Exhibit A

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.

Depending on your perspective, I’m either lucky or tragic enough to have lived alone for the last three years, and to have been without a ‘serious’ partner for the vast majority of that time. That’s partly down to circumstance, but is also the product of conscious choices that I’ve made, some of which I may explore in more depth in a future post. It affects my day-to-day life in all sorts of ways, of course – some good, some bad – but in a blogging sense it means that, for the most part, the photos that I post for memes like Sinful Sunday, or to accompany my writing, are ones I’ve taken myself, using a combination of the timer on my mobile phone, various bits of furniture, and stacks of books to adjust the height or angle of the shot.

It can be a bit fiddly and time-consuming, but overall I enjoy the challenge of setting up photos like that, especially on sleepy Sunday afternoons when I don’t feel like leaving the apartment. However, as well as both limiting the range of photos I can take, and reducing the quality of the finished product, it will also never be as much of a turn-on as having someone else train a camera lens on my naked body.

Perhaps it’s just that I’m an exhibitionist by nature – or an attention-seeker, if you’re feeling less charitable – but being photographed in such an intimate way always makes me incredibly horny. It doesn’t matter whether the camera is a silent observer, snapping away as I masturbate or just lounge around naked; or whether it’s in the hands of someone who wants to direct the action, or who has specific shots in mind; either way, I get a real thrill from the act of laying myself bare like that, and giving another person unfettered photographic access to my body.

I don’t know that I’m so unusual in that respect. I do know that my feelings about being naked in front of the camera are linked in a pretty direct way to one of my earliest sexual experiences. It came in February 2003: I was 21, still a virgin, and sufficiently scarred by the fairly disastrous attempts at sex with my first girlfriend three years earlier that I hadn’t dated anyone – been naked with anyone – in the time since then. Thanks to Karolina, a silly bet, and a Polaroid camera, that was all set to change.

—

I knew Karolina from university and we were good mates, although there’d always been a slight edge to our time together. She was curvy, flirty, a demon on the pool table, and very openly sexual. I viewed the last of those qualities with a mixture of fascination and outright terror. Late one night during my last year at Oxford, she appeared in my room after a boozy LGBT Soc dinner, stripped down to her underwear and dragged me into my bed with her. She was so drunk that she fell asleep shortly afterwards (I discovered that night that carrying a woman down four flights of stairs and up another two is harder than firemen make it look), but it’s fair to say that I wasn’t the only one who thought there might be some kind of spark between us, even if I was too clueless to know how to act on it at the time.

Karolina knew how shy and inexperienced I was, and although she was merciless in the way she exploited that information, she also encouraged me to come out of my shell a bit and to be more confident about my body. A few months after I graduated, and with a view to doing something about the second of those issues, she asked me how I felt about the idea of posing naked for her.

I’d been curious about having ‘candid’ photos taken for a while – I wanted to know what I looked like through someone else’s eyes  – so to have someone I knew and trusted offer to hold the camera felt like serendipity at work. She invited me over to her college room the following weekend. I dressed smartly, and stopped on my way to buy a Polaroid camera; these were the days before point-and-click digital devices were widely available, so Polaroid felt like the perfect format for what we had in mind that day. I was nervous, but excited; it was a completely new experience, and one that I instinctively knew would turn me on in some way.

Her room was small but airy, and looked out over the meadows. We stood for a long time staring out of the window and chatting, neither of us quite sure how to proceed. To my surprise, when she finally took the lead and told me to strip off, I found it easy to do so, draping my clothes over a desk chair until I was left standing in only my boxers. She wanted to take a photo of me like that, but I stopped her; we only had ten exposures and I didn’t want to waste any. She smiled and told me that in that case, I should probably get rid of the underwear too.

There was the briefest moment of hesitation, of self-doubt, then I did it, sliding them down over my thighs and letting them fall to the floor. She was sitting in the chair next to me, her eyes level with my cock; I could feel them on me, studying my body, and I looked down to see my cock begin to harden, slowly rising in front of her face until it stood fully erect.

Under normal circumstances, that would’ve been awkward enough. However, a few weeks earlier we’d been together to the cinema to see 40 Days & 40 Nights, a deeply mediocre film about a guy who’s challenged to go that long without an orgasm. Karolina had never been one to pass up an opportunity like that, and it took her less than 24 hours to goad me into attempting the same feat.

By the time I faced her on that Sunday afternoon, naked and hard, I’d abstained for 23 days; it had been agonising, a nightmare of seemingly permanent erections, made worse by the endless teasing she’d inflicted upon me by email. She reminded me of how long it had been as she placed a cool hand on my hip and guided me towards the bed. I relaxed a little as I lay down and made myself comfortable on top of the soft duvet; music played quietly in the background and I tried to concentrate on it, on anything that would get rid of the insistent desire to come.

