Loading...You find it slightly hard to believe he even thinks you would consider doing this.
The first time you saw it on a porn film you were fascinated but utterly repelled: a woman being deeply sodomised and then, when the man withdrew, spinning rapidly round as if eager, dropping to her knees and taking his glistening penis directly, deeply, apparently greedily into her mouth. How could she do that? What did it taste like? Was it safe?
Yet he isn’t offering to pay you. He genuinely thinks that you are going to do it this evening, and that you’ll be doing it just because you have been told to. He’s wrong.
——————————————
It was this morning as he left for work that he gave you an envelope, telling you to not to open it until he gave you the order to do so. You had pleasant butterflies in your stomach — mild but distinct — whenever you thought of it during the morning’s dull meeting. At lunch you hoped for a text, and checked your e-mail more often than you could really excuse to yourself. Why do you get so pathetically needy when he plays with you like this? You’re never normally the kind to wait, fluttering, for a man to contact you.
It doesn’t occur to you to open the envelope without permission, though he could never find out. The text doesn’t come until 3pm, by which time you are hardly able to concentrate at all on your work.
You slip to the loo and tear open the envelope in the semi-privacy of the cubicle. Your hands, you notice, are shaking slightly. The card itself is incongruously pretty — a late-Impressionist painting, in heightened colours, of a bourgeois garden, its flowers oversaturated by the reproduction. Why on earth are you stopping to notice this? Do you now want to tease yourself further? Are you afraid? Or are you simply wanting to experience every sensation to its fullest and clearest?
You open the card slowly. It hasn’t your name or his. It contains only the words, printed in his tight, small hand: “ATM tonight”.
You pause. When you first started exploring your submissive side with him you specified this as one of your hard limits. No blood, no marks visible when clothed, absolute respect for your safe word, absolute confidentiality, and no urine or faeces, including “ass to mouth” — even the Americanised vulgarity of the term offends your English ear. Now he is directly challenging your limits. And with something you think is pretty disgusting. You’d honestly rather he drew blood.
You make to stand up from the loo seat and can feel at once that you are wet — sopping. Your body is betraying you.
Maybe you don’t have to tell him just now that it’s not going to happen. You can go along with it for the exciting anticipation and call it off at the last moment. You trust him to respect your safe word. And the vengeful way he’ll take you if you use it and then let him get his own back on you with sex will be amazing! Until him you had never been taken really hard, and the orgasms have been a revelation. You often notice the paradox that his total selfishness is so much better for you than the consideration others have shown you. You’ve also discovered that you are more physically resilient than you (or your exes) would have thought.
You head home as early as you can get away with. If you’re going to tease him you want to make it special for him. You will be well-groomed and sexily dressed. You shower, imagining the harsh way his hands will grope your body as you gently caress your neck, breast and thighs. You shiver in anticipation of the pain that you will feel, aware of a familiar tingle in your thighs. He won’t be gentle. You flush slightly as your fingertips explore your clitoris. Abruptly you stop. What is he doing to you?
You know for sure you are going to be sodomised, so you unscrew the shower head and give yourself a careful enema, pushing the hose up to but not into your anus so that the water pushes through: not so much water that it will get far in and loosen things higher up, but enough to mean that you get every particle out as far as he will reach. You feel a shiver of shame that you now know how much water you need for this — it’s degrading to be becoming skilled at getting your anus ready for a man to use for sex. You’re squeamish and hate the idea of anything coming out. And it hurts when he takes you there. And he’s not gentle.
——————-
You are a soft-line feminist, but something about the way you are giving in to him suggests a kind of 1950s women’s-mag domesticity. It seems a pleasingly heightening juxtaposition to preface whatever depravity he will push you into with a display of wholesome, innocent, old-fashioned care: cook him a nice meal, hang his coat, wait for him to initiate conversations — signs of a feigned deference you would normally rather choke than feel or show.
As you move round the kitchen in your dressing gown, chopping veg, putting a bottle of white in the freezer, tidying as you cook, you enjoy the feeling of serving him, and you resent yourself for doing so. But you’re on a deadline, and your qualms are soon swallowed up in the choosing of underwear. What does a guy want to remove from a girl he mistakenly believes is shortly going to suck lubricant, and goodness knows what bacteria, off his penis? You decide on matching, white pants and bra with little lace borders. Innocent and clean should make a nice contrast with his soon-to-be-frustrated plans. You go for prim but sexy: a fitted, light grey, knee-length dress, its neck too high to suggest a slutty display of cleavage. Mid-height heels with round toes and a little strap over the arch suggest girlishness. No tights or stockings — he doesn’t like the faff of removing them, and hold-ups would be too tarty, and undermine the illusion that he is about to ruin innocence.
