Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  By your hands, lips, tongue. If you can.

  So, the licking, where he wants: most of all, the flattened front of the tip of his cock and then its underside, he can hardly bear your mouth on it and yet can’t get it enough and while you’re doing it you squeeze the base of him tight. You discover it all together, you’re both learning so much and you look up, to his eyes: astounded, delighted, both of you. Then the rim of his asshole. His balls, the firmness beneath and it’s his turn to tell you not to stop.

  Three, the clandestine public kiss, fully clothed. The bedroom kiss, unclothed, the places for it.

  Four, a candlestick. The handle of a hairbrush. The neck of a champagne bottle, and how thrillingly gentle you both have to be. Why is it that inanimate objects can excite you more than a penis ever does?

  Five, the vibrator. Teasing your clit and hard in you. Under the head of his cock and in his ass and you savour the clench in his face as he comes.

  Six, porn magazines. He has to buy them, it’s his task. You want the letters pages, nothing else; you’re not interested in what he does with the rest. You revel in saying all the words that’ve never slipped comfortably from your tongue: cunt, fuck, ass. You’re the housewife with the angel face and a sudden grit in her talk and it’s as if your outside and insides no longer match. Fuck me, you tell him, come on, fuck my cunt and you’re appalled and aroused by the words slipping from your mouth.

  Seven, wrists bound to the bed posts. Disabled, blindfolded, tied up.

  Eight, the shower, rammed against the tiles.

  Nine, sleep. Curled around his back, your body his blanket, your palm on his heart because sometimes, you tell him, that’s all a woman wants.

  Ten, the fuck. The first time didn’t count, there was nothing to be learnt, it just had to be done. You need time for it now, to get it right; you’re determined, finally, to make it work. He’s too jerky, grating, mechanical, you knew it would be like this, there’s no music to what he’s doing and he comes too quickly, of course. You’d always wanted it quick with Cole; but this is different, you have to find the exquisiteness you know exists. You’d been hoping for something different with Gabriel but the fucking, for you, is still not catching alight. You make an heroic effort not to show him your disappointment, not to turn away in frustration, sulk.

  You take a deep breath.

  Tell him, gently, that you both need some practice at this. Tell him he needs to slow down a little, look at you, not lock himself into his own little world. Tell him you’re not, actually, getting a thing out it. He snaps his head away from you, he’s so annoyed, feels he’s come so far, it’s hard to tell him it’s just not far enough. He gets off you. Leaves a sticky mess. You grab at him, tenderly, in apology, but he storms to the bathroom and tells you he’s had enough.

  You don’t contact him for a week.

  Ring the morning of the next session and he answers, too quick.

  Can I see you this afternoon?

  Yes: grumpy, abrupt.

  Good, you say, I’m so glad, you say, warmly, knowing this would be his response. And wanting him so much.

  Gradually, gradually, you slow Gabriel down, allowing him in a fraction at a time, pulling away if he tries to rush. Teaching him that a key to the exquisiteness lies in the waiting, the refraining, the holding back; and you’ve both been experts at that, ever since your hands brushed a touching in a café as a phone number was handed across. You tap into that now: enforcing the rules of no contact during the week, not removing your clothes the instant you walk through his door, sitting down over a cup of tea and then slowly, absently lifting up your skirt, no underpants, of course, and lightly touching yourself as you chat. Widening your legs, flexing your back, watching his distraction, his inability to stay seated: gathering his head to your kiss as you come.

  *

  You get Gabriel to feel you as if he’s a blind man reading the secrets of your inner skin. You make him vary his rhythm, gently admonish if it strays into monotony, teach him the secrets of tenderness, relaxing, surprise, teach him everything that you want. You iron him out until your inner thighs are fluttering and your pelvis is aching from stretching under him, until your thighs are trembling hours after you leave and into the next day.

  *

  Gabriel wants the lessons more frequently than you, he rages against the pleasure he’s missed, he’s afraid of time running out. It’s as if he wants to make love incessantly to cement what you’re doing in his life, to make your time together solid and settled and a habit you both cannot break. He says he is happy, so happy. He never thought he could have such greed in him.

