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Erotica

Strong Foundations

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.

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Cock shots Other photos Sinful Sunday

Sinful Sunday: Watched

I have this fantasy. About being watched.

I mean, I have a lot of fantasies about being watched. I’m an exhibitionist, after all.

But this one is different. This one is specific.

It starts in the bathroom. You’re clothed. I…am not. “I like watching you strip,” you say. “But now I want to watch you shower.”

Who am I to tell you no?*

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Uncategorized

Warsaw

I’m on record as being, um, ‘not a fan’ of erotic poetry. There are exceptions, of course, and if you hand me a collection of e e cummings‘ finest (or anything by Ashley Lister), I’ll be as happy as the next man, but in general it does absolutely nothing for me. And by ‘absolutely nothing’, I mean ‘makes me want to put my own eyes out with a hot poker just to escape the horror that is your painful, clunky and pretentious verse.’

…which is not to say that I’m not also capable of painful, clunky and pretentious verse. I haven’t written erotic poetry for a long, long time, but a little over nine months ago, as I prepared to leave my life in Warsaw, I attempted to capture my feelings about what had become my city in the poem below. I’m posting it here tonight because I feel a sudden, inexplicable longing for my apartment there, and for the wide, open streets around it; for the flashes of sky that slice down between the buildings, instead of hundreds of feet above them.

London is great. It’s where I lay my head at night – and even if it remains that way till I’m 100 years old, I will never exhaust its myriad wonders. No man could. My soul though? That lies in Oxford and its sleepy surrounding towns, but also right at the heart of the city I briefly called home. Perhaps I’ll do so again one day.

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Cock shots

Sunshine & Shades of Grey

I haven’t been in much of a writing mood for the last couple of weeks, and I also missed the latest Sinful Sunday through what could only be described as sheer laziness, so this post is a bit of a placeholder to address both of those things.

For anyone who’s interested, I should be guest-posting very soon over at Malin James‘ place, with a piece about sexual curiosity. I can also be found in this article by Girl on the Net for The Debrief, which went up yesterday; it’s about THAT movie, and what happens when you take a bunch of people who do know kink to see it. GOTN was kind enough to ply us all with booze before the post-movie discussion began, which is probably evident in a few of the comments.

I aim to get off my arse and write something ‘proper’ very soon, but until then I’ll mainly just be hanging out in my apartment, enjoying the warm sunshine flooding in through my balcony window.

Naked, of course.

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Sex

Interviews, flirting, and why so many people get them wrong

In the last week, I’ve had two first-round job interviews, with a third looming this afternoon. I’m good at first interviews – I’d go as far as to say I’m a bit of an expert – and having sat on both sides of the table many times over the years, I have a pretty well-rounded view of what good (and really, really bad!) looks like.

In the context of this blog, I find first interviews interesting because they share a number of obvious features with flirting – right down to the mistakes people make when conceptualising, characterising and conducting them.

The biggest of those is to view both interactions as one-dimensional and goal-orientated; and on top of that, to buy into a narrow, conventional view of what that goal should be. If you go into a first-round job interview thinking that your main – or only – objective is to sell yourself to the company you’re seeing, you’re missing the point; likewise, if you can’t see flirting as anything other than the intermediate step between meeting a potential partner/bedmate and ‘sealing the deal’, you not only reduce your chances of achieving that objective, you take a whole load of other possibilities out of play at the same time.

Let me be clearer: the aim in both situations is not simply to impress the other person. Take that approach, and you set up an immediate power imbalance that just shouldn’t exist. You put yourself in the position of having to do all the legwork; you imply that you’re the one who has to convince them, because your mind is already made up. It’s like playing a hand of heads-up poker and showing your opponent both of your cards before the betting starts.

This isn’t about being coy, or playing hard to get. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be direct and up front with the person interviewing you; nor that you should hide your attraction to someone when you flirt with them. Bluffing is an overrated skill at the poker table, and it’s even less useful when talking about your CV or chatting someone up at the bar. Just as you can represent your hand in an honest way and still make your opponent think about how to engage with it, so you can be yourself in an interview, or during playful conversation, without ceding control of the outcome to the other person.

That’s especially true when neither of you has a particular outcome in mind. When I sit down with an interviewer for the first time, I usually have no idea whether or not I want the job; in fact, sometimes I know for certain that I don’t. Those meetings should be treated as exploratory conversations; a chance for both of you to get a feel for whether there’s a ‘spark’. I do little in the way of preparation, because the aim is not to show off how much I know about the company. I’m not there to jump through hoops, I’m there to have a chat to someone who I may or may not want to talk to again further down the line. As far as I’m concerned, the onus is on them to impress me – to give me a reason to want to work with them – just as much as it is on me to impress them.

