Three Four Seven: Morning, Rain

 I've posted this before. It is one of my very favourite stories from Jill in Wellington. It's been eight years or so since she first wrote me about all this, and the story is still amazing and shattering. It's been a major fantasy image for me ever since. I want it saved, and I only wish Jill could be here to tell me more.

Rain was pelting on the windows. i woke up on the floor, naked under a kid's Toy Story blanket. dry mouth, pounding headache, very shakey. i sat up, and looked around for my clothes. an asian girl was snoring quietly on the couch. there were bottles strewn everywhere. i felt sick and dizzy. my black jeans were in the corner of the room, covered in mud. my keys and $650 were scrunched into my pocket. weird, i never carried that much cash. i pulled them on, then vomited into a pot plant. i couldn't see the top i thought i'd been wearing, so i grabbed a men's shirt that was hanging on the back of a chair and buttoned it up. i had no idea where i was or what i'd been doing. 

i wandered through the small apartment. there were three men asleep in one of the bedrooms. in another bedroom was a few weed plants. i looked in the fridge and took out a beer. one of the men woke up and asked me if i wanted a smoke. we stood on the balcony, under the eaves, and smoked in silence. i have no idea who you are, he said. i just shrugged. you're wearing my shirt, he said. i just looked at him. i was feeling too dazed to put a sentence together. you can keep it, he said. he flicked his butt off the balcony, and offered me another. he lit it for me. 

can i see your tits, he asked. i nodded, and he undid the buttons on his shirt. can i take a photo, he asked. i nodded. he took out a battered iphone and took a few pictures, then started slowly sucking my nipples. he was tall, and dark haired. he had a beard and green eyes. i fucking love your tits, he said. 

do you want to suck my cock, he asked. i undid his jeans and took out his cock. i got on my knees and took him in my mouth. i was still feeling sick and almost vomited once or twice, but i loved the feeling of him in my mouth. 

do you want me to fuck you, he asked. i nodded, with his cock still in my mouth. i stood up and he bent me over the balcony and slowly peeled down my skinny, muddy jeans. he kissed my neck and fucked me in the rain. the motion of it made me vomit over the balcony. i moaned at him not to stop. it felt so fucking good. his hand was rubbing my clit and his cock was deep in my cunt. i had purged and felt light and pure as air. he came, and rested his body against mine. he pulled my jeans back up, and buttoned my shirt. he put another cigarette in my mouth and lit it for me. i walked to caitie's apartment in the rain barefoot. i wasn't so far from there, 4 or 5 blocks. 

Amazing story. I fell in love with it as soon as she sent it to me via email. I always loved stories from Jill's Slutty Party Girl past. Caitie, by the way, was Caitlin, the girl Jill was dating at the time.

It floored me a couple of years ago when she started backing away from stories of her past. It wasn't that she was rejecting having had promiscuous, often random, sex with strangers and Older Men in her teens and twenties, it was rejecting the stories themselves. She was crossing the bar into her early thirties, and she saw herself as a serious professional, as a chartered accountant at a high-powered boutique firm in Wellington-- and someone like that wouldn't have stories like that. Stories about sexual adventures and encounters, however powerful, however hot, weren't something she should be telling people. She didn't want to be tagged as a Posh Slutty Party Girl now that she owned a house and was trying to be made a partner in her firm. 

I live through stories-- my own and others'. Stories are the way we present ourselves to the world. I liked Slutty Party Jill, Jill who could sit at a Wellington bar or lie next to you in a hotel bed and tell stories of adventures and encounters. I could understand her not devoting her nights to drinking bourbon and sleeping around now that she had a professional life to build, but I couldn't (and still can't) understand her redacting her past. 

I do miss her, and I miss her stories. I miss her telling me stories that would become shared fantasies for us. I miss the sound of her voice taking me into her memories. Right now, here in my flat, I miss the days when lovely, long-legged, underwear-averse girls would share stories and lives with me.

Two Zero Nine: Rain

I'm going to be posting a few stories young ladies of my acquaintance have told me over the years.