It didn’t work. She looked down and asked me whether I was ready to begin, saying that she wanted a picture of my cock while it was so hard. I blushed then and nodded, lifting myself up onto my elbows and looking into the camera as it flashed for the first time. I can remember how my dick actually jumped a little when she took the photo and how my balls seemed to tighten against my body. She took two of me like that, prostrate on the bed, then asked me to stand up so she could take a couple more. Each photo got me hornier, and the sight of her nipples stiffening inside her top didn’t make it any easier to retain control.

I knelt on her bed as we took a break and she rummaged around in a cupboard. When I looked up I saw her walking back towards the bed, grinning and holding out a set of cuffs, two for the wrists, two for the ankles, attached to each other by long chains. She’d told me about those, about how she liked to bind men hand and foot, then suck their cocks while they lay helpless, and I knew then that she wanted to hogtie me in a similar manner. I let her pull my arms behind my back and firmly strap the cuffs to my wrists, then felt her hands on my ankles, holding them in place until I was forced to bend back far enough to be fully restrained. As she moved away, she gave my arse a gentle slap and let her eyes linger on my cock, now sticking out obscenely in front of me.

She took her time over the photo, teasing me, letting me suffer. After she’d taken it, she left me chained up and started to talk; she told me that she’d recently fully shaved her pubic hair for the first time, and wanted a second opinion on what it looked like. She was wearing a skirt and lifted it around her waist, exposing her naked cunt to me as I kneeled, unable to move. I’d never seen one so openly flaunted like that, not in the flesh anyway. She stepped closer and I looked at it, the lips full and glistening, her clit visible to my hungry eyes.

The skirt was slowly lowered again, but the image lingered, and as she untied me I felt the blood return slowly to my hands and feet while continuing to pump through my cock. I was desperate to touch it by that point, but aware of how easily I could lose control if I did so. I sat on the edge of the bed and rested my fingers along the shaft, then curled them round it, unable to stop myself. She nodded approvingly, telling me that she’d wanted to take a photo of me masturbating. I didn’t dare move my hand up and down; instead I just held it there, gently squeezing my dick until she was satisfied. While the slide developed, she looked up over the camera, locked her eyes on mine, and asked me how badly I wanted to come. I found it hard to answer, stumbling over my words but admitting that it was torture not to do so.

For the final photo, she sat me in an armchair and told me to spread my legs. A desk lamp shone over the chair and she handed me a bottle of massage oil; I rubbed it into my chest and stomach, then along my arms until they gleamed in the yellow light. “You missed a bit”, she said, and took the bottle from me, pouring oil onto her hand then smearing it over the head of my cock. When I felt her touch me, I almost came all over her fingers, but they danced away just in time. She told me to finish coating my cock, noting dispassionately that she could see the pre-cum oozing out of the tip. It mixed with the oil as I applied it carefully, taking deep breaths and massaging it in as lightly as I could. I felt like I could lose it at any moment, with no way of stopping myself; as if the decision had ceased to become one for me to make.

In that particular photograph I’m staring straight into the camera, one hand on the arm of the chair, the other resting on the inside of my thigh and the base of my cock. It’s a decent enough shot, but what it can never show is the impossible tension that seeped into every muscle in my body, as I willed myself not to come when the shutter clicked. We exhaled together afterwards, and somehow the moment seemed to pass. I dressed a bit shakily and we sat down to look at the photos, as the daylight faded.

I left with a faint sense of regret that things between us hadn’t gone further, but also with a much stronger feeling of satisfaction at having managed to do it. Three years without a girlfriend had left me awkward and self-conscious where my body was concerned, and I felt like I’d passed some sort of test by posing for those photos. Late that night, while fast asleep, I dreamt of Karolina standing naked in front of me, and woke to find my stomach and sheets soaked with 23 days worth of cum. It was the first wet dream I’d had for years.

Some of the photos remain buried in a drawer somewhere. A few were scanned into an old laptop and subsequently deleted. One or two may still reside with an ex-girlfriend: I’d leave them between pages of her favourite books, for her to find unexpectedly when I was away. They look very dated now, blurry, faded, stiffly-posed images that compare unfavourably to the clarity and fluidity which digital cameras afford. Nevertheless, they were an incredibly important part of my sexual development, and retain a clear and enduring impact on the sorts of things that turn me on today.

Every so often, a person – invariably a brilliant person – will say something that makes me want to hug them in sheer delight. That happened earlier this evening, when a good friend casually reminded me of the pure, unadulterated hotness that is library sex.