———————————
Supper is over. You are tidying the kitchen. He is sitting at the table making no move to help you. You feel him watching you as you move around. Oddly, though he has seen you naked so much, you feel consumed with shy self-consciousness. You wish he would stop staring, or that you had worn a less figure-showing dress. You drop a fork as you carry the plates. What on earth is happening to you? You’re not clumsy! You’re not some giddy kid who gets wobbly at the prospect of sex. And you’re generally reasonably comfortable with your body, too.
After you have cleared supper, you don’t know what to do. You stand waiting for him to take charge, but he says and does nothing. He is completely comfortable, half-smiling, calm. You are absolutely not. You would like to throw his wine in his smug face and storm out, but you somehow cannot. You stand and, worst indignity so far, you find yourself blushing. He has whipped you with a belt (it hurt and you hated it), but just at the moment you would sooner take thirty strokes of that, naked and bound, than stand for another five seconds in front of him whilst he stares you down and inspects you. This is not OK. It’s not worth it. It’s not you. Just throw him out!
You don’t, of course. Maddeningly, though you yourself really thought you might, he knew you wouldn’t. At last he rises, you walk obediently, relieved to be taken upstairs. You remember to your abrupt disgust that you are wearing the dress you wore to your grandfather’s 80th birthday lunch. You want him to take you hard and deep, to drive the memories and the shame clean out of you and turn you into an animal that lives in the moment of its pain and pleasure. You want his sexual aggression to wash away the thoughts beyond.
Upstairs, he stands behind you and holds you hard by your hips, digging in his fingers as if to criticise your weight, or to hurt you. Perhaps it is purely that he likes the feel of your flesh giving under his grasp. Perhaps he is enjoying the fact that you no longer squirm, though he knows he is hurting you. He lifts your skirt to look at your pants, and you are sick with yourself for being grateful and aroused by his murmur of “good girl”. It is worse when he pushes a proprietary finger into the front of the pants, pulls them out and adds “very good girl” in approbation of your smoothness.
The height of your shame, though, is the peremptory shove of his finger between your labia to prove your wetness. You are SO wet. His forefinger slips around in you with a faint but perceptible theatricality. Though you don’t look up, you are disgusted by the smirk you know will be on his lips. You are ashamed of your body and upset by the fact that you are still tolerating this.
He brings his finger out of your pants and up to your face, showing you your slime and making you lock eyes with him. Slowly, he pushes the finger towards your mouth. At the last moment as it approaches your lips you quickly, apologetically, neatly, open your teeth and bob your head forward, licking it clean as if it were unwelcome, but a matter of course. You feel your body react further at this first active gesture of compliance. Your eyes are down and you feel your cheeks grow hot. Secretly you do like the way you taste.
He puts his hand on your head. He doesn’t push hard, but you kneel. He presses his crotch against your face. You can smell him through the clean suit trousers. A faint but clear musk that you will soon be tasting.
—————————-
Fifteen minutes later you are naked and bent over. It feels far longer than that. Your tongue, lips and neck know they’ve been at work, but he has not allowed you to make him cum. Your eyes sting with tears, and the non-waterproof mascara you wear for him (he indicated after the second time he slept with you that he wished you to, and you bought some the next day) has run from him pressing his cock aggressively into the back of your throat until you retch. You are glad you ate almost no supper, having now twice been sick into your mouth. Kneeling with your hands behind your back whilst he fucked your throat you felt a kind of pride that you had not resorted to the safe word. You hate the feeling of having your throat fucked. It’s not only the sheer discomfort — it’s the rising desperation of wondering if he’ll go too far this time and asphyxiate you.
You are glad that is over. He has blindfolded your eyes, the cloth wet against your cheeks from your gagging tears. He has bent you over your chest of drawers and made you hold your buttocks apart for him. You did not initially stretch them tightly enough, and he put his hands on yours and pushed them apart until the skin now feels taut and vulnerable. Cold air reaches skin which is generally covered and warm. You find your sensations focusing obsessively on the area between your buttocks, waiting in your imposed blindness and vulnerability to see what he has in mind for you.
