Pump House Jack

‘What man?’

Nevan was standing now, his arm raised, pointing. ‘That man o’er there,’ he said, frowning. Maeve turned to look, but there was no man to be seen.

‘Honestly, Nevan. Dun’t be shittin me. I’m stark naked fo’ fock’s sake.’

Nevan knew that, only too well. He’d flicked his eyes from the loopy looking man by the pump house to her long, dripping body for only a split second, and when he’d looked back, the man was gone.

‘He were focken there, Mae. A tard-lookin twat wi’ nae shirt on.’

She rested her hands on her smooth hips and looked at the pump house.

‘What were he doin?’

‘Musta run round back… where’d the cont go?’

‘Nevan! What were he doin?’

Nevan had started to walk toward the pump house. Wherever this shifty looking perve had gone, he would sort his shit out for him.

‘He were jes lookin, Mae. Jes standin there lookin. Bleedin cont.’

She half covered herself with her hands, glanced at her discarded togs on the rocks by her towel.

‘This is important, Nevan,’ she said, her voice wavering just a little. ‘What were he doin?’

His foot slid on a loose rock, his steps unheeded in wanting to keep his eyes on where the man no longer was. The sharp edge cut deep. He swore, looked down at the damage.

‘F’fock’s sake, Mae! He were jes standin there, nae shirt on, baggy dacks, arms by hi’ side afirst, like a focken halfwit, gettin himsel’ an eyeful o’ my gell. Then the cont starts wavin me o’er, like he’s gaen tell me summat. I’ll tell him focken summat, aye.’

She hesitated. The sound of grinding stones and rocks moving beneath Nevan’s bare feet annoyed her, stopped her thinking straight. She wanted him to just stop still and let her order her mind for a second…

‘Where th’fock d’y’think y’goin wi’ y’dick all out an’ all?’ she demanded.

‘To sort thet twat th’fock out, ye’ll see.’

‘Put some pants on, Nev. And… Jes come back here.’

He stopped. Turned. His face a rictus.

‘D’ye think i’m lettin some daft cont perve on my gell i’th’nud wi’out gettin a focken weltin for it? Who th’fock d’ye think i am?’

With the rocks silent, the pieces in her mind were able to fall into place, finally. She found the image, the words she’d been looking for.

‘No, Nevan. It’s not a perve… It’s… It’s Pump House Jack.’

Nevan had half turned to go on with his pursuit of the intruder, but now he turned back to face her. His dick swung, a meaty pendulum. It still caught her by surprise, his dick; she found herself wondering, even now at a time like this, what it would be like, one day, after they were married and their union blessed by Holy Mother Church, to feel that… thing, swollen up and, impossibly, sliding inside her…

‘Pomp Fock What?’

She snapped out of her reverie, back to the present.

‘Pump House Jack… Ye’ll not be beatin his shite out… Let’s get gone o’ here, Nev…’

‘Who th’fock is Pomp House Jack? Some wanderin fockin retard or somethin?’

‘He’s… Let’s jes go.’

‘Ye’re not makin sense, woman. I’m goin o’er there and findin this cont and beatin his focken lights out.’

And Nevan was off again.

No time even to snatch up her towel, Maeve took after him.

But he was off the stones now, and onto the grass. Running.

He had too much of a lead on her. She ran when she got to the grass, but it was no good. His bare arse pulled away from her, and then he was gone, around the corner of the pump house.

She heard the thump of his running footsteps stop, and then, all of a moment, she felt she couldn’t keep going. She stopped dead in his tracks.

She was suddenly very afraid.

Pump House Jack wasn’t a man. Not a proper man, anyways.

She stood there, water dripping from her long dark hair, her wet nipples puckering. Her knees growing weak.

She wanted to call out to her boyfriend, but she didn’t dare.

There was not a sound. It was like being underwater. She opened her jaw to pop her ears but it made no difference.

Something was very wrong.

Her mother had told her stories of Pump House Jack, but they’d only been stories. Same as the story of the Baby Twins, buried in the garden of old Gram Derry and crying for their Mam of a winter’s night. Same as the boggarts that knocked things over in the night kitchen for pure spite. Same as the leyline under the village that made the St Ronan’s Church bell ring softly with the vibrations of the unseen faerie folk travelling along it…

Same as all of those stupid fucking stories that her mother had told her, just for the satisfaction of scaring her little girl shitless.

But. Still.

Every fibre of her body told her to turn around and go.

That’s just the stories, she told herself. Nevan needs me.

She took a step. She didn’t fall to the ground.

She took another step. Still, she remained upright.

Step after step, her rubbery legs took her closer to the pump house. 

She could smell it.

Smell the weathered paint. The oil-wet interior. The bare earth floor.

It used to be a well, so the story said. Right there, a well! For centuries. The leyline that ran underneath the church even led way aways out here. That gap through the wood, no reason to be there, that was the leyline, her mother told her. A faerie highway from the time before people. 

And then the people had arrived, and they’d gratefully followed it the miles out from the village to draw water, and they had done so for centuries, honouring the well-spirit at each visit for the blessing of the good, clear water. 

And, of course, there were the ritual offerings. Virgins, that sort of thing. Her mother hadn’t been too specific on that point, just giving enough detail to leave her little girl with a sense of dread, of something dark happening when Pump House Jack appeared and began to beckon…

So on like that for generations, and then in 1929 the council had put a diesel pump on the well and made the reservoir. Pipes carried the water into village kitchens. So now nobody came here, except for the occasional teenagers like Nevan and herself, intent on some illicit courting and maybe a skinny dip.

Nobody gave thanks for the good, clean water anymore. It just gushed out the tap onto dirty dishes.

There probably hadn’t been a virgin out there for two centuries or more.

She didn’t think of herself as a virgin, of course. Virgins belonged in stories. With dragons.

The pump house had a hum inside it. A quiet hum, like an old fashioned electric kitchen clock. There was a door, she could see, on the side away from where they always swam. The door was open a crack. The hum was leaking out.

Now, she realised, would be a good time to call out to Nevan.

He must be inside.

She called him.

Her voice didn’t work.

The hum kept on.

The door felt damp in her hand.

When had she reached out to touch it?

It swung easily on its hinges, without a screech.

Moist air from inside the pump house embraced her, invited her in.

She could feel her wet hair curling in the humidity inside, her skin stretching.

It was dark with the door closed. The pump was moving, but only internally. Electric now, it was practically silent, except for that hum. Everything was still despite all the movement going on. All that water being carried down to the village.

Her eyes adjusted to the dark.

Nevan?

No. Not Nevan. The shoulders were wrong.

Not moving.

Standing against the wall, on the far side.

So humid.

It was such an effort just to breathe.

Her skin started to bead with perspiration.

Her eyes blinked. Slowly.

He wasn’t moving. The man with the wrong shoulders.

Was it a coat? Hanging on a hook? Not a man at all?

No.

It moved. Like a man.

Man shaped.

He was in front of her now.

Not a coat. Not Nevan.

Lifted.

She was being lifted.

Somehow her feet were off the ground.

It didn’t feel unpleasant.

Or pleasant.

Nevan?

No. Someone else. That’s right.

Bigger than Nevan.

Fingers like railroad spikes.

She felt herself parting, midair.

No. Parted.

Incredible strength.

Felt herself pierced.

Tearing.

There.

Not Nevan.

Nevan wouldn’t…

Thick.

Hard.

Pumping.

No! Nevan, no!

You promised!

Wait.

Not Nevan. That’s right.

Not Nevan.

Where was Nevan?

The pumping stopped.

The pain went on.

She felt herself lowered to the ground.

Found herself standing on the rubbery earth floor.

Where was the man thing?

Alone now?

Oh! There was Nevan.

Lying down.

Why was he lying down?

All twisted like that.

His neck so strange.

Why was it so hot?

So sleepy?

That hum…

Inside her head, that quiet, endless hum.

She tried again to pop her ears, to get the silence and the hum out of them.

Finally, they popped, and she could hear.

She could hear someone screaming. A high pitched, skin-prickling scream of terror. Barely pausing to take breath. Going on and on.

Annoying. For fuck’s sake! Who could be doing all that screaming?

It was a long time before she realised that it was her.

*** I ***

It wasn’t her first time on a yacht, and it wasn’t her first time on a yacht stark naked either.

Working for Marina Escorts Pty Ltd, she tended to spend most of her shifts stark naked on yachts.

But it was her first time on one of these millionaire’s yachts where she was given the chance to actually steer the thing.

She’d been just standing there in the line as usual, disrobed just like the other five escorts, waiting to see what she’d have to do first and to whom, when the captain of the yacht (that is, the owner) stepped up to her and asked her her name.

He was all salt-and-pepper mullet, with a moustache that was maybe two or three decades further out of fashion than his haircut, and his skin looked like it had been tanned to within a cell’s breadth of melanoma. His eyes, she thought to herself, were like the eyes of a department store Santa.

Just as she was about to give him her escort name (Rhiannon, like the song), for some reason she stumbled and gave him her real name.

His Santa eyes twinkled.

‘Helen, hey? With a name like that you’d know a thing or two about ships, hey, my girl?’

She upgraded her ingratiating smile to an encouraging grin, to give the impression that she understood what he was talking about.

‘Gentlemen,’ the captain/owner crowed, turning to his shipmates, one of whom was already as stark naked as the girls and happily sporting a semi-hard-on, ‘Here we have Helen, the girl with the breasts that launched a thousand ships…’

The nerdier of the guests (“guests” being escort industry talk for “men”) smiled to show that he knew what was going on. ‘That was “face”, Harve. Helen of Troy: the face that launched a thousand ships.’

Captain Harve reached out and took a hefty handful of Helen’s left boob, lifting it up for the consideration of the assembled party.

‘And i say, “breasts”. Come, Helen, allow me to install you in the position best suited to your legendary rank.’

He released her breast and took her hand as though he were leading her onto the dance floor at a deb ball, and she stepped carefully over the ropes and other general untidiness scattered on the slowly undulating deck. As her bare foot took the first step of the short high-gloss stairway that led up to the bridge, she glanced back to see the naked guest’s semi-erection sliding into Simone’s (real name, Julie) well-practised throat.

*** II ***

‘This here, Helen,’ Captain Harve explained, Santa eyes practically shooting off sparks, ‘is the wheelhouse.’

Bridge

she thought to herself.

‘This is where we steer the boat…’

Helm the yacht.

‘… and make sure we don’t hit nothin’…’

Maintain separation.

‘…or nothin’ that’s biggern’n us, anyways!’

She laughed at his joke. It took some effort to laugh only at his joke. But she was well trained.

‘You think you’d like to have a steer?’

More than anything you would believe or understand…

‘That would be terrific, Captain,’ she said out loud. Then she remembered her hostessing skills. ‘Would you teach me, please?’

‘Well, little lady, i’m pretty sure you’ll figure it on out yourself…’

She hadn’t taken the helm of a craft since that last time her fiance had taken her out. He had been so proud of her, his bride-to-be, guiding a trawler out through the lights, across the rip, and into the channel all on her own…

‘First up, we needs to observe some traditions of the sea…’

The trawlermen had said that it was bad luck to have a woman on board, and Jim had laughed at their superstitions. Turned out, there was no woman on board the night the trawler and most of the town’s fishing boats were blown halfway to the pole and sunk in seas so large the fleet was like tea leaves in a dishwasher.

Captain Harve produced a crisp braided cord with stainless steel eyelets at either end, and a chain that fastened it to the base of the wheel. He came at her with it, and she lifted her arms as he put it around her. She could smell his cigarettes and deodorant as he clipped the clasp that held the eyelets together. The braid settled about her waist like a belt, and Captain Harve’s hands settled about her waist like a belt as well.

When he spoke, he spoke almost in a whisper, his breath hot in her ear.

‘This is in case of rough weather,’ he explained. ‘So as you can stay at your post, no matter how much the boat starts tossin’.’

She looked out the window at the gentle seas, barely able to count a dozen whitecaps. Any tossing that was going to happen would be him, she suspected, wanking onto her breasts. Bondage was precluded in their employment agreement, but this seemed so slight an infringement that she was happy to let it pass.

She was just about to kneel down and receive his stinky smoker’s semen when he did a very unexpected thing.

‘This is for you, too, Captain Helen,’ he announced, picking up the captain’s hat lying on the instrument box, and placing it on her head with all due ceremony.

‘Keep us headed toward that there island over there,’ he pointed. ‘I’ll be back for you after i’ve… well, i’ll be back for you after, like.’

And then he was gone.

*** III ***

She chucked the pretentious peaked cap back onto the instrument box and checked the conn.

Position and bearing, she listed to herself mentally, noting her location relative to Gullshead Point to the west, and to the beacon at Windarm to the south-east. The yacht, for all its heated spa and cocktail bar, had no digital instrumentation, and relied purely on line-of-sight island hopper navigation.

Partyboat sailors! she scoffed.

Even though the course could have been followed by a beery millionaire with an escort in one hand and a joint in the other, she professionally checked and cross-checked her way methodically through the fundamentals required for safe navigation, and was almost at the end of her mental patter when she realised that the voice inside her head was Jim’s.

She’d been nineteen when the trawler had left, never to return. She’d loved him so hard she thought she’d die without him. And the sex had been pretty damn good, too.

Jim…

The channel’s notorious moodiness showed itself; the wind had been picking up steadily while she’d been setting course, and the yacht was shifting in the chop. It wasn’t anywhere near as heavy as the trawler, and she easily compensated for the crosswind. As she turned the helm through a few degrees, one of the polished handles stroked her side.

Another caressed her thigh.

She felt the sea and the wind vibrating through the handle in her hands, and through those pressing into her skin.

The yacht pitched and yawed as the wind freshened even more.

From somewhere behind the bridge she could hear voices of the girls and guests raising ironic screams and woah-hos! as the hull slid in the stirring waters.

She corrected again, and again the hard, polished handles slid intimately along her satin skin as the wheel came to rest.

Why are the handles so cocklike? she wondered. Why would sailors design things like dicks to hold on to? They’re the right size, right shape…

The deck was canted at a slight angle now, and she had to stand close to the wheel to hold it steady. The handle against her inner thigh pressed in more urgently.

It felt good there.

She felt its insistent firmness against her skin, like her lover’s cock would feel as he tenderly leant in…

Her breath caught.

She closed her eyes.

Being there, at the helm, Jim’s voice in her head…

A shiver of pleasure ran up her spine as the handle resting against her thigh inched up toward her vulva. She knew that she could step away from the wheel far enough that it wouldn’t have to touch her, she knew that she could turn the wheel a fraction so that it wasn’t in just precisely that position…

The handle gently came to rest against her left labium. As it connected, she could feel the ship vibrating throughout her delta of venus. She shifted her pelvis just slightly, and the handle slipped between her lips, parting them. She moved another fraction and it was against her clitoris.

Her breath was coming fast and hard now. She hadn’t felt this aroused since she’d been with Jim. None of the johns that she did, paying customers taken inside her at a set tariff, none of those ruttings came close to what she’d felt with Jim, or even to what she felt now, with this stubby piece of wood resting and pulsing against her opening.

The wheel moved seconds of a degree, despite her holding it as steady as she could. The rubbing against her clit was driving her closer and closer to orgasm.

A real orgasm. Not one faked for a paying guest.

It had been five years since Jim had disappeared beneath the waves. Five years since she’d had a genuine orgasm.