Library sex is a fairly predictable trigger for me, and I would guess the same is true for a lot of people who enjoy reading and writing erotica. The school library was my sanctuary as a teenager; various university libraries the cause of Stockholm Syndrome as an undergraduate. Since finishing my Masters, I’ve frequented them much more sporadically, but they remain deeply evocative of a ten-year period in my life when I was at my most hormonal. In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that you could get a decent understanding of my early sexual evolution just by looking at it in the context of libraries.

At secondary school, most of my break times were spent under the watchful eye of Mrs Potter, our head librarian. I read my way through every science fiction and fantasy title I could find on the shelves, followed by a sizeable chunk of the contemporary fiction and classics. As I got older, my interests shifted, and I became an expert at finding the hot sex scenes in otherwise respectable novels. I would read them standing up in the stacks, half-turned so that no-one could see my erection. They served as the inspiration for a lot of my earliest forays into masturbation, and sometimes I’d even squirrel the racier titles out of the library in my schoolbag, too embarrassed to take them up to the counter, but desperate to pore over them again in private.

By the time I reached university, my literary tastes had become a bit more adventurous. I discovered Literotica around that time, and through it a treasure trove of the filthiest reading material I could wish to put my hands on. Or to enjoy while putting my hands on my cock, anyway. I used to print out my favourite stories in the college computer room, and this time sneak them into the library, to be folded between the pages of a textbook and enjoyed while trying not to squirm too much on the thickly padded chairs.

And of course I would stare at the girls. It’s impossible not to at Oxford. The college and departmental libraries, and especially the Bodleian, form such an integral part of most undergraduates’ lives that complex social structures develop within them. As a result, they absolutely reek of sex. Take several thousand bright, curious, erudite, and incredibly horny students, coop them up for long periods in warm, stuffy reading rooms where silence is mandatory, and watch them find a thousand different ways to flirt with each other. The boys would try their best to look mysterious and soulful, all soft scarves and designer stubble; the girls would glance up at them under exquisitely-applied make-up, and show just enough skin to ensure that dozens of pairs of eyes followed them each time they got up to return a book to the counter.

Sometimes, I would find ways to masturbate in the library. That was easiest at my college, where I was usually able to hole up in a dusty, under-used corner and slide my hand down inside my jeans. I’d lick my fingers over and over again, then freeze in terror if they squelched too loudly and wetly over the head of my cock. I was usually sensible enough to bring tissue with me, but occasionally I’d be so desperate to come that even though I didn’t have any in my satchel, I wouldn’t want to break off to fetch some from the toilets; when that happened, I’d just pull my boxers and jeans over my dick at the last second and come inside them, or shoot all over my stomach and allow it to dry under my t-shirt, matted into the light fuzz that led down from my belly button.

It wasn’t until after I left Oxford that I started to do things with other people in libraries. The first time it happened was actually at my old college. I was doing a Masters somewhere else by then, but dating a second-year undergraduate, and we found ourselves alone in one of the reading rooms on a sleepy Sunday afternoon about halfway through term, the time when everyone’s work ethic is starting to waver. We were only about 30 metres away from her room, but she unzipped my trousers under the desk anyway, and bent down to take me in her mouth. I slid my hand up her skirt and just rested it on the inside of her thigh as she sucked me. Once or twice we heard what we thought were footsteps approaching, and she tensed herself to spring back up, but they never got too close, and after a few minutes I came down her throat. She held my cock in her mouth for a little while, as our heart rates slowly returned to normal; then we hurried back to her room and fucked like animals for the next couple of hours.

A few years later: same city, different girl, different library. We visited one of her friends, a PHD candidate living in Halls, and enjoyed a boozy evening in the college bar. At the end of it, we walked past the library, which was open 24 hours a day in the run-up to exams. Fired up by alcohol and never ones to miss an opportunity, we slipped inside and wandered between the high, wooden shelving units till we found an empty row. The carpet was thin and the floor underneath it cold and unforgiving, but I got down onto my knees anyway, pushed her back against the books, and licked her clit till she’d soaked my chin and her thighs. We fucked doggy-style: I pushed two fingers inside her mouth while I thrust inside her, so she could bite down on them instead of moaning out loud; when I felt her squeeze me hard, I pulled out and came tight against her arse crack, then pulled her knickers back up so she could feel that stickiness for the rest of the evening. I’m pretty sure at least one person saw us mid-shag, but we were rooted firmly and irrevocably in a haze of lust, booze, and horny memories of countless afternoons in the library spent fantasising about something like this.

Even if I never set foot in one again, the idea of having sex in a library will never seem less than thrilling. It might be driven by nostalgia, but when I think of how much time I’ve spent in them over the years, reading, thinking, learning and dreaming about sex, I feel very happy for some reason. When I think – as I did this evening – about the times I’ve made myself come in the library, and especially about the times someone else has done it for me, I’m a hot mess again within minutes. So thank you, brilliant friend, for messaging me from the library this evening: little did you know the thoughts you’d inspire!