  You hold him, you laugh, squeeze him tight. You don’t tell him you feel that too.

  You will not be hurried. You refuse to increase the frequency, to quicken your pace: you want to linger. You will not lengthen the lessons into the evenings, despite his insistence. When the dark comes you must stop. The lessons can only be conducted in the light, it’s like you’re living in fear of falling asleep with Gabriel and being kissed awake in the morning light, and being trapped, for ever, in his life.

  *

  It’s as if you’ve never felt pleasure until now. It’s as if what passed as pleasure before was a cardboard cut-out of it. For you’ve never been in control, until now; you’ve never, before, had exactly what you want.

  PULL

  Helen Cross

  Helen Cross was educated at Goldsmiths College, University of London and is a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of novels, stories, radio plays and screenplays. Her first novel, My Summer of Love, won a Betty Trask Award and was turned into a BAFTA-award-winning feature film. At the start of 2016 she became the Creative Fellow at the University of Birmingham.

  Impulsively, another handsome, rich, sex-starved London couple have booked a long weekend at Cosy Lodge B&B. Alice and her fiancé Tom have been working too hard, so they plan to fly north, take frosty coastal walks, unwind, de-stress, have some me-time, pamper one another and relax. She packs the aromatherapy oils, he the scented candles.

  Alice can be kind and funny, but she’s very posh and nowadays best known for an icy efficiency. “That blonde bitch expects to be curtsied to whenever she walks into a room,” as her own PA was recently heard to say. “Poor Tom”, as he’s known to his staff, is a rich twit, but with an endearing bewilderment that suggests utter ignorance of female intention.

  “Oh great!” Alice snorts when they arrive in the misty village, late on Friday night and have to weave nervously through locals loudly leaving pubs. “It’s English ugly. All white trash in T-shirts.” She is exhausted and irritable – and when Alice feels this way, which is often, she’s acquired a tendency to kick in all directions.

  “Oh I’m sorry,” Tom sighs, “why won’t the idiots wear proper clothes in winter?”

  “Why didn’t you check that on the internet?” she shouts at Tom, as they creep through the dark streets towards Cosy Lodge.

  Every twenty seconds the lighthouse beam illuminates Tom and Alice ghoulishly.

  Alice is not any more pleased when Tom runs up to the room the next morning to excitedly tell her that in their village this very day is the annual winter fête. “God, can you imagine living here forever,” is all she says as she stares out at the khaki plane of desolate land and the grey strip of distant sea, all smeared by an icy mist.

  At breakfast Tom tries to make Alice laugh at their B&B’s floral furnishings. He fails, though that afternoon he does convince Alice to head for the green where bright bunting marks the site of the fête. On the bill is a greasy pole contest, wrestling, karaoke and at 3 pm a Tug-of-War.

  “Christ,” Alice sobs. “Why didn’t you consider the climate? I’m freezing!”

  If Alice could express her feelings, she’d say she’s just upset that her hopes for sweet romance have already turned to vinegar. But increasingly Alice finds it hard to say, or know, what is right and true. “She’s so tigh
t-arsed I’m surprised she can even sit down,” Alice recently heard her PA whisper to a colleague.

  Three angry hurls at the coconut shy can’t dispel Alice’s fury, and even when Tom presents one of the cute gifts he’s brought along, she only sobs, “I’m depressed. I wish I were at work. This is total Chip Town Central; everyone looks so unhealthy.”

  “I agree the women are rather gruesome,” Tom smirks, glancing at a group of scowling scarlet-lipped teens.

  Tom’s about to take Alice back to the B&B for a cuddle, when a drum rolls. It is 3 pm. Sea mist spools like smoke. Slowly, from two sides of the green, strides a brute. And behind this creature, come seven more. Huge men. Broad and tall, with biceps, triceps, quadriceps, each with an arm strong enough to tow a truck. Leviathans who make Tom and Alice look two foot tall.