Her eyes snapped open. She did a quick calculation: the angle was wrong for front entry. She unclipped the ridiculous braid and used the chain, wrapping it around a cleat built into the charts box, to snag the wheel more or less in one steady position.

She turned and leant forward, backing herself onto the handle.

The angle still wasn’t quite right. She gripped the inner brass ring of the wheel firmly and tried again, working with the little bit of play in the chained wheel.

This time the handle did go in. She felt it opening her up, filling her with its stubby presence. Then the cool brass of the inner ring touched her bum cleft and she knew that she was as far on as she would go.

Not as long, not as deep as Jim, but it would have to do.

The ship and the sea thrummed inside her.

Her orgasm welled up on two fronts, first leaping up from from her knees, and then sliding down from her stomach, the two unstoppable forces meeting at the point where the thick wooden phallus was buried inside her.

As she came and came, paroxysms shuddering her whole body, her hair and breasts flapping with the exertions, her legs almost giving out with the ecstacy, she had one crystal clear thought.

Jim.

*** IV ***

‘Captain…Helen…?’

She opened her eyes. There stood Harve, his nautical polo still in place but his trousers gone. His genitals looked like a button mushroom resting on a dried fig.

She pulled herself off of the wheel’s handle, and ran her hand through her hair.

‘Are you ready for me, now?’ she asked, since there was no other possible thing to say.

He stepped further into the bridge. ‘What the hell were you doing to…’

‘You made me so randy,’ she lied, ‘that i couldn’t wait for you any longer.’ She stepped away from the wheel, which was now jerking against its chain.

‘Fuck me,’ she offered, placing her hands on his polo-shirted shoulders. ‘Fuck me now.’

He was looking out at the channel ahead of them. He seemed alarmed.

‘Are we still on course?’ he asked, uncertain as to whether he should be turned on by having caught her frigging herself, or whether he should be telling her off for endangering the vessel.

She took hold of his button mushroom and gave it a pump.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘That island there, right?’

She gave his dried fig a tickle, but he wasn’t interested.

He stepped around her and began unsnagging the wheel. He checked the brasswork for damage.

‘You can’t just… This is all very expensive fittings, you know.’

She could do without a report going to Madeleine about her having damaged the old bastard’s expensive fittings. She slinked her slinkiest slink and put her arms around his neck.

‘I have some very expensive fittings too, you know,’ she purred, in her best customer-relations voice.

‘Yes, and i’ve just seen those fittin’s of yours with the steering wheel of my yacht jammed up ‘em,’ he complained. ‘Never get that image out of me head i won’t.’

She took the braided cord from him, in as reassuring a way as she could manage.

‘How about you… clip me up again, and i’ll … steer the boat for you, and you can fuck me any which way you please as i do it. Would that get the image out of your head?’

He looked uncertain. He studied her up and down, her full breasts, her teardrop navel, her landing-stripped pussy…

‘OK,’ he agreed. ‘But i think i’ll steer while you suck me off.’ He took the wheel in his hands and brought the yacht back onto a bearing for an island in the distance. ‘You’ve had your go.’

She knelt and started to work on getting his grey-wisped mushroom aroused. It smelt of steak and kidney pie without the steak, and the best she could manage from the mummified thing was about four centimetres of stiffness somewhere between ballsack and glans.

As his cum wept grudgingly into her mouth she thought again of how she’d noticed that the island he’d been setting course for wasn’t the one he’d pointed out to her earlier, but one some twenty kilometres to the west of that one.

She didn’t say a thing about it.

*** V ***

There was no discotheque on the island they eventually arrived at. No restaurant, no sports bar. No karaoke.

There was a jetty and a few ramshackle fishermen’s cribs hidden in the tangled growth behind the weed-strewn beach.

And mosquitoes. Billions of mosquitoes.

The plan had been to get to the party island just before sunset and then spend the evening cavorting in the many stately pleasure domes it had to offer.

But they’d gone to the wrong island, of course.

And, without digital navigation aids, they couldn’t hope to find the proper island after dark.

The other escorts were getting bitten all over by mosquitoes, and they were whining about how they would be unbookable if they looked like they were covered with the Pox. To make matters worse, they insisted on scratching the bites. Crystelle (Joan) had already made several bleed.

The guests had had enough fucking to last them a week. One guest who, in his normal life, was in charge of several lawnmower shops, was complaining of “blowing steam” the last time he’d managed to get it up and fuck one of the girls.

Captain Harve was looking older than his sixty-odd years, and, just before the yacht’s batteries failed and the lights went out, Helen thought he might even have been crying.

She sat in the darkness, wrapped against the mosquitoes in her practical surfwear hoody and long pants, not her filmy evening dress like the other escorts were wearing. She was off-duty for the time being, she’d decided. Hang the car repayments.

She felt the yacht rocking gently beneath her, and heard the waves stroking its sides.

As her mind drifted off, away from the tawdry sex boat and the life she now had to live, one clear thought came to her.

Jim.

She knew that he could wait all day, and all night, too.

Time and tide didn’t matter if you were far enough out.

And that was where he lived, where he did business: far enough out.

Far enough out that laws didn’t reach.

Far enough out that no-one could hear you crying in the darkness.

Far enough out that anything could happen.

Or nothing.

Two and a half weeks they’d spent becalmed. Seventeen days of nothing but each other. Nothing but the sound of his voice and the slap of his hand on her thigh, telling her to get into position again.

Again?

she’d think out loud to him with her eyes.

Yes, again

, he’d reply with his furrowed brow, as if she’d been insolent, or stupid, for asking.

What else is there?

She hadn’t worn clothes in months. That had been fun, in the first weeks. The freedom! And the sex! He was better than average, knew a thing or two. Liked to play: spreading Vegemite on his skin - chest, thigh, cock - and making her lick it off. Laughter like she’d never had before. Love hearts in her journal, their names entwined in four different colours of ink.

Then the wind dropped to a whisper, then to a rumour, then to nothing at all.

‘Make yourself comfortable, my love,’ he’d said, one tanned hand plucking absently at a guyline, his ocean-grey eyes squinting at the horizon. ‘We might be here a while.’

So masterful. So in command. She’d dropped to her knees and sucked him off right there and then. The salt on his skin almost as strong as the salt of his cum. She let him know she’d finished by licking him one finishing stroke, like a cat cleaning itself, up through the middle of his pulsing balls; at that he’d reached down and tousled her hair.

‘Good poppet,’ he’d said.

And that was when she’d remembered that he was easily twenty years her senior.

Not that that mattered.

Not at all.

Not at first.

She loved his tales of sailing the seas alone as a young man. It didn’t matter to her that these tales came from a time when she herself was as yet unborn.

Not at all.

Not at first.

But then, in the second half of the first week with the sails rolled up useless, it happened.

He turned into her dad.

‘You need to wash those dishes,’ he’d said, in a voice just exactly dad-shaped. ‘Do it now. I don’t want to get sick out here just because you were lazy about washing some fucking dishes.’

Of course her dad would have not said “fucking”. And he would have not-said it in exactly the same tone of voice that this man just had, this “Experienced Sailor and Companion” (as his magazine ad had proclaimed him to be).

So she stood at the tiny galley sink and washed the fucking dishes.

Then, with the bubbles still popping on them in the rack, he’d caught her wrist, pulled her away from the sink, bent her over the A3-sized table, and stuck himself into her.

Just stuck himself right on in.

This time, no laughter.

This time, it was punishment.

As he thumped against her, she remembered sitting on the balcony of the Oceanspray Hotel with him that first time they’d met, the art deco edifice perched on the hillcrest like a liner about to sail out across the twilight bay. Him sitting there like Hemingway, even down to the rolled-neck jumper and hand-clipped beard. Her with bare feet and an all-over tan, her top some filmy, flimsy thing, barely there. The waitress with the blonde dreads magnetised, unable to keep away; he politely flirting back, playing the game.

All the oceans, and all the skies, he’d promised her that night, his eyes twinkling above the rim of his beer like bad santa.

She knew then and there that she’d finally be happy and safe, with this wonderful, mysterious, dangerous man.

He thrust into her hard, the cabin contents rattling with the force: three times, pause, then three times more.

Six of the best.

Then he knotted one handful of fingers in her hair and gripped her hip with the other handful. He drew himself out, and she thought it was over.

Then with the hand not snagged in her hair he plied her arse crack open like splitting a peach and spat, spat fair into her arse! She could feel the hot, wet spittle sliding down between her cheeks, a humiliating insect crawling where no insect should go.

Then he pushed his cock right into her shitter.

She gasped with the shock of it. Collapsed forward onto the ridiculous table, mashing her sunburnt nipples against its indifferent laminex, his tight fingers in her hair bringing tears.

He kept on going, up and up her arsehole, further up than she could fathom there to be enough cock to reach.

Then again with the pulverising thrusts: three in a sickening row, then the pause, and then the other three.

He held still for a moment, and she tried not to sob. Then, where a younger man, raised on Internet porn, would have pulled out and sprayed his load over her back, he stayed buried deep inside her shithole, forced her cheeks ever more painfully apart, and emptied himself into her with a deep, beachmaster grunt, like a surging Elephant Seal keeping his recalcitrant harem in line.

The magazine ad had mentioned nothing of this.

When he pulled out of her, really finished this time, he wiped the shit streaks off his cock with their one teatowel.

‘Clean this,’ he said, flinging it into the soupbowl-sized sink, and then he went up on deck to look at the dormant sky and leave her to do the tidying up.

She allowed herself one sob once he was gone. She timed it to coincide with, be covered up by, the rhythmic ding of the chandlery as the yacht slowly rocked back and forth on the long, oceanic waves.

Her dad had never fucked her up the arse, of course, but he had smacked her. Smacked her hard, and out of all scale to the misdemeanour. He’d smacked her over her skirt or pants all but that one time, and that one time when he’d smacked her bare derriere had been the last.

Sometimes she admitted to herself that that one time, that one time when he’d been in such a murderous fury that he’d pulled her pants and underpants right on down and smacked her good and hard on her bare pink skin, that one time had been the most arousing moment of her life. She’d longed for it to happen again, in fact, ever since. Actually lay in bed with insipid boyfriends spent and limp beside her, and longed for it to happen again.

Not anymore, though.

And that was almost two weeks ago.

Things had not improved since then.

She no longer worked the boat: now she did chores. Before his cock had slid up inside her arse that first time, she had been an equal partner in their adventure, and ‘working the boat’ had been a welcome duty. It had been a simple joy to empty the crap-bucket over the side, to prepare the humble but ingeniously nutritional meals from their little packets, to check the bilge and crank the little handle unnecessarily…

But now it was all chores.

Even the sex.

Especially the sex.

On Day Seventeen he was fucking her face to face, for a change. Giving her anus a break. She was juddering to his thrusts, unable to look him in his bleary, middle-aged man’s eyes, when they both heard it. She wanted to push him away, spit his thrusting stiffness from her like an unneeded splint, but he caught that look of flight glistening in her eye and pinned her to the bulkhead. He pursed his lips in her face, white, sea-split lips, and finished fucking her good and proper before he lifted his weight from her, and let her go.

She crawled out from the cabin like a survivor emerging from a car wreck. Her hair streamed - actually streamed! - in the wind. She began the rituals that would billow the sails, carry them away…

He watched her from the cabin mouth, bemused.

‘Bring her about, you dozy cunt,’ he drawled. ‘You’ll be no good to me with the boom upside your pretty little head.’

***

The island had no name on the chart. She wasn’t even sure it was on the chart. There was a blob the shape of one half a yin-yang symbol that she thought it might be. She had no idea if it was the yin or the yang, or even if it was either.

She folded the sails like a flying fox might wrap its wings about itself, making the yacht go into a secret place, disappearing it as best she could. The only way to judge her work hiding it, she thought to herself, would be from a distance. Without another thought, she dove into the glass-clear water.

Three powerful strokes, a pause, then three powerful kicks, and she was away. Reluctantly she surfaced from the cocoon of underwater, and looked back at the world.

It looked as ridiculous and as small as that A3 table had looked that day he’d bent her over it.

She turned and struck out for the yin/yang, happy to have either.

***

The sand felt ignorant beneath her. It didn’t move, it didn’t breathe.

It reminded her of a boyfriend she’d once had to put up with for a whole three months, until he finally got the picture.

It was nothing at all like the living world she’d escaped from.

The shushing of the tiny breaking ripples was a parody, pathetic. The island was practically silent; she might well have been the first person to ever lie on its dead sands.

She closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, it was morning.

How had she slept all that time?

The yacht was still there. Still much the same, except that he had tidied the sails away. She could imagine him aboard, moving about, doing things. The white hair on his red-brown chest curling. Leatherglove fingers working. Dark cock swinging.

The yacht was not far enough out that she couldn’t hear the chandlery, rattling against the mast, clear and musical across the flat water.

She stood up, felt the sand sticking to her legs and back, to her bum. She brushed it off her hands. Her hair was moist from the night air, wavy with the salt that made up so much of her life now.

The water was blood temperature. She could barely feel it.

Step by step, she moved closer to the moment when she would once again leave the stable and solid behind and be immersed in that fluid and moving world, the one that she had grown to love in so short a time.

As the water closed over her knees, she wondered what her dad was up to, right at that moment.

She really should send him a postcard, she thought, next time she got far enough in.

(Source: procaine, via naturellement)

The Virgin Club

‘Are you sure it’s perfectly safe?’

‘Of course it’s perfectly safe,’ he smiled, unbuttoning his shirt and watching her slip her lace panties off over her high heels. ‘That’s the whole point of the Virgin Club. Hence our motto: “Safety first”.’

She dropped the panties onto the tiny, silky pile of her other clothes, still frowning. ‘Look, i know you explained it to me already at the restaurant, but… i was a little tipsy then, and… Could you just go over the main points again?’

He admired her main points, nicely perky and adorably pink, and decided it was no trouble to indulge her.

Plus, he liked laying out the logic. It was, after all, his own invention, his own brilliance.

‘Well, as you know, there’s many, many horrible diseases out there,’ he began, careful to keep his voice from becoming sing-song, so the beauty of it didn’t end up sounding like it was a sales pitch, something he’d recited too many times already. ‘Venereal diseases.’

She shuddered.

‘Sex is the single most enjoyable thing that two - or more - adults can participate in… but, if you catch a venereal disease, that life of pleasure is all over for you.’

He watched her imagining her sex life being over, and the took off his shirt, flexing his pecs and giving his guns just the slightest pump.

‘One in four people has herpes, for example. and two out of three of the Infected don’t even realise they’ve got it. Their genitals are literally dripping with viruses that will happily take up residence in the warm, moist interior of anyone that they touch, and then…’

He unlatched his belt and pulled it out of its loops, for a split second holding it as though he was going to strap her with it; punish her, as though she were one of the Infected.

‘…regular as clockwork, the newly infected person’s genitals break out in ugly, weeping, painful sores. Over and over again, like the phases of the Moon. Then, all day long, no matter whether they’re at work, on the beach, or at their mother’s funeral, they have this uncontrollable urge to itch, itch, itch their privates raw…’

He noted the concerned way she looked down at her own privates, which were fresh as a just-opened fig and neat as a new sock.

‘…And then, of course, once you’ve got herpes, no-one will ever want to have sex with you ever again.’

He unzipped his pants and dropped them, revealing his bulging boxers.

