The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker

by Suzanne Portnoy

  Sometimes people aren’t friendly in spas. It might be a matter of taste – You’re not my type – get lost. Or it might be territorial – This is our room, get lost. I’ve seen guys spread out in a Jacuzzi meant for six, not to mention sex, so that it’s impossible for anyone to join them without sitting on a foot. They’re just rude. Luckily, these boys are in a friendly mood; otherwise it might have been a challenge to find a way to initiate a conversation with the handsome one.

  ‘Thought you normally came on a Wednesday,’ the fatty says.

  ‘Yeah, I do, but couldn’t get away from work this Wednesday,’ I say. ‘I do come on other days, you know.’

  A couple of minutes later, the laughing Buddha announces he’s off to the sauna, leaving me and the hottie in the tub together. I’ve got a little over an hour to get this guy into one of the relaxation rooms and have an orgasm. It shouldn’t be too difficult. I position myself so I’m directly across from him.

  ‘I’m Sam,’ he says.

  ‘Suzanne.’

  ‘Nice to meet you, Suzanne. I haven’t seen you here before.’

  ‘I usually come at Wednesday lunchtime,’ I explained. ‘As you heard. This is the first time I’ve been on a Friday.’ I look meaningfully into his eyes. ‘I’ll have to come more often.’

  We discuss what we do for a living. He’s a property developer with a sideline in making corporate videos. He is sweet and relaxed and I like him instantly. A few minutes more of this casual chit-chat passes, then I say, ‘Fancy going upstairs?’

  ‘Really? Wow. Sure.’ He seems surprised, perhaps taken aback that I’m so direct.

  I’m in.

  I learnt that the direct approach usually works. As my mother taught me, ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get.’ She was talking about a waiter bringing us an extra round of bread. I learnt to adapt that advice to satisfy my needs. When you’ve only got an hour to get laid, small talk is a waste of time.

  The first time I went to Rio’s was with Daniel, a year earlier, on his birthday. I’d asked him what he wanted as a present, and he told me, ‘I want sex with lots of strangers. Organise it.’

  As I am not Heidi Fleiss, I didn’t quite know what to do. But then I recalled a leaflet I’d picked up at an erotica exhibition I’d attended as a joke with some girlfriends; it was now tacked to the kitchen bulletin board, hidden behind my children’s school-holiday dates. What caught my eye and made me keep it was the small type: ‘Couples’ Night’. Although the brochure didn’t proclaim it, it was apparent that meant ‘Swingers’ Night’. Since it was just down the road from my house, we decided to check it out, more out of curiosity than anything else. We figured that, even if it was crap, we’d have a laugh. I promised Daniel that if the place was a bust, we could come home and I would make up for the lack of performance art by performing a few tricks of my own.

  It wasn’t immediately apparent to us, on that first visit, where the alleged swinging was taking place. After sitting at the bar for twenty minutes and seeing people stew in the Jacuzzi, we noticed a couple being buzzed through a door that led upstairs. We asked a bearded guy, an old hippy sitting next to us, what was upstairs. ‘Ooooh, you need an open mind to go up there.’ That was our signal.

  We climbed two flights of stairs, passing the relaxation rooms and discovered an orgy, with about twenty people in various intriguing configurations. There was a large white woman with drooping tits and a hefty belly in the middle of the room, on all fours, being fucked by three men, one in each hole. Sofas lined the walls. Most of the people on them were middle-aged men being sucked off by their partners or, in a few cases, by younger women who could have been hookers. These women were far too attractive, I thought, to be the partner of some fat hairy white guy, and I wondered if the men had hired the girls for the night and brought them to Rio’s.

  Swingers clubs attract a real cross-section of humanity. Imagine fucking everyone in the Tube carriage on the way to work. There’s always a pretty girl, a hunky boy and everyone else is fairly average. Rio’s is just like life, except it’s full of people who made the leap, got over their fears – if they ever had any – and take off their clothes and perform sex acts with strangers in public. These clubs are heaven for most men, who are happy to be getting so much pussy. They just want a hole to fill. It’s different for women, who often can’t relate to a cock on its own. They want them attached to men with beauty or bodies or brains, preferably all three; otherwise, they must close their eyes and concentrate on a fantasy to get off.

