1
There’s a little pub on Whitehall that mixes some of the best cocktails in London. It’s closer to what we decided – while several daiquiris deep – should be called the Arse End of Whitehall. Technically it’s Parliament Street, but due to the tremendous concentration of arseholes prowling around that particular postal district, we determined it should be named the Arse End. Sometime between daiquiris two and three it was briefly the Twat End, but Cerys reasonably vetoed that on the grounds that twats have both charm and a purpose. I pointed out that arseholes also have a purpose (and some are even charming) but by then it had stuck.
The Arse End of Whitehall it was. Bumhole ground zero. Absolute sphincter central. The seat of government.
I’d had my run-ins with politicians before, but that’s not why I was here. I was here because there was a new kind of raspberry mojito on the menu and because Cerys had the night off. She had had a big weekend booked, but her client cancelled because he had to go to Brussels. I was trying very hard not to look like I wasn’t speculating about which cabinet minister had dashed off to Brussels in a hurry, but I obviously wasn’t doing a very good job of it, because she looked up from her mojito and said “Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
“You know what. I can see you going through the list in your head.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I can’t help it. I don’t like it any more than you do, believe me. Right now I hate my own brain for picturing the Foreign Secretary hogtied and ball-gagged with a vibrating dildo shoved so far up his catflap that he can taste it in the back of his throat.”
Cerys raised her hand to her lips. “I don’t even know how to begin to help you,” she said.
“No. I know. I’m beyond help at this point.”
She squeezed my hand. “How much pornography have you written lately?”
“A lot. Do you think I should stop?”
“I think you take a holiday,” she said. “If you’re thinking about the Foreign Secretary in that way.” She screwed up her nose. “I don’t like to think about things like that. And I’m a professional.”
And I was a journalist, or had been. The old instincts were still there. “So,” I said. “Does that mean it’s not him?”
“Toby!”
“Sorry.”
“Why are you so fascinated by it?” she asked. “If you want to come in for a session…”
“Um, no.”
“…I’m just saying. If you’re curious I could show you the ropes, pun intended.”
“I’m not curious,” I said. “I don’t enjoy pain. I’ve spent most of my life avoiding it. I’m sure you’re very good at what you do, but my idea of a good time involves…” I swished the straw in the cocktail glass. “…whatever’s in this. Not being tied up, bent over a bench and paddled.”
“Chambord,” said Cerys.
“What?”
She tapped her glass. “In this. It’s Chambord, I think,” she said. “And Malibu. You can definitely taste the coconut, can’t you?”
“You are wasted as a dominatrix,” I said. “Your powers of distraction are straight up parliamentary.”
Cerys shrugged. “Nah. I’ll stick to the bondage dungeon, thank you very much. All that talking gives me a bloody headache.”
I knew how she felt. The volume was rising as more people piled in. And the place wasn’t large. It was one of those old, narrow buildings that had probably been here since they beheaded Charles I, one of those city pubs still clinging defiantly to its wood panels and horse brasses. That was why it had stayed emptier a lot longer than all those more fashionable places with microbreweries and mood lighting and chips served in miniature shopping trolleys, only it was clear that word was getting around. Westminster was – when all was said and done – still very much a village.
I scooted my chair in to avoid the scrum as more people piled in. The drizzle outside had turned to rain and I felt something wet on the back of my neck. Annoyed, I turned around and saw that someone was just shaking out his umbrella right behind me. Besides the umbrella the first thing I saw was the back of a narrow grey coat. Slim hips. Wide shoulders. And at the top was a damp thatch of red hair.
“Oh, shit. Sorry.” He turned to look down at me and I glared up at him. Derek Waterhouse. West Ealing. Had one of the biggest majorities – and one of the biggest egos – in the entire house. “Did I get you?”
“A bit,” I said, wiping water off my neck. I caught Cerys’s eye, but she was looking up at Waterhouse the same way most women looked at the man - like he shat puppies, farted rainbows and tasted like Toblerone.
