Some context: this is a segment of a much longer piece I wrote several years back, about a small-time petty thief called Benj who sets himself up selling a consignment of counterfeit designer underwear to lap-dancers who then sell it, used, to the people they dance for. The longer piece was never published and probably never will be… Unusually for me there’s no bdsm in the story. Normal service will be resumed soon!
***
Benj moved around his bedroom, indecisively. It wasn’t his style to get invited to dinner by lap dancers and he didn’t know what to wear. He’d showered, shaved, noticed a stray hair in his nose and painfully removed it, and was wondering if his regular jeans and T-shirt were OK or whether he should go smart – chinos and a shirt with a collar or something. In the end he decided that if he was going to make a mistake on the fashion front, he’d rather be overdressed than underdressed. And Guy wasn’t helping, his conversation peppered with words like in, out, oral, and penetration, together with speculations about Sarah wearing as little around the house as she did on stage, and his observation that it didn’t really matter what he wore because he probably wouldn’t be wearing it for very long anyway.
He drove the van on automatic pilot, thinking there must be something he’d forgotten. A garage reminded him. Benj cut across the forecourt, switched off the ignition, pulled the handbrake and opened the door in one fluid movement. Flowers. That was what he needed. And chocolate. He selected the least weedy-looking bunch from the bucket by the door, the largest of the boxes on the display.
Sarah must have heard him pull up. She was at her front door as he climbed down from the van, looking gorgeous in a crop top, jeans holey at the knees, and bare feet. She was much shorter than he remembered, barely up to his chin. Of course, he thought, in the club she wears heels. She looked, if it was possible, even better in her clothes than she did out of them. In her arms was a kid, maybe three years old. It hadn’t ever occurred to Benj she might be a mother.
‘Come in.’ She cracked that wonderful wide smile, and jerked her head towards the kitchen. ‘Thanks for bringing those, that’s really thoughtful. There’s a vase in the cupboard next to the sink.’ For the next few minutes they made inconsequential talk while Benj made coffee and Sarah let the kid get messy with some jelly, then bounced him in her arms. ‘Come on, Josh, you should be tired now! Nearly time for your lie down, you naughty boy.’ She rubbed her nose against the kid’s, and swung it from side to side. ‘Jesus, you’re heavy these days. Will you go and lie down for mummy?’ In the time she was gone, putting the Josh to sleep, Benj sat in the living room. Your regular small private estate first-time buyer’s house, cream walls, grey carpet, no real decorations and self-assembly sofa from Ikea. The only out-of-the-ordinary touch was the pair of thigh-length five-inch heel red PVC boots lying beside the telly.
The stereo in the corner was on low, playing some kind of folk music – about the last thing Benj would have predicted to be in Sarah’s taste. At length she returned, took her coffee mug from the side table, and sat facing him cross-legged on the floor in one smooth graceful sweep. ‘Sorry about the place’ she said, gesturing around her. ‘I’ve not long moved in, haven’t had time to do much with it.’ Benj thought how clean it looked. No empty cans in the corner, unwashed plates on the table, or fluff on the carpet. ‘Compared to where I live it’s a palace. But then it is a shared flat…’ He left the thought hanging. He’d spare her the details.
‘I’ll do the dinner in a minute,’ she said. ‘It’s nothing much, just a stir-fry. I’m guessing you’re not vegetarian, but I am and I promise not having meat won’t kill you.’ She took a slug of coffee. ‘You gawped a bit at Josh’, she observed. ‘Yeah’ Benj replied. ‘Well, you see people in one context, you know, and you don’t expect … I mean you don’t know …’
‘Other parts of people’s lives?’ Sarah completed the sentence for him. ‘I know exactly what you mean’ she continued. ‘That was my problem with Josh’s dad. Not knowing about other stuff in his life. Which caught up with him pretty damn quick.’ Benj raised an eyebrow.
