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  But anyway, for whatever reason, Andy does like to talk about my sex life. And that’s what he’s doing right now.

  ‘You don’t have any problems, then? You’ve got full feeling?’ he says suddenly, causing me to open my eyes very wide in surprise. He says it in a very matter-of-fact way as if he’s talking about, I don’t know, biscuits or something.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, trying to match him with equal bravado. Deep down I’m terrified that he’ll expect me to get my fully functioning dick out and show it to him.

  ‘And sex, that’s normal too, you can get an erection and come? The works? It’s all there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Heh. Well, that’s good.’ He scratches the side of his nose. ‘I think that’s pretty much usual for your type of injury, although it varies a lot. Was she surprised by that, Mary? Delighted to find you in full working order?’

  ‘Um. Maybe, I guess.’ And that’s more than a little weird because I never thought about what Mary expected to find in my underpants. A strange, hollow feeling creeps into my brain then, as I consider the possibility that Mary was disappointed that I was the Full Monty in that department. Maybe it would have turned her on even more if my dick was as useless as my legs. I squish that nasty feeling away.

  I end up saying, softly, ‘Actually, sometimes I feel like it’s a bit harder to get, well, hard, like my erection isn’t as strong. But that happens more when I’m on my own than when I’m with Mary.’ (And it certainly isn’t a problem right now. Right now I’m in a serious tent-pole situation if I so much as think about it!)

  Andy reads my mind. ‘Yeah? I bet you wish you’d had a bit more of that problem earlier today when Eleanor was squeezing your arse.’ And he laughs a lot.

  I laugh with Andy. And I can’t help wondering if maybe I got him wrong, maybe he doesn’t fancy Mary at all, maybe he likes me.

  Mary

  David’s got physio and stuff today, so I’m at the university library, working. I’m to and fro from the stacks, bringing up obscure articles and texts, ploughing through endless desert-dry, long-forgotten Victorian novels. I love this. Sex with David is wonderful, but this is every bit as fulfilling. This is the other side of me. I’m in academic heaven.

  The library is fairly empty today – a lonely Tuesday – so I’ve had my pick of the very best study spots. Right now, I’m sitting at this nice big window table, with piles of books and paper all over it and my glasses sliding down my nose. I feel satisfyingly like a character in an 80s college movie, one of those scenes where the character has to suddenly start studying hard to pass their exams, after 90 minutes’ worth of partying down. This, just this, is exactly how I used to fantasise that academia would be when I was hard at work at the grimy PR coal face.

  After this wonderful morning-long wallow in the cerebral, I head off to meet Mercury for a quick update on my dissertation followed by another wallow – this time in the rather more carnal. I’m so ridiculously high, I all but skip down the street, with my head so full of facts I keep thinking that they’re going to start spilling out and splashing on the pavement in great luminous puddles.

  As expected, our dissertation update meeting quickly becomes more of an update on my sex life. In fact, after less than ten minutes, we’ve abandoned the austere (and smoke- and alcohol-free) surroundings of Mercury’s office for our usual table at Monroe. Before we know it, it’s more mid-afternoon than lunchtime and we’re both perfectly pissed and lusciously lush. I’m even cocktail-goggled enough to reflect that although this place still looks like it was hollowed out of oak by a bunch of particularly determined termites, it may be starting to grow on me.

  Mercury suggests we eat something (a very timely idea) and orders himself a plate of hummus and olives, accompanied by some jaw-challenging bread that claims to be wrought by artisans. I go for soup – the ubiquitous carrot and coriander – and yet more salacious updates on my sexual adventures.

  Although, really, there is nothing about my relationship with David that Mercury doesn’t know. Every up and every down. Every position. Every room. He could probably recite my description of the time David and I glided from room to room, like a porno Torville and Dean, David naked in his chair, all steely muscles and steely steel, me with my warm smooth legs pressing against slightly cooler, slightly hairier ones. Close and connected. He was so hard inside me the entire time. So cool and in control as his muscles flexed, hands on the wheels, moving us around, pirouetting and gliding and fucking all at once, like something from a delicious dream. Mercury has heard it all.

