After forty-five minutes or so we decided not to order a second round at The Bells but have a drink back at my place. The problem of the locked-out flatmate became somewhat less urgent, as Tom texted him to say he should find something to do and stay out for a while – a nifty solution of my own devising.
I made Tom a sandwich back at my place because I know how hungry young men always are (in all senses of the word), but before he had finished it we started kissing and after a few highly satisfactory minutes of that, we moved upstairs to ‘accelerate matters between us’ as Charles might have put it.
Tom had had the same girlfriend throughout most of his time at university. She was a nice girl, he told me, but the relationship had run its course and was over now. He was ready to move on to more advanced studies. He had never been with an older woman but (as per usual) it had been a long-standing dream of his and if he hadn’t been so northern he would doubtless have appeared more thrilled about the fact that it was finally coming true.
After the orthodox stuff I initiated him into the same practice I had taught Little Pup and for the first time Tom seemed genuinely excited. He loved this new game. Now his imagination was unbound. ‘Hey wanna do a threesome sometime?’ he murmured as he peered down at me, propped on an elbow, and smoothed back his damp hair.
I laughed. ‘You planning to bring a mate along?’
‘I meant with another girl.’
‘I think I’d prefer to have your undivided attention.’ Then I pulled his face close to mine and said ‘Come here, my little cupcake,’ before kissing his cute, grinning mouth.
Tom left at nine o’clock to take the tube down south, so as to let his hapless flatmate back into their pad. I, meanwhile, threw on my old dressing gown and flopped onto the sofa to watch The Borgias. I was thoroughly engrossed in the medieval mayhem when I got a Tinder message from another of my matches, 28-year-old Jon. According to the app he lived only a mile away. Initially, Jon was wary and insisted on verifying my identity. I gave him my surname so that he could check out my full Facebook profile and after that he was reassured.
‘I’d like to come over,’ he messaged. ‘You up for that?’
‘What, now? In the middle of The Borgias?’
‘Oh, you’d rather watch TV. So disappointing.’
I thought about this for a moment. It was 10.30 and I was slouching around in my dressing gown, hair awry. Upstairs the bed was still a mess from my frolics with Tom and there were condom wrappers and tissues on the floor. But what the hell. This is the Raven we’re talking about. And Jon’s photos were captivating, which was why I had ‘yessed’ him. ‘How soon can you be here?’
‘Twenty minutes.’
‘See you then.’
Ha – a booty call!
I whipped around and put everything into order, including myself – slinky dress, stylish sandals, tidied hair and fresh make-up.
When Jon emerged out of the darkness onto my front steps, I was drawn to him right away. He looked raffish, with uncombed locks lying over the collar of a loose, casual shirt. He wasn’t conventionally handsome (there was little about him that was conventional) but he had palpable appeal. I might even go so far as to call it magnetism.
As per the accepted procedure, we sat for a while as though at a job interview. He told me he worked for a recording company but his real passion was music and he was a part-time disc jockey. I told him about the louche DJ from Liverpool I’d had a relationship with in the nineties and he knew of him. Instant connection. We chatted easily, as though we had already been friends, and moved so naturally into intimacy it seemed almost preordained.
Where Tom had been an attractive, likeable boy who had entered our association in a commendable spirit of higher education, Jon was already a skilful lover whose every move and touch exuded finesse. He was a grown-up, unafraid to show real affection, and I felt almost drunk with pleasure. I loved everything that he did and every minute that we were entwined, looking into each other’s eyes, rather too much. Because to my alarm I could feel it stirring long dormant emotions, and therein lay the prospect of pain. Sparking off that sort of fire with a Tinder match would be such a bad idea.
Jon left sometime after midnight and I went to sleep drained, sated, still flushed from all the love-making and thankfully too tired to think.