  That first night at Rio’s, Daniel got his birthday wish when we got friendly with a gorgeous Spanish girl with perfect tits and a French woman who didn’t know how to suck cock to save her life (though we enjoyed watching her try). For six months after that, we were Saturday-night regulars – until the night I pointed out a black guy’s twelve-inch erection as he and it emerged from a Jacuzzi. Daniel said angrily, ‘If that’s what you want, you shouldn’t be with me.’ He had been sensitive about his size ever since the day he asked how he measured up against my previous lovers.

  ‘Well, truthfully,’ I said, ‘I’m used to much bigger.’

  ‘You know, Suzanne,’ he said, ‘sometimes it really is better to lie.’

  ‘Darling, if you want me to lie, you shouldn’t have asked.’

  Sam and I get to the door that leads upstairs and he asks the receptionist to buzz us in. She flashes me a dirty look, as if to say, ‘I see you’ve found another victim.’ It takes her about thirty seconds to reach the buzzer that is about two inches from her hand.

  Sam and I find an empty room. We take off the towels we’ve been wearing around our waists and spread them on top of the mat. We embrace and kiss. His body is even better than I had anticipated – pronounced abs, athletic thighs, narrow hips that offset broad shoulders. He’s hard. I sit on the platform bed and take his cock in my mouth. It tastes slightly of chlorine, is about nine inches long and thick. If I had more time, I’d stay down there longer. Sucking cock, especially a big gorgeous black cock, is one of my favourite things to do, and fortunately I’m told I’m very good at it. I have Frank to thank for that. He taught me everything there is to know about sucking cock. Before I met him, I didn’t have a clue. I thought the nerve endings were at the base of the shaft – that, I assumed, was the significance of the movie Deep Throat.

  Once, during a weekend visit to New York, we were in bed and I noticed that yet another of my blowjobs was making Frank go limp – I didn’t have much oral experience, since most men just wanted to fuck me – and he told me to stop.

  ‘Close your eyes and relax,’ he said, then explained what I needed to do to make him come. ‘Imagine what it would be like if you had a cock.’

  Now I think of blowjobs not so much as an act of love as a form of meditation, and in the same spirit in which he performed oral on me. If there were a religion for girls who like sucking cock, I’d be a convert.

  Once I get into the rhythm, I lose all sense of time and place. It’s just me and the cock. Actually it’s more than that: the man thinks it’s all about him, but, in fact, for me, it’s an act of pure selfishness. I suck cock because I love it.

  Frank taught me to feel every twitch, the way a man’s penis gets hard and then subsides slightly when he is trying not to come. I love the responsiveness of a cock; the way it slides in and out of my mouth; the way I can make it do what I want it to do. I think about how it must feel when my tongue circles around the head and when I take it deep into my mouth until I almost gag. I slide my tongue up and down the shaft and then back into my mouth again. In my mind, I’m so connected to the man’s cock, I get wetter and wetter and almost come myself, just thinking about what he must be feeling. My head moves up and down, up and down. Then I’m massaging the head of his cock again, swirling my tongue, watching and feeling him get harder and harder.

  A big hard cock is a thing of beauty. I don’t need to hear the words ‘I love you’ or ‘I want to fuck you’. A man’s arousal is
the ultimate turn-on for me. I’m in my own world. And, lucky man, Sam is loving it.

  The clock is ticking and, although I’m on an endorphin high sucking Sam’s cock, my reason for spending lunchtime at Rio’s is simple: I want to come. So I stop sucking. Now it’s my turn. I lie down on my back and Sam crouches between my legs, inhaling my scent before darting his tongue over, around and on top of my clit. I can feel myself getting wetter.

  ‘I want to feel your cock inside me,’ I say.

