Sex with Strangers

by Lindsay Gordon

  ‘That’s a good girl,’ comes the quiet efficient voice.

  Jazz wipes away the sweat that trickles into her eyes then turns, reaching behind and –

  There is a tap at the door. The woman jerks away. Jazz jumps up, yanking at her knickers. She hides behind the door as it’s opened but the woman prevents it from opening too far. Jazz presses her naked back to the wall. It is cold against her skin. She holds her breath and hears the woman say that they’ve just about finished. Another moment or two, please.

  The door closes. The woman has left and Jazz is alone, frozen to inaction. She hears her shallow breathing in the hush, feels the dampness on her knickers, feels the heat between her thighs where a pulse still throbs.

  Then she moves. She grabs her clothes from the floor and pulls them on. Ready to leave, bags and dress in hand, she glances in the mirror, taking one deep calming breath. And blinks. The reflection smiles back at her.

  Beyond the cubicle Jazz feels rather bemused because everything is carrying on as normal. She lingers behind the first rail that she comes to, finger-combs her hair and breathes deeply ten times, hoping that her high colour is fading fast. Glancing around, she peeps from behind the hanging clothes but the woman is nowhere to be seen. Probably seeing to another lucky customer, being oh so attentive. What excellent service this store provides! Does everyone get such treatment? Jazz wonders.

  ‘Dear Rick. I’m on my way. Be ready 4 me. I’m hot hot hot! Yours expectantly, Jazz xx.’

  The clock on her mobile tells her that it is only seventeen minutes since she last sent a message. Is that all! She is surprised for it had seemed much longer.

  At the pay point as she stands behind another customer, she is caught in a beguiling waft of something floral with musk undertones. Or is that me? she wonders. The assistant is smoothly efficient and looking very smart in blue blouse and black skirt. Jazz waits, patiently detached, and then blinks twice. She does a double take. Blue? Name badge? Her eyes flit to another assistant. Then another. Both are in the same blue-bloused uniform. It’s not white at all. And both wear name badges. So the woman wasn’t –

  ‘Can I help you, madam?’

  Jazz returns from her startled thoughts and lays the dress on the counter. The oh-so-polite assistant takes it and adds, ‘Oh, by the way, your friend thought that you might like these to go with the dress.’

  On the dress she lays some earrings that perfectly reflect the deeper tones of the fabric. They are a triple of suspended chains, dropping to differing lengths with shimmering glass beads that catch the sunlight. ‘Your friend had to rush off.’

  Jazz looks at the earrings. They are beautiful and cannot be resisted.

  ‘What do you think, madam?’

  Jazz considers for a moment, picking up one of the earrings and holding it in a sunbeam. She blinks, smiles and nods. What do I think? You really wouldn’t want to know.

  Stag Hunt Elizabeth Coldwell

  WHEN AN UNEXPECTED present is left on my doorstep, it’s usually a dead bird one of the neighbourhood cats has caught or a jar of homemade chutney from Minnie in the cottage down the lane, not a naked man. Not that I actually notice he is naked at first. I’m too busy looking at the golf umbrella he is holding. Blue-and-white striped and bearing the logo of a financial services company, I assume it was what he used to rattle my letterbox and get my attention. Anyone else would have used the door knocker, of course, but in his predicament I guess that wasn’t an option he had available.

  As I finally realise the extent of the state he is in, I have to stifle the temptation to laugh. He is half-crouching beneath the umbrella in a cramped, uncomfortable-looking position, which I eventually twig is due to the fact that not only have his wrists been fastened together with parcel tape, his cupped hands have also been secured around his cock and the crook handle of the umbrella – presumably to preserve what remains of his modesty. He is wearing nothing but a pair of green wellies, an ‘L’ sign is hanging round his neck and he looks completely wretched. If I were to close the door on him in shock and disgust, which I am sure a couple of the neighbours would have done, I think he would burst into tears.

  Instead, trying to act as though I am confronted by this kind of thing every time I open my front door, I say, ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I – er – I don’t suppose I could use your phone, could I?’ he asks.