‘Ever. Again.’

She ran a hand through her dark, wavy hair, still clearly a little tipsy from all that chardonnay. He could see her working it all out. He loved watching them working it all out.

‘So… the motto thing,’ she asked, her voice only the slightest bit slurry. ‘I get how the idea is to have sex only with a virgin, and that since they’re the first, you don’t have to worry about… herpes…’

‘Or syphilis, which rots your brain and drives you mad, or chlamydia, which destroys your ability to have children, or gonorrhea, which leaves you feeling like you’re pissing razor blades, or AIDS, which just plain kills you…’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ she said, waving her hand at all that misery, trying to swat it away, ‘but i’m not your first, and you’re not my first, so…’

‘So that,’ he interrupted, taking her hands and lifting her to her feet, ‘is where the Virgin Club comes in.’

He admired her openly, raising her hand above her head and slowly turning her, like the ballerina in a music box. She was truly gorgeous, and he couldn’t wait to be joined with her, to feel that warm, healthy flesh moving against his…

‘Everyone in the Virgin Club,’ he went on, leading her to the bed, ‘has only ever had sex with other virgins. So there’s no chance that any of those horrific diseases can get in, correct?’

She sat on the bed where he had led her, and looked up at him as he removed his boxers, his stiff cock coming pointedly into the room.

‘So, this is perfectly safe, purely recreational sex,’ she said, reciting - he was pleased to note - almost exactly what he’d said to her over the dessert course.

‘Indeed,’ he agreed, trying to sound like he wasn’t giving her top marks on her test. ‘Pure. Don’t you just love that word?’

‘But,’ she asked, her brow again forming those same vertical lines he’d been trying since he’d paid the dinner bill to smooth away with his careful logic, ‘how did you… find me?’

‘You know about Facebook, of course?’

She lay back on the bed. He knelt between her legs which gracefully parted to allow him to draw closer.

As the word ‘Facebook’ sank in, he saw her breath catch. But he expected that. He was prepared for that.

‘My relationship status? You… what? You tracked my status update? The one about Bobby?’

He gave a reassuring laugh - like he always did at this point in the interview - and he lowered himself gently onto her, his erection leaving a trail of slickness on her right thigh.

‘I didn’t track you, silly! A friend of a friend of one of your friends… recommended you as a potential member of the club. As founding president, it’s my task to check out new members.’

He brushed his hand through her wine-crumpled hair in a way that could almost have been mistaken for love. But they were not doing this because of love. Or, at least, not the normal sort of love.

‘I’d been with Bobby since High School,’ she said, a little tearfully. ‘We were high school sweethearts…’

‘Yes, i know,’ he smiled, kissing her perky nipples one by one. ‘Seven years, just the two of you. And now, here you are.’

Here she was indeed! Her skin smelt like warm milk and she was completely blemish free. One owner, original condition.

‘It’s not often we get twenty-four year olds who’ve only been with one virgin, you know,’ he congratulated her, licking playfully between her breasts. ‘You’re going to be very popular.’

She closed her eyes as he slid his fingers inside her. Her wetness pleased both of them equally.

‘So does this mean i’m… in this club of yours?’ she asked, her voice dropping half an octave and then rising again as his fingers found her hidden pleasure pads. Places Bobby had never located in all his seven years between her lips.

His breath hot in her ear as he drove her into uncontrollable squirms with his skillful fingering, he said, ‘Just one or two more questions, and you’re in.’

And, he thought to himself, so am i.

‘Are you sure,’ he asked in a husky whisper, his thumb playing on her clitoris, ‘that Bobby never cheated on you?’

Her eyes were squeezed shut as he brought her closer and closer, and her jaw dropped open in the way that women’s jaws always dropped open when he did… that… special…

There.

‘Oooooooooooooh, fuck! FUCK!’ she moaned. ‘No! No! He never cheated on me… He was so into sport, it was hard enough for him to spend time on me,’ she said, ‘Let alone any other girls… Yes… Do that…’

You poor, neglected child, he thought, calculating whether or not she would be OK with him inserting his thumb into her anus as he fucked her.

‘Last question,’ he breathed, feeling himself straining, ready to penetrate her. ‘You’ve never cheated on Bobby, have you?’

She giggled. She blushed. He couldn’t be sure if it was from embarrassment or from sexual arousal.

Then the blush spread from her cheeks to her entire body, and he knew that it wasn’t from embarrassment.

‘No, Mister Founding President, i’ve never cheated on Bobby.’

Naturally, this was only a formality. He’d had her and Bobby carefully checked out. She would never have made it to the dinner table if there’d been any doubt.

Now that she’d sealed the deal by her own pledge, she was officially a member of the Virgin Club.

His penis found her ripe vulva without a moment more’s delay, and then he was inside her. The warm purity of her was like a blessing upon him. His cock feasted upon her…

‘This is the first time…’ she said, her voice dreamy, ‘the first time i’ve had a naked cock inside me… Bobby always used condoms…’

He stopped his thrusting as though someone had slammed a door on his erection. Always used condoms? What did Bobby have to hide?

‘Why would he do that?’ he asked, careful not to hiss.

‘Oh,’ she said, reaching up and touching his cheek, not recognising the hesitation as potential revulsion. ‘He just liked it to be tidy that way. He didn’t like me leaking, he used to say.’

That made sense. Yes, that made very good sense!

So here was a double bonus: not only twenty-four and only been with one man, but twenty-four and never felt naked cock before!

What a find!

‘Just so long as neither of you ever cheated,’ he said, and he began thrusting into her with a renewed passion. Imagine, never to have felt the pure friction of skin on mucous membrane…

‘Hang on,’ she said suddenly, as though just remembering something. ‘There was one time…’

He froze. He could literally feel his balls drawing up inside himself. What was this? What dark secret had escaped him and his investigative team? A fling with a stranger in a bus station? A blow job given to someone at a night club? Some filthy hobo who may have been carrying christ knows what pestilence? Or maybe she had it off with an intravenous drug user…

‘Do girls count?’ he asked, her voice quivering.

‘It depends. What, exactly did you do with this girl?’

Girls were worst of all for harbouring diseases and not realising it. If there’d been any oral, his veins could be filling with herpes right now, even as her deceptive warmth wrapped around him…

‘We just… kissed. On the mouth. It was a Uni thing. You know, experimentation…’

He could feel his balls re-descending.

‘You’ve never had any Cold Sores?’

She shook her head, sheepish.

‘Then i think that’s fine,’ he said, and once again her interior was a delightful place to be.

He pumped into her so hard, imagining her lesbian ‘“phase”, kept secret from condom-wrapped Bobby, that he expected she would find foam, as well as his juices when she wiped herself for the first time ever…

Delicious now, but, he thought to himself as he jetted his hot semen into her, how awful those few moments had felt, those terrible moments when he’d thought it could have all been over for him.

Thank goodness for the Virgin Club!

Keeping him safe from all those nasty venereal transmissions.

***

He didn’t see her for another two months. She was still as gorgeous as she’d been that time of her audition. In fact, she was now even more gorgeous, if that were possible. She seemed to glow.

Curious, though. He’d expect her to be that full of life if she’d been taking part in all the freely available purely recreational sex that the Club offered, but he knew, from the Club’s immaculately kept records, that she’d not been with anyone else since that afternoon with him.

He hoped she wasn’t crushing on him. The only thing as bad as a venereal disease for cramping your sex life was a relationship.

She sat at the table opposite him and smiled a charming smile at the waiter as he took her order for a macchiato. He ordered his usual fair trade organic decaf latte and the waiter began to leave when, of a sudden, she called him back and changed her order to an orange juice. He took the opportunity as she turned to get the waiter’s attention, exposing her long, supple legs from beneath the table, to drink in her exquisite beauty.

‘So,’ he began, hopefully. ‘What would you like to talk about?’

He smiled, and expected her to laugh. Surely she wanted to ask him to once again play his magic fingers and talented cock over and inside her…

‘That time,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed, sure now.

‘I caught something from you.’

He blanched. Not because what she was saying was possible - it wasn’t - but because it meant that she had developed some symptoms that had been previously hidden, and that meant that he, too, now was carrying something! But what? Surely not any of the obvious diseases… So what? Trichomoniasis? Hepatitis B? HPV?

The bitch! What the hell had she done to him?

‘There is no way…’ he said in a slow and steady voice, one that threatened to leap to a shout, ‘No way whatsoever that you’ve “caught” anything… anything… from me.’

‘Well, yes. I have. I’ve had it checked by a doctor, and i have a sexually transmitted condition, and i got it from you.’

Lies! Damned lies!

Confront the whore! Yes, catch her in her lies! Whatever it is, have her name it, and then his own medical records, kept with the attention to detail of a Swiss accountant, would disprove it.

‘What then,’ he asked. ‘What. Then.’

She smiled. ‘I’m pregnant.’

kisssuck

‘Happy new year.’

‘Happy new year to you, too.’

She flicks down the sheet that’s covering her chest.

‘Say happy new year to my tits.’

He raises himself up on an elbow. ‘Happy new year, tits,’ he says, and leans forward to kisssuck the nearest: his lips suckkissing the right nipple and its ring of areola.

kisssuck. suckkiss. The words themselves are circular, like the areola. 

kisssuckkisssuckkisssuckkiss…

Like the year. Circling around, starting again. Endless.

They’ve been woken by the blart of a vuvuzela from the street. As if it had just occurred to the reveller that it was new year, at ten in the morning, as he was walking home, and that he should mark the occasion with his plastic trumpet.

Last night the suburb had been alive with such calls. At two past midnight, bored suddenly with the two-dimensionality of the televised fireworks, the pair of them had spilled out onto the street, alone together in a landscape alive with heard but unseen people. Both their daughters were away at the houseparties of their respective friends; it was the first time they’d been alone for New Year’s since her waters had broken, more than twenty years ago.

They’d stood beneath the black sky and listened to the thump and crump and whump of illegal fireworks confessing around them, shooting up from private backyard hoards into the public sky.

Improbably, cars were whistling down the road from five past midnight. Where were they going? Why weren’t they with loved ones? He stood behind her, hugged her, slipped his hands beneath her tanktop, cupped her breasts through the lycra of her bra, right there, in the street. She put her head back and whispered happy new year, and he gently lifted the bra off of her, not even unfastening it. Her nipples erect in the palms of his hands, he wanted to lift off her tanktop, her dislodged bra, expose her breasts to the passing vehicles. Look at this: look what i have! Far away down the road invisible girls were squealing and laughing at the passing traffic, screaming happy new year from the footpath darkness at the metal boxes sliding by.

‘Do you like my tits?’

‘I like them very much.’

He reaches over and caresses her left boob, then his hand flows down her tummy to the soft bristles of her hair.

‘Ooh! Careful. Can you feel my bladder?’

‘I can feel it alright. Can you feel this?’

He pushes his morning glorified cock gently against her thigh. 

‘With that,’ he suggests, ‘i could feel your bladder from inside, too…’

Her mobile bleats, though, and she rolls half away from him to grab it from the bedside table. Everything stops.

‘It’s youngest: “pick me up in twenty minutes, please”.’

‘How far away is she?’

‘Only about five minutes drive. I’d better get going; get my shower done and get over there…’

She flicks the rest of the sheet away, sits up, stands, opens the curtains, oblivious of any vuvuzela-bearing revellers that may be passing outside.

He admires her graceful back, her sculpted bottom, the lilt of her breasts as she walks around the end of the bed to the en suite.

She’s halfway to the toilet when he flicks the sheet off himself and leaps out of bed, covering the distance between them in half a second, grabbing her playfully around the waist from behind, the bedsheet-cool skin of her back almost a shock against his naked body, her summerroom-warm front soft and smooth beneath his fingers, arms, hands.

‘No! No!’ she giggles, ‘I really need to piss…’

His cock, overinflated by both the unresolved excitements of the night before and the hydraulics of its morning erection, bobs urgently against her bum, seeking purchase on the smoothly rounded surfaces, looking for a way in.

‘Come on, Honey,’ she laughs, the audacity of his need too large and hilarious to resist. ‘I have to pick up our daughter. You remember our daughter.’

‘I remember making our daughter,’ he says, taking his cock in hand and feeling between her thighs for fluff, her back still to him.

‘OK,’ she acquiesces, tilting her pelvis back toward him, opening her cunt for access. ‘But if i’m late, you can explain to her why… and if i piss on the floor, you’re cleaning it up.’

He is already inside her as she is finishing off the rules of engagement, and with practised skill she pushes back onto him, her hands braced on the doorframe of the en suite, her feet apart. 

His cock is enormous this morning, and the skilfully set angle of her vagina allows him to sink so deeply into her that he can feel internal organs. Yes, there is her bladder as promised, and there, yes, right at the far end of her, there is the beak of her cervix. His balls are summer loose in the warm air and he can feel them flapping as he thrusts in and out of her. He knows he won’t last long, and he doesn’t. His loose balls draw up and do their thing.

When she feels him cum she moans, the way she moans when she has just bitten into the soft centre of one of the leftover xmas chocolates. This always touches his heart, this moan of hers: he knows that she doesn’t feel anything especial from his orgasm, that fucking itself for her is just a “pleasant fullness”, as she’s described it, and this moan of hers is purely a sympathetic affirmation of her love for him, not a sensual response. You have experienced this wonderful thing, she is saying, and i feel happy for having helped bring it to you.

The moment only lasts a second, though. She is wagging her tail. ‘OK, now come out,’ she is giggling again, jiggling from foot to foot. ‘I seriously need to piss…’

He is barely out of her before she is through the door and on the toilet, a hot, urgent stream of last night’s wine gushing into the pool at its bottom. Now she lets out a moan of relief that truly is sensual.

She showers like a maniac and dances into a cotton maxidress, topless beneath it, her panties visible through the thin material. The shoes she straps on seem too solid and harsh against her naked skin, and then she is gone out the door.

He showers, his cock still half inflated despite having feasted. He looks down at it proudly, soaps it, rinses it, offers it a few words of congratulation.

He climbs back into bed to think about the day, indeed the year ahead, and to enjoy the post-orgasmic afterglow. He hears her arrive back with their daughter. They are in the kitchen, talking about the party, two excited girls together.

She’s spent the night there, at her friend’s place, slept on a couch amongst boys and alcohol, but she will have come home unfucked, still a virgin. This is her way, the understanding she has with her friends.

He imagines the boys at the party, irrespective of that understanding, each with erections like his own, each seeking out, in that terrifying transitional moment when the counting stops and everything is supposed to begin again, the warm grip of creation that only a girl can give.

He imagines his own little girl, seventeen and only been kissed, her cunt being sought by those erections.

He knows it’s a double standard, his wanting to protect her from sex, the very sex he’s just enjoyed. His resolution is to worry less about that. It’ll be fine.

He listens to his wife and baby girl turning from talk of the party to the new, blank kitchen calendar, excitedly writing in all the birthdays for the coming year.

Celebrating creation.

(Source: pulpmill)

We had maybe ten minutes.

That was how long it took her mum to drive down to the shops and pick up the fish and chips.

Maybe fifteen, if there was a queue.

Of course, we couldn’t rely on there being a queue.

‘Should i take my jeans completely off?’ she whispered, hoping her little brother wouldn’t hear. I wasn’t all that worried about the kid. I don’t think i’ve ever seen him look up from his GameBoy long enough to register that other people - non-animated people that he doesn’t either control or battle - exist.