I suppose these will be stories that I envy a bit, stories where I wish the male player could've been me. Or they may be stories I envy simply because they're hot and delightful--- stories from a world I wish I could be part of.

They're also here simply because this is an archive of sorts, because I want to be able to have records of these things, to have them saved in a place where I can read them again over the years.

This is a story from August 2012, a story told me a posh blonde girl in a distant city, and it's one of the hottest stories a girl has ever told me:

rain was pelting on the windows. i woke up on the floor, naked under a kid's toy story blanket. dry mouth, pounding headache, very shakey. i sat up, and looked around for my clothes. an asian girl was snoring quietly on the couch. there were bottles strewn everywhere. i felt sick and dizzy. my black jeans were in the corner of the room, covered in mud. my keys and $650 were scrunched into my pocket. weird, i never carried that much cash. i pulled them on, then vomited into a pot plant. i couldn't see the top i thought i'd been wearing, so i grabbed a men's shirt that was hanging on the back of a chair and buttoned it up. i had no idea where i was or what i'd been doing. i wandered through the small apartment. there were three men asleep in one of the bedrooms. in another bedroom was a few weed plants. i looked in the fridge and took out a beer. one of the men woke up and asked me if i wanted a smoke. we stood on the balcony, under the eaves, and smoked in silence. i have no idea who you are, he said. i just shrugged. you're wearing my shirt, he said. i just looked at him. i was feeling too dazed to put a sentence together. you can keep it, he said. he flicked his butt off the balcony, and offered me another. he lit it for me. can i see your tits, he asked. i nodded, and he undid the buttons on his shirt. can i take a photo, he asked. i nodded. he took out a battered iphone and took a few pictures, then started slowly sucking my nipples. he was tall, and dark haired. he had a beard and green eyes. i fucking love your tits, he said. do you want to suck my cock, he asked. i undid his jeans and took out his cock. i got on my knees and took him in my mouth. i was still feeling sick and almost vomited once or twice, but i loved the feeling of him in my mouth. do you want me to fuck you, he asked. i nodded, with his cock still in my mouth. i stood up and he bent me over the balcony and slowly peeled down my muddy skinny jeans. he kissed my neck and fucked me in the rain. the motion of it made me vomit over the balcony. i moaned at him not to stop. it felt so fucking good. his hand was rubbing my clit and his cock was deep in my cunt. i had purged and felt light and pure as air. he came, and rested his body against mine. he pulled my jeans back up, and buttoned my shirt. he put another cigarette in my mouth and lit it for me. i walked to caitie's apartment in the rain barefoot. i wasn't so far from there, 4 or 5 blocks. 

In November 2013, the same girl sent me this intriguing note:

Last night, smashing Jack Daniels, riding a rough bogan boy so damn hard, kissing his neck tattoo & thinking  is this how I live now?

Still have morphine in my pocket, still wearing yesterday's clothes, still thinking about you.

You'll never believe me til you're on your own.

The same girl sent me this a bit later, a lovely expansion of what she'd told me about what happened:

I got dragged to drinks at an apartment in the city by a friend who wanted to score some eccies. I was seriously not in the mood, but I know how it is when you need to score, and figured I'd go along for a little bit. We got buzzed up to the apartment floor, and as soon as I walked in I got a really great vibe. This was a seriously expensive apartment, huge, with a great view over the city and waterfront. There were heaps of people there...this bogan boy from up the line was doing the rounds of the room...I think he had some other stuff besides eccies, I wasn't paying too much attention. My friend paid for her eccies and we left. We'd just gotten into the lift when he came out of the apartment and called out 'Hey darlin', come for a drink with me?' We ended up at an irish pub, doing shots of jager & jack daniels. He took me back to his hotel room, and we did a few lines. I felt really hot, so I just took my top off, kicked off my ballet flats and sat on the floor looking at him, topless, legs wide open. I can still picture the exact look in his eyes as he fell to his knees and grabbed my anlkes, lifting my skirt, then pulling my legs as far apart as they would go.  He went down on me until I came twice, hard. I took his cock out of his jeans and started sucking him there on my knees. He came hard in my mouth, I swallowed most of it but some came spilling out my mouth and running down my chin. I wiped it with my finger then licked it clean. I could tell he loved that. We had a few more JDs, sitting naked facing each other on the floor, until he said if he didn't fuck me soon he was going to explode. I pulled him onto the bed and rode him hard, my cunt almost aching from it. He came deep inside me, his teeth around my nipple. He wanted me to stay the night, said he needed more. I shook my head, pulled my top & skirt back on, kissed him on the lips & cock and went to leave. He told me to wait, and gave me a hundy bag, and $50 for a taxi. He wrote his number on my upper thigh, and told me he'd hook me up anytime he was in Wellington.