*
My next encounter was with Jake, a six foot three inch-tall, blond, rugby-playing 22-year-old, who lived with his family in South Kensington. He was so well-constructed that I would defy any red-blooded woman not to drool over the photo of him in swimming trunks served up on Tinder. Public school-educated and with courtly manners, he was not the type to send a picture of his penis. He didn’t have to. I had already seen it in my dreams.
He came over late one evening after working out at the gym, as he did five times a week. I opened the door and there he stood in all his mouth-watering glory, like the statue of David. Only this David was warm and alive and as I was shortly to discover, far better endowed.
Jake, with his green eyes and open, friendly face, was so direct, so uncomplicated, he really brought home to me how much I valued these young men for their lack of neuroses. After this, how could I bear to face the wearisome hang-ups and emotional handicaps of middle-aged men? No, I mused, Jake and his kind might well spoil me for good.
We spent a fervent hour or so together and Jake, for all his impressive brawn, was gentle and considerate as we romped around in various enjoyable positions. Afterwards, as he put his shirt back on, he said he was glad I didn’t turn out to be one of those kinky married women who gets guys over for sex so that her husband can watch. It had never happened to him but he’d heard about it and ‘You can never tell,’ he said with a wink.
‘It was brave of you to come over, Jake.’
‘And brave of you to let me.’
I perched on his lap as we waited in the kitchen for his cab to arrive. ‘Do you realise there’s a condom on the floor?’ he said, pointing to a spot under the kitchen table.
I bent down to take a look and was mortified (although fortunately the condom appeared to be unused). ‘God, how embarrassing! What must you think?’
Jake laughed. ‘I don’t think anything. Don’t worry about it.’
‘I have absolutely no idea how it got there. I assure you I haven’t been doing anything in the kitchen.’ Both statements were true. And ever after, wrack my brains as I might to figure out who had dropped the offending item under my kitchen table and when, I could never come up with any sort of answer. But it made me feel grubby.
*
Sara and I are in the sitting room with a bottle of red wine and an array of nibbles spread out on the coffee table between us. She’s curled up in the armchair; I’m sitting cross-legged on the floor. I love our confidential girly catch-ups…even though I know what’s coming. She has never heard of Tinder and I am explaining how it all works. And how it has been working for me personally, over the past week. It’s only been one week and I have packed in so much Tinderness already!
‘So you just give this guy your address,’ says Sara, ‘this enormous rugby-player who could squeeze the life out of you with two fingers, a guy you’ve never even met, and invite him over one night when there’s no one else around.’
‘Um, that’s pretty much it,’ I say with a sheepish grin.
‘No one around to save you if he decides to attack.’
I dip a small piece of pitta bread into the houmous and munch on it. ‘Nope.’
Sara shakes her head, hopelessly. ‘What if he’d brought half a dozen of his great hulking mates along to gang-bang you, before trashing the house and stealing your stuff?’
‘Oh I knew he wouldn’t do any of that.’ I have to offer some rationale, so after a moment’s consideration I say: ‘He went to public school and lives with his parents in South Ken. You should hear him, he sounds like Colin Firth in Pride and Prejudice.’
Sara groans. ‘You’re a worry,’ she says, before topping
up her wine glass and taking a gulp.
‘I’ll be more cautious next time. Honest, I will.’
*
I was as good as my word. Heeding all the sensible warnings, I arranged to meet the next TB in a crowded public place, safe neutral territory. My address had remained top secret. Paradoxically, this assignation was with 27-year-old Benjamin, from whom the nation’s womenfolk had little to fear. For a start he was only marginally taller than me and slight of build, not at all the physical type, and what with all my swimming-toned muscles, I could have easily grappled him to the ground in any rape attempt and sat on him until the cops arrived. But Benjamin wasn’t the sort to rape anybody. He was an anxious Jewish ‘creative’ and part-time stand-up comic who did the rounds of the small comedy venues. The Woody Allen of Golders Green.
Not surprisingly, on first sight I was disappointed by the extreme contrast with my sex god, Jake. But I soon discovered over cocktails at a noisy West Hampstead bar that, slight and nervy though he was, Benjamin was entertaining company.