‘Just pull ‘em down and keep ‘em on,’ i whispered back, playing her game. ‘We’ll work around them.’

I liked the idea of working around her jeans. The word “working” made us sound very professional, and “working around” made us sound flexible and experienced.

She kicked off her shoes, flicked her hair, and pushed her jeans down far enough.

I dropped mine and pushed down my undies. My dick was ready, and i watched to see her expression when she saw it.

She was distracted, mindful of her little brother, and fretful of her mother, a woman representing at least three kinds of hell, swooping around out there with a bootful of battered carbohydrates and a furious suspicion we’d be doing some heavy petting on the couch.

She pulled her undies aside, rather than down. It felt illicit, the whole thing, and the sight of her undies pulled aside made it moreso. Her pussy was just as i’d remembered it from last weekend in my bedroom: meaty and totally nude. Not a hair to be seen.

One day i’d tell her i prefer them with a bit of foliage.

Too soon to bring that sort of thing up at the moment. She’d just be all inquisitive about what i mean, “prefer”. She’d want to know how many pussies i’d been associated with, to have become such a gourmand. I could do without those sort of questions.

‘Are you ready?’ she asked, still in that conspiratorial whisper.

‘What do you think,’ i asked conspiratorially right back, still waiting for her to latch her eyes onto my manhood. It was something i was quite proud of, that tube of flesh.

She glanced down at me. She’d seen it all before, her eyes said; she was sixteen, after all. Now wasn’t the time for praise and male-ego-buffing.

She took hold of me and slid me up and down that meaty gash of hers. She plied open her full lips and socketed me into position.

‘OK’, she said, like i hadn’t been paying attention.

I felt my foreskin slide back as i pushed into her. I watched her face, but her eyes were on the door. I ran out of dick before she changed her expression.

‘Do you think he can hear us?’

‘There’s nothing to hear! We haven’t even started yet…’

‘Shh! Listen…’

I have five senses, and right about then, the sense i was most interested in was touch. I could feel the wet walls of her gripping insides on the naked skin of my shaft, and i could feel - or imagine i could feel, which is the same thing - the flannel tissues of her interior stroking gently against the bared pink of my glans.

‘Do you hear that?’

I could feel her heart beating through my cock.

From the other side of the bedroom door, quiet sounds of movement. Maybe floorboards creaking.

‘He’s out there, isn’t he,’ she hissed.

Neither of us moved. On my part, not by choice. She had reached down and grabbed the small segment of shaft that was still sticking out of her. It seemed like she was planning on pulling me out, should little brother unprecedentedly decide to come into her bedroom when the door was shut.

I shifted my weight, because i’d been caught halfway between comfortable positions. The bedsprings squeaked.

She looked daggers at me, then her eyes flicked back to the door.

We listened to the silence.

I imagined the fish and chips winging their way closer to us through the dark winter streets.

It was obvious that nothing more was going to happen, so i let my mind wander. I remembered a joke a guy in PE had told me, about how he’d thought “coitus interruptus” was “caught us - interrupt us” the first time he’d heard it.

We’d laughed, then. It had seemed funny, then.

Didn’t seem funny now.

It seemed to me that there was something almost sacred in the coupling of two people, the way we were coupled right then. Something sacred, her having chosen me, me having chosen her, and there was no-one in the world, not her mother, not her brother, who should come between us. In fact, if they did, they should be the ones apologising.

Yeah! Hell yeah!

If we decided to come together like this, who were they…

I thought of her meaty cunt, and me being in it.

I came.

‘What the fuck are you doing?” she hissed, her eyes wide open, glaring down at the suddenly contentious place where we were connected.

‘I’m ejaculating,’ i said, not meaning to sound like a smart-arse. ‘It’s a recognised physiological reaction in response to this sort of thing.’

Of course, that was the moment when GameBoy called out from the other side of her bedroom door.

‘Tanya? Do you know where Mum is?’

‘Don’t come in, Ty! Mum’s getting the Fish and Chips…’

‘Why can’t i come in? Are you smoking in there?’

She glared at me as if to say, Are you finished? Then she pulled me out of her, or, more accurately, she pushed her fist into my balls and i pulled myself out of her.

‘Of course we’re not smoking! Go wash your hands for dinner!’

‘“We’re not smoking?” Is your boyfriend in there with you?’

Six months and he still doesn’t know my name.

‘Just wash your hands, Ty…’

The door opened.

Ty had his GameBoy in his hand still, and now he had his mouth wide open.

‘Um-maaah…’ he said, staring at his sister pulling her jeans back into place, and at me, who was kneeling on the bed, my wet cock hanging out, not giving a fuck what the brat saw.

‘Hey, mate,’ i said casually, sitting back on my heels, ‘You don’t walk into a girl’s bedroom without knocking, all right?’

‘I’m dobbing,’ Ty said, still staring at the two of us in disbelief.

‘You do,’ my beautiful girlfriend spat in an ugly voice like a harpy, ‘and i’ll take all your stinking GameBoy games and smash them with a hammer!’

That gave him pause to reflect, but he still looked to me like a young man who wanted to get his sister into as much trouble as he could manage, and damn the consequences.

‘Dude,’ i said, standing up off the bed, my cock still swinging free. ‘You’re, what, twelve? So you know what me and Tanya were doing, right?’

He nodded, the hint of a smile flashing about the edges of his mouth, in underneath his outraged morality.

I walked over, pulling my pants up as i got closer to him. ‘So you understand it’s none of your business, and none of your mother’s business, right?’

He looked uncertain. ‘You shouldn’t be doing that to my sister,’ he rallied.

‘Mate,’ i leant forward, my face in his. ‘She’s your sister, but she’s my girlfriend. Do you understand?’

He looked from Tanya to me, still not sure whether or not his advantage had been lost.

‘I’m going to fill your sister with my cock, and with my babies if i want, and there’s fuck all you can do about it. Do you understand that?’

He looked at me for a long time.

‘I hate you,’ he said, embarrassment sapping his indignation.

‘I don’t care, mate. Now piss off.’

I slammed the door after him.

‘Next time,’ i said, ‘my place.’

‘What,’ she said, ‘You mean the cubby?’

‘It’s a bungalow and you know it.’

Touch me

 
‘Here she comes again!’
 
‘You’re just tormenting yourself, you know.’
 
‘No, i’m not. I’m not! She’s the one tormenting me.’

‘I don’t think she knows you even exist, actually.’

‘But i do exist, and one day, she’ll know it…’

‘Look at her, and look at you. Why should she be even the slightest bit interested in you?’

‘I have my charms! I’m… enticing.’

‘Pfft! Hardly. Everything about you says “keep away!”. Good luck attracting the attention of someone like her with your so-called “charms”.’

‘Well, one day, i will get her attention, you mark my words. One day, she will notice me. One day, she will touch me, and then she will never forget me.’

‘One day, she will ignore you. One day, she will walk past you like you’re not even there. One day, she will…oh, hang on. That’s every day.’

‘Shhht! She’s coming!’

She’d risen late, showered, and then toweled off before returning to the bedroom to relax with a magazine while her hair dried. Then, after slowly and deliberately rubbing body butter into her long, supple legs and arms, and smoothing over her trim tummy and pert breasts with moisturiser, she’d stepped languorously into the sunlit room where her two admirers had an unobstructed view of her, her ringlets crinkling halfway down her back like autumn grapevines.

They waited breathlessly to see what she would do next.

She stretched into a yawn that reached from her toes to her fingertips, her arms way above her head, her legs longer than her torso. She was a petite little package, and the stretch made her seem all the smaller somehow, like a delicate miniature, exquisite in its detail.

‘I mean, look at that. What chance do you have?’

‘I have every chance that you have, bucko!’

‘Well, i’m a realist. Down to earth, you might say. I know that a woman built like that would have nothing to do with me, so i’m not looking for any chances. You can have mine, if you wish. For free. Don’t mention it.’

The girl was looking around the room, a little lost for something to do. She looked out toward the balcony, her hands on her naked hips.

‘If she goes onto the balcony, that’s when i’m gunna make my move…’

‘Your move?’

‘Yeah, that’s when i’m gunna make my move. Declare myself. She’ll find me irresistible.’

‘A dumpy, rotund little podge like you? I’ll bet you anything you like that she doesn’t even register your move, let alone respond to it.’

‘You’d have a better move than me, then? Mister i’m-too-cool-to-even-try?’

‘Chicks prefer free-spirited souls. I’m more open. They dig that kind of thing. You know. If i were interested.’

‘Which you’re not?’

‘Which i’m not.’

She clicked on the TV, flipped through some channels, then clicked it off again. Its old-fashioned CRT tube rang quietly, like a bell under water. She tossed the remote onto the couch.

‘She’s bored. She’s looking for something to do!’

‘Perfect time for you to make this move of yours. Entertain her.’

‘Shut up! I can be entertaining, you know.’

‘No, i do know, and you can’t.’

She looked at the balcony again, squinting at the midsummer light blasting in.

‘Shht! Do you think she sees us?’

Breathless seconds.

‘No. No, i think we have gone undetected. I think we can safely continue to spy on her without her screaming and running and putting on a dressing gown and calling the police…’

‘You mock, but you want her just as much as i do. Just admit it.’

‘I know what i can have, and what i can’t have. I know what i need, and what i want. I’m at peace with the deficit.’

‘“I’m at peace with the deficit”! Is that an example of your famous knee-trembling expressiveness that the chicks all dig? Ooh, can i borrow that line? Make her all wet and needy with my uber-cool expressiveness…’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d have been that interested in getting her wet, someone with your appetites…’

‘Well, it’s not about me, is it? It’s about the girl. Satisfying her wants and needs…’

‘Yeah. A real gentle lover you’d be.’

‘And you’d suggest what? I would have thought bending to her every whim would have been your modus operandi.’

The girl looked away from the balcony, walked over to the sideboard, glanced at some books, pulled out a volume, examining it like it were an archaeological find.

‘See her interest in books? That’s the sort of girl who would respond to someone expressive and flexible like me. Not someone who’s so set in his ways, like you.’

‘I thought you weren’t interested.’

‘I’m not. I’m just saying.’

She slid the book back into the bookcase and put her hands on her hips again. Then she left the room for the bedroom.

‘Damn!’

‘Yeah, you almost had her.’

‘She moves onto that balcony where i can make my move, bucko, and i will have her…’

She came back, still naked, carrying a tapered object a little larger than the remote control. She clicked it on as she walked to the couch, setting it buzzing.

‘What’s that?’

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘You’re so smart, you tell me!’

She sat on the couch, made herself comfortable with some cushions, and opened her legs.

‘I would have thought a ladies’ man like yourself, with all your moves, you’d know all about things like that.’

‘I…’

The girl slowly applied the tip of the buzzing thing to the lips of her vulva. She closed her eyes.

‘Ah.’

‘Of course.’

‘It’s one of those.’

‘Yes. Unusual design.’

‘You think so? Don’t they all look like that?’

She played it over her bush for a few moments, then slid the tip inside the slit of her vulva, digging the object deeper inside so that its pitch changed, like a bee dealing with a particularly pollen-rich flower.

‘She’s not likely to notice us now.’

‘No. She does seem somewhat rapt.’

‘It’d be nice to get closer…’

‘Yes. That would be nice. Maybe we should just fly over there on our silver wings?’

She had buried half the buzzing rod inside of her, and she was now making little ‘Muh!’ noises from time to time. Her admirers were close enough to be able to hear each syllable as it gushed from her.

‘She has such beautiful skin…’

“Yes, that’s the first thing i noticed about her when she walked into the room stark naked. Her skin. All over her, it is…’

‘But it is beautiful. I’d so love for her to touch me, to feel that skin… i bet it would be like…’

‘Yes? Like what?’

The girl was rotating the rod around inside her, making her little ‘Muh!’ noises, and to all intents and purposes it looked like she were trying to dig a particularly large splinter out of her insides.

‘…like…’

The ‘Muh!’ sisters were replaced by a long and hearty mother of a moan, and the girl started bucking like a worm that had been unearthed into the sunlight. The moan left the room and she thrashed in silence for a few more moments, and then the only sound was the buzzing.

A gossamer curtain lifted gently in the warm summer breeze.

She pulled the rod out of her with a quiet slurp and snapped it off. She tossed it onto the couch next to the remote.

‘…like… sunlight…’

‘Sunlight?’

‘Yeah, sunlight.’

‘Deep.’

The girl stood up after a few moments, then looked at the balcony door again.

‘Oh… this is it!’

She walked across the room on tiptoe. She was blushed red across her breasts and cheeks from her exertions with the rod.

‘This is it!’

She trailed her fingertips along the flimsy curtain that some loopy designer had thought would make an excellent room divider. She seemed fascinated by the texture as it swooshed past.

‘You’re making your move? I mean, let me know; i wouldn’t want to miss it.’

She touched the wall, the doorframe, in fact, she seemed to want to touch everything, drinking in the mosaic of feelings with her hungry skin.

‘Now!’

He made himself as enticing as he could. He sent out signals that said, i am lovely to touch, you need to feel me! Run your fingers over me, and you will see how lovely i truly am…

She walked past, her back to him, onto the balcony, disappearing into the sunlight.

She was gone.

‘Well, that worked well, your move. Good work. You should have tried to be more expressive…’

‘Oh, shut up. What would you know about touch? You’re only a stupid house plant,’ said the cactus.

Last Sunday

‘Terry, this is the last Sunday of the last weekend of the last week of the last school holidays, ever.’

‘Yeah, yeah, i know… Look, could you do up your shirt? I mean, come on…’

‘I don’t think you do know, Terry. I don’t think you fully understand. This is The Last Sunday, Terry. Got that? The. Last.’

‘Yes, yes. I’ve got that. Look, i can see your… your… Could you just do up some buttons?’

‘You haven’t got it at all, Terry. Did you read that stuff they gave us about Final Year? Did you? I bet you didn’t, Terry. I bet that’s why you’re so fucking calm about all this.’

‘Look, three things. One, stop using my name all the time, OK, Amelia? It’s creeping me out. Two, of course i didn’t read that stuff they gave us about Final Year; i’m a boy, remember? We don’t read stuff teachers give us to read. And three, please do up your shirt.’

‘OK, Terry - Oh! Sorry! OK, Mister Nameless Joe. Here’s… i dunno… some fucking number of things, OK? One, if you had overcome your masculinity and read that stuff they gave us, you’d have seen that they expect us to do twenty five hours homework a week. Twenty. Fucking. Five.’

I shifted my weight a little and the whole drum-raft bobbed grumpily, like i’d disturbed its sleep. I was trying to concentrate on this whole end-of-the-world scenario she was painting for me, really i was, but i was just too uncomfortable about her boobs peeping out at me.

I’ve known Amelia since Primary School. She was my first crush, my first kiss, and my first punch in the mouth. I didn’t feel like i was ready to see her boobs just yet. Of course, i wanted to, one day. I guess.

See them, that is.

Just not today.

A little longer with the whole mystique thing, i think. That would have been nice.

But now, there they were. Pop! Pow! Just like that.

They were OK, i guess, but her nipples were a little too puffy, and the boobs overall weren’t as big or as round or as… well, as magazine quality as i’d been imagining.

And now she was angry with me.

Somehow, seeing a girl’s tits and her being angry at me both at the same time didn’t seem quite right.