  As they come closer Alice notices that these barbarians have hands the size of hams hanging at their sides. And, when they curve into the ring, she figures these giants do not spend the day sitting down; their denim behinds are not just firm, they seem forged on an anvil. She clenches her own buttocks and bites her lip. “Gross!” she murmurs to Tom, who grins and nods.

  Close up several of the ogres are hairy. “What trolls!” Alice gasps. Six are stubbled, two bearded, five with faces the colour of old pennies, one sprouting such thick gingery curls it’s hard to see his face at all. Alice reckons they are all under thirty, and single. “Urgh! I told you this place was beyond civilisation. They’re not humans, they’re hulks!”

  “The women too,” Tom agrees, casting a glance around the fête for the thick-thighed, half-dressed young fillies he’d spied earlier.

  The compère announces the teams as bitter rivals from two local pubs. The men line up, ready to pull. Sixteen stamps to the left, sixteen to the right. “Monsters,” Alice mutters, “whose footsteps quake the earth.” There is a hush. Alice concentrates on the rope. How thick it is. Fat fingers gripping its rough length. She swallows hard and loosens her cashmere scarf.

  She really does wish she were at work, and in control.

  Each team captain takes his place at a chalky line in the grass. Behind him his seven giants lean, and grimace. The rope is already slippery and slides in their wettening hands. “I wouldn’t like to run into them on a dark night,” Tom smirks, but Alice isn’t listening. She feels petulantly hot.

  “PULL!”

  For a moment the desperate urge in the men’s faces suspends them all in a wrench of pure tension. Raw effort is in every inch of them. Grunts and moans rise out of the ring and the sway forces a shift in even the clouds. Fury is unleashed for a split – winning – second.

  There is another go.

  The captain, shouldered like an ox, urges his shackled beasts on, angrily. They thrust themselves backwards, digging their huge heels into the frozen ground. Alice focuses on just one crimson man, the pump of blood, the scrunch of his eyes, the sudden roar from his colossal mouth.

  She unbuttons her coat, and exhales a little cloud of agony. There is applause, and Tom tells her it’s a tournament of ten tugs.

  After the first five there is an interval during which Alice, breathless, collapses on the damp grass and sends Tom to the beer tent. He is gone some time. Alone, she spreads herself out and leans forward and watches the Goliaths take refreshments, throwing iced water over themselves and shaking their giant heads like wet dogs, prowling the ring like bulls, loosening their shirts and scratching like bears.

  Alice catches the salty semeny scent of them.

  For the final matches, Alice stands up to find a better position and is shocked to discover her knickers are wet. “The grass is damper than I thought,” she sulks at Tom when he comes back with her double vodka. “Now I’ll probably get a cold.” She goes to sit behind the team from The Wagon, so in front of her are their sixteen half-squatting, bulky thighs, their eight iron arses angled towards her face.

  The contest becomes furious, the men are sweaty, their forearms pulse and their beards drip beads of sweat and Alice imagines their eight cocks, crowned with purple-blue tips. The eight long shafts – each solid as Tom’s forearm.

  Alice feels dizzy and finishes her vodka in a furious gulp.

  Each tug comes to its quick climax with a roar, then a heave, so perfect, so desperate that Alice moans. She aches. She grits her teeth and closes her eyes, and if she hadn’t been at a busy family event at 3.42 pm would have slipped her fingers in her knickers and wiggled her thumb against her clit, so keen is she to celebrate that moment of tight rope, of perfect, equal stiffness.

  Too soon the event is over. Alice wants another vodka but Tom says he’s got a surprise; he’s booked afternoon tea in the B&B. Then drinks in their room. Then the special Cosy Lodge six-course dinner. After that, he whispers, he’s going to give Alice a nice foot rub and then run a hot scented bubble bath.

  Alice spends a lifetime dining with Tom that night.

  The lighthouse yawns round and round for years.