“Sorry,” he said, again, and then his gaze lingered. On me. “It’s…um…Tony, isn’t it?”
“Toby,” I said, trying to inject as much ‘you ruined my fucking life’ into my name as humanly possible.
“Right. Toby. Guardian, wasn’t it?”
“Not any more,” I said, oozing unfriendliness.
“Well,” he said, and took the hint. “Nice to see you.”
“Yeah.”
He sidled away.
“What is wrong with you?” said Cerys, when he was at a safe distance. “He’s lovely.”
“He’s a cock,” I said, but then she got this look on her face. One of those looks that said she knew something scurrilous. “What? Why are you looking like that? Is this a cock thing?”
Cerys looked infuriatingly blank. “You might think that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”
“Don’t you House of Cards me, you Welsh tart. What’s up with the cock? What are we talking? Button mushroom? Or anaconda?”
She laughed. “I haven’t a clue,” she said, and leaned closer. “Don’t you think he’s good looking though?”
“He’s Westminster hot,” I said.
“Westminster hot?”
“It’s a low bar, Cerys. Most men in the House of Commons have reached that age where male pattern baldness has done its absolute worst and left them looking like thumbs. And then you’ve got those cabinet ministers who look like haunted children’s television puppets or those pictures of British dentistry that they use to scare American parents into spending even more money on braces. There’s a reason they say politics is like show business for ugly people; if both of your eyes look in the same direction and your teeth aren’t fifty shades of grey then you’re practically George Clooney around here.”
She finished her drink and sighed. “All right. I’ll bite. What did he do to you?”
“Do? Who said he did anything?”
“You didn’t have to. You gave him evils the moment he walked in and then you go off on this rant about how he’s not really that hot because everyone around here is ugly. It’s bloody obvious, isn’t it?”
“Fine,” I said. “He’s a shitweasel, okay? He stitched me up like a kipper on a story some years back. Gave it the full Derek the Red routine and came off only slightly to the right of Leon Trotsky.”
“Okay.”
“So I run the interview, and then it turned out he’d changed ideology – apparently overnight – and he’s been appointed as a new ‘centrist’ voice in the shadow cabinet. Totally disavowed the interview and came up with a bunch of excuses saying he’d ‘evolved’ on some positions and painting me as an outright fucking liar on others.” I drained my own glass and wondered if I should have another. It would probably make me angry-drunk, and I couldn’t really afford it. “That’s why I’m in the mess I am now, grubbing for blog crumbs and writing dirty books on the side. Every time I email the Guardian with something they now have a perfect excuse not to print it and instead publish some self-centred thinkpiece about Taylor Swift or fatshaming, as seen through the eyes of some trust fund foetus named Rhiannon.”
“Oh, I love the name Rhiannon,” said Cerys, confirming that she had indeed been drifting in and out the whole time. “Fleetwood Mac.”
“Cerys!”
“Sorry,” she said, and tapped the edge of her glass. “They’re a bit pokey, them. Probably should have stopped at two.”
“You think?”
“I did hear you,” she said. “And it does sound like he fucked you good and proper.”
“He did.”
Just then the crowds thinned enough for me to glance through. I was treated to the sight of Derek Waterhouse standing side on at the bar, one leg up on the rail, revealing an interesting bulge in the front of his trousers.
Cerys saw it too, because I heard her giggle.
I had my answer. Unless Waterhouse was stuffing his underpants, that wasn’t a button mushroom.
*
The word ‘pornography’ comes from the mid-nineteenth century, born out of the Victorian desire to classify and remedy the evils of society. Since then, a shocking amount of ink has been spilled trying to quantify, analyse and often straight up eradicate this menace, to lay stumbling blocks in the ways of those mucky minded monsters who wanted to corrupt the nation’s youth in the interests of pure profit. The most recent parliamentary crackdown came in the shape of a list of sex acts now banned from British smut. No caning, no spanking, no aggressive whipping, no penetration with any object ‘associated with violence’, no physical or verbal abuse, no water sports, no daddy kink, no physical restraint, no humiliation, no squirting, no auto-erotic asphyxiation, no face sitting and no fisting.