I envy her sitting at a desk in her new house in a posh hip suburb of her city, looking at the hard drive where she keeps all her memories, seventeen years worth of them, all the way back to being fourteen. And I'm always both envious and jealous, thinking of all the stories she has there on that drive. I envy her being able to sit in her outdoor living space on the deck behind her house and sip bourbon and feel the wind in from the harbor as she loses herself in memories.

One Eight Nine: Holmes

Downtown on a Saturday morning, watching sleepy-eyed co-eds and young twenty-somethings drift into the coffeeshop by the river. Bright and surprisingly hot so early--- a morning for iced coffee rather than anything hot. The girls I'm watching are on their way home, threading their way through older, empty streets and construction zones back to their own rented rooms or to the new condos in reno'd buildings along the river streets. I can sit at a corner table with my own iced coffee and a stack of books from the tiny downtown library branch and try to read faces. I suppose it would be a novelist's feast, watching the faces of Saturday morning Walk o' Shame girls--- so many stories in those expressions.

Twenty-odd years ago, there was a Zalman King "version"--- a very, very free "version" ---of "Delta of Venus". It actually wasn't so bad on its own terms, and it's worth watching. It just wasn't Anais Nin in any way--- take that judgment however you wish. There was a fun scene where the two leads walk through Paris streets in that odd Phony War autumn of 1939 and try to construct stories for passers-by. They sit in cafes and do the same--- watch the other tables and construct whole lives for the couples who flirt or bicker or sit silently. Well, I liked the girl who played the lead in the film; I'll admit that. I did like the idea of sitting with a lover and constructing stories. That's one of the things I've loved, and one that I wonder if ever I'll do again.

Walk o' Shame stories for sleepy-eyed co-eds--- always a lovely chance to see what you can do with imagination and deduction. I won't refer here to all those moments in Sherlock Holmes stories where Holmes deduces a whole life from details. I hated those moments, really. Far too arrogant, and I was never a Holmes fan. I'll always admit to using imagination more than deduction. I'm turning the girls at the coffeeshop tables into characters in a story, not assessing them as potential clients or criminal suspects.

Sleepy-eyed, I always say. If they've been with lovers, they should be sleepy--- they should've been having sex 'til not long before dawn. Hungover a bit, too. What's sex without vodka shots or bourbon on the rocks? Pensive, sometimes--- you can see the girls thinking about whether last night was a mistake or a disappointment, thinking as well about whether last night was a one-off or whether there's an affair beginning. Sometimes you can see them wondering about how to explain to roommates that they slept in a new bed last night. Once in a while you do see smiles--- they liked the guy, liked what they did, enjoyed the sex. Sometimes you see them looking at cars parked on the street, or at couples, and wondering why they're walking home alone, without their new young gentleman escorting them. That expression leads to all kinds of interesting speculations about social rules here in the new age, right?

It's all different if you're male, I suppose. The walk home is less thoughtful, less a contemplative time. More triumph, less analysis---- unless that's an image that we've decided to reject here in the new age of equality and diversity.  My own experience has been that the walk home is a victory march--- proof of my own value, proof that for one night I've won a battle against time and decay and my own body and past.

But it's still a fact, I think. Male stories on mornings-after are much, much less interesting, and they're so much less complex.