‘Well,’ i began, trying to focus on what she was saying, ‘there’s, what? A hundred and forty… a hundred and… sixty eight hours in a week? They only want us to study for twenty five…’

Oh, shit.

She had The Face on.

The one that tells me that i’m not getting it.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the company of The Face, i can tell you.

I asked her to come to my tenth birthday party but didn’t invite any of her girlfriends…

The Face.

I walked the hideously long distance across the Junior School Disco dance floor to ask her if we could dance, her and me, in front of all her girlfriends and all my mates and all the teachers and some random parents who’d stayed to help with the refreshments…

The Face.

I bumped into her and some of those inseparable damned girlfriends of hers in the With-It Youth Clothing department at our local shopping centre, and - right there, on the spot - i finally worked up the courage to ask her for a kiss, cos she just looked so damned lovely in the size-too-small pair of jeans said inseparable girlfriends were trying to convince her she fitted into…

The Face.

I convinced her to go for a moonlight walk alone with me on the Year 10 school camp, and surprised her by stealing a kiss while she was distracted with talking about this Harry Potter book she’d just read, and then, there in the moonlight, just after she’s punched me full in the mouth in return for that stolen kiss…

The Face.

So many times i just didn’t get things.

So many times i let her down.

‘Yes, there’s a hundred and sixty eight hours in a week, Descartes,’ she was saying, ‘but let’s actually work this out, shall we?’

She stood up, the shirt still undone and flapping, and her sudden shift of weight set the drum-raft to really wide-awake annoyed rocking as she counted off on her fingers the things we had to work out.

‘There’s five school days a week, OK? Five. That means that we have to do five hours a night homework, right? i have got that sum correct, haven’t i, Mister Calculus P. Higher-Mathematics Es-fucking-squire?’

She was gesticulating so much that i thought she was going to fall off the raft into the lake. Then i’d have to dive in to save her, and then the two of us would be in the water, slipping and sliding against each other, her half naked body squirming in my arms…

‘I think there’s some hours on the weekend as well,’ i offered.

It didn’t help.

‘So, OK,’ she half yelled, her eyes wide with indignation, her arms waving like she was sending semaphore to the wild ducks watching us mildly from a little way across the water. ‘Let’s say we do - oh, i don’t know - five hours on Saturday and five hours on Sunday? That leaves us only having to do… three fucking hours a night, every fucking school night, for the whole fucking year!’

She sat down. Actually, she dropped straight down onto her bum, like she’d been felled by a sniper.

I couldn’t help but notice the way her boobs had bounced, small as they were, when she landed.

Buh-wounce.

‘But,’ i said, since i figured it couldn’t make matters any worse, ‘the whole school year is only about nine months long…’

‘Nine months!’ she snorted. ‘Nine fucking months! I could have a fucking baby in nine fucking months! Squirt it in, gestate it, and shoot it the fuck out! Nine fucking months!’

I was wrong. It could make matters worse.

‘Look. At five o’clock this afternoon,’ she continued, disconsolate, ‘Your parents and my parents will stuff all our families’ collective shit back into the four-wheel-drives, and then we’ll drive home through all that fucking traffic, and then we’ll each get to our fucking houses, eat fucking dinner, go to fucking sleep, and then tomorrow - tomorrow! - tomorrow our fucking lives are over.’

She crossed her arms the way little girls do when they’re in a temper. That is, the way she used to do when she was a little girl in a temper. While this at least half covered her tits, it also showed that her mood was sinking, fast.

I thought for a moment that she was actually going to cry.

I knew i had to do something to comfort her. I would rather have been defusing a terrorist’s explosives vest while he was still wearing it and slapping at my hands, but i still had to do it.

‘Well,’ i started, realising i couldn’t offer any suggestions of my own to fix this disaster. ‘What should we do about it?’

She sniffed. She was on the verge of tears for real. She even pawed at an eye with the heel of one hand, as if brushing away an actual tear. I’d never seen her cry, and i was horrified that she might start showing me that particular spectacle now, the way she had started showing me the particular spectacle of her tits, not ten minutes earlier.

Tits i could handle. Crying? That was a-whole-nother thing.

She pulled herself together and looked me straight in the eye.

‘You have to fuck me,’ she said.

***

You know how you’re watching a DVD and you don’t quite catch what a character says, how you can rewind, turn on subtitles, and find out exactly what you’ve missed? When my childhood playmate told me i had to fuck her, i started mentally reaching for the remote control.

I knew i couldn’t ask a clarifying, “You want me to fuck you?”, just in case that wasn’t what she’d said at all. Also, just in case that was precisely what she’d said.

I also knew that if that was what she’d said, then saying nothing at all would also be the wrong thing to do.

I could tell that The Face was about to make its second appearance in under five minutes, and then everything would just fall apart.

Luckily, a stroke of brilliance hit me.

‘Why do you think that will help?’

Ha! Vague enough so that, no matter what she’d said, she’d have to go into it in more detail, and, if she had said that i had to fuck her, then she’d elaborate. If i’d misheard her - as surely i had - then i’d find out what she had said for real, without my embarrassing Freudian slip of the ear being exposed.

‘Aren’t i good enough for you,’ she asked, her voice dead cold, her eyes clouding, but The Face holding off.

‘Um…’

‘A girl asks you to fuck her, you really shouldn’t be asking the whys and wherefores, Romeo.’

Oh. So i had heard right.

‘You should just start getting undressed and fuck her. I mean, it’s rude not to.’

And then there it was.

The Face.

But then, a miracle. The Face faded, and in its place was a look that, had it been on any other person in the world, i would have immediately recognised as vulnerability.

‘Let me tell you something,’ she said. ‘You’re not going to believe this, but…’

She stopped and looked away, out across the tannin-stained water. All very soap opera. Her eyes were still turned theatrically away from me when she made her big confession in a small voice.

‘…i’m a virgin.’

I’d figured as much, of course. It’s not that she was plain or unattractive or anything like that, but she was just so much hard work! Trust me, i know.

I’d been trying to get into her pants since… well, since i’d realised she had pants that i could get into.

I couldn’t imagine any other boy having the persistence required to complete that journey. They used to joke about her, actually, the other boys. ‘She’ll make a meal a’ ya, that girl,’ they’d crow, ‘Get it? Amelia? Cos she’s a fucking man-eating bitchfaced cunt…’

Plus, if any other boy had managed to overcome his fears of her presumed cannibalistic vagina dentata ways and decided to make that journey up the Orinoco, stamp his passport with Amelia’s name, and smear his chest with her hymenal blood, i’m sure i’d be the first person that that boy would run to to boast about having done it.

On account of her and me being best friends, and on account of how that’s what boys do when they fuck your best friend.

They brag.

So the intactness of her virginity wasn’t the shock revelation here. The two of us sitting on this raft alone, her half undressed and explaining that me having sex with her would somehow help us with our study workload for the year, that was the shock.

I hoped it wouldn’t be too long before she revealed how this plan of hers was going to work, since knowing that would mean there’d be one less thing doing my head in.

I reached out, at a loss for anything else to do, and put my hand on her tight, bony shoulder, consolingly. She shrugged it away.

‘I don’t want your pity,’ she said, morose.

She seemed content with her own pity. She always thought she was better at things than i was.

‘I’m not offering you pity,’ i said.

I felt dizzy as those words came out. I nearly swooned, actually. Way manly.

You see, i’d never told a girl i loved her before.

She turned back and looked me in the eye again, her lips pursed.

‘What are you offering, then?’

My breathing had gone all funny.

‘What you want.’

See, in my head, as i rehearsed it mentally a split second before i said it out loud, that sounded totally romantic. I mean, BBC-TV-Adaptation-of-the-Beloved-Jane-Austen-Classic romantic. I expected her to whimper a bit, throw her arms around me, and … then the rest.

‘What i want?’

Uh-oh.

‘What i want? You’ll do me that favour, will you? What i want?’

I realised that my lips had been parted, perhaps in case they were about to be needed for a tender kiss. I closed them, to protect my teeth from any punches she may be about to throw.

‘I mean,’ she said, the colour rising in her cheeks, ‘you’ll be so kind as to chuck a fuck up me, would you? You’ve got no other chores lined up for the day, so you might as well get the old dick out and gump me up good and proper, like i want! I! Me! Like i want!’

There it was.

The Face.

‘It’s not like it’d be something you’d want to do, would it? It’s not like making love to me would be something that you’d have perhaps thought might be nice or anything? It’s not like you’d maybe even enjoy…’

Oh, shit.

There it was.

A tear.

‘…doing it…’

And now a sob.

‘…with me, your best friend.’

And now she was fully crying.

I guess she’d never told anyone that she loved them before, either.

***

Her body was hot in my arms. Her face was leaking onto my chest, her shoulders heaving, her bare breasts wobbling.

Her sniffs were wet and blubbering.

Her thin hair was whipping in the light breeze.

Her back was smooth and shaped for speed, no bra strap breaking its sweeping lines.

Her arms, holding loosely onto me, were strong and weak all at once.

Her hands were balled into fists, clinging to the sides of my t-shirt.

I remembered her pulling back one of those fists, that time in the school camp moonlight. The cold-numb feel of those knuckles on my lips, the lips that had, moments before, rested on the softest, most intoxicating thing i’d ever known…

‘Amelia, more than anything i’ve ever wanted to do,’ i said to her in what i hoped was a consoling and earnest voice, the passion and emotion threatening to choke me, ‘i’ve always, always…’ i didn’t think i’d be able to complete the sentence, the feelings i was expressing were just too damned raw.

‘I’ve always wanted to fuck you.’

There. It was out.

Perhaps - again - not as romantic as i was hoping it would sound, but i’d said it, and i’d meant it.

She stopped sobbing and the horrible nasal snerkling sound stopped, too.

She looked at me, her eyes red.

‘Always?’

In a move i’d seen on TV more times that i could count, i reached up and wiped away a tear from her hot face.

‘Always.’

She hiccuped and sniffed again.

‘What. Even when we were little?’

Oooh. Nasty mental image. Hairless genitals mashing together in the wading pool…

‘Um, no. That would have been… weird. But certainly for as long as i’ve wanted to fuck anybody. You’ve been my first choice.’

She wiped at her cheeks.

‘Then why didn’t you say something?’ she asked, the anger rising. ‘Now here am i, worried that this stupid virginity thing is going to distract me from my studies, all twenty five fucking hours a week of them, and all this time you’ve wanted to fuck me?’

‘Well, you’ve never mentioned it either, you know,’ i said, feeling a little slighted. ‘It takes two, and all that.’

‘I’ve not wanted to fuck you, not past tense, Terry,’ she explained. ‘I want to be fucked, now. Present tense. I don’t want to be sitting there in my study for the next nine months, reading over biology notes, punching away at my calculator, trying to get perfect scores, while all the other dumb-arse girls are fucking boys left right and centre, and me sitting there wondering what it’s like, what it feels like, all that shit, and not having any time to invest in some stupid relationship just so i can get fucked and find out what all the fuss is about.’

Just like Amelia. Still playing hard to get.

‘So you’re mad at me because i never told you i wanted to fuck you, but you’ve never wanted to fuck me, and now you want me to fuck you,’ i said, clarifying, ‘so that you don’t have to waste time thinking about what it might feel like?’

She wiped her nose on the loose front of her shirt.

‘Sure. Why else?’

I couldn’t see any good coming from bringing up words like “hypocrisy” at this point in time, so i let it go.

‘OK. And why did you wait until now, then, to bring this up?’

‘How do you mean? It only takes… what? Half an hour? And that includes undressing, and i’m already half undressed…’

‘I mean, we’ve been on holiday up here at the lake for three weeks. We’ve spent most of that time in each other’s pockets, practically, and you wait until the very last day to do something about this?’

‘I only want to do it the once, and there’s plenty of time left…’

‘Well, what about if you find that you like it? What about if you think it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to you, and you want to do it again? Maybe even three times? We could have done this weeks ago, and then had time to go again, if you decided… if we decided we wanted to. I’m pretty sure i’ll want to go for a second and a third time…’

‘My period,’ she sniffed, wiping at her nose.

‘What?’

‘I’m not on the Pill. I had to wait for my period.’

Involuntarily, i glanced at her crotch.

This time two years ago we’d been up here, and my dad had been gutting a fish i’d caught in the lake; my first catch, actually. Showing me how it was done. He’d never formally sat me down and given me The Talk, you know, about S-E-X, but he did send me postcards from Adultville from time to time. This turned out to be one such occasion, and he paused, looked up at me from that mess of bloody fish guts, and he said, ‘Son, man to man… if a girl tells you she has her period but that it’s OK,’ he picked up the entrails and threw them in the bucket with a splat, ‘don’t you believe her.’

I looked into Amelia’s ruddy face and tried not to think about fish guts.

‘You’re… on your period?’

‘It just stopped, the blood, if that’s what you mean. This is day six. I’m safe.’

‘Safe?’

It hadn’t for a second occurred to me that there could be any danger involved in fucking her.

‘Yeah, safe. You can fuck me and i won’t get pregnant.’ She looked across the lake and squinted into the distance. ‘I could well do without that distraction from my studies…’

It was weird to think of her as someone who could get pregnant. Equally weird to think of her as someone who could be “safe”.

‘So,’ she said, the tears finally having stopped altogether, ‘We gunna do this fucking thing?’

***

‘Here?’ i asked, feeling the drum-raft still wobbling beneath us from her standing up a few moments earlier, trying to imagine fucking her on its unstable planks.

‘Sure. Why not?’

‘Well, for one thing, because the ripples’ll send a signal out from this little cove to everyone at the lake that something suspiciously rhythmic is going on.’

She thought about this and agreed, nodding.

‘OK, then. Where?’

I had no idea. I guessed the woods would be as good a place as any. Maybe on some pine needles or something?

‘How about we hike up that way,’ i suggested, pointing in a random direction. She shrugged, stood up again, and leapt off the pitching raft.

‘You might wanna do up your shirt,’ i said to her back. ‘In case we bump into somebody.’

She turned around and looked at me. With curiosity.

There was an awkward silence while she regarded me with that look.

‘Do you like my tits?’

I nodded.

She cupped them, squeezed them together, forming some cleavage.

‘Do they make you… horny?’

I nodded again, felt myself blushing.

She looked at my boardshorts.

‘Do they make you… hard?’

“Hard” wasn’t a word i’d expected to hear Amelia say, ever. It caught me off balance. Literally. I was just at that moment about to jump from the raft to the shore, and i nearly ended up in the drink.

‘When the time comes,’ i assured her, clumsily landing and regaining my footing, ‘i’ll be as hard as you need me to be.’

She uncupped her boobs and put her hands on her hips.

‘So you’re not hard… now?’

‘Well, not right now,’ i admitted.

‘Why not?’

It was a good question. I probably should have been, considering. But it wasn’t like i was doing it on purpose.

Based on her past comments about my attitude to fucking her, though, i figured i should come up with a very good and plausible reason, one that in no possible way reflected badly upon her.

‘Well,’ i began, inventing as i went, ‘a guy can only stay hard for so long, or he gets… gangrene.’

‘Shit! Really?’ She stared at my groin.

‘Yeah. Oh, yeah. So it sort of only gets stiff just when you need it.’

She started doing up her shirt.

‘Well, let it know that i need it in about five minutes’ time, OK?’

And she turned around and strode off into the woods.