He hasn’t touched you for a while. You start to worry about what he’s about to do.
Suddenly you feel the lightest tickling sensation against your left thigh. You want to wriggle but you know he likes you to stay still. You fight the urge to move as the tickling passes up the thigh, and past your fingers to your anus. So cold! So ticklish! The sensitivity of your anus can distinguish that he is blowing on your skin lightly. You are irritated that he won’t just take you. Doesn’t he know you’re literally starting to drool for his penis?
Abruptly you twitch at the feeling of his lips on your right thigh, just above the knee. You hadn’t heard him move, and the new location startles you. To warn you for your movement he gives you a distinct nip with his teeth — not harsh, but clear. You stay still as he tracks the tip of his tongue very slowly up your thigh, curving round the line where your buttock meets your thigh, and up, skirting your anus closely, but not touching it. You want to push back towards his face so that the tickling becomes a more definite pressure. You know he won’t indulge you, though. You stay still.
He nibbles your left ankle, gently but now hard enough to feel good. His tongue and his teeth take turns back up your left calf, moving round from one side to the other, alternating surprise contacts in new places with agonisingly slow, languorous licking, inch by inch. He is taking his time. You want to scream at him to have sex with you. If you thought you could overpower him you would hold him down and thrust yourself into his face, onto his lovely penis.
It takes an impossibly long time for him to get up your leg to your upper, inner thigh, his stubble brushing your skin, his breath against your labia. Surely now… But no, he has started again on the right, kissing your toes with what would seem like gentle deference if it weren’t for the fact you are blindfolded, mascara- and spit-stained, bent over, holding your buttocks apart, awaiting his will.
This gentle progress absolutely isn’t suiting your mood, but it does feel amazing. By the time he reaches your thigh you are almost relaxing into it, starting to enjoy it in itself. You have clearly relaxed too much — his hands push yours further apart again, admonishing you for slackening the tension of your spread buttocks.
He returns to blowing on, then licking, and finally kissing around your anus. You wonder if he is being squeamish, not touching it. Within a couple of minutes you know that that was not it, as his tongue first glances across, then licks, then pushes against, then penetrates your anus. You want to grab his hair and push back, but you know he’ll stop if you do. You wait absolutely still and allow him to play with your body in whatever manner he chooses.
You feel his thick forefinger pushing into your anus. You relax to let him in, but notice with a momentary qualm how big even a finger feels with only spit for lubrication. He wriggles it round inside you, exploring you. You are so glad you washed carefully. He pushes down firmly towards your vagina, and you wonder whether you have misremembered. SURELY that’s something in your vagina? This isn’t an anal sensation at all — except the niggling discomfort. Your body grows hot and you feel the rush of blood to your g-spot. He presses hard onto it and you start involuntarily. His finger yanks out of you and he gives you two hard slaps across the right thigh to punish you for moving. The stinging pain is such a definite, clear sensation that it is almost welcome. It even slightly helps to calm your overexcitement.
He pushes one hand into the middle of your back and, standing over you now, intrudes his finger back into you and down. You fight the wriggle as hard as you can, but it’s beyond you not to move a little as he brings you quickly to orgasm, and then, as you cum, pushes harder against your g-spot, hurting you and arousing you into an unwelcome, over-intense, overwhelming second orgasm which seems almost to trip over the first one.
You are tingling all over when you feel the shock of cold lube against your anus. You don’t care anymore. This is why you let him treat you like dirt. No one else has made you feel anything like this — so abandoned. So elated. So owned.
Now he is pushing his penis against your anus. It feels very big and very stiff. His large head does not immediately find its angle and its place, and when it does it enters you with a sort of silent, dull pop, shooting an inch or two into your body too abruptly, and making you start with pain. He does not punish your movement this time, but increases it by shoving himself in further. For some seconds the pain swallows up all pleasure. Through your foggy mind you feel an animal certainty that it is cruelty and not passion which is making him so rough.
You don’t notice the changeover, but the initial sharp, nauseating agony of ill-prepared penetration subsides gradually and arousal resurfaces, the two now working together as he pushes and pulls your hips to get you to an angle where he can hit your g-spot with his penis, through the soft dividing wall between your vagina and your stretching anus. No longer fully responsible for your actions, you notice blearily that he hasn’t punished you for the fact that your hands have at some stage found their way up, and are now flattened against the un-giving surface on which you’re spread, trying to gain traction to push back and intensify his thrusts. You cum, the pain rolling through the orgasms in successive waves.