‘Well, it’s an everyday story really, isn’t it?’ she observed, quietly. ‘Couple meet, fall in love, girl gets pregnant, guy turns out to be a violent criminal who gets himself put away on a drugs bust. Me, I was an accounts clerk before all this. Josh has never seen his dad – born a couple of months after he started his sentence. He’s never written to us or anything. Mind you, the breast feeding was good for the dancing. It gave me nice big weighty boobs.’ She lifted them up and gave herself a cleavage to emphasise the point. ‘And it always means, when guys come on at me, I can say I have to go home to a very possessive blond hunk.’ She finished her coffee. ‘Anyway, stir fry awaits. Come and help in the kitchen?’
Glass of white Chardonnay in one hand, wooden spoon in the other, she carried her story on over the sizzling wok in the kitchen. ‘I only got into this after Josh was born, you know. We needed more than I was making in the day job, and when I started going to the gym again one of the girls was a dancer. It’s funny the way things work out.’ She scooped stir-fry onto two plates. ‘Fork or chopsticks?’ Benj opted for a fork.
Now the meal was under way, Sarah got down to business. ‘Now we’re eating, let’s get down to business. I want to tell you something I’ve not breathed a word about at Suspenders.’ This suddenly got Benj’s attention and made him grateful he’d bothered to dress up. ‘I won’t be there much longer.’ He sat straight in his chair, having a sudden vision of his enterprise and profits collapsing. ‘I’ve taken up an offer to work for the competition.’
‘I didn’t think they had competition, not round here.’
‘Ah, but they will soon,’ Sarah pointed out. ‘It’ll be a bit smaller, more city centre, attached to the casino. So it’ll be a better class of punter. And I’m in there, maybe doing a share of the dancing but mainly choosing the girls and working on costumes and routines with them. It’s a move up in the world, you see. And I’ll be wanting to do the pants thing there. No, don’t worry,’ Sarah reassured him, seeing the expression on his face, ‘Suspenders will keep doing it. I’ll pass the business over to one of the other girls. So you’ll have double the fun, two places to service. Deal?’ Benj couldn’t see it being a problem.
Sarah sighed. ‘There’s only one thing about being a dancer,’ she said. At the club you’re untouchable, and outside the club everyone who knows you dance thinks you’re either a lezzie or a man-eater. So men stay away.’ She stretched and flexed her shoulders, then hooked fingers into her jeans to pull out the waistband and let it fall a little lower on her taut belly. Following Benj’s gaze, she smiled. ‘Took ages to get it back to this condition after Josh. Months of sit-ups and a small fortune at the gym. You don’t think I’m a man-eater, do you? No, it’s just doing what I do, I guess it makes you more … direct about certain things.’ Her hands snaked across the table and into his. ‘I’ve got two hours before I have to get ready for the club. We’ve done the business, so let’s not waste the rest of our time, huh?’
Benj allowed himself to be led upstairs by the hand, quietly past the back bedroom – Sarah with a finger to his lips, mustn’t wake the kid – and into the front. Closed gauzy curtains suffused the room with warm pink light. Benj took in the piles of clothes on the floor, the women’s mags and toys scattered beside the bed, and finally the bed itself, king-size, with brass bedstead and cream Egyptian cotton sheets. This was obviously where she spent her money. There was no standing on ceremony. Even as he took in the decor, Sarah was peeling off her top. Turning to face him, she undid the fly buttons of her jeans, shrugged her hips, and bent to take them off. No bra, no knickers. She giggled as he took in the view. ‘I keep underwear for work, not home,’ was her short explanation.
Benj had to remind himself the only part of her he hadn’t already seen was the pink, moistly glistening sex between her legs. She shaved – and yes, he knew that from the taut, cheese-wire G-string he’d seen her wearing at the club. But there was a world of difference between seeing her flesh on display at the club, and seeing her now as real, touchable, strokeable flesh plus a real personality. While he fumbled with his shirt buttons, she knelt and gently unzipped his fly, easing his cock from the restraint of his underwear.
‘You sell designer stuff and the best you can do for yourself is scabby old boxers…?’ He was on the point of replying when his cock disappeared into her mouth, making him buckle at the knees. He collapsed slowly backwards until he was lying on the bed and felt his trousers being stripped from him – not so gently, either. Quite an art considering her mouth was still working his shaft.
