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To P – I have never felt so loved.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Epilogue
Exclusive sample chapter
Copyright
About the Publisher
Chapter One
‘I know nothing about sex because I was always married.’
Zsa Zsa Gabor
‘So if you could do anything, anything at all, what would you do?’ I asked, handing round the after-dinner mints.
Across the table, Gabbie, who is one of my oldest and best friends, and who was busy helping herself to the last slice of cheesecake, said, ‘I’m assuming we’re not talking about hang-gliding here, are we?’
‘No. In bed.’
‘In bed?’ said Helen. ‘That restricts it a bit. How about out of bed?’
‘You know what I mean: if you could do anything sexually.’
‘Oh, you’re way too coy to be a pornographer,’ snorted Gabbie.
‘Do the things we’ve already done count?’ asked Joan.
We all turned to look at her. Joan is small, lovely, and looks like butter wouldn’t melt. Back in the mists of time she’d been a tour rep for Thomson’s and up until now what had happened on tour had most definitely stayed on tour.
‘Anything,’ I repeated. ‘Any time, any place, anywhere.’
‘And then you’re going to write about it?’ said Helen, topping up her wine glass.
‘Well, yes, if it’s any good I will. I won’t use any of your names, obviously, and I’ll change it enough so that no one knows it was you.’
‘That’s a shame,’ said Joan, taking another mint from the box. ‘I’m sure Miguel and Antonio would be chuffed to bits to see their names up in lights.’
Everyone laughed. ‘You’re winding us up,’ said Gabbie.
Joan pulled a face and then laughed. ‘Oh, come on,’ she said. ‘We all did crazy things when we were younger.’
‘I didn’t,’ I said, and this time it was me they all looked at. ‘Well, it’s true. I didn’t. I was married by the time I was twenty.’
‘Before then,’ said Gabbie, ‘you must have played around a bit.’
‘I had a couple of boyfriends, but not that many. And Ray and I met when I’d just finished sixth form …’ I began. ‘You know that.’
Although I didn’t say anything, in all the years we’d been together Ray had always preferred his sex the same way he enjoyed his food: plain, nothing fancy and without any peculiar ingredients. For him the very thought of anything that didn’t involve fumbling around under the duvet with the lights off was a sign of moral turpitude, and if he had ever enjoyed it before, it wasn’t the kind of thing you inflicted on your wife.
‘Oh, that is classic,’ snorted Helen. ‘You’re the one who is supposed to be writing a dirty book and you’re the only one who’s stuck to the straight and narrow. Fabulous.’
‘It’s not dirty, it’s erotica, and this is exactly why I’ve got you lot over. So what would you do?’
We were having a fajita evening in the kitchen at Gabbie’s cottage near Somerleyton.
We’ve been doing it for years. We used to meet up once a month when the children were smaller, but these days we get together when we can fit it into our increasingly busy lives. Every time we do it I wish we did it more.
We met at pre-natal classes in a scout hut in a little village just outside Cambridge. We’ve supported each other through backache, heartburn, teething, sleepless nights, terrible twos, troublesome teenagers, empty nests, dodgy marriages, cheating husbands and messy divorces. We’ve wept with each other, laughed with each other, got drunk with each other, and helped each other move house and move on. Remarkably we’re all still friends.
Spread out over Gabbie’s huge farmhouse kitchen was the debris of wrap-them-up-yourself chicken fajitas, tortilla chips, sour cream, salsa, potato wedges, white wine, Spanish beer and a big jug of margarita mix. We’d eaten our way through assorted tubs of Ben & Jerry’s and a twice-baked New York cheesecake made by Joan who, after years of abstinence on the kitchen front, had started working in a cookshop, taken up the apron and turned out to be the most amazing cook.
Gabbie is a solicitor, well spoken, tall and skinny, with the most fabulous long, straight, brown hair. Whatever she’s doing, she always looks as if she has just been ironed. Helen is a gardener: strawberry blonde, ruddy complexion, capable, funny, always wears trousers or shorts and smiles a lot. There’s Joan, tiny, pretty, dark-haired Joan, who manages a shop and is a deacon at her local church. And then there’s me, Sarah, and I’m a writer.