While Cerys was usually close-lipped about her clients, she did tell me that every item on this menu had been requested by MPs at one time or another, and sometimes by people who had actually helped draft the legislation.
You could never do anything about these waves of moral panic, she said. They came and they went, and the best thing to do was just ride them out and take comfort in knowing that even if both Houses somehow managed to sit and legislate against it until the human race was extinct, they would still never manage to make people stop wanting to touch themselves to dirty pictures.
Or dirty words.
My own problems with pornography were more immediate. Ever since the Waterhouse incident had shafted my credibility I’d been supplementing my skimpy income by writing smut for money. I’d been grinding away at this manuscript for over thirty thousand words and only now had it just hit me that both of the main characters left me colder and limper than day old salad. It was ridiculous. All I had to do was have sexual fantasies for money, and I couldn’t even seem to manage to do that successfully. What the hell did that say about me?
I wound up staring morosely at the front page of the Guardian. Some Maisie-Jane from Hampstead apparently had some column-worthy meditations on the politicization of pumpkin spiced lattes. I blinked at it and decided not to click, since it didn’t matter (it was a just a coffee drink, for fuck’s sake) and because we were all doomed anyway. North Korea was pulling more nuclear nonsense and several enormous hurricanes in the Atlantic appeared to be forming a conga line of whirling death. It was in these dark moments – I knew from experience – that I was prone to doing really stupid things, like stuffing the symptoms of my headache into Google, or reading my reviews on Goodreads.
Instead I listlessly scrolled down the page, only to be confronted by a picture of a smiling Derek Waterhouse dressed in running gear.
He wasn’t Westminster hot: he was just hot. He had thick eyebrows and great cheekbones and a pair of heavy lidded eyes that I remembered clearly, because they weren’t the bright blue or green you’d expect from someone with his colouring. Instead they were a brownish hazel, which at one point had looked almost gold when reflecting the thin grey light bouncing off the murky surface of the nearby Thames.
In the photo he was sweaty and flushed, holding up a medal. His shorts were very short, revealing long, muscled thighs, strong calves and the kind of ankles it was impossible not to imagine wrapped around your neck. He was running a marathon for a mental health charity, apparently, which was nice of him. Good for him, doing some charity work on his days off from making innocent reporters question their own sanity.
Following the interview debacle I’d spent several days wondering if the interview as I remembered it had actually taken place, or whether I’d had a complete break from reality. Depression and anxiety were two things I knew all too well, but for a while back there Derek Waterhouse had practically gaslighted me into worrying that I’d tipped over the edge into outright psychosis.
So yeah. Nice guy.
Lovely legs, though.
I returned to my listless porn. I was in the middle of a spanking scene and couldn’t seem to get into it. Cerys had been helpful, of course, explaining the whole power dynamic thing, but I was beginning to suspect that the problem with this book wasn’t just the characters; it was me. Bondage didn’t really ring my bell.
The blank page yawned before me, so I did what I usually did to fill it. I started making notes, quick bullet point breakdowns of what needed to happen in the scene ahead.
My sub character was currently kneeling over a bench with his hands tied behind his back and a buttplug rammed where the sun didn’t shine, while the alpha male dickhead character prepared to go to town on him with one of those big, studded spanking paddle things. First point of order was making sure that the characters were in positions where the things they were about to do were physically possible, because there was nothing more distracting than reading a sex scene and having to stop to wonder if human knees really did bend that way.
And that’s when my brain pulled a stunt out of left field. As I was imagining my way around angles and positions, the image of Derek Waterhouse’s thighs popped back into my head. It gave me a jolt, and that was it; my dirty little mind had grabbed that particular ball and was now running with it towards the goal posts, elbowing all other thoughts out of the way. I saw those long muscled thighs straining with anticipation, pictured his pale arse stuck up in the air, the hole already slick and obscenely dilated, ready for the moment when I plucked out the plug and entered him. But not yet. Not until I’d turned those pale cheeks pink, just like he deserved.