  I grab the walking stick I keep in the hallway and walk out on to the doorstep, brandishing it with menace. As I look up and down the road, an ear cocked for any suspicious rustling in the hedgerow, the stranger stares at me, baffled.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just checking you haven’t got an accomplice with you,’ I tell him. ‘We’ve had a couple of burglaries round here recently, and for all I know you could be standing here distracting me while your mate’s up in my bedroom rifling through my knicker drawer.’

  ‘I haven’t got a mate with me, and if I was going to distract you I’d have at least kept some clothes on to do it. It’s freezing out here.’ He shivers slightly as he speaks. ‘I’m not a burglar, I’m an investment banker in the City of London and my name’s Ivor Curtis. Normally, I’d be able to show you some identification to prove it, but …’

  He could be spinning me a line, but I am beginning to doubt it. And I haven’t heard anything to suggest there is someone taking advantage of the situation, creeping around in the cottage while we stand out here. ‘OK, I believe you. And I’m Alex, by the way. You can come in, but we’re going to have to take that umbrella down before you come inside. It’s bad luck to have one open in the house, you know.’

  I am teasing him now, and we both know it, but I can’t resist. ‘You’ll have to give me a hand,’ he says sheepishly.

  ‘Of course.’ I take hold of his wrists, searching for the loose end of the tape that binds them. Finding it, I pick at it with my fingernail and pull until it begins to come away. All the time, I can’t help but be aware of how close my hands are to his cock; I can’t actually see it, but once or twice as I unwrap this unorthodox parcel, my fingers brush unavoidably against the soft skin of his balls.

  ‘I warn you, this might hurt a bit,’ I say, and yank the rest of the tape away. Some of the hairs on his wrists come away with it, as do some of the longer and curlier ones from his groin. He bites his lip hard and drops the umbrella, but he doesn’t cry out. I am impressed.

  Leaving the umbrella where it has fallen, he follows me into the house. ‘There’s a phone in my office,’ I tell him. ‘It’s the second room down the hall. I’ll get you a towel and make you some hot sweet tea. You look like you could do with it.’

  ‘Thanks, Alex,’ he says. ‘I really appreciate it. Oh, and before you go, you couldn’t give me some idea of where I actually am, could you?’

  His eyes, brown and soulful, meet mine and I suddenly realise this stranger is actually rather attractive in a rough kind of way. He’s somewhere in his late twenties, with a strong-jawed face, slightly overlong dark-brown hair and a growth of beard on his chin which gives him the air of a pirate, rather than a banker. I suspect he has to be pretty damn good at his job to get away with looking quite that scruffy on a daily basis. And then I consider his body. Now standing at his full height, he is well over six feet tall, with long taut thighs and a stomach which, while nicely flat, isn’t an over-defined six-pack. Sporty, I reckon, rather than obsessed with spending hours in the gym. Unsportingly, though, he is keeping his hands firmly in front of his cock. As I think about just what he might be covering up, I feel something tighten in my pussy and rush off to find that towel before it becomes too obvious I am having filthy thoughts about him.

  When I come back downstairs, I not only have a towel with me but the only item of male clothing I keep in the cottage – a dressing gown which normally hangs on the back of my bedroom door and used to belong to Mike, my ex. It’s one of the few things he left behind when he walked out on me, and somehow I have never quite got round to throwing
it out. I hand it to Ivor and he turns his back on me as he shrugs it on. I can’t resist taking the opportunity that offers to admire the small neat cheeks of his arse before they disappear under the white towelling.

  ‘How did you get on with the phone?’ I ask.

  ‘Not great,’ he replies. ‘I tried my mates, but they’re either not answering or they’ve got their mobiles switched off. I’ve left a couple of messages, so I suppose I’ve just got to wait till one of them comes and gets me. I mean, even if I had the number for a taxi firm, I can’t exactly see them giving me a lift anywhere with no money and dressed like this.’ He looks ruefully down the length of his body. He is taller than Mike and the dressing gown finishes higher up his thighs, which I don’t exactly have a problem with. And he has ditched the ‘L’ plate and the wellies somewhere on the way from the hall, leaving his feet bare against the 200-year-old floorboards.