Well, a morning that's all summer sunlight. You can sit and sip vanilla iced coffee and watch girls with stories in their eyes and try to imagine what their lives are like. Surely there was a third Holmes brother who was a novelist---- surely.

One Four Five: Debriefing

A young companion left here a little while ago. I walked her down to my street gate and we kissed goodbye. I watched her go up the hill with her backpack to the next cross-street and tried to decide whether the morning was awkward. No--- it hadn't been. I was glad of that. Whatever the night had been, there hadn't been that: no why-am-I-here awkwardness.

Well, she knows my first name. I'm not sure if she knows my last name. I know her nickname, and I know the name (cover name? work name? what's it called?) she uses on tickets at the place where she tends bar.  I don't know her actual name, though the nickname makes her first name fairly obvious.

I know where she works, of course. That's where I met her. I know...what else? I know her age--- just old enough to be tending bar ---and that she lives up at the south edge of the bohemian part of the old downtown.  She's not the usual run of young companions--- the black-clad girls in Comparative Lit or Critical Theory who've been my niche companions and niche prey all these years. She was admitted to the interior design program at the university here. Our first conversation at the bar was all about apartments. Not just the usual urban fascination with rents and locations, but about furnishing what she called "transitory spaces". She wants to design hotel rooms, she said. Hotel rooms and student housing. She was impressed that I'd stayed at the Pod Hotel in Manhattan; we both sighed over some day staying at capsule hotels in Japan. She wants, she said, to design spaces for people who'll be moving through and don't want to bring history with with or leave history behind when they go. That was fascinating.

What else? She has a brother in the Pacific Northwest who works in craft beers. She says she'd love to learn that, too, learn brewing  and how breweries are run. I can't disagree. Though I did have to grin when she told me that. That's one of the prizes of being her age--- there are  multiple futures and future lives still waiting, careers and worlds to explore and all the time in the world.  I envy that.

Last night's debris was still on the counter in my kitchen. Two shot glasses and a mostly-empty bottle of Jameson's. We'd been outside  with those, sitting and drinking and looking at the shadows and lights on the lakes.  The conversation hadn't been bad--- mostly me encouraging her to talk. Hearing all about design and what rooms could be like in hotels and dorms and what the designs would mean. I miss conversations like that when I'm away from them--- a lovely girl telling me all about the things she's learned or wants to learn,  telling me all about the new things in her world. I miss learning from someone else's excitement.

She's dark-haired, dark-eyed. Good legs in the inevitable short-shorts. Likes biking, doesn't like basketball. And went home with me...why? That's the Most Dangerous Question, but I did ask it. Asked it before seriously kissing, asked it before bed. She just shrugged in a half-apologetic way and told me that Well, you're nice. And I want to see what it's like--- someone like you, I mean. Not a bad answer,  though I understood what someone like you means. Not someone with a doctorate in History, not someone who lives by the lakes. It certainly doesn't mean someone handsome in a dangerous way. It means someone much older. I'm a learning experience. That's not the worst answer in the world, I suppose. Being a learning experience, being a kind of wicked adventure--- how long have I been marketing myself as that? Isn't that the whole point of being a roué ?

Well, she was at least open and blithe about it, which I appreciated. I'm a chance to experiment with something, to see what something's like. I don't mind being a research project. It's not like I haven't seen the world as a set of explorations and experiments all my life. And I know how to do this.  There's a set of unspoken things to check off, and I'm good at checklists.

As nights go, not bad. She didn't mind talking during things, didn't mind my suggestions or requests. She was good at phrasing things for her own requests, too--- I've heard that's what guys like you like to do, so... She didn't object to the music I had playing. Well, no disappointed looks or sullen conversations this morning. I even went out to bring two large lattes back. I trust that well-brought-up lovely girls have been taught to hide all disappointments if bed partners bring them large lattes. Courtesy gets us all through many small social moments.