And you know what? Taking that approach can be really fucking hard sometimes. In January 2013, I’d been out of work for over four months, and was starting to get desperate. I was miserable, I was running out of cash, and all I wanted was for someone – anyone – to give me a job. Rather than playing it cool in interviews, I felt like getting down on my knees and begging the other person to help me out. With every passing day, the stakes got just a little bit higher, along with my anxiety levels; as they rose, so did the volume of the voice in my head, whispering “don’t fuck this up” over and over again.

It’s both fine and natural to feel that way…but it’s even better if you can stop it translating into actions and behaviour. That’s exactly why I make myself go to interviews for jobs I neither want nor need. Honing your technique when the pressure’s off is ultimately the key to overcoming interview nerves, and to maintaining a calm, conversational approach even when chasing the job of your dreams. It’s Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule in miniature: practice hard enough, build up your muscle memory, and your chances of success increase accordingly. Beyond that, you also give yourself a chance to play around with different (and hopefully better) ways of representing yourself, or your skills and experience.

Flirting works in a very similar way, albeit usually with less at stake. It’s also why it ought to be viewed more as a recreational activity – an end in itself – rather than as part of a wider process. I flirt frequently, casually, and – some have said – incorrigibly. I flirt that way mainly because I enjoy it, but also because I don’t see it as something that’s goal-orientated. It’s fun, pressure-free conversation, and if it turns into anything more, that should be seen as a bonus.

Drawing parallels between first-round job interviews and flirting is easy, obvious…and frequently, dishearteningly wrong. Yes, both require eye contact, and smiling, and confidence, and all the rest of it, but to focus on those things is to miss the more fundamental key to success: namely to approach each activity not as if you have to make a sale at the end of it, but instead as a pleasant, initial conversation that’s a good worth having in its own right.

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Sinful Sunday: Airport Hotels

At six o’clock on Friday morning, I flew to Marrakech for the weekend. The early flight necessitated either catching a bus from Central London in the middle of the night, or holing up for a few hours in the airport Radisson; despite the additional expense, I was always going to choose the latter.

Is that mainly because I place a disproportionately high value on a decent night’s sleep? Perhaps…but alongside any practical considerations sat one compelling, indisputable fact: airport hotels are sexy.

Actually, airports are sexy full-stop. Maybe not always – at their worst, they can be dull, dreary, depressing, or a mixture of the three – but pass through one on the right day, in the right mood, for the right reason, and they positively hum with the promise of desire soon to be fulfilled.

The hotels attached to them are even more of a tease. Their bars host a heady mix of bored business travellers, giddy holidaymakers, and those left in limbo by cancelled flights or lengthy layovers. Most airports sit miles away from the cities they serve; the hotel guests constitute a captive audience, penned in and forced to find their own entertainment. Looking down on the main bar from my room at the Stansted Radisson, I watched strangers strike up conversation; saw work colleagues gradually shift laptops to one side and huddle closer over their drinks, bathed in pools of soft yellow light.

They’re not for everyone, but to me there’s something romantic about that kind of casual, transient hook-up. Meeting someone as you’re passing through, then flying off in different directions the next morning; your lives briefly illuminated by the few hours you spend together behind a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign and thick, soundproof curtains.

Maybe I’ve just watched Up In The Air too many times.

I didn’t venture down to the bar on Thursday night. Instead I lounged naked in my room with a bottle of wine and a good book. I put aside all cares and worries, and gave myself over to gleeful anticipation of the following morning’s flight; of a first trip to Africa; of the thrill of the new.

Airport hotels are sexy. Sometimes you don’t even need another person to help make them feel that way.

(Many thanks to the super-talented Oleander Plume for one again turning my mediocre attempts at photography into something approaching art!)

Sinful Sunday

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Cock shots Erotica

Capture Cupid: a Valentine’s Blog Hop (with prizes!!)

(NOTE: Photo is *not* of me…much to my chagrin…)

—

In 1999, Valentine’s Day fell on a Sunday. I was 17 years old, and still unkissed. My alarm clock was stuffed under my pillow and set for 5.40, on what would turn into a cold, clear February morning. I had work to do.