  ‘So things are good, then?’ says Mercury when I’ve finished my salacious storytelling with an update on last night’s David-tormenting session, and how he is at his social club for wheelchair users with a cock that springs to attention if it so much as feels a draught. Mercury laughs heartily at this. He is always very appreciative of my more imaginative stunts.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I babble, happily, ‘it couldn’t be better. It really is refreshing, because David knows exactly why I find him so attractive. I told him upfront. It turns me on. His helplessness. Or maybe his perceived helplessness, because he isn’t all that helpless. Not really. And I know he doesn’t like to think of himself as helpless – he’s incredibly proud. But he can give the illusion of being helpless so easily …’

  I tail off and look at Mercury, but he doesn’t meet my gaze at first. He’s got his head down, busy carving a swooping groove in his hummus with a crust of his bread, chuckling lightly to himself. Then, after a few moments’ silence, he seems to lose interest in his pretty patterns and pops a luscious and lustrous olive into his mouth instead, finally looking over at me.

  But he still doesn’t say anything, just flashes his eyebrows, so I keep going with my garbled rationalisation of my relationship. ‘I don’t know. But there’s just something to be said about being able to be this honest about what I like. What I like and what I want. It’s just, just wonderful.’

  ‘Well,’ Mercury says, with a rather sarcastic smile, ‘I’m glad things are so sunny in Mary-land. You’re shagging away merrily and all your little dreams are coming true.’ I can tell Mercury is patronising me, amusing himself because I’m starting to bore him. Normally I’d read these signs almost unconsciously and segue into another depraved topic, but I have a one-track mind these days. I want to keep talking David. I’m all fired up now from reliving my most recent David sex-capades, and there’s still an hour or so until he picks me up from the library, so in lieu of real David, I want filthy David talk. I like talking about him, it turns me on. I like talking about him almost as much as I like being with him. But as Mercury is getting bored, I decide to settle for thinking about David. And have a change of scene. So I wrap up, plead that my books are calling and get back to the library.

  And off I skip, back to my books and pens and papers, and my occasional breaks fantasising about David and his poor frustrated cock.

  David

  When the social club starts to wind down, I get going to pick Mary up from the university library.

  I’m feeling a little het up because she’s sent me a couple of teasing texts during the afternoon, asking how I’m feeling, so I know she’s starting to get frisky. She misses me. I like that. But I’m being cool. Although I knew exactly what she was referring to in her texts, I didn’t play along. I didn’t tell her how I was feeling – frustrated, horny and completely unable to stop thinking about sex, about her, and about what she might do to me when we get home tonight. How could I possibly condense all that into txt-speak? So I just sent her a one-word message in reply, ‘fine’.

  I try not to think about these things as I drive to meet her. I don’t want to have an accident. Another accident.

  Maybe I drive a little faster than normal, though, because I arrive early and Mary isn’t there. So I’m sitting in the car outside the university library, squatting on the double yellows waiting for her, when someone raps on the car window. It’s not Mary. And it’s kind of awkward.<
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  It’s awkward because it’s Larry.

  And I’ve been ignoring Larry. Now it might have been an easy enough job to ignore Larry, when Larry was personified by a bunch of irritatingly laddish texts, but now we’re face to face – give or take a bit of toughened glass – I can hardly blank him and drive off, can I?

  I push the button and the window hums down.

  ‘Hey,’ I say.

  ‘Hey, dude. What you doing here?’

  ‘Um.’ I don’t want to tell him I’m waiting for Mary, because then he might wait with me. She could be here any minute. And the last thing I want is for the dreaded Mary–Larry interface to happen right when I so desperately need Mary’s assistance with a little problem in my pants.

  I can think of only one way out. It’ll make me late meeting Mary, but this is a very devil/deep-blue-sea conundrum.

  ‘I was looking for you, actually, mate,’ I say, as brightly as I can. ‘Fancy a quick one?’

  We end up in the Union Bar, just like before, with awkward pints of lager and fidgety packets of crisps.