I heard him gasp at the first blow. “Apologise,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
Not good enough. I brought down the paddle again, this time hard enough to make him flinch forward, offering a glimpse of red kneecap as he shifted. My toes curled. My cock, still in my pyjama pants, rose to full, eager attention. Oh, this was more like it. An erection was always an advantage if you were trying to write any kind of convincing filth.
And this was convincing. I imagined the paddle coming down again, and this time he whimpered, his breath coming out hard from his nostrils as if he’d been biting his lip to keep from making a sound. I saw his muscles contract, twitching the base of the plug inside him. “Mean it,” I said, and gave him another whack.
This time he cried out. I grabbed his hair and pulled his head up. His back was to me but I saw a fat tear slide out of the corner of one eye, and my cock stiffened to ever more monstrous urgency. “I’m s…sorry,” he said. “I’m s…so…so sorry.”
“That’s better.” I reached down and squeezed his cheeks, nicely glowing now from the paddle. His internal muscles rippled again, as if his body was so desperate that it was trying to fuck itself on the plug inside him. As he thrust forward I glimpsed the top of his cock, neglected, untouched and rock hard.
“You want me to fuck you?” I asked, gently twirling the base of the plug.
“Yes. Oh God, yes. Please.”
I stopped and reached for the paddle, so that he saw me from the corner of his eye. He stiffened and once more I thought of the red patches on his knees; I don’t know why that did it for me, but oh God, it did. “Ask properly,” I said, and teased him by slapping him with my hand instead. His arse felt hot as hell under my hand.
“Please, sir,” he said, in a gasping voice. “Please fuck me, sir.”
I pushed aside my laptop and wrestled my pyjamas down. I was so turned on that the first touch of my hand made me cry out, and the sound of my voice – so hungry and sex starved – made me want to keep right on moaning. In my head he was making the same noises I was as I eased into him, his tight, hot flesh closing around me as I went deeper. When I was in all the way I felt the heat of his pink, spanked buttocks against the root of my cock, and that was it. That was all I could take. My heels dug into the bed, my hips pounding upwards into my hand as I came so hard that I felt it splash against the neck hem of my t-shirt.
The bed was still shuddering as I sank back down, drained, shaking and trying to remember the last time that masturbation had left me feeling this satisfied. I licked my lips and tasted warm saltiness; I’d somehow managed to splatter all over my own lower lip.
The good news was that my imagination was not nearly as vanilla as I’d feared. The bad news was that I desperately needed to get laid.
*
Back in Whitehall, Cerys was running late. I sat kicking my heels impatiently, needing to confide in another human being that I’d become so hopelessly depraved that I was having complicated, deviant sexual fantasies about members of the shadow cabinet. I was fairly open minded, obviously. Spanking, paddles, buttplugs – it was all bread and butter to me, but politicians? No. That was just weird.
I was just about to text her again when Derek Waterhouse walked in.
This time it wasn’t raining, and this time he wasn’t shaking an umbrella out on the back of my neck. No, this time he was clearly looking for me.
“There you are,” he said, joining me at the bar. “I was hoping you’d be here.”
I stared at him for a moment, wondering if once again my brain had slipped the surly bonds of reality and gone flying off to explore the happy pink clouds of absolute lunacy. Maybe I’d spent so long wanking over the man that I’d confused sexual fantasy and reality and now he was about to tear off all his clothes, writhe on the bar and beg me to get inventive and dirty with ice cubes, cocktail olives and a large packet of dry roasted peanuts.
“Here I am,” I said. “What do you want?”
He settled on the stool beside me. “I would like to buy you a drink.”
“Why?” I was still annoyed with him, even if he had – without knowing it – helped me pump out a large volume of porn over the last couple of days.
Derek took a breath, like he’d been rehearsing this speech for a while. “Because,” he said. “I’m a huge piece of shit who made you look foolish at best and in the throes of actual psychosis at worst. So…sorry about that.”