It took me no more than a couple of minutes to pull on my warmest clothes and tiptoe across the landing. The stairs creaked under my feet, but my luck was in; my mum, normally the lightest of sleepers, didn’t stir. I grabbed my bicycle lights from the kitchen counter, squeezed the lock on the back door, and slipped out into the darkness.

My bike lived in the garage, propped up next to boxes of childhood toys and unwanted books. At eight o’clock every weekday morning, I wheeled it out onto the driveway, slung my backpack over my shoulders, and cycled the two-and-a-half miles to school. At 5.45 on that Valentine’s Sunday, I had a different destination in mind.

Her name was Rachael. We were classmates, close friends and confidantes. Or rather, she confided in me and I hung on her every word, happy just to bask in the glow of her company. I walked her home sometimes after school, wheeling my bike alongside me; on the days when she invited me in, I sat at her kitchen table, or on beanbags in her dad’s sunlit study, and drank endless cups of tea, desperate to delay my departure for just a little longer.

I was in love; she was not. Not with me…but also not with the boys she dated, and that gave me hope. Hope is a dangerous drug when you’re 17 and unkissed. When you haven’t yet been chewed up and spat out enough times to lose faith in the all-conquering power of heartfelt, moon-faced adoration. It was hope that pumped through my veins on the afternoon before Valentine’s Day, when I shuffled into the local florist and bought a dozen red roses, to go with the card I’d hand-made that morning. It was hope that set the butterflies in my stomach dipping and spinning as I took the flowers out of their bucket of water on that cold, clear morning, and closed the garage door behind me. And it was hope that surged up in my chest, and across my pink-flushed cheeks, as I sped down the narrow path behind my house, tyres barely kissing the top of the tarmac.

I reached her house to the distant sound of the church clock striking six. I left my bike propped up against a lamp-post, and crept up to the front door. Her cat appeared at the kitchen window, ancient and half-blind; she fixed me with a baleful stare, one paw pressed up against the glass as I knelt down on the covered porch to leave my token of love.

By the time I got back to my bike, I could feel my heart shuddering and thumping against my ribcage. I half-turned, suddenly desperate to scoop up both card and flowers, and to forget the whole thing. To go back to bed, and wake up in a world where my shuddering, thumping, tender heart wasn’t resting on someone’s cold doorstep, waiting to be brought into her warmth.

Hope, though; hope had its claws sunk in deep, and I hadn’t yet learned how to shake them loose. It was still dark as I swung one leg over my saddle and nosed the front wheel of my bike towards home.

Dark enough that when I reached the end of her road and glanced back one last time, the triangle of light that appeared at the corner of her bedroom window shone fierce and yellow against the morning gloom. I put a foot down to steady myself; when I looked up again, it was gone…but as I squinted and strained my eyes, I could just make out the gentle sway of a curtain dropped silently, carefully back into place…

—

…when you’re a kid, you believe in Father Christmas and the Easter Bunny; when you’re a teenager, you believe in Valentine’s Day.

I only really have one sexy Valentine’s story, and I wrote that last May. However, what I can offer instead is a sexy collection of stories, courtesy of the Chemical [se]X ‘Capture Cupid’ Blog Hop competition. Jacob Louder kicked things off on Sunday, Malin James picked up the baton yesterday, and between now and the 13th, each of the other Chemical [se]X authors will be giving you the chance to enter the contest, and to win some really great prizes.

If you want to take part, all you have to do is comment on this post – or on any of the other posts in the Blog Hop series. In fact, the more comments you leave, the more entries you get into the final draw. The two lucky winners will be picked at random on Valentine’s Day itself, and will each win a great bundle of prizes.

1st Prize

2nd Prize

  • £10 gift card for Belle de Soir
  • $10 gift certificate for Seattle Chocolates
  • E-book copy of Chemical [se]X

belle_code_lingerie_250_2014 Go Deeper Press » Booksseattle chocolate

What sort of comment should you leave? Well, now that I’m a cynical 33, rather than a hopeful 17, I no longer believe in Valentine’s Day – not in the cards, and the flowers, and the fluffy pink hearts, at least.

I do still believe in romance though, so when one bright spark suggested marking the occasion with a ‘reallllllly romantic dick pic’, who was I to turn down the challenge?

“You could get some ribbon and wrap your dick up like a present,” she said. Bitch, please – been there, done that.

“You could get a bunch of pink Valentine stickers and stick them all over your thighs,” she said. And risk an accidental waxing when I remove them afterwards? I don’t think so.

In the end, I turned to the contest administrator, all-round creative genius (seriously), and editor of Chemical [se]X for assistance.