Well, she has my phone number, and I'll see her where she works. I won't trespass beyond what the subject of an experiment should.  I'll be polite and no more flirtatious than usual. That's my place.  I hope she'll be back, but it's not my place to ask, or even to expect anything. I'd like to hear more about her visions of rooms and hotels and transient housing.  I'd like to offer her more data points for her experiment. Watching her walk up the street wasn't a bad way to begin a Sunday. And I did have the latte and a goodbye kiss.

One Three Zero: Long Con

There's a question worth considering tonight. Suppose you were standing at a party or a bar and someone fairly attractive and of your preferred gender came over and began speaking to you--- flirting with you. What would do you? Assume you're unattached and there on your own. What would you do?

There are nights where I'd very coldly glare at the person speaking to me and walk away. Not because I wouldn't be interested in flirtation and seduction. It's not that at all. There are nights when, the more attractive the girl was who was speaking to me, the more likely I'd be to snarl at her and walk away.

At some basic tactical level, why would I walk away from someone attractive who might be interested in me, who might laugh and flirt and dance and make out?  The answer is that I'd find the fact that she was approaching me to be...uncanny. Unheimlich.   There are arbitrary social rules and socially-approved courtship norms--- they may be archaic or oppressive or exclusionary, but they do exist, and everyone knows what they are.  I'd have to be suspicious of anyone who violates the arbitrary norms, for better or worse. Why would they do this? And why would they do it around me?  My thought process on some nights would be simple enough: this is out of the ordinary, and that's suspicious. There's always the possibility that something out of the ordinary, something that comes out of nowhere, may be a good thing. Perhaps the person randomly handing you the $100 bill isn't running some kind of con, some kind of scam. Perhaps the attractive person approaching you at a party isn't going to humiliate you in public or isn't setting you up for some cruel joke. But how much trust do you put in the possibility of sincerity and good fortune?

You can ask yourself why they'd do that to you, but the answers are easy enough: boredom plus because-they-can. Because for certain people, random cruelty is its own reward.

And yet we are social animals. You'll remember the experiments where, when given the choice between a cold, wire-framed replica of a mother that provided milk and a warm, soft, cuddly cloth "mother" than gave no milk at all,  infant monkeys bonded with the cloth doll. We need the social interaction and the belief in kindness. We need to think someone might want to bond with us in some way. And so we're...optimistic. And foolishly optimistic at that.

So, then--- how would you answer the question?

What would you do if someone (yes, attractive) began to approach you outside the approved courtship norms? Would you believe in possibilities, or in the likelihood of the long con being played?

One Two Seven: Place

I'm thinking tonight about the old line: location, location, location.

Everything in real estate depends on that, and in economic history, too, I suppose.

There's something to be said for applying the saying to fantasies, too.

I read an article not so very long ago by a blogger who once had a reputation as a "sex-positive" writer, a writer who'd fought in the 1990s Sex Wars against the moralizing and puritanism of the forerunners of the Social Justice Cult and the gender warriors.  Her article, though, was a long rant about how we needed to take sex out of most social settings and social encounters. We would never be truly free until sex was kept in its (very narrow) place.  Allowing desire loose in the world, she wrote, would only support...the Patriarchy. Well, one more person lost to age and the blandishments of the Social Justice Cult.

I of course am a gentleman of  a certain age and a roué by vocation. And when I walk through the world on any ordinary morning, desire is always there. I was brought up in a time and place where almost any social encounter had its tinge of flirtation.  I can't imagine a world where desire, flirtation, and the promise of adventure don't whisper through social spaces.  I can't imagine a world where there's not at least the possibility of seductions and adventures there on any ordinary day.  The possibility exists that I watched far too many episodes of "Red Shoe Diaries" back in the waning days of the last age. But I can't imagine a world without the hint of adventures and seductions in the air.

Location, location, location....

When I walk through cities, I look at the architecture and the landscapes and what I see are stage sets. I see the possibilities in location, the places where a novel, a film, a "Red Shoe Diaries" episode would focus.