Without warning he pulls himself entirely out of you, fast. You gasp with the emptiness. A newly-discarded condom couldn’t collapse to something more hollow, more desolate than you feel now. You try to look round, peering puzzled into your blindfold, and pawing back sightlessly to see where it has gone, the penis you need so much. Your tentative wrist is grabbed and you are tugged, hard, off the chest of drawers, your falling weight held up by the strong fingers which dig into your upper arms. Your knees hit the ground and a sharp jolt of pain shoots up your thighs, but you barely register it. Your body is limp and graceless as a rag doll. He slaps your face and grunts something at you that you are too out-of-it to catch. “Kneel up” he repeats, with a second slap. After a third slap you manage to obey, and feel your head yanked forward as he tugs the blindfold off abruptly.
He has pulled up your office chair and now sits down in front of you. His legs are splayed and his hips are pushed forwards. His penis, bouncing slightly with his fast pulse after the vigorous sex he’s been having with your rectum, points crazily at the corner of the ceiling. You are starting to realise what he wants you to do.
You look at his penis. From where you are you can’t see anything nasty on it. You have just endured the most ruthless sex of your life, and you are proud of yourself for taking it. Proud for having enjoyed it. You are not going to spoil it now. You are a determined, professional woman who can achieve the things she wants to achieve. If drug-addled little tarts from the porn industry can do this, you certainly can. You want to do this. You want to gaze up and look him proudly in the eye, his penis in your mouth. You shuffle towards him on your knees, steadying yourself for a moment with a hand on the chest of drawers as an orgasmic after-shock goes through you from the movement and perhaps from excitement at your heady resolution.
As you get closer to him he pushes the chair back, keeping you a yard away. You whimper at the game, and try to move faster. He moves faster too. You stop and look at him pleadingly. What on earth does he want now?
“Beg.”
You pause, looking at him. It is only an adjustment, though, not a real hesitation. You beg.
You drop to your hands, lowering your face to the ground and raising your bottom. Now you see yourself from outside — with his eyes. You will be the craven whore he wishes you. You want to fulfil his fantasy, his ambition, to turn you from the strong-minded professional he first met into a piece of barely-human flesh, abasing itself on the ground and weeping to suck its own arse off his triumphant penis. “Please may I suck your shitty cock?” You say, juxtaposing the correct grammar and the swear-word, shocking in your mouth — previously clean in word and action, now pleading to abandon both. “Please may I clean you and then bend for you to fuck my arse again? Please fuck my throat and my arse.” You warm to your task, writhing your arse hungrily in the air and kissing his feet imploringly.
He takes your hair and pulls you up to your knees, twisting your face upwards. “Open your mouth, whore.” You do so, widely, pushing your tongue out to open your throat, assuming he’s going to fuck it. He bunches his lips and you realise he’s going to spit in your face, in your mouth. He holds it for a second to let you react — you who on your first date with him saw a man spitting in the street and spent the best part of ten minutes ranting about how disgusting you found it, until it had become a joke between the two of you. Now, kneeling, teary and sweat-stained, shaking with orgasm and with your own hedonistic descent into whoredom, you smile and open your mouth still wider to welcome his contemptuous spittle. You swallow what hits your mouth, gulping loudly enough for him to hear it, and leave the trail across your face just where it landed.
He lets go of your hair and sits back. He isn’t going to make this easy by taking control. You are glad — you want to show him what you can do. You kneel up to it, and, your hands on his knees, you take it as far into your throat as you can manage in a single go, your lips wide-parted. When it is in almost to the hilt you close your lips around it, put your tongue to it and suck slowly and very thoroughly up its whole length, slurping yourself gratefully off it. You are surprised to find that, whether it is your flavour or that of the lube, it is sweet and by no means unpleasant. You lick around his penis with the thoroughness of genuine enthusiasm, making direct, confident eye-contact with him as you run your tongue under the ridge beneath his head where most of the lube has accumulated, tasting the faint echo of offal and enjoying your own revulsion.
When you have cleaned him completely you turn away and lower yourself onto your face, your arse sticking in the air provocatively. You look back round at him, your face an open challenge — “you’ve made me into a whore,” you seem to say, “now fuck me like one.” He reaches quickly for the lube, but you, suddenly without limits, grab it out of his hands, and chuck it away. His startled eyes as you take such an assertive action put you in charge. You spread your buttocks for him impatiently, and suddenly it’s you forcing the pace, you choosing the action. As he sinks himself in you you bark “harder” at him and reach back a hand, digging your nails into his thigh and tugging him into you in the rhythm you want. You cum again, and this time he cums in you too. Thrusting deeply and squirting several times before he is spent.