But when she finally lay down beside him, there was none of the “masterfully he plunged his throbbing tool into her aching honey pot” stuff. They lay in each other’s arms for a while, getting used to how well they fitted together. He felt the warmth of her groin against his, and her breasts pressing on his chest; she felt his hands alternately stroking and kneading her shoulder blades and the curves of her buttocks. He closed his eyes to kiss, and as their tongues slipped around each other he opened them briefly to see her wide-eyed. This can’t be real, Benj thought, I must be in someone else’s fantasy, stuff like this doesn’t happen to me.
They moved gently together, smiling; he felt her long fingernails quietly manipulating the base of his cock, she felt the warm squeeze of his fingers rolling her nipples. Benj felt her tawny flank ripple as she stretched her free arm behind her, and heard the bedside table drawer open.
‘Condom?’
‘Sssh.’ She held his lower lip between her strong white teeth. ‘Yeah, condom’. Putting a corner of the packet between her teeth now, to hold while she twisted and extracted the limp pinkish-white thing from the foil. Sliding down the sheets, Sarah caressed his dick, not forgetting the sensitive prostate spot right at the base, just behind his balls. Then he felt her squeeze the base of his shaft rhythmically, while giving the head a tongue bath. He juddered involuntarily, pumping his thighs to meet the pressure on his cock and feeling long, repeated, downward sweeps of her hand.
‘Done.’ Peremptorily Sarah pushed a hand down on his shoulder, pressing him flat on the bed, and brushed away the hand that fluttered between her legs. ‘Me on top’, she said, and bracing herself against the bedhead, fed him strongly, urgently, inside her. Benj gasped with the warmth. In a daze, he saw her chest blushing under her tan, and breasts bouncing as she moved back and forth. Balanced now, Sarah matched him thrust for thrust, fingers circling her nipples as she swayed above him. Little noises escaped from her throat, gasps and grunts, and gradually, as her sense of balance evaporated with pleasure, she swayed lower until she almost lay on top of him, breasts dancing inches from his face. In a little rational corner of his brain, Benj thought she’s smaller than me, how come her tits come this far up? And then he had one in his mouth, gently biting – and not so gently when he heard her insistent moans.
In a moment she had collapsed on him completely. ‘Roll me over. Fuck me hard … hard … hard …’ Gathering her arms to her sides, and allowing her to straighten her legs, Benj twisted until she toppled onto the sheets and quickly raised his thighs, managing – just – to keep inside her. As he drew up his knees, Sarah’s legs parted underneath him and he raised himself on his elbows just enough to look into her face. Her thighs were already pumping, grinding her belly into his as he pounded, grunting, into her with his whole weight.
Benj felt a familiar tightening of his scrotum, gradually supplanted by a shuddering, pulsating flow. And he was spent. It was that sudden, that explosive.
Lowering himself to Sarah, he licked perspiration from between her breasts. He could feel the tightness of her cunt trying to suck him in, but in reality squeezing him out.
‘Hang on in there,’ he heard himself saying, as he twisted and slithered down her body to let his face rest between her legs. She tasted hot, salty, and slightly rubbery from the condom. Allowing the weight of his forehead to fall below her pelvis, in what he thought of as her love cradle, his tongue went off on a journey of its own, parting the folds to discover her clitoris. His head thumped as she bucked in response to his discovery, and her fists tugged his hair, thrashed wildly, gripped the bedhead, and went back to his hair again. He heard her ragged gasps, building to an inarticulate cry as she twisted to bite the corner of a pillow. Yeah, I remember, don’t wake the kid, Benj thought, but the noise of her coming was like an aircraft takeoff, louder and louder until his ears were ringing and Sarah’s belly slammed up and down so fast he thought his nose would break against her pubic bone.
And suddenly it was done, and they were laughing out loud in each other’s arms, locked eye to eye with the enormity of the moment before knotted muscles collapsed and they fell together, belly to belly, her face buried in his neck. Benj sneaked a look at Sarah’s face – completely sated, blissful, almost childlike in repose. He reached behind him to pull a corner of the duvet across them both and realised, suddenly and incongruously, that he was still wearing his socks.