  I grab a condom from my kitbag, which contains my other Rio’s essentials: shampoo, conditioner, massage oil, lube, a bullet vibrator and a butt plug.

  I split the wrapper and roll the condom on his hard-on, making sure my mouth follows immediately, to be certain he’ll stay hard enough.

  I climb on top of him, slide his cock inside me, and start to grind. He’s the perfect size and the perfect shape for me. Any thicker and it might be painful; any smaller and I wouldn’t feel him sliding up and down inside me. We fit. He’s just thick enough to feel full and long enough to reach to the end of my pussy without hurting. It feels good and I’m really enjoying this. It’s a lot better than what I’ve got at home and makes me realise what I’ve been missing. I move up and down the shaft, massaging it with my pussy. He’s groaning with pleasure. ‘Your pussy is fantastic.’

  ‘If you keep going,’ he says, ‘I’m going to come too quickly. I want to make this last.’ He seems to be enjoying it as much as I am, which is to say, a bit too much. That’s not the deal. The deal is, I fuck a stranger, don’t get his number and never see him again. I don’t want the complications of an affair. This is a snack, after all, not the main meal. Besides, I’m living with my boyfriend.

  I come, and a few minutes later so does Sam. I look at my watch; an hour has gone by. I’ve still got to shower, dry my hair and change. We lie together for a short while, then get up off the bed, both of us soaking in sweat. The red walls are covered with beads of our sweat as well. We embrace.

  That final embrace is always so much more awkward than the first. Only minutes before we were complete strangers, laying together and having sex, just like a porn fairy tale. Then, a few minutes later, we’re saying our goodbyes. The words sound no different to what is said after bumping into a neighbour at the corner store.

  As I turn to head back to the changing rooms, Sam says, ‘So, see you next Friday, then?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ I say, smiling, even though I know it’s breaking my one-shot-only rule.

  Ten minutes later I’m back at my desk.

  Over the next week I tell myself that going back to Rio’s the next Friday is a really dumb idea. My body is telling me something else. Sam felt a lot better than Daniel does – bigger cock, better body and he likes straightforward intercourse. Hallelujah! Perhaps another bite at the apple wouldn’t be so terrible, I think, telling myself it’s only a lunchtime thing. I spend more time at the gym, I think. What’s one hour a week? Still, I call my girlfriend Bernadette to sound her out.

  ‘But what about Daniel?’ she says. ‘What about him?’

  ‘It’s not really cheating; it’s only lunch,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t count if it’s only lunch.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  I tell her I don’t even have his number, so he’s more fantasy than reality at this point anyway.

  I’m back at Rio’s the following Friday.

  Sam is there. This time we don’t bother much with small talk or the Jacuzzi but head straight upstairs.

  It’s great, just like the first time. We part after our second perfect date with the same words as before – ‘See you next Friday’ – but both of us know that’s not going to happen. That’s not the gig. You don’t go to places like Rio’s if you want a relationship.

  I show up the next Friday anyway. He’s not there. I’m half-relieved, half-disappointed. I have sex with a middle-aged, greying man who makes me come with his fingers.

  When I got home that night, Daniel said, ‘I need to talk to you.’ I wondered if he’d found out about my lunchtime snacks.

  Daniel paused. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you, because you’ve been such a bitch recently,’ he said, ‘but I suppose I should. I have liver cancer. It’s inoperable. The doctor says I have three to six months left. It would be really great if you’d let me stick around with you.’

  I can’t say I was stunned by the news. I’d had a premonition when we first met that he was unwell; this hard-living guy didn’t seem the type to live to a ripe old age. Even my children had once asked over breakfast why Daniel’s eyes were so yellow. Then there was the tiredness, his always falling asleep on the sofa, the length of time it took him to get over colds and the flus, and the slow disintegration of our sex life. Suddenly, it all made sense. Nonetheless, I hadn’t suspected the severity of his illness.

  I didn’t know what I was meant to say. Part of me didn’t feel anything. I hadn’t felt any love for Daniel in months. Yet I knew I should cry, like in the movies. It would have been the right thing to do, the expected thing. Part of me felt sad and sorry for the man sitting opposite me. He was only forty-four years old.