He had a day job as an advertising copywriter which he hated. ‘Ugh. So stressful,’ he said.
‘What, and standing up in front of a room full of rowdy, boozed-up people and having to make them laugh isn’t?’
‘Actually I find it less nerve-wracking to deal with some nasty drunken heckler than with my bastard of a boss at work.’
I nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yeah I hear you. I had some fearsome bosses at the Daily Mail, back in the day. Especially the Editor. I’d rather be pelted with rotten tomatoes and booed off every stage in town than have him tell me I’m a useless cunt.’
‘So are you a useless cunt?’
‘No!’ I threw him a wounded look. ‘I’ve been using it and it’s worked every time.’
‘Ha ha! Good to know.’ And he raised his glass to me.
The longer we sat there talking the plainer it became that humour and intelligence can be as much of a turn-on as a great body and movie-star looks. And what with the bar crowd being so loud, making our repartee at times difficult to hear, I suggested that we continue the evening back at my place. Benjamin didn’t put up a fight.
I sensed that he was less sure of himself grasping a woman in bed than a mike on the comedy club circuit. That, I presumed, was why he chose an older woman like me on Tinder. And also, perhaps, because the young women had been letting him down and he craved a change. He told me his girlfriend had left him two months earlier, a blow which had knocked his self-confidence. I asked whether he still missed her.
‘I miss some things about her,’ he said. And after a pause: ‘She used to wake me up every morning with a blow job.’
‘Bloody hell. That’s beyond the call of duty.’
‘A guy can get used to it.’
‘I’ll bet. Well, you won’t get that sort of room service here.’
‘Would you run to a cup of tea, then?’
‘You got it.’
Benjamin stayed the night and we slept fitfully, stirring and fidgeting. He had told me he was a lousy sleeper, which fitted in with his Woody Allen-ish persona.
The next morning as I drove him to the train station he mentioned that he had a gig that night, at a small venue somewhere on the outskirts of London.
‘Maybe I’ll come along. I’d like to see you strut your stuff. I’ll be the heckler at the back.’
We had a brief good-bye kiss and I said it would be nice to see him again sometime, on or off the stage.
Later I thought of texting him to ‘break a leg’ that night at his gig. But at his age, he might be unfamiliar with the theatrical saying and take it as a cruel and unwarranted jibe. You can never tell with young people. It’s best to refrain from employing such old-school expressions.
I wondered whether our encounter – it was Benjamin’s first with an older woman – would one day find its way into his comedy routine.
‘So, what about these older women, cougars, they call them? You know, horny middle-aged women who’ve been around the block and really know how to give you a good time. I don’t know about you guys out there but I’ve always had a fantasy about them. Oh yeah, the stuff of wet dreams. Anyway, one day I decide to give it a go and sign up on Tinder. And there are all these hot young chicks of 22, 23, and I’m going “no, no, no”, then I see my old primary school teacher and I go “finally!”…’
I just hoped I would be out there in the audience, laughing away.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Tinder was a playground, and as in any playground, there were some kids who didn’t play nice. Zac, for instance, was a bumptious prick (I use that word for a reason) with scant respect for his elders and betters. Very early on in our messaging he told me he loved a ‘really good long BJ’. It was the most important and most enjoyable part of sex for him and he always got what he wanted.
‘I’m sure that as a cougar your experience will prevail in that,’ he said. And he added that if I wasn’t prepared to do it, as far as he was concerned it was a ‘deal-breaker’.
I replied that, first of all, I didn’t like being labelled a cougar. A cougar was a wild cat, a predator, whereas I believed only in relations between gladly consenting adults and had never preyed on anyone. And didn’t cougars wear red lipstick and have long painted talons? Nothing at all like me. I was more of a pussycat, really. So much more simpatico.