  But after a little small talk, something truly unexpected happens. Larry leans forward and fixes me with a slightly shifty look. ‘It’s nice to do this again, mate. It was really excellent before wasn’t it?’

  ‘Before, what, before the accident?’

  ‘Nah, shit, dude, not that. I meant you and me, tracking down that chick. Just us boys. Just like old days. Didn’t you just love it?’

  ‘Er, well, yeah, kind of.’ God, did I? I haven’t thought about it, except when deleting Larry’s increasingly frequent texts.

  ‘Now, can I just get something straight?’ he says next, not even pausing to let me come to terms with the last thing he said. (What was that exactly? Larry declaring his undying love?) ‘Mary, the girl you are now shacked up with, she isn’t the one we saw, right, the one who leant out the window with the hair?’

  God, is Larry thick? I don’t think I ever noticed Larry was thick before. An ignorant, reactionary idiot, sure, but not thick. Surely the fact that the girl who leant out of the window wasn’t the right girl was obvious from the conversation? But I don’t mention any of that. I just say, ‘You mean Carrie, she’s Mary’s flatmate.’

  ‘Ri – ight,’ says Larry, cool as, but clearly going somewhere. ‘So this Carrie, she’s available?’

  ‘Well, as far as I know. I haven’t met her.’

  ‘You haven’t met her? You’re going out with her flatmate!’

  ‘Yeah, but I don’t go to Mary’s place. It’s up three flights of stairs, which is kind of a pain. Anyway, why are you so interested in Carrie all of a sudden? Don’t you like to aim a bit higher than a crazy wholemeal hippy?’ Because I might not have met Carrie, but I certainly have heard a lot about her – she is the second biggest reason why Mary now practically lives in my bungalow.

  Larry gives me a look that I haven’t seen for a long, long time. It’s a bit like the way he used to look at me when I first met him, before I taught him how to be a player.

  ‘That’s not quite true, David. You used to aim a lot higher than that. And I was often lucky enough to get the ones you didn’t want. But now I haven’t got you around, things are different. When I said I needed you as bait, well, truth is, I always needed you as bait. Look in the mirror, David. There’s a reason why you used to have to beat them off with a stick, and it wasn’t your dazzling wit.’

  This is a rather uncharacteristic outburst for Larry. He’s not usually one to express himself. So I guess he must be feeling desperate. ‘But what about that girl, the one who came up to us before? The one who had the party?’

  ‘Yeah, there is her. Emma? Ella? She’s completely mad, though. But yeah, OK, I didn’t say it was a complete drought, I’m just saying I might not be able to complete with your all-dolly-birds-all-the-time standards.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  And my first thought, all the time this weirdness is going on, is – rather treacherously – that Mary herself isn’t up to my old self-imposed ‘dolly bird’ standards. The ones Larry is going on about. The ones I really did used to have. And my second thought, even more treacherously, is that how Eleanor, the physiotherapist totty, does meet the standard. Oh yes, Eleanor is the kind of girl I would have set my sights on, way back when.

  Larry sighs, a deep and heavy end-of-the-world sigh, into his pint. ‘And it’s not just that, David. I’m kind of bored of all this dogging around, anyway. It’s a lot less fun than it used to be when it was you and me, young lads. But I’m turning thirty next month and I just don’t know if I can keep it up anymore.’

  Oh shit. First I’m a girl-bait puppy, then I’m an advice-dispensing eunuch for that party-girl and now I’m a fucking therapist. Can’t I just be a normal bloke? There was a reason I used to try and avoid people.

  I roll my eyes and start scrabbling around for a way out of this conversation.

  I finally manage to get a goodbye in edgeways, and escape from the Union Bar. I get back to the library and my heart leaps when I see Mary standing outside, wearing a light-brown raincoat and clutching a huge pile of dark-brown books. She looks a bit tired, but seems to brighten as I pull up. She doesn’t ask where I’ve been, which is good because I don’t want to tell her about my encounter with Larry, in case it leads to me telling her about the old me and the sexy type of girls I used to date.