  Despite my anger and resentment and shock and pity, tears came to my eyes.

  ‘I’m not sorry to go, Suzanne,’ he said. ‘I’ve done everything I wanted to do, you know.’ He mentioned some early career accomplishments; said he’d seen a lot of the world as a kid; and cited the number of women he’d fucked. ‘I know it sounds like something out of a chick flick, the final scene, but I’ve crammed more into forty-four years than most people do in eighty, and, you know what, I’m fucking tired.’

  Daniel was stoic and that made me feel better about my ambivalent feelings about losing him. There was an end to our relationship in sight, even if it wasn’t the kind either of us would have desired. Despite the tears, I felt relieved, then guilt at feeling relieved. Another three to six months. I wondered whether it might be longer. What if the doctors didn’t get the diagnosis right and six months turns into a year? I wondered. I couldn’t imagine a year of nursing someone I didn’t love.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Daniel,’ I said. ‘Of course you can stay.’ I didn’t want him to die alone.

  10. BIG COCK LONDON

  The doctor told Daniel that, because his liver cancer was so advanced and there was nothing they could do, his only treatment would be pain management at this point. Chemo was not recommended, as it wasn’t considered worth the harsh side-effects for such minimal payoff. Still, we spent most of our time following Daniel’s diagnosis ferrying back and forth to the Royal Free Hospital. Perhaps because it was a teaching hospital, doctors there seemed always to be calling Daniel in for tests.

  Daniel refused to tell his family about his condition, saying he didn’t want them to fuss over him. I was his sole carer and chauffeur – not roles I was born to play – and I found it emotionally exhausting. My moods veered from sadness for Daniel to anger at myself that a relationship I had tried to end a year earlier had come to this. So, while the doctors and nurses took blood samples and did MRIs and pored over X-rays, I sat in waiting rooms.

  Daniel was so tired from all the tests and poking and prodding, and so bloated from the water his body could not flush through his kidneys, that just walking from the hospital reception to the oncology department might take a half-hour. He was too proud to take a wheelchair. Even putting on his shoes took a quarter of an hour. The nurses came round to my house one day and, seeing the stairs, told Daniel that soon he would have to move to a hospice. I was relieved. I had already decided I didn’t want my children to see Daniel die in my house, and he had offered to move to a hospice when it was clear that he was close to death. Now the deadline was being imposed on us.

  Soon after Daniel’s diagnosis, we were on a visit to the hospital and asked his doctor to prescribe Viagra. We thought it was the least the NHS could do. We hadn’t had sex in months and I knew sex was the one thing Daniel really wanted. Daniel had told me it was only when he could no lo
nger perform in bed that he had decided to go to the doctor. It wasn’t his falling asleep all the time, or his rapid weight gain, or even the alarming shade of yellow his eyes had become. It was that my world-class blowjobs no longer had an effect. ‘You were the only one in the world who made me hard,’ he told me, ‘and, when I couldn’t get it up for you any longer, that’s when I knew I was really sick.’

  As sex was what he’d always lived for, I wanted to give Daniel the one thing that gave him joy, so I didn’t think that mentioning the Viagra was such a big deal. Apparently it was. The doctor looked at me, shocked, as if he couldn’t believe someone could ask for something so base at such a sensitive time.

  ‘I just think his last few months should be as pleasurable for him as possible,’ I explained.

  ‘I don’t really want to do that right now,’ the doctor replied. ‘Let’s see how the treatment goes first.’

  ‘What fucking treatment?’ I was disgusted. ‘According to you, he doesn’t have much time. This is what he really likes.’

  The doctor was appalled. ‘Let’s revisit this when your boyfriend returns for his next visit.’

  It took several more trips to hospital and another two doctors before we finally found one who was sympathetic. ‘Of course,’ he said, and immediately wrote out a prescription. But by then it was too late; Daniel was too sick for sex.