It’s been ten long years since I last had sex with a woman, nine and a half years since Beth passed. Call it puppy love, but I really believe she loved me, and I loved her, with all my heart. More than loved. I was obsessed with her and still am. Not that this means I haven’t had sex. I have sex most nights – with Beth.
I consider myself well-organised and structured in all that I do. My routine for having sex never changes. I get home stressed, late from work, work out for half an hour in my basement mini gym: weights, planks, press-ups, sit-ups and pelvic thrusts, mainly. Then I make myself a healthy vegan salad, a cup of milky peppermint tea, a slice of wholemeal toast loaded with crunchy peanut butter, and eat a ripe banana.
Next, I log-in to my laptop, plug it into the plasma screen, which takes up one whole wall of the lounge, and network.
Being a workaholic, a loner with no family to speak of, other than Esther and Richard, who reach out to me with occasional messages from their office when they manage to get their heads above their deluge of tax returns, I use online media to network. My contemporaries at work, the less successful dealers, all shun me, jealous of my success, suspicious of my motives and aspirations. I have no friends, not in the truest sense. My friends are faceless entities on social media, desperate women on adult chat sites, the eight hundred contacts that I’ve accumulated in lonely hearts sites.
I begin with a woke family-oriented site with content restrictions, full of photos of happy couples and their offspring on holiday, owners’ dogs and cats, scenic locations, hobbies, arts, crafts, books and reels. I can never understand how to delete the reels. Call me a hypocrite, given my rabid sex drive, but I don’t visit platforms to watch candid shots of, mostly, oriental mothers breastfeeding their babies. Then there are hundreds of people who I might know, I have to delete. I’ve never found a single soul I knew. I frequently ask myself why I don’t just leave the blessed channel but vanity takes its toll and makes me return again and again, wasting my precious life away, closeting me indoors.
I prefer the more liberal microblogging site: it panders to my obsession. This channel enables me to follow sexy blogs, content, and tags to my heart’s content. The more models I follow, the more photos of naked girls pop up on the screen: blondes, brunettes, redheads, silken-haired girls like Beth. Once I’ve found her closest natural likeness (I don’t do AI-generated), I start to feel aroused.
Quickly, I switch channels to the online social networking site where lonely hearts communicate with or try to reach out to each other, in order to gain more follows, using posts, photos, gifs, and images. By far the most self-gratifying late night viewing site for me, this is my voyeur’s paradise, perfect for a social reject like me. I only have to click explore or search, punch in adult 18+, and I enter a surreal fantasy world where I can savour young silken-haired women with a strikingly similar appearance to Beth willingly having sex with gangs of well-hung young men. Disgusted with myself, I rapidly quit their posts, select clear all, delete history, and log off. Then I go to bed, to have dreamful sex with the only girl I ever truly loved.
Inevitably, my fantasy spills over into the real world. Lately, I’ve been drawn into the shady world of dating apps, adult chat sites, singles clubs, swingers clubs, late night bars, in search of women of the night, looking to breed. I can’t believe that I found Flyn: the beautiful woman of my dreams, even though she looks nothing like Beth. That said, she seems too good to be true: a woman only interested in having a sexual relationship with a stranger for the express purpose of breeding, with no reference to payment and, seemingly, no long term commitment on either side. I wonder what will happen to her, to me for that matter, the morning after the night before. Does she really expect me to support her from my income? Is she expecting me to clothe, house and feed her? If she does expect my charity, how long for? What happens when our initial flame of passion flickers, fades, and dies? Should I draw up a contractual agreement, allowing me to turf her out on the streets when her usefulness is over?
Our relationship, in my view, is purely functional: the fulfilment of my sexual fantasies in return for breeding her a child. I don’t want the child to interfere with my life. I need to think about that.
Call me cold, heartless and unfeeling, but I don’t love Flyn, not in the fond way that I loved Beth.
I sense the feeling is mutual.
I’ll let her make the next move, see how she makes me feel, inside, after we’ve had a night of sex.
A pang of warning, an inaudible alarm bell ringing in my head, tells me to be alert, careful. There was something that didn’t ring true with her sob story. It seemed contrived, made-up, too perfect. Then there was her fashion parade: the change of clothing from her red satin dress to her barely worn mini skirt. The way she flaunted herself, rubbing her bare arse against the shoulders of other men when she went to the toilet. Was that a ruse to excite them? Or was her rude tease to make me jealous, make me want her more? Then there was the way she changed the colour of her eyes in the blink of an eyelid. What is she, some kind of alien?
The young Indian driver has climbed out of the taxi, braving the teeming rain, grounding my mind in reality. I watch her stow Flyn’s mediocre baggage in the hold beside the driver’s seat, slam the passenger door shut, sliding the door open for us, letting Flyn climb aboard first and make herself comfortable in the rear seat. The taxi is warm and dry, a welcome respite from the rain. Flyn takes off her wet zip-up jacket, drops it on the floor, and kicks off her stilettoes, gesturing to the driver to leave the interior light on. The driver nods, smiles at her. She slams the door shut. I snuggle up to my woman.
‘Why did you ask her to leave the light on?’ I ask her, preferring to be discreet, ‘She’ll see us pet.’
Flyn nestles her beautiful head against my neck, ‘I want her to see us: it turns me on. Besides, I’m frightened of the dark.’
The driver fires the ignition and we set off on my journey of a lifetime. I leave any residual doubts that I might have lying on the deserted pavement, like emotional flotsam and jetsam, the litter of my fantasies, of her.