I had trouble keeping up with her, such was her striding. She was clearly eager to get this thing done.

As was i, of course. As was i.

‘Here?’ she asked when she found a nice looking spot with some cushy looking underbrush scattered about, and some spindly onion grass, complete with little white bell flowers.

‘Well, the ground looks a bit wet,’ i demurred.

She pushed the soil with the toe of her sneaker. It sank in. ‘Yeah. So where, then.’

‘How about under those pine trees?’ i pointed. ‘They’ll have pine needles and shit for us to lie on.’

So we hiked up half a kay or so to the line of pine trees, which rose like a Greek temple out of the scrub and she-oaks.

She pushed the carpet of needles with her sneaker toe again. It was musty, but dry and springy.

‘Right,’ she decided. ‘We’re here. What do i do now?’

That was when i realised that she thought i was experienced in this sort of thing. That she was under the impression that i wasn’t a virgin, and that i was going to now bring the full benefit of my worldly knowledge to bear upon her hymen.

If i told her the truth, i’d have to deal with The Face, and the very real possibility that she’d take herself off to the lake cafeteria and proposition some random but more experienced boy to do the deed.

Yes. That was a very real possibility.

‘Take off your clothes,’ i said, my voice confident and practised. I even pointed, to show her where her clothes were.

She unbuttoned that shirt again and her bare boobs popped back out. ‘Are you gunna take off your clothes, or what?’ she asked, a little impatiently.

‘Of course,’ i said, and started to pull my T-shirt over my head. When my face came clear, i could see that she was completely topless, and that her jean-shorts were unbuttoned and in the process of being unzipped.

I tugged at the cord of my boardies, and, when i looked up, she was kicking off those jean-shorts, and then she was standing there in just her sneakers and undies.

‘Funny,’ she smiled. ‘I never realised that i’d have to get naked to do this.’

I smiled back, waiting breathlessly for her undies to come off. The little pink and purple love hearts taunted me.

‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘i never thought through the fact that you’d have to see me naked. And that i’d have to see you naked…’

Those undies weren’t coming off.

Something had gone wrong.

‘Aren’t you embarrassed?’ she asked, crossing her hands in front of her undies, right over the spot i’d been staring at: a dark triangular shadow behind the thin cotton and those blasted love hearts.

‘Oh, no,’ i said, wrinkling my nose and shaking my head to show how totally unembarrassed i was. ‘This is all part of it.’

‘Then you first,’ she said.

That was when i realised that this was some sort of a trap. A practical joke. She must have some girlfriend hiding in the bushes with a cameraphone. As soon as i dropped my boardies and my boxers, a photo would be taken, and within seconds my dick would be up on Facebook, and then in Google, and then i’d never get it back.

Which would suck.

So this called for some brinkmanship.

I dropped my boardies.

‘Let’s do our undies together,’ i said. My thought being that she wouldn’t risk ending up in Google as well as me, and that she wouldn’t be prepared to actually show me her bare muff if it was all just for a prank.

‘OK,’ she said, happily enough, and hooked her thumbs under her waistband.

I peered into the bushes, looking for cameraphones.

‘One,’ she counted. ‘Two… It’s on Three, OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Three.’

I was torn between looking for cameraphones and looking at her.

Looking at her won.

I was so rapt in the sight of her fully naked body that i messed up pulling down my boxers. My dick, now heavily half stiff, had gotten hooked in the pop-hole, and it took a moment to work around that. When i did get disentangled - by sense of touch, since i was so busy staring lustily and stupidly at her - my dick sprang out of my boxers like the proverbial Jack-in-the-box.

‘Ooh!’ she said, clearly impressed. ‘Is it meant to jump about like that?’

‘Not really,’ i said, in case saying otherwise got her hopes up for tricks i wouldn’t be able to perform.

‘Oh,’ she said, a little disappointed. ‘Well, how do i look?’

She did a little swing of her hips. Put one hand behind her head, one on her hip. Vamped.

‘You’re beautiful,’ i said, hardly able to put the breath behind the words.

‘Really?’ she said, and i thought, no, not really.

A waterfall is beautiful. A thoroughbred is beautiful. A sportscar is beautiful.

Amelia wasn’t beautiful. She was superbly naked and hypercharged with sexual attraction, and i wanted to fuck her right away, plant myself right in that fluffy bush of hers, sure. But she wasn’t beautiful.

‘You,’ i said, ‘You’re absolutely gorgeous.’

Yeah. That was the word. Gorgeous. I wanted to gorge on her.

‘Good,’ she decided. ‘Now what? Now i suppose you stick it in me, right?’

***

‘Before you do stick it in me and it gets all wet and slimy and shit,’ she said, ‘could i just touch it?’

I’d swear that when she said, “touch it”, it got stiffer than it’d ever been before.

‘Sure, if you want,’ i consented magnanimously.

She took a step toward me and reached out, gently gripping it between thumb and fingertips.

She turned it slowly this way and that, checking it out.

‘It’s warm,’ she said.

I just nodded.

She let go and took half a step back. She put her hands on her hips and looked at it.

‘Should we wait some more, or is this as big as it’s gunna get?’

I gave it an appraising look. I’d never seen it that big, not ever in all those hours i’d spent sitting in my secret spot with my secret stash of magazines.

‘I think that’s about as big as it’s gunna get,’ i confirmed.

Her hands still on her hips, she said, ‘Should i suck it first? Some girls suck them to start with.’

I couldn’t help visualising - and, what? feel-ualising? - her putting that wonderfully soft mouth of hers over my dick. I felt a familiar tumbling in my tummy and i was certain that i was about to just plain cum, right there and then, shooting my load prematurely and disappointingly onto her legs. Although, from the angle it was on, and the pressure i felt it had behind it, i reckon i could have hit her in the eye.

‘Nah,’ i said, ‘they do that instead of fucking. If you suck it and i cum, it’d be hard to get it to work again for a proper fucking afterwards.’

She nodded again. It felt more like we were discussing where to pitch a tent, and which side to build the fire on.

‘So,’ i began, ‘you wanna lie down now?’

She leant forward instead, reached out, and held onto it again. I felt my balls shift, draw up.

‘You’re not circumcised?’

‘No. Nobody really is anymore.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah,’ i shrugged. ‘I think that’s just an American thing.’

She looked dubious.

‘Will it feel different?’

‘From a circumcised one?’ I shrugged again. ‘Probably not.’

She seemed satisfied with that.

‘I’m not going to lie down,’ she said.

Which to me seemed like she was getting cold feet.

‘I’ve done some research,’ she went on, ‘and i’d like to do it “cowgirl”. Or, i think it’s “cowgirl”. Maybe it’s “reverse cowgirl”… Which is the one where the girl faces the boy?’

I had no idea.

‘Well, that’s your…’ I visualised a cowgirl riding a horse, complete with frilly leather vest and stetson, ‘…basic “cowgirl”. Cos you’re facing the head - my head - like a normal riding position on a horse.’

‘Are you sure?’

I nodded a little too furiously. ‘Oh, yeah. Yep, the good ol’ “cowgirl” position. Yes indeedy.’

I sounded too much like a cowboy, saying that. A nervous, over-compensating cowboy. But it was too late to do anything about that.

Then nothing happened for a good ten seconds.

‘Shouldn’t you lie down, then?’ she asked, finally.

‘Of course,’ i agreed, and gingerly lowered myself onto the mat of needles, which was strangely warm beneath me, despite the deep shade we were in.

Still, it had been hot the last few days.

‘The needles are warm,’ i commented.

‘Well, it’s been hot the last few days,’ she replied.

Awkward pause.

‘Do you think it’ll rain?’

She looked up through the canopy. ‘Nah. Probably not.’

Another awkward pause.

‘Well, good. You wanna get on top of me, then?’

She looked at me lying there.

‘It’s pointing the wrong way,’ she said, a little confused.

‘No, that’s fine. That’s the way it’s meant to go. It lines up with your… passage.’

She didn’t look convinced.

‘Just try it,’ i enthused.

So she stepped over me, planting one foot either side of my hips, and started to squat.

‘Like this?’

I had no idea.

‘I think it might be better if you kneel.’

She looked in that squat like she was going to do a shit on my dick, and i couldn’t imagine that that was the right position. But, as noted, i had no idea.

She looked dubious, but then she knelt, just like that.

Her calves and thighs felt unspeakably sexy against my flanks. Again i got that tumbling feeling and i thought i was going to cum right then and spoil things.

‘How,’ i asked, trying to distract myself, ‘did you do this research?’

She smiled. ‘You’ve heard of a little thing called the Internet, i presume?’

‘But girls don’t look up porn,’ i said, a little horrified.

‘It wasn’t porn, it was research.’

She sat on my ballsack. I looked down at the unbelievable sight of my stiff dick poking out from underneath Amelia’s brown curls.

‘Now,’ she said, ‘you make with the fucking, right?’

***

‘I think i have to be inside you, first,’ i said. ‘Before the fucking starts.’

‘You… think?’

‘I mean, i definitely have to be inside you, first. Here, lift up.’

She lifted up, her knees digging into the needle mat and releasing bottled up earthy scents that i knew i would associate with sex for ever after.

‘A bit higher.’

‘What are you trying to do?’

‘You need to be a bit higher so i can get this in…’

‘Like this?’

‘No, now i can’t reach at all. Come back down a…’

Neither of us spoke.

For what seemed like a full minute, but which was probably only ten seconds.

‘Like that?’

I hadn’t expected it to feel so hot. Wet, sure, but not hot.

It didn’t feel wet at all, actually.

I knew, from my own “research”, that it had to be wet for matters to proceed. I knew i had to arouse her more before the next bit, but there was something i couldn’t get my mind to work past.

The tip of my penis was resting inside the lips of Amelia’s pussy.

Penis. Pussy.

That hot feeling Down There was her.

Amelia.

‘Should i start bouncing?’

‘No, no. I have to go in further, and you have to be wetter than you are, and… we have to break your hymen first…’

She frowned. ‘There’s a lot to this, isn’t there?’

‘I guess.’

‘You… guess?’

‘There is, i mean. Definitely a lot.’

‘So how do i get wetter?’

I was kind of hoping that her research would have provided that answer. Mine only told me that chicks had to be dripping wet when you fucked them, and that it seemed to be something you had to compliment them on, this wetness.

‘Maybe we should kiss?’

‘Maybe?’

‘We should definitely kiss. And i should play with your…’

‘Tits?’

‘Yeah. And your clitoris…’

She wrinkled her nose. ‘Let’s just stick to tits for the moment.’

She leant forward, putting her hands either side of my head to hold herself up off of me.

She didn’t close her eyes.

Her lips were as soft as i remembered them from that midnight walk. Not having the kiss accompanied by a punch in the mouth made it all the more pleasant.

Then the lips were taken away.

‘How’s that?’ she asked.

I reached down, about to touch her pussy to check for wetness, when it occurred to me that touching her Down There with my fingers would be a bit weird.

‘How does it feel for you?’ i tried instead.

She looked off into the scrub, as if trying to figure out which direction the wind was blowing from.

‘Kiss more,’ she decided, and her lips once again lowered onto mine.

This time she opened her lips, and i felt her tongue explore out a little way.

I opened my lips and sent my tongue out to meet it.

I closed my eyes.

I was very aware that i was connected to Amelia by the warm softness of her mouth, and by the hot pressure of her pussy.

Why hadn’t she started this three weeks ago? How hard was it to get the Pill, for goodness’ sake?

She again lifted those lips off of me, far too soon.

‘Tits,’ she said.

I dutifully ran my fingertips over the skin, which was warm and dry, and soft, but not as soft as her lips.

Her nipples were poking right out, the areolae wrinkling up in an effort to force them out as far as they would go.

‘Fuck it,’ she declared. ‘Forget the tits. I think i need you to be in me, right now. Let’s do this hymen thing.’

***

‘This’ll sting,’ i said. ‘Quite a bit.’

‘Well, i’m relying on you to make it not sting too much.’

‘It doesn’t work that way.’

‘Well, isn’t it just like getting your ears pierced?’

‘Not really,’ i guessed.

‘Maybe i should have used some ice…’

‘No, that wouldn’t work. Just… hold on.’

I started to push.

Nothing happened.

‘Is it done?’

‘Not yet. How’re you going?’

‘If it hurts too much, i’ll let you know, and you can stop.’

‘OK. Sounds like a plan.’

I pushed again.

Still nothing.

‘Should i push, too?’

‘Maybe yes.’

‘Maybe?’

‘Yes. Definitely.’

‘One… two… it’s on three, OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Three.’

I pushed up, just as gently-but-firmly as before, and Amelia thrust herself powerfully against me, like she was trying to shove me out from underneath her.

She screamed.

‘HOLY FUCK!’ was what she screamed, actually.

‘Are you OK?’ i asked.

She slapped me. Clean across the face.

She jumped up off of me, holding onto her crotch like she’d been kicked in it.

There was blood.

She held up her fingers and looked at the blood.

‘Is that meant to happen?’ she spluttered.

‘That’s meant to happen,’ i reassured her, even though i was having my doubts.

‘You know,’ she spluttered on, ‘Sylvia Plath nearly bled to death when she had her first time.’

The wilderness felt suddenly huge around me. And i imagined carrying the bloodstained and unconscious Amelia down to her parents, explaining what had happened…

She was conscious now, though, and doing a little jig, still holding on to her vulva.

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! FUCK!’

This didn’t look good. Fuckwise.

Still, i’d been all the way inside of her. Even if it had only been for two seconds.

I was a man!

So, even if the fuck wasn’t forthcoming, i had that.

And maybe she could suck me off, after all…

‘Look,’ she said, ‘I still want to do this thing, but i need a few minutes to gather myself, OK?’

I nodded, certain that any words would be the wrong ones.

She hopped around, leant against the pine trunks, hopped some more, spent a lot of time looking at the blood on her fingers, and finally came back and stood over me again.

‘You don’t mind getting blood on you? I think it’s stopped.’

‘I don’t mind in the least,’ i assured her, a little amazed at her asking me about minding.

‘I don’t have AIDS,’ she said. ‘Or zombie.’

Of course, i’d not thought for a moment about AIDS. Or zombie.

She knelt back on top of me, determined to get this thing done. My dick was co-operating nicely, and it was stiff as a boat oar. I held it upright as she lowered herself onto it.

‘Sheeeeeeeeeeeeee,’ she breathed, through gritted teeth, as my knob slid through her bloody passage. ‘I hope it’s not always as fucking painful as this…’

‘It’s not,’ i guessed. ‘If we did this tomorrow, it’d feel a lot better.’

Can’t blame a guy for trying.

Then, just like that, she was sitting on my pelvic bone.

I was fully inside her.

Oh. My. Fuck.

‘Well,’ i said. ‘Look at us.’

‘Yeah,’ she smiled, before another sharp gasp. ‘I wish i’d brought my iPhone. This would make some impressive wallpaper…’

Which made me glance about at the bushes again, to see if my earlier suspicions were about to be confirmed.

‘So, now i bounce?’

I figured i was nut deep in my best friend’s pussy, anything was worth that price of admission. Even having embarrassing photos of me fucking her stored in Google for all time.

‘Now you bounce.’

It was pretty basic, the fucking. She just lifted up and down over me.

It was also the most amazing thing i’d ever been involved in.