  ‘So tell me the story,’ I say, as he follows me into the kitchen, bending his head to avoid cracking it against the low lintel. That’s something I’ve never had to contend with, but this cottage wasn’t constructed for a man of Ivor’s height. ‘How does a nice boy like you end up naked on my doorstep?’

  He smiles. There is something of the rogue in his smile, something that makes me think again of pirates, and of men who might want to see a woman bound and helpless before them, to do with as they wish. ‘If only I knew. I was – am – on my stag weekend. My best mate, Jonny, arranged it all. Half a dozen of us had gone down to Bournemouth for what he was calling my “Last Days Of Freedom Tour” – he’d had the Tshirts made up with that printed on the front and everything. The plan was to get a bit of surfing in during the day and then go clubbing at night.’

  Surfing. So that explains the body; you have to be strong and supple if you’re a surfer, not all bulked up and heavy. I can just see him in a skintight wetsuit, whooping with exhilaration as he rides the waves down by Bournemouth Pier, his wet hair plastered to the nape of his neck. It’s an appealing image, an arousing image, and I busy myself with the kettle and the teapot so he won’t notice the way I am studying him again.

  ‘OK, so where did it all go hideously wrong?’ I ask, handing him his tea.

  He blows on it, then takes a sip before continuing. ‘I wish I knew. We ended up in this table-dancing club – they call it something like Cleopatra’s Palace, from what I remember.’ I know the place, down in the part of town they call the Triangle, just over the road from the restaurant where Mike and I had one of our first ever dates. It’s no more than half an hour’s drive from there to here; he’s been dropped closer to civilisation than he knows. ‘Anyway, Jonny gave it the chat, blagged our way into the VIP area even though they had a private party going on in there. It must have been about midnight by then. So there we were, drinking champagne, with this absolutely gorgeous pair of twins dancing for us in nothing but matching silver G-strings. One minute I had these two girls writhing on my lap with their big bare boobs rubbing in my face, then I start to feel a bit woozy and the next thing I know it’s morning and I’m waking up in the middle of nowhere with nothing on but those lousy wellingtons, parcel-taped to an umbrella. I assume my so-called friends spiked my drink, bundled me in the back of Jonny’s Jeep and drove me out here. I suppose it could have been worse. They could have left me tied up naked on the promenade for a policeman to find me.’

  ‘Yes, but Bournemouth’s crawling with stag parties at weekends, and I bet the police are used to things like that. For us country bumpkins, it’s a bit of a shock.’

  ‘You don’t strike me as the bumpkin type.’

  ‘I’m not. I inherited this place from a distant relative on my mother’s side. I’m a writer and I moved here because I thought the peace and quiet would be good for my work.’

  That, of course, had been when Mike was still with me and the commissions were coming in so fast I was actually having to turn some of them down. When he left, it seems that he took my inspiration with him and now I have a half-finished novel sitting on my PC, peopled with characters I’m not even sure I like any more and with absolutely no idea of how the plot should progress. If ever I am blocked like this, I always seem to look for distractions and I tell myself that’s the reason I find Ivor so fascinating. But then, I had a man round to read my electricity meter the previous week and I didn’t start fantasising about him bending me over the kitchen table and giving my bare bottom a good spanking before slipping his cock into me from behind.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ I ask him.

  He shrugs. ‘I suppose all I can do is wait and try ringing them again later. They obviously want me to stew for a while.’ He sits down heavily on one of the high-backed chairs that ring the table, his legs just wide enough apart as he straddles it to give me a glimpse of the shadow of his pubes through the gap in the dressing gown. I tell myself he isn’t aware of what he is doing – he is too preoccupied with getting back to his friends and his personal possessions and his wedding preparations to notice that he is practically giving me an uninterrupted show. ‘I know it’s silly, but the one thing I regret most about this is that I never got to properly enjoy that lap dance. I mean, twins.’