  When we are both in the car, Mary reaches over and squeezes my thigh. I find myself flushing a little. I know it’s from guilt. But those feelings melt away as she slides her hand up my leg until it grazes my crotch and squeezes there, ever so gently. ‘I missed you today,’ she half whispers. ‘I went for lunch with Mercury and bored him half to death talking about you.’

  I gulp and try desperately to make some less squirmy conversation, telling Mary about my time at the social club, and how Andy asked me a million questions about my sex life again and seemed very amused by my twenty-four-hour delayed gratification. But I don’t mention anything about a new assistant physio, or about the incident that followed when I worked with her. I feel more guilty about that than anything else, despite the fact that, really, it was all Mary’s fault. More to the point, I don’t like feeling guilty about stuff. It’s new to me.

  But, luckily, there are some more pressing matters to attend to. Like the fact that I am in danger of spearing a hole right through the crotch of my trousers if she doesn’t let me come pretty soon. So I end my tale of physio and social club and Andy by pressing that point. ‘So, anyway, I told him I would be getting it tonight, I’ve been waiting all day.’

  She laughs, half to herself. ‘I was wondering how long it would take you to remind me about that. Well, actually, I did half suspect it would take you no time at all.’ She smiles, like she’s said something really clever. ‘Anyway, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten. In fact, I’m looking forward to it almost as much as you are, you greedy eager little bitch.’ It sounds a bit like a threat and a lot like a promise.

  My breath comes a little quicker.

  She’s noticed, of course, even though I haven’t said a word, even though my breath is whisper-soft, even though she is looking out of the window and not at me, as if her mind is elsewhere. She always notices. And I always know.

  I try not to think about that. I try to concentrate on the road. In fact, I’m concentrating on the road more than I really need to; it’s not a particularly complicated bit of road. And then she says, ‘Well, not long now.’

  ‘No,’ I say, not daring to say more, because I feel sure she’s about to twist things around somehow to tell me that I can’t come tonight either.

  ‘Has it been very, ahem, very hard?’ she says, trying not to laugh at her very obvious, very deliberate double entendre.

  ‘Yes,’ I say blankly, answering the question both ways, giving everything away with the way my voice half cracks in the middle of this confession.

  I can tell without looking at her that she’s grinning broadly. I can practically h
ear it. ‘Well, I am glad, actually. I didn’t really think you’d do it.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Hold out for me. Wait all day. After all, I couldn’t have prevented you from nipping off to the loo at any time today and sorting yourself out. I wasn’t watching. I wasn’t there. I wouldn’t even have known. But it never occurred to you to do that, did it?’

  I don’t reply. But she’s right. It never did.

  It’s not long after we get home that I get my reward for my good behaviour, for which I am truly grateful. I wasn’t in the mood for waiting around.

  I don’t know what it’s all about at first, this evening’s diversion. It isn’t what I thought it would be. At least, I thought it would be something more straightforward, more of a quick release. I have another thing coming.

  My arms are tied tightly down to the armrests again with those same jewel-bright green ribbons. A fact that has added to my discomfort in more ways than just the obvious, because when she ties me down my cock starts to feel like it is going to explode.

  Mary plays with me a bit once I am helpless, manoeuvring me from room to room.

  In the hall she toys with me, stroking my face and then pulling my hair, hard. Making me beg for her mouth on my cock, only to have her refuse and slap my face.

  In the bathroom she runs the taps, smiling sinisterly, before suddenly scooping handfuls of icy cold water over my head and my crotch, which does nothing to cool me down, and has her leaning up against the wall for a long time, panting, staring at my wet hair stuck to my face, the drips running off my chin, and clearly having a hard time not peaking too soon herself.

  We end up in the kitchen.

  At first I just sit and watch her. She looks sideways at me, peering around the shiny brown curtain of her hair. She’s mixing something up on the stove. I’m not really paying attention, choosing instead to concentrate on my confusingly delicious feelings of exposure and helplessness. But I do notice that something in the warming air smells like chocolate.