“Don’t you worry your pretty lil’ head about it for a minute longer,” she cooed. “Just send me that hard cock of yours, and I’ll take real good care of it.”

And reader, that she did.

So yes, after the jump you’ll find my Valentine’s Day #dickpic; my Cupid’s arrow for those who like their romance hard and salty, rather than soft and sweet.

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Sex

Socks

I’ve always done my best not to shy away from tackling sensitive subjects and taboo issues on this blog. I’ve written about getting an accidental hand job from a masseuse. I’ve written about period sex, and angry sex, and sex when I don’t come. I’ve written about strap-ons, because I like them, and about blowjobs, because I don’t didn’t.

However, until today I avoided confronting perhaps the most sensitive subject – the most taboo issue – of them all…

…yes, I’m talking about men who keep their socks on during sex.

Even Ella Dawson – one of the most sex-positive people I know – blanched at the notion of hopping into bed with a chap who declined to bare his toes before getting down to business.

“For me it comes down to the fact that socks are goofy,” she wrote. “When I see the guy I’m fucking is still wearing his socks, I immediately laugh.”

And it’s hard to argue with that response, especially when it seems to reflect conventional wisdom on the subject. Socks are not sexy, and men who wear them in bed – well, they’re even less so. Socks are smelly and sweaty. They draw attention to the feet – not a strong selling-point for most guys. With very few exceptions they look either boring or ridiculous; and as a society we seem to have decided that, by association, the same must be true of any man who can’t bring himself to remove them pre-shag.

I should add at this point that I have no vested interest in the topic, beyond a general desire to debunk ridiculous sexual myths and stereotypes; because even bearing in mind what I wrote in the last paragraph, sock-wearing feels to me like an example of finding the idea of something unsexy, rather than the something itself. We mock it because we think it says something about the guys who do it, not because socks look any more inherently unattractive on men than they do on women.

Does that matter though? Or rather, are the things it says about those guys actually true? When I first started thinking about this yesterday afternoon, I was struck by the fact that – in my head at least – the one type of sex where socks on men are both common and accepted is the type that takes place on camera. When I think about male porn stars, I picture dubious facial hair, enormous dicks…and yes, little white ankle socks. A bit of research confirmed that I wasn’t imagining things: of a random sample of 10 Youporn clips (I know, the sacrifices I make…), six of them featured men whose footwear remained in place for the duration of the scene.

At the time, I thought that was going to be the perfect rebuttal to a tired old cliché. If we watch porn to get off, and if the men in porn generally wear socks, doesn’t it follow that socks must, at the very least, be no great barrier to arousal?

It was only this morning that I realised my mistake. Most mainstream porn (straight and gay) is made by men for men – if it turns women on too, that’s really just a happy accident. As a result, those ankle socks aren’t there because women find them arousing; they’re there because the men can’t be bothered to take them off, and because they don’t intend to stick around after shooting their load. The socks symbolise the fleeting, transactional nature of the sexual encounter, and if that’s true in porn, maybe it’s true in life as well.

My conversation with Ella brought that idea into sharper focus.

“I know other women who think socks are symbolic,” she said. “If a man leaves his socks on it means he has one foot out the door.”

Then there’s the late Kirsty MacColl. ‘Don’t come the cowboy with me, Sonny Jim,’ she implores, and why? Take it away, Kirsty…

‘Some boys with warm beds and cold, cold hearts
Can make you feel nothing at all
They’ll never remember and they’ll never mind
If you’re counting the cracks in the wall
They’re quick and they’re greedy
They never feel guilty
They don’t know the meaning of hurt
The boots just go back on
The socks that had stayed on
The next time they see you
They treat you like dirt
The next time they treat you like dirt’

Socks are dull and boring. Socks are goofy and ridiculous. So far, so blah. What I hadn’t considered is that for some people, socks symbolise impermanence. Lack of intimacy. ‘One foot out the door.’ Or that if a guy can’t be bothered to take them off, maybe there are other things he can’t be bothered to do either, like give head, or prioritise her orgasm, or stick around and cuddle afterwards.

Do I occasionally leave my socks on when I fuck? Sure. Sometimes it’s because I don’t want to break off to remove them. Like putting on a condom, it’s possible to do it in a sexy way, but it can also feel fumbling and awkward, jarring you both out of the moment, however briefly – unlike putting on a condom, it’s never essential to the whole process, so why not skip it every now and then?