“Sorry?” I said. “The other day you didn’t even remember my name.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I really am.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. It figured. My byline photo looked like that of every other young male journalist; nebbish, hipster glasses, optimistic attempt at facial hair. I had a knack of blending into the background.
“So?” he said, after an uncomfortable pause. “Drink?”
“Thanks. Raspberry mojito.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“I’m a girl-drink drunk,” I said. “Deal with it.”
Derek extracted a twenty from his wallet and waved it at the barmaid. “Two raspberry mojitos, please,” he said. Please. Sorry. Shit, why did he keep using the words that I kept hearing him say in my fantasies? And what was wrong with me that simple expressions of politeness had turned into code words that could start my own personal version of The Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom playing in my head?
“Are they any good?” he said.
“Huh?” I said, because here we were again. Moans and groans and wild, spurting come-shots unspooling behind my eyes. I really needed to have sex with someone, before I turned into one of those sweaty, squirrelly men who wanked behind the seats on the Tube.
“The raspberry mojitos,” said Derek. “Any good?”
“Oh. Yeah. Excellent, actually. Chambord, I think. And coconut rum. All the cocktails here are great. Please don’t tell me you’ve been coming here to drink beer?”
He laughed, baring straight white teeth. He had one of those smiles that was impossible to fake, the kind where the eyes and cheeks got in on the action, and it had already etched fine lines at the corners of his chestnut brown eyes. At thirty-seven he was practically an infant by parliamentary standards, and only two years older than me. It was hard not to know the age of someone who was barely older than you and was already being talked up as a future party leader. And it was even harder not to let that information bother you in some way.
“I don’t do beer,” he said. “Barley doesn’t agree with me for some reason. I had that skin prick test thing, you know?”
“No.”
“When they test you for allergies,” he said. “They draw a little table on the inside of your arm with magic marker and then poke you with needles impregnated with things you might be allergic to. Gluten. Peanuts. That kind of thing.”
“Sounds dangerous,” I said. “What if you go into anaphylactic shock?”
“Well, that means you’re definitely allergic to something. It’s all right. They have an epi pen handy for that kind of thing.”
“I should hope so,” I said, as our drinks arrived. “So did you swell up and stop breathing when they exposed you to barley?”
Derek shook his head. “No, but my arm came up in a huge welt where they’d stuck me. I had a really bad reaction to it, and the next day I had to go to a school and tell a bunch of kids to stay off drugs. My advisor was all ‘Roll up your sleeves. It makes you look casual. Accessible,’ and I’m like – nope.”
I sipped and smothered a grin, guessing what was coming.
“So she won’t stop going on about it, so I roll up my sleeves and it’s like something from Trainspotting. All blisters and scabs and holes. Told me to roll them back down.”
“Pissed on your photo opportunity, then?” I said.
“You have no idea,” said Derek. “The sleeves stayed down and I looked about as casual and accessible as Jacob Rees-Mogg.” He took the first sip of his drink and looked pleasantly surprised. “Oh my God, you’re right. This is delicious. Is this what they call a Raspberry Beret?”
“The kind you find in a second hand store? No, I think a Raspberry Beret has Cointreau. And egg white, like a gin fizz.” I took another slurp of mine. “Or am I thinking of the one with Baileys?”
“Jesus,” he said. “You really are a girl-drink drunk, aren’t you?”
I shrugged. “If you’re going to be an alcoholic you may as well drink something that tastes nice.”
“Please don’t tell me you’re an alcoholic. I’d hate to think I was enabling you.”
“I’m not,” I said. “But I’m not ruling it out as a career trajectory.”
“What? Alcoholism?”
“Why not? It’s not like I’m going to win the Orwell Prize at this rate. My career’s in the shitter.”
Derek bit his lip. “Right,” he said, swirling the straw in his drink. “Which is my fault.”
Awkward. Why did I keep busting out the hostility when it was obvious he was sorry? “Let’s just say you didn’t help my credibility,” I said, trying to be diplomatic.
