. I got so turned on by the feeling of power it gave me, and by the trust she placed in me when she allowed me to make that decision for her. It was like a drug: every time I said those four words, my dopamine levels would spike and I’d get a surge of pleasure rushing through my body, especially when she cursed me or called me cruel and heartless.

I still get that same satisfaction from keeping someone right on the edge and not allowing her to come, especially if I know her body well enough that she doesn’t have to tell me when to step in and pull her back.

However, these days I also absolutely adore having those roles reversed. I hate it too, of course: when I’m so close that I can feel the pressure building in my balls, the last thing I want to do is stop…and that’s the beauty of subbing for someone who knows my body and my limits. I might not want to stop, but that becomes secondary to the desire to please the person to whom I’ve surrendered control. Not because I’m forced to do so, or because I’ll be punished if I don’t – no, that desire exists as something positive, active, and rooted in my own free will. I can choose to ignore it at any point, and that’s what makes it sexy – the realisation that I don’t want to. I might be desperate to come, but I’m even more desperate to be a good sub, and to do as I’m told. The act of choosing to do one thing, right at the moment when my body is screaming at me to do another, is what makes being told not to come so much hotter than anything involving chastity devices.

So it doesn’t really matter which one of us says those four magic words:

“Don’t come. Not yet.”

Whether I’m feeling dominant or submissive, whether we’re together in person or playing from a distance, they do it for me every single time.