  Eventually Alice demands they go out to the pub for a drink, but Tom counsels that the locals don’t look too welcoming. Hasn’t she seen American Werewolf in London? Tom thinks Alice should stay in their room and pamper herself.

  “I’m going out for some cigarettes,” Alice cries at 11.30 pm. Tom gasps. “It’s this horrid place,” she shouts. “I hate it. I want to go home. I need a cigarette,” and she storms from the room before Tom can tell her smoking’s dangerous.

  When Alice is free she walks slowly. Her cunt feels like it’s licking its own lips. The night is black as ink. She’s forgotten her coat and wears only her pink camisole top. Alice has not tied up her hair in a familiar ponytail and instead it blows around her face madly. Her high heels make her slink, catwalk the murky streets. She’s burning up, though the wind from the North Sea blasts her wildly. A greasy drift of fish and chips slides on the night.

  Soon the salty air, and her heaviness of breathing, relaxes Alice, and she remembers herself long ago, before work, power, money and Tom, as a naughty, rebellious girl.

  The only place to get cigarettes is the grim-looking pub, but it’s closed, the lights are off, the curtains drawn, and anyway she doesn’t want a cigarette at all. She lurks around the streets for a while, her hands pressed into the pocket of her combat trousers. Soon she’s nuzzling the silky lining of her pocket into her damp pubic hair.

  Alice wants a drink and a fuck.

  The lights are dim in most of the houses. Smoke curls from chimney pots. She wanders on down lanes, through alleyways, smiling and humming, then eventually moaning like a horny tomcat. Frequently couples heading home pass her and smile, some nod kindly, like they know her. A few look at her high heels, tousled hair and revealing top, tut, and hurry on. A clutch of teenage boys hoot and shout “Slag!” as Alice strides by.

  At last, when Alice thinks she can’t bear it any longer and she’s going to have to duck into a piss-soaked bus shelter on her own, she rounds a corner, and there, through the brackish drizzle, she sees a large figure. Male. He has his back to her in a shadowy shop doorway. He’s enormous, and pissing like a horse. She creeps up on this giant and he turns, his long eel of a cock still hanging, piss-jewelled, in his big, rough hand.

  “Have you got a light,” Alice says coyly, in her poshest, cutest voice, looking up at him through her hair, “please?” The big man narrows his blue eyes at her. Alice tips on her toes, leans a little way forward so her pink camisole dips an inch, revealing her large full breasts, her erect nipples. Attracted, the giant bows his huge head a little. Alice can’t wait much longer.

  His cock is still slung before her, broad and heavy.

  Then she feels a blast of sheer unbearable frustration as the man tucks this perfect cock away and slowly begins to pat his pocket for his matches.

  “Oh forget it,” Alice cries. “I don’t smoke. Just fuck me.”

  There are people passing who hear this and cry out with laughter, a few cheer, several applaud, but Alice doesn’t care, a minute l
ater she has a giant’s cock in her hand at last, a divine, God-like huge heavy cock, and she’s kneading it and yes, it’s stiffening just for her.

  “Did you get some?” Tom says grumpily, when Alice returns fifteen minutes later.

  “Yes,” she smiles, bouncing up onto the bed, “the people are really friendly.”

  VOX VULVA

  Andrew Crumey

  Andrew Crumey was born in Scotland and holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Imperial College London. He is a former literary editor of Scotland on Sunday and is senior lecturer in creative writing at Northumbria University. He won the Saltire First Book Award with Music, in a Foreign Language, and the Northern Rock Foundation Award with Sputnik Caledonia, which was also shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize. He has been longlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke Award (for Mobius Dick) and the Man Booker Prize (for Mr Mee).

  He was in a café when the cunt called out to him.

  Hey you!

  He turned but saw no one he recognised, only a plump, attractive woman in her thirties, sitting some distance away. Her bare arm, dimpled at the elbow, levered a spoonful of chocolate gateau, and she glanced momentarily at him before pushing the soft food into her mouth, then quickly looked away.