Back in the middle of the last decade there was a website for people at Harvard who'd had sex in Widener Library.  I read about that and wondered why there weren't blogs for other places. Why weren't there websites for university libraries and museums and corporate towers? The post-9/11 world put an end to the Mile High Club, I suppose--- any "misbehavior" aboard an airliner now draws the attention of the security services. But there's a whole universe of architectural possibilities out there, of buildings to target, of architectural styles to match to mood and erotic preferences.

No city is ever actually yours until you've had romantic and sexual adventures there. That's always been true of apartments and houses, and it's true of cities as well.  We make a city ours by incorporating it in our fantasies, in the films in our heads.

It matters, I think, that we're able to do that. We can still see the world as a stage set, as a series of stages for the adventures we want to have, for the dreams that haunt the corners of our thoughts.

Offices and museums, bridges and libraries, fire escapes and shadowed alcoves in old-guard men's clubs... All those places are there to be sets for the stories we want to inhabit.  Place matters, I think. Places have their own magic, their own valence for adventures.

My own tastes in these matters run to libraries, I think. That shouldn't be unexpected. But if you're reading this, tell me about your own dreams of place--- and what the places mean to you.

Nineteen: A Walk In The Morning Light

There's a small kerfluffle around the web today about an ad from an "upmarket" chain called Harvey Nichols. The ad is simple enough. It shows various girls coming home in last night's party dresses on what's now known as the Walk of Shame. The point of the ad is that in a Harvey Nichols dress, you'll look both fashionable enough to be out at night but still elegant and professional enough to pass as in daytime attire--- thus avoiding the Walk of Shame look. It's a reasonably cute ad, but it has drawn fire both for what's now called "slut shaming" and for "class privilege". The second claim does perplex me, and I'm not sure how its proponents justify it, or just what privilege it is to shop at Harvey Nichols.

There is a difference between the dawn walk home for males and females. That much is true. I've walked home from young companions' apartments in the morning in last night's clothes, but I've never thought of it as a Walk of Shame. I'm more likely to think of it as a kind of victory march, and I'm likely to recite Housman to myself: Soldier from the wars returning, spoiler of the taken town.... I will add here that the victory isn't over the young girl I've left sleeping in her bed. The victory is over time and fate and entropy. Walking home with a jacket over my shoulder and a tie stuffed into a pocket, I do feel like I've won something, or proven something. But never at my young companion's expense. The goodbye kiss as I left her bedroom for city streets was heartfelt and had no small amount of thank-you to it. Walking home, what I feel is elation. If the world and all the passers-by can tell that I'm returning from a lovely girl's bed, all the better. I've defied time and age and social expectations, and I've been given a whole nested set of gifts: pleasure, certainly, and a sense of renewed life and potential.

I'm usually at coffeehouses early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and there's always a steady inflow of Walk of Shame girls at the ones near the university--- hungover, tired, often carrying last night's stiletto heels. I can understand why they're walking. It's a close neighbourhood, bars and clubs and undergraduate apartments all together. (I've never understood girls having to do the Walk of Shame in places like London or New York; you'd think last night's partner would have the grace to offer cab fare.) I'm often amused by the girls--- who avoids her friends' eyes, who sits with other returning girls to share stories or commiserate, who's too hungover to do more than try not to go face down on the table. Amused, but never contemptuous. That's a distinction worth making. I enjoy watching them and inferring stories, but I don't feel contempt. I do feel envy, of course, the standard male wish that one girl or another had been in my bed last night. And there's always the fact that last night's party dress may be delightfully revealing in morning light. I can't deny that, and I'd never think of denying it. I will always turn the Male Gaze onto youth and beauty. But there's never contempt or derision. Why would there be?

Well, I still don't understand the "class privilege" attack on the Harvey Nichols ad. The remnants of the class system in Britain are as mysterious as ever the older system was. Is it only that the dresses sold there are expensive? I'll leave that for readers' comments. I will just say that I like seeing Walk of Shame girls--- though I certainly have no interest in shaming them. And while I think of my own dawnlight returns as a small Roman triumph, there's no reason at all why a lovely girl shouldn't stride home with her own sense of victory.