At other times, I leave them on because we’re both so desperately, pantingly horny that every extraneous action gets forgotten: all that matters is getting down and dirty, even if that means we forget about a pair of socks here, or a bra there.

For the most part though, when I think about leaving my socks on during sex, I think about serious relationships, and about the sort of easy comfort where neither of us has to worry about the impression we’re giving – because we know each other well enough to look beyond and inside that.

I didn’t expect to come to this conclusion yesterday afternoon, but maybe when that deep, intimate connection doesn’t exist – and when it’s not clear from the start that it’s just a casual hook-up – there are good reasons for men to make a bit of an effort and leave their socks on the bedroom floor, where they belong.

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Sinful Sunday: Anonymous (January)

The first Anonymous Sinful Sunday of 2015 maintains the same high standards established over the second half of last year. All three photos – as well as the words that accompany them – offer something compelling; they’re sexy, honest, and playful, and as a result, very much within the Sinful Sunday tradition. I hope you enjoy looking at them as much as the three contributors clearly enjoyed taking them.

Winter in a Summer City

I spent the new year in Berlin. Us Brits like to create storms in teacups when it comes to the weather and three or four people had told me, with that slight tone of panic we so often use to talk about the weather, that Berlin was *definitely* a summer city. Why didn’t I wait a few months? Apparently I was foolish to be visiting when it would be so bitterly cold. I remembered a post from Exhibit A that mentioned naked sunbathing in Tiergarten and wondered fleetingly if the naysayers might be right. Then an idea was born…

There’s a no photography rule in Germany’s nude areas but unsurprisingly there weren’t too many naked people relaxing in Tiergarten’s retreating snow as the sun cast its weak light on the first day of 2015, so I broke the rules. The adrenalin rush and sharp bite of cold did wonders for my hangover!

SS1

Dressing Table

SS2

Untitled

SS3a

The tights are supposed to show Mickey and Minnie kissing each other but I like to view it as Mickey and Minnie kissing my ankles. I would love a MFF threesome. I guess Mickey & Minnie kissing my ankles is as close as I’ve ever got.

Sinful Sunday

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Cock shots Erotica

Grey in January

North London this afternoon was dull and cold, and as I watched the light drain slowly from the sky I felt myself fade with it. I am grey in January. A fuzzy grey too: blurred and damp, rather than the clear, crisp chill of a sunny winter’s day.

I pottered and fidgeted. I paced out the same triangle, again and again. Kitchen table to kettle. Kettle to sofa. Sofa back to the table, and to the laptop perched accusingly on top of it.

Too much pent-up energy to sit still. Too many blurred, damp thoughts to focus on any one activity. The silence broken only by muffled, distant street noise, and the occasional wailing siren.

I am grey in January.

By 5pm the last of the light had disappeared, replaced by the pale yellow glow of first one window, then two, then 10, as my neighbours returned to the warmth of their houses and flats. I made one last cup of tea and settled on the sofa, a book in my lap to anchor me in place.

It was only when the heating kicked in that I realised how stiff and numb I’d been. How cold and grey. I burrowed deeper into the cushions and put my hand on the radiator, feeling the first tentative flush of warmth spread across the metal ribs.

I made myself read. I buried my chin deep in the thick, woollen neck of my jumper, and let my body relax. Feeling returned to my fingers, my knuckles, my bare feet. Slowly, reluctantly, the blood started to pump around my body again, like an old car engine being coaxed back into life after weeks outside in the rain.

I thought about other January afternoons, on other sofas. Other afternoons where inertia felt more like rich, indulgent laziness. Other sofas where the warmth came not from a chipped white radiator, but from the person snuggled into me, book held up alongside mine – her other hand resting on my stomach, fingers flexing and digging into the coarse fabric with idle, rhythmic repetition.

Because sometimes it’s better not to be naked. Sometimes I don’t want to make a big fuss over it. I just want her to scooch down the sofa, pop open the button fly on my jeans, and reach inside for my cock. When I go to put down my book, I want her to stop me: to shake her head and smile; to push it back up towards my face with gentle, silent insistence.

I want her to lick and suck me like a cat cleaning its paws. Nothing flashy; no tease. Just methodical. Precise. Efficient. Muscle memory kicks in, from all the other afternoons we’ve spent together; she can literally do it with her eyes closed.

After she finishes, I want her to flop back down next to me and reach for her book. Smile as I kiss her hair and press my warm cheek against her, a bubble of laughter rising in my throat, threatening to spill out in a burst of light and colour.

I am not always grey in January.

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