I looked up at the sky. There, between the treetops, i could see the ghost moon, haunting the summer sky. Amelia kept sliding herself up and down my impossibly stiff dick, and i wondered about Neil Armstrong, walking up there on that moon. I wondered if he felt, when he was up there, that it was better than doing this sort of thing with Mrs Armstrong.

Given the choice between the moon and this, i knew which i’d choose.

‘Amelia,’ i said, coming back to earth, with that loamy smell of the good brown motherworld all around me, all around us, ‘I have to finish now.’

She stopped. Just dead stopped.

‘How come?’ she asked, shocked.

‘No, no. I mean, i have to… ejaculate. Please, don’t stop…’

She set her jaw and started that delicious sliding again.

‘Here it comes,’ i warned her.

‘Will i feel it?’ she asked.

‘Not…’

I came. It felt like i was pumping litres of myself into her, draining vital fluids, losing organs, brain tissue…

‘…really.’

She was still bouncing.

‘You can stop bouncing.’

‘That was it?’

With a sudden shock, i realised that i hadn’t made her come.

‘Aren’t i meant to orgasm?’

This was going to be awkward.

‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘i’m supposed to orgasm. We orgasm together…’

‘Well…’

‘You did orgasm, right? That was an orgasm? Where was mine?’

‘It doesn’t always work out that way. Maybe all the blood and the pain…’

‘Shit!’

She climbed off of me, leaving a splatter of blood-tinged cum on my balls.

‘I was supposed to orgasm! Now i’ll be wondering about that all fucking year…’

She was pacing. Naked and pacing.

Smeared with my sprog, naked, and pacing.

Now that would make some awesome wallpaper!

‘I can make you cum,’ i offered, ‘but it doesn’t always work like that for the girl.’

I’d read this. In a shoplifted Cosmo. Because it pays to know that sort of thing.

‘How would you make me cum,’ she spat, still smeared with my sprog, naked, and pacing, but now also annoyed.

‘It’s a thing i do,’ i said, like i did it all the time, instead of having seen some animated gifs online, ‘with my tongue.’

She put her hands over her ears. ‘This is all becoming too complicated,’ she said. ‘Let’s just… see.’

I wanted to lie there a while longer, but she wanted to clean herself up. We pulled our clothes back on - she’d had her sneakers on the whole time - and we walked the kilometre back down to the drum-raft. We stripped off and entered the water, which was bracing, and washed my ejaculate and her hymenal blood off of us both.

Luckily, no-one wandered by that secluded little cove to catch us skinny-dipping.

We lay on the raft in our underwear - the wet cotton a precaution in case someone did stroll by - and dried off.

I reached out for her hand, and she let me take it.

I half rose and went to give her a kiss, but she pursed her lips and shook her head.

‘We’ll see,’ she said.

***

School started the next day and she was right. Our lives were fucking over.

The teachers loaded us up with so much homework that i put my neck out carrying my bag home the first day.

Amelia was in mostly different classes to me, so i hardly ever saw her.

This was the worst possible thing.

I needed to catch up with her, get her alone, and give her that orgasm.

Probably school was not the best place to do this.

My mind, when it was not whirling with algorithms and chemical formulae, was trying to figure out how to complete the experience for her, to get her mind off of wondering what an orgasm was like, to make her see that i was not just a penis of convenience, but someone who could be her boyfriend…

Sort of a backburner boyfriend. I could wait for her, and she could wait for me…

It was only nine months, after all.

Nine fucking months.

Or, excuse the pun, nine no-fucking months.

Thursday i decided it was make or break, and i chased her down. She was in her period three Chem study group, and i walked right up the them and said, “Amelia, i have something to give you.’

It was clumsy and awkward, and i saw a glimmer of The Face.

‘Can’t you give it to me here?’ she asked, looking out the side of her eyes at those interminable girlfriends, the ones who would be bragging about all the fucking they’d be doing over the course of the year to come.

‘Not really,’ i said. In my head, i completed the thought, ‘It’s an orgasm.’

Grudgingly, she stood up and followed me out of the library.

It seemed so odd to see her in her school skirt and blazer, considering how i’d seen her naked, speared her on the end of my stiffened dick, fucked her after having popped her cherry…

‘What is it, Terry?’

‘That thing, the unfinished thing…’

She rolled her eyes.

‘We had a shot at that,’ she whispered, even though there were only a handful of little First Years scampering late to class who might have heard. ‘It didn’t work.’

‘But we can try again,’ i offered. ‘Let me try to give you this thing. Let me make your Final Year that bit easier to get through…’

She was staring without seeing at the portables on the other side of the quadrangle. Trying not to see me.

‘I’ll be fine,’ she lied.

‘But,’ i pleaded, ‘think about what we shared last Sunday…’

‘Yeah,’ she said, her voice strangely flat. ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. About last Sunday…’

INSTANCES OF INTERCOURSE

I knew, of course,

Of course i knew.

It wasn’t that i was looking for “substantiating evidence” that would put me “beyond reasonable doubt”, or anything like that.

Substantiating evidence was the very last thing i wanted to find.

And i’d been nursing that reasonable doubt for so long it was beginning to feel like my invisible friend, come back from childhood to hang out with me again.

No. All i wanted to find, all i was looking for, was what we were doing on Sunday afternoon. I had all this work that i needed to get done on a bunch of contracts, and i needed to know if i could get the work done then, or if we were committed to some thing that she’d told me about and that i’d forgotten.

So, without thinking, i go to her handbag to check her daily planner.

We are, after all, a couple. We share everything. Our lives are open books to each other. I’ve kissed her anus and she’s licked my balls. We have nothing to hide from each other.

I pull out her daily planner, the one where she notes and records everything from the dates and times of nephews’ concert recitals and her shiftwork at the clinic, down to her ovulation readings and our “instances of intercourse”.

She likes to be organised. She doesn’t want to miss a concert recital, a shift, or a period.

I flip to this week - she has, of course, a ribbon to mark her place in the year - and i check Sunday. It’s clear.

I’m about to close the planner, put it back in her bag, go back to my life, when i notice the capital letters “IOI” carefully inscribed against Monday night, encased in a neat little rectangle.

Monday night is her Gym night. She always comes home sweaty, always has a shower before bed.

We never have an Instance of Intercourse on a Monday night.

Yet there it is.

Substantiating evidence, beyond reasonable doubt.

***

Simon and Sarah.

That’s us.

Simon and Sarah.

simonandsarah.

We go together like sticky and date, like butter and scotch.

We are a unit. A single entity.

A catchphrase.

A cliche.

I look at the photo of us she has in a magnetic frame, stuck on the fridge. A friend took it one time we were at the beach. I’m shirtless and she’s in a bandeau and sarong, but the photo is from the shoulders up, so we look naked. She calls it our Honeymoon sex tape photo.

I look into the eyes of the me in the photo.

You poor bastard, i say to that version of me. But that version of me wants nothing to do with the problems of this version of me. I’m fine, dude, that past version of me says. You’re the poor bastard. Later today, past version of me swaggers, i’m getting a blow job on the beach. You, you’ll be packing your bags and phoning college mates for a place to stay the night.

He’s right, of course, past version of me.

The prick.

I open the fridge and get out a can. I might as well drink, i figure. Being a little drunk might make the whole thing a little bit easier to get through.

I’m three cans down when she arrives home.

***

She walks in and sees the planner on the bench.

She looks at me. She knows that i know.

She puts the shopping bag on the bench, on top of the planner, and slips her purse into her open handbag.

If only she’d taken the handbag shopping with her.

‘I wanted to know if we were doing anything Sunday,’ i offer.

She nods.

‘I needed to be me again,’ she says, without preamble. ‘It’s not that you were smothering me or anything like that, i just needed to have some space where i was just myself.’

I nod.

There are so many things i can’t say at this point.

I can’t ask if she’s been using protection with her new man, or do i need to get myself checked.

I can’t ask her if he’s a better lover (i see her naked, her breasts bouncing, her cheeks hot, her eyes closed as she comes) than me.

I can’t ask her if there was something that i did that was so wrong that it brought this about, so that i’ll know, for next time, next girl.

I can’t ask her if anything.

We’ve discussed her exes. We’ve talked about them all, gone over their good and bad points, the things they did that spoiled it all, so obvious now. In hindsight. I always assumed that i would be her last, that i would be immune to making one of those obvious mistakes.

Love makes you stupid, though, and mistakes are easier to make when you’re stupid.

‘Shall i leave tonight,’ i ask, ‘or can i sleep here, on the couch, until i get myself organised tomorrow?’

She reaches out a hand, but it doesn’t connect.

‘You don’t have to leave now,’ she says, but i realise then that i have to.

I put down my can. I walk to my study, start stuffing papers into my heavy-duty, overnight briefcase.

She’s followed me, stands at the door.

‘I’ll get the rest of my stuff tomorrow,’ i say, picking off a shelf the framed photo of me as a kid. One day, i’d hoped to have another photo in a frame to put alongside that one, a photo of a kid who looked just like me, but with her auburn hair and green eyes.

I put the photo in my briefcase along with the other things i’ve picked up, mostly at random.

‘You can stay the night, you know,’ she says, quietly.

I’ve just lost a son. I want nothing else but to get the hell out of there.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ i say as i walk to the back door.

‘You don’t have to be like this,’ she says.

I don’t know what she means.

I don’t know how she can say that.

I don’t know who she is anymore.

***

A line down the middle of the page.

The car is mine, that’s beyond dispute.

I’ve been helping her with the payments on the flat, but i figure that money’s just plain gone.

Seven years’ worth of mortgage payments.

It feels beneath my dignity to quibble over the small matter of forty or fifty thousand dollars.

But i know i’ve been robbed.

The sex was OK, but it wasn’t worth a grand a month.

Her cooking was average at best, and i seemed to be the one who always did the laundry.

Even her companionship didn’t justify the price-tag. She wasn’t very bright, and her conversational powers were limited to organising from week to week what we were going to do with all my money and all her time.

‘Do you want to meet him?’ she asks, her finger twirling her hair absently.

I can’t believe the question. I don’t bother with an answer.

‘You’d like him,’ she goes on, clearly besotted. ‘He’s a lot like you.’

But obviously better than me. In at least one way.

I wonder what that way is.

I’d give anything to know. It’s cost my fifty grand so far; i wonder how much more it’ll cost.

‘So,’ i go on, ‘Who gets the friends?’

‘You don’t have any friends,’ she says, without meaning to hurt. ‘I have friends, and they all think a lot of you, but i don’t think they’ll want to be exclusively your friends from now on.’

All those picnics and dinner parties, pretending to be interested in their home renovations, work problems, trips overseas.

‘You work too hard to have friends,’ she says, like it makes things better. I wonder if this is what that the new man has over me. Friends. Time.

I look down at the piece of A4. Our lives divided up on a sheet of clay and cellulose, 210mm by 297.

‘That’s that, then,’ i say, and stand up.

‘One last thing, if you want it,’ she says.

***

It’s awkward, of course.

But we’d always discussed this. Lying together in the us before now, listening to the traffic on the road below late at night, or the rain on the window, or the people downstairs fighting.

The worst possible thing: not knowing it would be our last time.

This is to honour those discussions.

But it’s still awkward.

When i come out of the bathroom she’s already naked, standing like an anatomy model, ankles together, shoulders back.

I’m unbuttoning and unzipping my chinos. I take them off and fold them, but i don’t put them in the en suite where i would have put them two days ago. I place them on the chair. The chair where in the past i’ve sat while she’s ridden me, yelping and moaning, and to hell with the neighbours.

I take off my Y-fronts. I wonder if he’s bigger than me.

‘Shall i wear a condom?’

She looks like she’s making a calculation. I decide, based on what that calculation means, that i’m going to wear a condom regardless of what she says.

‘It’s probably best,’ she says, but i’ve already taken one out of the bedside table.

Must remember to take those with me, i think to myself. Right after this.

She steps into me, and we embrace. My cock, which has no sense of the situation, stiffens, nuzzles against her fuzz.

We don’t kiss, which makes it seem worse than it is.

She drops her eyes and points to the chair. I move my clothes onto the bed, rip open the condom wrapper and roll it on.

I sit on the chair and she sits on me, steadying herself with one hand, just the fingertips.

I shuffle forward, we get the angles right, and i slide in. Just the tip. Just the first two or three inches, the way she likes it.

She pushes down. I push up.

We fuck.

She makes the same groans. Her boobs bounce the same way.

Her sides feel the same. Her back warm satin.

Everything is the same. Nothing is the same.

I finish, and that’s it. The last time. We’re over.

She hasn’t come, and i don’t care.

She stands up off of me. I squeeze off the condom. Tie it and drop it in the bin in the en suite on my way to the toilet.

I feel like i’m marking my territory with the slimy rubber thing, but i know it’ll be gone five minutes after i leave, dumped in the kitchen rubbish bin with the vegetable peels and the empty cans.

She’s already dressed in her jeans and T-shirt when i come back from cleaning myself up.

I dress, and then we stand there.

‘Well,’ she says. ‘So you’ll be along on Sunday to pick up the rest of your stuff?’

‘Yeah. Sunday’s still free?’

‘I could check my planner,’ she says. Almost smiles. Sees i’m not at the look-back-and-laugh-at-all-this stage yet and doesn’t.

For an awful moment i think she’s going to shake my hand.

‘Bye, then,’ she says.

‘He won’t be here Sunday, will he?’

She shakes her head.

Before i know it, i’m outside.

The sunshine mocks me.

Cars mock me.

Couples walking dogs mock me.

At my college mate’s place, his TV mocks me.

I drink, to try to forget about the mocking, but the alcohol just gives me headaches.

On Sunday, Sarah is over me.

She no longer cares.

She doesn’t ask how i am, or how i’m going, or how i’m getting by.

She asks, at the end, as i lift the last box, if i have everything.

How can she not realise that i have nothing?

Who the hell is she now?

Where has she gone?

***

I saw them together, actually. At the Races. Sipping flutes.

I assume it was him. It was only a few months later.

He was my height, but balding a bit at the back.

Bulbous, drinker’s nose, like W. C. Fields.

She had a belly bump.

I didn’t care.

PUT THIS ON

He was always buying me little things.

That was how i knew we were serious. That first thing he bought me was his way of telling me that it was more than just The Sex.

It’s easy enough to take off your clothes and just go through the motions.

I’ve done it before, you know. And they all respond pretty much the same, really.

You just need to know how to hold one, where to lick it, and when.

But then he bought me something, and i felt myself shifting inside, felt my life changing course, altering to follow his star.

‘Now you won’t lose your place ever again,’ he breathed into my ear as i unwrapped the box. It was far too big for its weight, the box. For a moment i’d thought he’d bought me a GPS or something.

But it wasn’t a GPS. It was a bookmark.

The previous time we’d been together, he’d dropped by my place unexpected, and i’d been all snuggled in bed, in my jimjams, reading a book. I’d answered the door, and there he was, all smile and lust.

We barely made it to the bed. He still had his shirt and tie on, and his socks, and i only managed to pull my jimjam pants all the way off at the very last minute, just before he lifted me up and threw me onto the mattress.

Once he was inside me, he popped my jimjam top open, sending buttons flying, because he loves my breasts. He likes to see them wobbling all about my chest as he rocks and rolls me to orgasm.

I was surprised by the feel of his Italian silk tie as it slid about on my breasts. I liked the way it was slippery yet firm.