  Don’t ask me why I say what I do. Maybe it’s the thought of another long morning sitting in front of my PC, wondering where the next paragraph is coming from, or maybe I am just hornier than I have been in a long time and see the sudden chance to indulge myself with this sexy stranger. Whatever, the words are tumbling out of my mouth before I’ve really thought about them. ‘Maybe there’s a way you could still have your dance.’ He looks at me, tea mug frozen halfway to his lips as I continue, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have an identical sister tucked away upstairs, but I do have a full-length mirror in my bedroom. All it’ll take is a bit of imagination. What do you say?’

  For a moment he hesitates, and I start to think I’ve blown it. Then he nods. ‘Yeah, let’s have some fun. Let’s show Jonny I don’t care about his puerile little stunt.’

  I lead him up the stairs to my bedroom, which isn’t quite as tidy as it could have been, but then I haven’t been expecting to show it off to anyone else. Not that it would have the ambience of an upmarket gentlemen’s club even without my discarded clothes from the day before and the magazine I was reading before I fell asleep strewn across the floor. I kick everything in the general direction of the laundry basket then, feeling a little silly but undeniably turned on, haul the mirror into the centre of the room. In the absence of a suitable chair, Ivor positions himself at the bottom of the bed, legs spread in that inviting way again, and I twist the mirror until he has the best view of my reflection.

  Next comes the music. I hunt through the CDs in a rack by my bedside cabinet and pull out one of those compilations of dance music where each track segues endlessly into the next. I used to enjoy having it on in the background when I was working, back in the days when I could lose all track of time as my fingers pounded away on the keyboard. I set it playing at a low volume, encouraging Ivor to relax as I wonder what I’m going to do about my outfit. I am dressed in an olive-coloured T-shirt and a long grey gypsy-style skirt, comfortable to wear while sitting at a PC, but not exactly appropriate for writhing about on a man’s lap. I pick up a pair of high-heeled strappy sandals and disappear briefly into the bathroom. When I emerge, I am in my underwear – a black bra with just enough frothy trim on the cups to turn it from functional to decorative and a matching pair of little lacy shorts. I think I look the part, and Ivor’s expression is certainly appreciative, but it only serves to stoke the nervous fluttering in my belly. I’ve never done anything like this, not even for Mike, who was on the receiving end of most of my kinkiest exploits, but it’s too late to back out now.

  The heels push my bum backwards, my chest out, giving me a slutty little wiggle as I cross the bedroom floor and begin to dance in front of the mirror. It’s hard not to feel self-conscious at first, but it’s obvious that my audience of one is getting into what I’m doin
g, and it gives me the confidence to run my hands gently, teasingly over my breasts as I sway to the music. I glance into the mirror, make eye contact with my own reflection and blow myself a little kiss. Getting bolder, squatting on my haunches and opening my thighs, copying moves I’ve seen in any number of music videos, I begin to realise why this kind of dancing gets offered as an exercise class. I can feel muscles I haven’t used in ages, in or out of bed, groaning back to life, reminding me of how good it feels to move and stretch. Not only that, but offering up my body to this man in such a blatant way is getting me wetter than I’ve been in a long time. There’s an itch between my legs that won’t go away and only one way to scratch it.

  I strut over to the bed and straddle Ivor’s thighs with my own. I can’t help but notice as I do that his cock is beginning to rear up out of the folds of the dressing gown, as though it can sense the heat of my sex, so tantalisingly close. I put my hands on his shoulders so my cleavage is only inches from his nose. He glances down at my breasts, then up to my face, and I know I’ve got him exactly where I want him.

  ‘Just like the twins, eh?’ I smile.

  ‘Not quite,’ he says, swallowing hard. ‘When they were on my lap, they were topless.’

  ‘All in good time,’ I tell him, and I sink down so that his cock is just touching my pussy through my soaking wet shorts. Part of me wants to pull them to one side and take him inside me, but this is his dance, his stag treat, and I can’t be greedy. He tries to grab me by the hips and pull me down harder onto him, just as impatient as I am, but I catch his hands and wrap them round my neck instead. We’re both laughing, both turned on by the tease and the game, and our faces are almost touching. He raises his head towards mine, straining to make our lips meet, and I just shake my head and drop a kiss on the end of his nose. It feels good to know that he wants me and to have the power to make things happen at my pace.