He screwed up his nose in thought. His hand was resting on the bar next to mine and he stretched out an index finger and gently ran his fingertip down the length of my pinkie. He had chutzpah by the bucketload; I had to give him that much. “We could say that,” he said. “Or we could say that I undermined your credibility to the point where you ended up looking like you’d stayed up all night smoking joints with a bunch of undergrad tankies.”
“That’s one way to put it, I suppose,” I said, so stiffly that he stopped touching my hand.
“It’s the truth.”
“Steady on. Don’t you people burst into flames if you tell the truth?”
“No,” he said. “But we do suffer from severe allergic reactions if we do too much of it.”
“Really?”
“Really. Far worse than my barley thing. We swell up like blueberries. You know – like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
“Violet Beauregarde.”
“That’s her,” he said. “It’s awful. Very unsightly. That’s why we try so hard to avoid it, even in the face of the direst situations, like riots, Brexit or Jeremy Paxman.”
“Oh,” I said, shifting on the bar stool so that the side of my knee knocked gently against his. “Is that what it is?”
He smiled and I smiled back, the awkwardness over. It was always there when you flirted with another man and you weren’t sure how he was going to respond. I knew he was gay, of course. He was a loud, proud, Pride attending London MP, but I doubted he had any idea about my preferences. And he definitely had no idea that he’d somehow turned into my porn muse.
“For the record,” he said. “And this is off the record, by the way–”
“–wait. How can something be off the record and on the record simultaneously?”
“I don’t know,” said Derek. “But it can. It’s like Schrödinger’s cat or something.”
“No, it’s not. That’s physics. We’re talking politics. You can’t apply physics to politics.”
“Says who? Everything is physics. Even members of parliament are subject to those laws, otherwise they’d be floating around the chamber because gravity would no longer be a thing.”
I laughed, starting to genuinely enjoy myself as I pictured the scene. “And that would be chaos.”
“It would,” he said. “You’d have no idea which side of the house people were supposed to be on. The idea of back bench and front bench would become meaningless, because nobody would be able to sit down.”
“Egalitarian,” I said.
“Absolutely. It would probably be good for democracy, now that you mention it.”
“You should get on that. I’m sure the ratings for Prime Minister’s questions would improve drastically if there was a chance of watching Dennis Skinner float by like a leaf on the wind.”
Derek drained his glass. “He would love that.” He waved to the barmaid. “More please. These are really good.”
I checked my phone. There was a text from Cerys; she couldn’t make it after all.
“Everything okay?” said Derek.
“Yeah. Fine. I’ve been stood up.”
“Oh dear. You’re stuck with me, then?”
“Looks like, yeah.” I smiled maybe a little too widely at that and he returned my grin. It was dark outside now, and the artificial light reflecting off the brasses and whiskey bottles lent his eyes a deep gold colour. His gaze lingered on my mouth for a moment, and I felt a swooping sensation in the pit of my stomach; this was looking more and more like a sure thing.
“So,” I said, as yet another raspberry mojito landed in front of me. “On the record, off the record…which is it?”
“Right,” he said. “That.” He sighed. “Basically what happened is that I got carried away.”
“Carried away? With what?”
“The whole New Left narrative. When you interviewed me it was right after the leadership election and all the old guard had stopped pretending that they no longer knew the lyrics to The Red Flag. Hard not to get swept up in that, especially when the Murdoch press calls me Derek the Red. I know it’s supposed to be an insult, but I love it. It makes me feel like a fucking Viking, like I could go off and pillage their offshore tax accounts.”
“So you ran with it?”
He took a long slurp of his drink. “I did. For about twelve hours, in total. That’s how long it took for the centrists in the party to find out about the interview and send round a gaggle of Blairites to beat some sense back into me and spin everything back to the centre.”
It made perfect sense, and I’d pictured a similar scenario in one of my many post-mortems of the whole mess. “Why is everyone still listening to those people?” I said.
“Because they win elections, Toby. That’s it.”
“They won elections,” I said. “Over a decade ago. Back when you could predict things in politics. Back before everything went completely and utterly batshit.”