He falls forward and you both roll sideways, him spooning and holding you as his penis shrinks inside you. You pull off him gently before turning back to suck him clean a second time. He is too sensitive to stand much of it, but wanting the current filthy mood not to leave you yet, you raise his leg and kiss and lick his balls. They taste strongly of very fresh sweat, and you suck them clean, adding your spit to dissolve his musk.
Are you really going to do this? To stick your tongue into a man’s anus? You look up, and see him watching you in fascination. He isn’t in charge. For the first time since you met him he doesn’t know what is going to happen next — it’s your decision. How nasty an act will you carry out to shock him, to debase yourself? You smile, amused and suddenly excited, you push his buttocks apart and sink your tongue into his arse, pushing until your jaw aches, worming the tip into him and hardening your whole tongue into a rigid muscle. You reach around and play with him as you do so, and notice with pleasure that he is hardening fast.
——————-
Your mood lasts, and now it shapes his. He is wild-eyed with pleasure and excitement at the grubby little whore he has unearthed. He fucks you very hard indeed. You can hardly tell where one orgasm ends and the next begins, and you switch him between different positions with confidence and authority, pulling him to you as he fucks your arse, jumping clear to lick or deepthroat him. After taking him in your throat or licking his anus you kiss him, challenging him to degrade himself too with your filthy, corrupt little body and face. On two occasions you have even pulled his head to your arse, pushing him into you, then kissing him deeply, sucking on his defiled tongue.
You are at last finished. It’s under three hours until you are due to get up for work. You kneel him up and bend him right over so that you can tongue his arse one last time, the deepest yet. For the first time you don’t actually want it to turn him on again — he is lasting longer each time, and even through the adrenalin your arse is really starting to throb and ache, unlubed by anything but spit since so much earlier. This goodnight tonguing is a farewell to yourself as a whore. You don’t want to think about it, but you guess you’ll be pretty uncomfortable about some of this stuff in the morning. As you lie behind his exhausted body afterwards, nuzzling his neck, you think of your ‘hard’ limits, and smile to yourself at their naivety. Suddenly one last thought comes to you. You lean in close to his ear and whisper “piss on me. Please?”
He jumps a little, unwilling to believe it at first. “Please?” You repeat. “Please piss on my filthy little body. Clean my dirty face with your piss.”
Even as you say it you’re disgusted by the idea, but you don’t want your mood to flip — you want to find new extremes. You don’t want to suddenly find yourself back in sensible mode, looking back on your whorish self. “Please? I beg you. Piss me clean.”
He rises, leads you by the hand into the bathroom with an uneasy brusqueness. You lie on your back in the bath. You turn your face up to him, your mouth and eyes wide open. You push in your breasts to make them more prominent in case he wishes to focus on them, and you part your thighs with exaggerated coquettishness to reveal your neglected cunt. You run your hand through your hair, spreading it out so that he can really soak it if he wishes. You smile at him.
He stands over you — outside the bath, unwilling to splash his feet with what he is about to soak your face and body in. The contrast makes you tingle with pleasure, and you reach down to play with yourself. You note with amusement that you would have been horrified by the brazenness of playing with yourself in front of a man before you met him. And now you are masturbating theatrically beneath him whilst he prepares to piss on you.
An idea comes to you, and you reach your hand back and push the plug down, smiling conspiratorially at him as you do so. The thoughtful depravity of this final touch tips you over the edge and you cum violently, pushing your legs hard against the sides of the bath as you do so, and touching a finger on your sore anus to remind you of how spectacularly you’ve just been fucked.
The stream of piss comes almost without warning, just as your orgasm tails off. It hits your cheek harder and hotter than you expected. You flinch away, but willpower intervenes, and you force open your eyes in the hope that they’ll get bloodshot by it and you’ll look even more wrecked. It hurts as it spatters in, but he’s mainly aiming at your open mouth. It fills far faster than you expect, and you find yourself swigging down three large mouthfuls before realising you’ll be sick if you carry on trying to keep up with him. You keep your mouth open and full, and let the piss splash over your face. As he slows to a drip you decide to gargle a little of it to keep the bravado going. It goes down the wrong way, and as you cough and splutter it also runs up your nose, stinging.
