My favourite pool lifeguard, Jake, stood beside me, bowl of mixed nuts in hand, hair as endearingly shaggy as ever. I barely recognised him without his pecs on display, but his top was figure-hugging enough to please the eye regardless. A little younger than I, working his way through an MSc in Rescuing from Drowning Studies or
some such, he made up for lack of experience with bags of enthusiasm. And stamina. Oh yes, such stamina. Perhaps he was not the Christmas gift I had had in mind for myself, but he was a nice stocking-filler treat. Really, didn't I deserve a little something?
'Yes, you're right,' I said, popping a cashew into my wildly lipglossed mouth. 'Season of mistletoe and mellow drunkenness.'
'Oh, well, if it's mistletoe you're after,' he whispered into my ear, then he whipped a sprig out from the belt of his jeans and held it aloft.
'Oh, you naughty boy!' I murmured, shimmying off my barstool and pressing the length of my body to his, proffering my lips while my eyes skittered off to the side, looking for Chase, not sure whether I wanted him to be watching or not. He was.
See what you're missing, I said in my head, then I fastened my mouth to Jake's, allowing his big rough hand to land on my cross-lacing, then to wander slowly down to the dip of my back, finally resting just above the crest of my buttocks. Something was hard and swollen against my stomach, easily tangible through the thin stretched layer of my dress. I let him maul my mouth until, from the corner of a half-closed eye, I noticed Chase leaving the room, then I pulled my face back.
'That dress is hot,' croaked Jake.
'Yes, it is. Very hot. Too hot. Let's go somewhere.'
'Follow me.'
There was nothing comfortable in the lifeguards' station; just a slatted wooden bench running the length of three of the walls, some pegs and a pile of lifejackets. Jake pushed me down to sit on the bench, then knelt in front of me, prising my knees as far apart as he could and peering up the dark mysterious cavern they revealed.
'No knickers,' he ascertained. 'Thought not.' He tried to fit a hand into the gap, but it was a struggle. 'How the fook do you get this thing off?'
'You don't,' I told him. 'But if we get to work now, we might be able to get the skirt up before midnight.'
'Right you are. On your feet and turn around then.' I was happy to obey, leaning over the wooden bench with my palms flat to the wall while he inched the rubber painstakingly up my thighs, dry humping my bottom as he toiled. When he finally managed to uncover my willing snatch, he abandoned the rest of the task, leaving much of my bum to strain against the shiny sheath while he found a home for his cock, clad in its own rubber garment.
I revelled in the ability to spread my legs wide after their incarceration, pushing back on his slamming weapon, needing the supportive clamp of his forearm around my midriff to stop me keeling over sideways. The coupling was fast and rude and exactly what I needed, pounding my residual angst over Chase from my head and bringing me back to my self, Sophie, the sex seeker, Selfie, the soak sexer, Sexie the Smoke Sizzler, bleurgh, no more thoughts just slam, slam, slam, steam, scream, cream, done.
'I'll never get this dress off now,' I panted, on my knees on a lifejacket, my head braced in my arms. It was stuck fast, my perspiration acting like glue.
'Let me untie you,' offered Jake. 'I'll go up and get your work clothes from Reception if you want.'
'Uh huh,' I agreed. But I don't want that knot undone. Chase tied it, and I want to be bound by it for as long as I can.
Room Service
I know what she is here for.
She doesn't know I know, but after four years behind this desk, I can read the signs.
She has signed her name in the register as 'Mrs Barker', and her low-key outfit tries too hard to blend in.
She is here to meet a man. A man who is not her husband.
Why though? What will this man give her that her spouse does not? Allow me a moment of speculation. The name Barker makes me think of barking, of dogs, of doggy-style sex that perhaps the husband will not provide. But I think it goes a little bit further than that. I think it goes like this.
Mrs Ross would consider herself happily married in all respects but one.
It isn't even the classic story of a couple growing apart, sex becoming routine, and then surplus to the routine. Mr Ross was a considerate lover who made it his business to provide his wife with a minimum of three orgasms weekly. His own tastes were conservative but not particularly repressed; if the overwhelming majority of his encounters with his wife took place in the missionary position after the required ten-to-fifteen minutes of foreplay, it was because this was the way he liked it. He had no desire to try anything more outré than the odd spot of soixante-neuf. If he had known the term 'vanilla' to apply to anything other than ice-cream, he would have applied it to himself.
For a long time, this was fine by Mrs Ross. She did not consider herself sexually deviant; indeed, they had been married three years before she felt emboldened to nudge him into their first attempt at cunnilingus. Whips, rubber and anything of that sort were certainly not her thing. Heaven knows, that Ann Summers party her sister-in-law had dragged her to had been bad enough. Huge plastic phalluses, shrieking women, too many Bacardi Breezers. And all that nylon.
But then, quite unexpectedly, once the children were at school and life had settled into a form of equilibrium, a buried memory of her younger years began prodding its way through the layers of denial.
Sipping her mid-morning coffee at the breakfast bar, Mrs Ross would travel back in time to the estate agency where she had filed and faxed for a year after completing her NVQ. She had attracted the attention of Mr Gregg, of Gregg and Saunders, on her first day, kneeling on the sill of the shop window making up a display of properties for sale.
'That's a nice . . . skirt,' he had said, creeping up behind her as she bent over, stapling photographs to cards.
'Thanks.' She had giggled and blushed, thinking no more of it.