“I know that. You know that, but these are people with landslides under their belts. That still means something. And we need to be in government. More than ever. We need the voters.”
“Yes, you do,” I said, frustrated. “But now? We also need opposition. That’s you. That’s your job. Stop worrying about an election that might not even happen and hold this fucking government to account, on behalf of all the people who didn’t vote for them and voted for you.”
“That’s all very well–”
“–no,” I said. “That’s how it’s supposed to work.”
“I know that, but we can do a whole lot more when we’re in power.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Don’t you want us back in power? Don’t you want us to see the rich and the corporations pony up the taxes they’ve been avoiding so we can pump that money back into the NHS? And don’t you want to see this unholy fucking EU mess negotiated by actual adults instead of a bunch of delusional Poundland Spodes who think we’re all going to somehow sail away from Europe, happily farting Rule Britannia from our collective anuses and go off and found a new British Empire based on artisan marmalades and exports of the Great British fucking Bake Off? It’s not going to happen, Toby. Whatever happens, we’re fucked, but currently we are the least fucky option.”
“The least fucky option?” I said. “I think you just came up with your next general election slogan.”
He snorted. “That’s the reality. We’re useless if we can’t get people to vote for us. That’s what they said to me when they ambushed me after that interview.”
“Ambushed? You make it sound like they tied you to a chair in a cabinet office and threatened to pull your fingernails out with pliers.”
Derek didn’t take a beat. “Shadow cabinet office, actually.” He sighed and took another drink. “That’s realpolitik, I’m afraid. And once again, I’m so sorry that you got caught up in it.”
I shrugged, reluctant to revisit the thing any further.
“So,” he said. “How about you? What are you working on these days?”
“Oh, you know. The usual. Bondage. Fisting. Conjuring with the thought of water sports.”
He stared at me.
“I’m writing filthy books to pay the rent,” I said.
Derek swivelled on his bar stool and edged closer. “How filthy are we talking?” he asked. “Fifty Shades of Meh or the Marquis de Sade?”
“Somewhere in the middle.”
He kicked me lightly in the ankle. “Centrist.”
“Fuck you.” I laughed. “The book sellers won’t carry the extreme stuff, and anyway, I have no desire to write about people eating poo or having sex with their pets or immediate family.”
“No,” he said. “I’m quite glad about that, actually.”
“Are you?”
“Oh yes. I find you very attractive and all of those things would be deal breakers for me, if you happened to be into them.”
“I’m not,” I said, feeling my face turn hot. “Into them, that is. Although I am very attractive, obviously.”
Derek gave a soft, sexy laugh and brushed his fingers over my cheek and jaw, smoothing my beard. “Yes, you are.”
He was so close that his shoulder bumped mine. I was already tingling all over with subdued excitement; half of me wasn’t even sure this was happening, but the lower half in particular was really interested in finding out more.
“Do you want to get out of here?” he whispered, his hand on my knee.
“Yes, please.”
His hand travelled upwards briefly and squeezed the top of my thigh. “Come on, then,” he said, his eyes bright with mischief. “I know a place nearby.”
I grabbed my coat and followed him out, feeling sure that everyone in the pub was staring at us as we left. We stepped outside, the darkness and streetlight lending London a glamour it didn’t have in the daytime. For the first time since spring I felt a chill in the air.
“This way,” he said, leading me into Derby Gate. He slipped his hand into mine. My heart was already beating hard and fast and some sane, killjoy part of me wanted to say ‘Maybe not. Maybe next time,’ but no. If you wanted to make sure there was a next time, you had to make sure there was a first time. And it probably wasn’t a great time to tell him I hadn’t had sex in over six months.
“Here,” he said, and we entered a building of a kind all too familiar in this part of London. The stairwell was large and old and cold, and it echoed the sound of every, cough, sneeze and footstep, but that didn’t stop him from pouncing as soon as we were through the door. The taste of his mouth immediately dissolved all my faint misgivings; I was hard as a rock and ready for anything.
