Exhibit A

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?”