As for his favourite practice, I told Zac it wasn’t something I took lightly or did for everyone, ‘only for someone I have feelings for’. I also tried to make him understand that going to bed with someone wasn’t about being ‘serviced’. A mature, experienced lover derived as much pleasure from giving as from receiving, maybe even more. That was real class.
‘That’s just a sucker in my opinion,’ he retorted. ‘Nothing classy about it. That’s about desperation. Older men are so desperate for sex they’d do anything to get laid. Maybe you’d better stick to your older men, golden oldie.’
Golden oldie? Rude little shit.
Okay, let’s take a moment here to consider the blow job. I don’t wish to keep alluding to Sex in the City’s Samantha Jones, but the woman had something cogent to say on pretty much every sex-related subject. I would refer you to her celebrated speech in Season three, Episode nine:
‘You men have no idea what we’re dealing with down there. Teeth placement, and jaw stress, and suction, and gag reflex, and all the while bobbing up and down, moaning and trying to breathe through our noses. Easy? Honey, they don’t call it a job for nothing!’
Exactly. Unless you’re a hooker, all this work is something you only do for a person you care about. And I didn’t care for Zac, not one little bit.
Clearly this well-built, dark-haired 28-year-old, working for a bank in the City and living in smart Maida Vale, thought that any woman – and perhaps especially a more ‘eager-to-please’ older woman – ought to feel privileged to service his pulsating member. Admittedly it was an impressive specimen; he texted me a photo of it (oh yes, another day, another dick).
But I sent him one final message before deleting his Tinder profile: ‘It’s a shame we don’t see eye to eye on these matters, Zac. Under the circumstances I think we’d better go our separate ways. Have a nice life! By the way, that’s cougar for fuck off.’
*
The blow job figured high on the to-do list of another Tinder boy, the baby of the bunch, 19-year-old student Stevie. The idea of my engaging in rumpy-pumpy with a teenager was both alarming and titillating in equal measure. (Oh all right, it was more titillating than alarming.) This was not only because the gender-reversal age difference would be so monumental as to stand a good chance of making it into the Guinness Book of Records – he was forty-two years younger – but because I had never in my life had sex with a teenager. As mentioned earlier in this book, I was late entering the sex scene, having retained my virginity until the age of nineteen. And every man I slept with was older than me, not that I slept with many before marrying at twenty-two.
So S
tevie could fill this gap for me, and by the sound of it he was keen to apply for the job. His photos showed a cute, slim boy with swept-back brown hair. He would do nicely.
He put his cards on the table at the start.
STEVIE: I’ve never had a blow job. Truth.
ME: Really? I thought you kids started all that stuff so early these days.
STEVIE: Not me. I’m a good boy.
ME: Are you really 19?
STEVIE: Yeah.
ME: They’ll arrest me for cradle snatching.
STEVIE: I’ll give you something to cradle! I like older women. I’m naughty like that.
ME: How old was the oldest woman you’ve been to bed with?
STEVIE: 56.
ME: And she didn’t give you a BJ?
STEVIE: Nope. I just fucked her senseless.
ME: Well done.
STEVIE: Would you wine and dine me first?
ME: Hey, I’m not your sugar mommy. But I’ll stand you a drink sometime.
STEVIE: Okay and I’ll treat you to a kiss. More if you promise to be gentle.
ME: Love your sense of humour, baby.
STEVIE: Can you keep up with me in the sac?
ME: I reckon so. And BTW, that’s spelt sack.
It had all started so hopefully. But I’d forgotten how unreliable teenagers can be. They always have some excuse for not getting on with the tasks at hand. One of Stevie’s excuses was that as an impecunious student he had little money for travelling expenses, and he lived an hour’s train journey out of London.
We messaged each other now and then but never seemed to get any closer to doing the deed. I sent him the lingerie shot, to speed things up a bit. ‘I can’t wait to be inside that!’ Stevie texted. But he did wait. And wait. Until finally I was compelled to give up on him. Honestly, you’d think I was asking him to tidy his room or mow the lawn.
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