“You should see the look in your eyes right now,” he said, pressing me against the wall next to the lifts. I could feel him hard against me. “Makes me want to fuck your brains out.”
I was about to tell him I was definitely down with that, but then the lift door opened and we stumbled inside, kissing frantically. I managed to get a hand under his shirt, making him start at the chill of my fingers. “Ow. Cold,” he said, with a short giggle that spiked my arousal even higher and harder. His skin was warm, his belly and chest as lean and hard as all his photographs had promised. I found a nipple and pinched, making him shudder and groan into my mouth.
The lift stopped, and the doors opened. He took my hand again and we hurried through a rabbit warren of modern partitions and cheap office doors, until he stopped and fumbled a key from his pocket.
“This is yours?” I said.
“Yep. If I was in government I could be fucking you on a nice couch in Richmond House right now, but this will have to do. In you go.” He slapped my arse, so hard that I stumbled into the tiny office and caught myself with both hands on the edge of his desk. The blow stung even through a layer of denim and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe my fantasies hadn’t been that wide of the mark. Maybe he was kinky. Like, really kinky.
But there was no time to think. He pulled my jeans and shorts down and I felt him crowding – still clothed – against me. I cried out in pleasure and relief at the first touch of his hand on my cock, and he pulled me close against him with his other hand and planted a sloppy, gasping kiss against my ear.
“Okay?” he said, tugging gently at me. “Is this all right?”
“Oh God, yes.” His touch was firm and confident. “So much yes.”
He slapped me again. This time it rang it out loud against my bare skin, and the shock of it made me yelp, and not entirely in pain either. I fell forward against the desk with my bum in the air and my glasses hanging off the end of my nose. I quickly took them off, my brain still trying to parse what was going on with my behind. My cock, on the other hand, didn’t seem to care about the difference between pleasure and pain. As I heard him fumbling with his clothes behind me it thrummed in time with my pulse.
Derek grabbed my hips and pulled me against him, making us both moan at the touch. I felt the length of his cock hard against the cleft of my buttocks and turned around, desperate to see, touch and taste.
He was naked from the waist down, his uncircumcised cock standing up stiff from a tidily trimmed patch of red hair. He was wearing a half open shirt, but that didn’t last long; I yanked the thing off, thrilled by his nudity, and tugged off my own remaining clothes, so that the next time we came together it seemed like there was nothing in the world but skin on skin and our hard cocks and our panting breaths between kisses.
“Feel, Toby,” he said, thrusting into my hand. “Feel how much you turn me on.”
I wanted more. I slid down against the desk and I heard him gasp as my knees hit the floor. The carpet was cheap and rough, but the sound he made when I licked him more than made up for it. I dragged my tongue up the length of him, my arm around his shaking thighs, holding him steady. He had such beautiful legs, and his cock tasted better than a cool drink of water on a hot day; it had been forever since I’d had one in my mouth, and his was thick, clean and eager, perfectly delicious. I wrapped my fingers around my cock and started to stroke rhythmically as I sucked, licked and lapped at him.
He steadied himself on the edge of the desk, already gasping for breath. “Oh my God,” he said. “Oh God, you’re amazing.” I could feel the tension in his thighs as he held himself back. His hands were clenched on the edge of the desk.
“Go on,” I said, squeezing him at the root. “I can take it. Fuck my mouth.”
Derek let out a short, soft cry and put one hand on the back of my head as he started to thrust. I swirled my tongue around him on the outstroke, working my cock in my hand the whole time. I felt dirty and used in the best possible way; a couple of hours ago I’d been sitting around waiting for Cerys to text and contemplating my sad, sexless state, and now I was kneeling naked on a cheap carpet with a dick in my mouth. I was going to have rugburn for days.
Red knees. Oh God.
“I’m coming,” I managed to say, and then I was moaning helplessly all over him and around him, lashing him with my tongue as I came good and hard and deep. And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, his full-throated moans joined in chorus with my muffled ones, and I had the taste of him in my mouth.
It didn’t get much better than this.