After we’d both come, me first, and then him, we parachuted down from that high plateau and then got up on our feet and put the place back into order, like air-crash survivors picking through the wreckage.

My book, arrived just that morning from The Book Depository, was underneath the bed.

‘You made me lose my place with all that incredible sex of yours, mister!’ i scolded him.

He said he was sorry, and the next time i saw him, two days later, he gave me the bookmark.

It was the Birth of Venus. The one of the woman standing on a clamshell in the ocean, surrounded by naked babies and naked men blowing conch-shells and naked women with envious eyes. The Bouguereau one, not the other one.

I told him it was wonderful, and perfect for me.

He told me that i was wonderful, and perfect for him.

‘And you’ve got much better tits than Venus,’ he assured me.

Because he loves my tits.

After that, he kept bringing me little things like that, things that showed he not only enjoyed sliding into my various openings in novel and surprising ways, but that he was also into the person i was.

Me. Myself.

Having great tits meant that i’d had a lot of men who were into sliding into me, not always in novel or surprising ways, either. And none of them before him gave the slightest indication that they knew who i was, that i was more than just some arbitrary set of curves and holes, easily replaced by another set with the same shape and size and skillset.

It was so wonderful to know that he treasured me for me, not for my tits, or for how adeptly i gave head, or because i cooked so well.

Me. Myself.

One night, late, he came in bearing a present, held out before him like an enormous pizza box.

‘Put this on,’ he smiled.

The box was huge. It was the size of a lounge chair seat. Bigger, actually, since i tried to put it on the lounge chair seat and it wouldn’t fit. I had to rest it on the floor.

The satin bow reminded me of his satin tie. I undid it with a snap and lifted the lid off the box.

Inside was a set of the most beautiful French lingerie i’d ever seen. The swing tags had little Eiffel Towers on them and all, to show that they were authentically French, shipped direct from the City of Love.

It made sense that the first big thing that he bought for me would be something to put those tits of mine in, the ones he loves so much.

But i was almost a little disappointed that it was for my tits, actually, since the other, smaller presents had been things that acknowledged my life as a reader, as a photographer, as a fan of blues and jazz.

I thought about it, though, as i slipped out of my dressing gown, under which i was stark naked in hopeful anticipation, and i realised that this was my opportunity to give him a present back, to acknowledge him for who he was.

The lingerie fitted me like body butter.

‘How do i look?’ i asked as i finished sliding the garter belt into place.

‘Totally fuckable,’ he said, his voice catching a little as he pulled his silk tie undone.

‘No,’ i said, gently. ‘Leave your tie on, please.’

I undressed him slowly, kissing down the length of his strong, tanned legs as they appeared from inside his Hugo Boss trousers, caressing his stiffening prick inside his Calvin Klein Y-fronts, slipping his Boss suit jacket off but leaving his Van Heusen business shirt on, to go with that tie.

He lifted me up and carried me to the bedroom. He lay me down carefully this time, and i squirmed excitedly there in that beautiful lingerie, like a kitten that’s been put on its back. I wanted him inside me, hot and hard, and i didn’t have to wait long for it.

He pushed down his CKs, and his prick lobbed huge and ready toward me, poking through the gap in his shirt front, the tie pointing down to it like a warning sign: caution, huge cock! He climbed onto the bed and placed his lips gently on my vulva, blowing warm air onto me through the silken lycra of the brand new panties.

I felt that familiar melting feeling inside my girl parts, and hoped that my wetness wouldn’t stain the panties.

But then he pulled them to one side, exposing my snatch to the air and to his prick. In a single movement he entered my pursed lips, and i could feel him surging inside me.

He seemed to grow larger with each thrust.

I was sure i was growing wetter with each thrust.

My boobs, which he loves, were behaving themselves more than usual. The French brassiere was holding them demurely in place, but still allowing them to bobble about over the top, an effect he enjoyed as much as their wanton disporting when unsaddled.

He paused in his powerful, slow thrusts to lean forward and kiss the skin on my decolletage, raising the tiny hairs with the slight cool wetness of his lips.

When he blew gently on those raised hairs, i felt my nipples become ridiculously large inside all that imported lycra, and i felt my petite mort growing hugely inside my plexus.

When i came, i came so hard that i nearly bit through my tongue.

I’m afraid that i grunt when i orgasm. Grng! Grng! Grrrng!

I’ve always wished i could recite poetry or something at that moment, but there it is.

Seconds later, i felt his ejaculation pulsing into me.

We collapsed together.

Once we’d regained our composure, we set about the delicate task of extricating me from all that expensive French fabric without getting cum stains in it.

That task accomplished, he stripped naked and we showered together.

He fucked me again, standing up, in my little shower. Taking me from behind.

I thought that the glass was going to break.

Imagine explaining that to the paramedics!

In bed, i sucked him off goodnight, even though he was spent. He did come, but there was nothing much left to swallow.

I turned the bedside light out, and he got up to look for his iPhone. He needed it for the alarm, he said, as he had a big meeting in the morning he didn’t want to be late for.

After a search, he realised that he’d left it in his car. I told him he could use my alarm, save him going down now.

We snuggled and fell asleep inside each other’s breathing.

In the morning, i woke up early, before the alarm.

As a special treat, i decided to get him his iPhone. I put on my dressing gown and fished his keys out of his discarded trousers.

I padded down to the underbuilding carpark, not really caring if i met another tenant while in a state of post-coital half-dress. They’d think things, for sure, but if those things were right, then did it matter?

I had a man who loved me, and only me, for precisely who i am.

What could a little raised eyebrow do to spoilt that?

I blipped open his Bimmer, and looked all through the console for his iPhone. Not there, not under the seat, not in the glovebox.

I clacked open the boot, figuring it had to be in there. He was too smart to leave his iPhone in plain sight anyway, although why he’d put it in the boot rather than take it upstairs with him made no sense.

In the boot, i found two huge boxes. Identical to the one upstairs. Even the same satin ribbon.

Looks like i had some more torrid lingerie sex ahead of me!

Unable to resist, i undid the bow on the top box, and took off the lid.

It was exactly the same set of lingerie as the one upstairs. Exactly the same.

I shuffled the boxes and opened the other one.

Again. Exactly the same.

I thought, maybe he’s bought a size either side, just in case the European fittings are tricky. So i checked.

Exactly the same size, both of them.

This didn’t make sense.

Then i heard his iPhone message ring. Xylophone. I found it at the back of the boot, behind the boxes. He must have dropped it there when he put the boxes in and forgot about it.

I picked the iPhone up. On the off-chance, i swiped the unlock.

There was no lock code. There were two messages.

One was from someone called Chandel.

The message said she was looking forward to getting her present bright and early this morning, whatever it was, and that he was such a tease. Maybe, this Chandel thought, she’d tease him, and see how he liked it.

There was an attached photo.

It was clear from the attached photo that Chandel wasn’t a kindly old Aunt. That this wasn’t some silly misunderstanding.

At least one of the sets of lingerie must have been for this Chandel, and, judging by the photo, she could have really used some underwear right about then.

I didn’t read the other message.

I tossed the iPhone into the lingerie box and closed the boot.

I blipped the Bimmer locked, and walked the long, slow climb back upstairs.

I took off my dressing gown and climbed back into bed.

He rolled over in his sleep and put his arm across me. His hand found one of my boobs, the boobs that he loves so much, and gave it a squeeze.

Then i remembered. He’d told me dozens of times how much he loves my boobs, but he’d never once actually told me that he loved me.

Me. Myself.

How had i missed that?

He stirred awake, and, with a gentle shift of his weight, he deftly slid his morning erection into me.

I was still trying to figure out how i’d missed all this, when he squirted his jizz inside of me.

‘You OK?’ he asked. ‘You didn’t come.’

‘I’m fine,’ i said. ‘Haven’t you got that meeting?’

ALICE IN RAPTURELAND

It was warm.

She was stark naked and kneeling on the ground.

But it was warm.

Moments earlier, she’d been holding a coffee, checking her iPhone for email, standing in a queue for sushi.

‘Where…’

‘Excellent question,’ a voice congratulated her.

‘I agree,’ joined another. ‘That’s always a good place to start, “where?”.’

‘Well, it’s all about place isn’t it, “where?”.’

‘True, true. Well spotted.’

The ground she was kneeling on was a dark, cracked sandstone. She was in the open; a vast, almost limitless open that stretched away into the distance. She had the feeling that if she could see forever, she’d not see an end to the space she was kneeling in the middle of. The sky above was not limitless, though, but brewing a storm of some considerable size, wheeling and turning like it would screw the whole world into a wad and throw it away.

And two seagulls were talking to her.

‘What…’

‘Ooh! Lost interest in “where?” already? We haven’t even answered “where?” yet…’ said the seagull at her knee.

‘Could you get “where?”, when she gets back to it, old chap?’

‘So long as you handle “what?”, old bean…’

How could the seagulls be talking? And why did they have British accents?

She tried to stand, but her legs weren’t cooperating. She pitched forward and caught herself on her palms.

‘See, that’s why you’re kneeling, love.’

‘Can’t go jumping about just at the mo. I mean, you have just died, dearie…’

She was looking carefully at the seagull, and she couldn’t see it moving its beak, so how was it talking to her? And what had it just said?

‘Died…?’

‘Yes, dearie. You’ve died. Sorry to be the bearer of sad tidings, but…’

‘I’ve not… died… Where am I? What’s going on?’

‘Ah! That’s two questions at once! Hold your horses! I believe you were going to get “where?”, old bean.’

The seagull at her knee ruffled its wings and tilted its head so that its beady black eye pointed right into hers. ‘I take it you don’t believe in God, then?’

She sat back as best she could. ‘God?’

‘You know, love. God. Jehovah. Big old chap in the sky and whatnot.’

‘I was… just getting some sushi…’

‘Yes, sweetums. And then you died. And you don’t believe in God. Know how I know?’

She looked away toward the horizon. There was a river a long way away, snaking itself across the floor of the forever-wide place she was kneeling in. And a seagull was asking her metaphysical questions.

‘I’ll tell you,’ the seagull said, clearly having gotten impatient. ‘You’re seeing us as birds, aren’t you?’

‘Why am I naked…’

‘Goodness me, love! So many questions! I take it you’re one of these people who “have spirituality”, am I correct?’

She wondered if she should be covering her breasts. The seagulls seemed to be male…

‘You’re not being very cooperative, love. I’ll spell it out for you, all right? You’ve just died, so - assuming for a moment a space in your “spirituality” for God - where are you?’

She looked back up at the boiling sky. There was a tornado of birds forming under the darkest part of the wheeling storm, riding its thermals and updraughts. They didn’t look like seagulls, but they were so far away…

‘Heaven? This is… Heaven?’

Both seagulls flapped their wings and raised off the ground a few inches before settling back down.

‘There!’ the seagull who had been handling “where?” cried, exultant. ‘You worked it out for yourself. Clever girl!’

The seagulls fussily tucked their wings up after their celebratory flight-hop, and looked at her expectantly.

Her head hurt. ‘What’s going on here?’

The other seagull tilted its head, and she looked at it, staring into its glossy, lizard eye.

‘You’ve died, heart, and we’re here to help you… adjust.’

‘So… you’re… angels?’

Both seagulls shook their heads, like they each had something in their beak that they wanted to fling away.

‘If you believed in God, snookie, we’d be angels. As it is, with your “spirituality” and whatnot, we’re seagulls.’

This didn’t seem fair somehow. Not the being dead part, but the seagull part.

‘But… you’re just birds…’

‘Well, heart, you’re just some sort of gorilla thing, but let’s keep it nice, all right? No need to be rude.’

She felt as if her legs might hold her, and she slowly stood up and looked around.

‘So this is Heaven?’ she asked. But it wasn’t a question. It looked like she’d just have to deal with the fact that her Heaven was some sort of vast, empty valley, populated exclusively by talking sky-rats. ‘This is where I spend eternity?’

The seagulls looked at each other. It was a gesture she usually only saw when two of their kind were fighting over a hot chip.

‘Well, heart, eternity’s not as long as it used to be…’

There was a warm breeze now, probably something to do with the storm that was building overhead. She liked the feel of it on her bare skin.

‘I wish you wouldn’t speak in riddles all the time. Do I have to put up with you forever, being like this? Or do I get different angels when I move on to the next… level… thing…’

One seagull took off and started flying around her. She felt bad that she didn’t know which one it was: they both looked and sounded the same.

The other one started beaking under its wing for something. While it still had its head buried, it spoke to her.

‘There’s no other levels, sweetums. This is it, I’m afraid.’

‘Do I get robes and stuff? Where are the other people?’

The seagull’s voice was sounding sadder and sadder. She didn’t want a sad guardian seagull. It seemed like a bad sign.

‘Normally you get to meet five people. You get to choose them, and everyone has a terrifically great time. It really is nice…’

‘Normally?’

She noticed that the other seagull was circling further and further from her. She didn’t like that, although she couldn’t put her finger on why.

‘Normally Heaven lasts for a good long while. With you, though, I’m afraid that won’t be the case.’

Something cold settled on her heart. It started to squeeze.

‘I don’t get it. What’s wrong with my Heaven? Is this the Rapture or something? Is it the end of everything?’

The seagull leapt up into the warm breeze and started to fly. She wanted more than anything for it to settle again, to be with her, but it flew and flew. The other gull, she could see, was starting to be drawn to the spiralling birds beneath the centre of the storm.

‘It’s the way you died, sweetums. You only get a little piece of Heaven. Sort of a Greatest Hits version…’

That didn’t seem fair. None of this seemed fair. She’d been checking her email, sipping her coffee, and waiting in line for her regular Tuesday treat of an avocado handroll, and now this.

Dead and naked in an empty Heaven beneath a hugely impending storm, with her guardian seagulls drifting away.

‘Normally,’ the seagull was explaining from its slowly enlarging orbit, ‘when a person dies, she gets ten, fifteen minutes of Heaven. But if there’s too much damage to the brain, well…’

None of this made any sense. The sky was getting darker and darker, and none of this made any sense.

‘I don’t understand!’ she screamed at the seagull. She started to run after it. It saw this and swooped back, hanging above her on the breeze in that clever way that seagulls have.

‘What,’ it asked her, in what seemed to be a carefully sympathetic voice, ‘was the last thing you remember before you found yourself kneeling here?’

And with that, it broke off hanging in midair, and the seagulls both flew away.

She thought hard.

The breeze had picked up more and more, and even though it was still warm, it was starting to take her breath away with its power.

What was it? That last thing… She could feel the memory but not quite make it out, like an annoying fold in her stocking underfoot.

Something about God…

The seagulls were so far gone now that she could only see them as dots, and the sky was so dark that the dots were becoming invisible.

Someone was talking, no: shouting about God…

She started walking towards the centre of the storm. It was pleasant enough, walking naked like this. She wished she’d done it more often, when she’d been alive. Her hair was flickering like an electrical discharge about her head; she could feel the static building in the air.

Then she remembered.

Someone had cried out, “God is great!”, but not in a language she could understand. How had she understood it, then?

“God is great,” and then…

A blue-white flash from the storm cloud lit up everything. Everything. It even lit up her internal organs. It was a flash so bright she dreaded the thunder. It would split her ear drums, smash her into the earth. She covered her ears, hoping to protect them at least.

But she never heard the thunder. The rain fell in fat, sticky blobs, like meat dropping from the sky, and then Heaven faded away, leaving her