Your mood is suddenly and spectacularly gone. You are a professional woman sitting in a half-inch of cooling piss, soaked in it and choking. Your arse is beyond sore (possibly damaged?), your face is an utter mess, your hair is piss-sodden and tangled, you’re cold and completely exhausted. You think you’re going to be sick, but you fight it back. Instead you cry, not even willing to wipe your face free of the tears because face and hands alike are polluted with piss and lube and spit and anus. An ineffectual hand pats your shoulder with apparent reluctance and you shout at him to get outto leave. You stagger, dripping, into the shower, turn it on and slump to the floor, the water at first ice-cold and bracing, then gradually warm. You sit beneath it sobbing and hugging yourself. You wash your hair repeatedly and your body even more, lathering on the shower gel by the handful until the bottle is empty.
Your knees and elbows are raw and weeping from carpet burn. Your body, your breasts (your poor breasts!) are covered in incipient hickeys and red marks which will soon be hand-shaped bruises.
You clean your teeth for minutes on end, swilling mouthwash in between and deliberately swallowing it in an attempt to clean yourself internally too. You are naked, cold and shaking. Your eyes in the bathroom mirror are bloodshot, red-rimmed and small-pupilled. Your gums are hurting from the toothbrush but still you clean, squeezing the toothpaste straight into your mouth. Clean though you might, you feel (or imagine?) that you can taste arse and piss just as strongly.
Eventually tiredness overcomes revulsion and you stagger towards your bed through the mess of discarded clothes, papers swept off the desk when he had fucked you on your back on it, and books from a bookshelf you overturned whilst bending over and holding it tightly to take it harder up the arse. You shudder and try not to look, stepping around an upturned chair, a dressing-gown cord with which you had had him tie you up, and other debris of the night.
The bed is mercifully clean and unused since he had fucked you — no, be honest, you had fucked each other — entirely on the floor and other furniture. He is half-sitting up, the bedside light on, and looks at you anxiously as you approach. He seems genuinely concerned and makes to cuddle you. You tell him coldly to shower, disgusted by the idea of his body after all its contact with yours. “And clean your teeth” you shout after him as he leaves the room.
The tone could hardly differ more from that you had had towards him before… …before whatever had just happened. You pull the duvet over your head and curl up, crying again, vulnerable and self-loathing.
—————-
You don’t know how long he’s been there. He is holding you closely to him, cuddling you. You don’t give away that you are awake. You want to run away and never again see the man who knows what you did last night. There is, however, an immediate animal comfort from contact with his clean skin. You are physically exhausted and feeling desperately alone, and even the man you would like to blame for what you did is better than nothing as a fellow being to offer you the visceral reassurance of proximity.
As you wake up more you notice with relief that he is not hard from cuddling your poor broken little body. Rather, as you turn at last to look at him, you see that he is awake, watching silently and anxiously. His tired eyes as you first open yours give you an odd flash-back to the way your mother looked at you when you came out of the general anaesthetic of your childhood tonsillectomy. You find yourself, to your deep surprise, cuddling instinctively closer to the man who did this to you.
And though you don’t want to reflect on it, you know perfectly well that he “did this to you” only in a rather limited sense. From the moment you first went (you shudder to think of it) “ass to mouth” on him, you were in charge. It was you who pushed the quantity and you who pushed the nastiness of what happened after that. He had been like an overexcited teenager screwing an older and vastly experienced nymphomaniac. You can hardly blame him.
And the fact that he is still there and obviously sympathetic gives you curiously powerful reassurance. He has switched off your alarm clock and called your work to tell them you are sick. Whilst you slept he has silently tidied and cleaned out of existence any reminders of the previous night. He cuddles you and strokes your hair gently until mid-afternoon when you suddenly feel powerfully hungry. He is downstairs at the moment, and the smell of bacon and eggs is wafting up to you. The kettle is whistling and you have just heard the toaster pop.
You realise that rather than a dark secret, an enemy with benefits, you might have found yourself a really lovely man. Your memory plays back over the second half of the night: his obvious hesitancy about your ill-judged final extra game in the bath; his care in letting you set the pace when you had gone beyond all your limits; his anxiety to cuddle you when it all got too much for you. So gentle, so kind, after the cruelty of the evening’s beginnings.
“A shame,” you whisper to yourself, a little guiltily, “he was almost perfect.”