I’d been writing romantic fiction for the best part of twenty years, creating modern fairy tales about handsome, flawed, lovable heroes and complex women with complicated lives, finding their way to their very own happy ever after. For the last couple of years I’d been the main breadwinner, paying the bills while my husband, Ray, went back to college full time. To make ends meet, alongside writing novels, I’d also written for magazines and newspapers, for radio, short stories, travel guides, country house handbooks – in fact anything to make a living. Which was what led a friend, another writer, to send me a newspaper clipping about a publisher that was bringing out erotic fiction specifically written for women by women. My friend suggested that we both have a go at writing something. All they wanted was three chapters and a synopsis. What had we got to lose? After all, she reasoned, the sage advice given to all writers is to write about what you know. We were both married and we knew about sex. More than that, we knew about the sex we would enjoy given half a chance, which wasn’t necessarily the same as the sex we were getting.
To be frank, writing erotica had never been up there on my ‘Ten things to do before I die’ list, but it was a new market, I needed to earn a living and I decided it was worth a shot – after all, what was the worst that could happen? They would reject my idea. What I hadn’t bargained for was that it would help change my life for ever.
You’d think writing about sex would be easy, but when, after submitting my sample chapters, I was given a commission to write my first erotic novel and started work, I discovered it isn’t.
You need to find ways to describe all the bits and pieces and goings on so that it doesn’t sound like a public information film; and once you get past the labelling of parts you need to make it all sound sensual and romantic, and take your reader on a slow enjoyable journey towards a rip-snorting climax.
So no pressure then.
I kept a notebook alongside my keyboard with a whole collection of stick drawings in it, a visual aid to help me to work out what you could do given time, patience and no worries about a dodgy back – man woman, woman woman, man man, twosomes, threesomes, foursomes, orgy – as well as where all the bits go. While you can more or less guess what the business end is up to, where people put their arms, knees or elbows isn’t always as clear, so you need to work it out, so that the mechanics are sorted and therefore more or less invisible, and your hero won’t fall over while mid-fuck.
No one in erotica ever falls over unless they’re being swept off their feet and ravaged. They don’t get cramp, or the giggles, or trip over their pants while they’re trying to take them off. No one passes wind and flaps the covers, laughing furiously. Zips never get stuck, everyone always comes, and no one ever has a spotty bum. Humour and sex don’t mix in erotic fiction, or so my new editor reliably informed me.
‘Good erotic fiction should be like the best sex,’ she said during one of our telephone conversations. ‘A long, slow, satisfying build-up, hitting all the sweet spots, filling you with expectation, getting you more and more aroused, slowly bringing you closer and closer to the edge, making you gasp with pleasure, before finally taking you breathlessly to the grand finale. Erotic fiction should never let you down. Nobody in an erotic novel ever thought: let’s get this over and done with, X Factor’s on at nine. Never, ever.’
The downside as a writer is that you need to have great sex in every chapter in lots of different, ever more exciting ways. In real life, not only is real sex not like that but also it doesn’t need a plot. I’d been married a long time, and sex had long since slipped from something you were doing all the time to something squeezed into the to-do list, between cleaning out the guinea pig and collecting the kids from football practice. And unlike when you’re writing about sex, during real sex you generally don’t need to stop halfway through a really good bit to take the dog to the vet or nip out to buy the ingredients for your child’s home economics bake-a-thon.
I hadn’t got an office, so I was writing my first erotic novel on the family computer in a corner of the sitting room, squirrelling it away after each session in a desktop file labelled ‘This year’s tax receipts’ and constantly reminding myself not to email it to my accountant. With a house full of teenagers the last thing I wanted was for them to read what I was writing, so I put an old-fashioned clothes horse around my desk, hung laundry all over it and told them it was to keep out the draught. My husband, although he knew what I was writing, never peeked. No one else in the family seemed to notice that the same towels and sheets hung there for weeks on end.
Halfway through the first book I stalled, stuttered and finally ran out of ideas. There were only so many ways our heroine could shed her clothes and gasp in breathless anticipation. Which was why Helen, Joan and I were all at Gabbie’s, eating for England. They had volunteered to help me out.
‘So it can be anything?’ said Helen.
I nodded. ‘Anything at all that you’ve ever fantasized about. Anything that you’ve always wanted to do, if you could do it without getting caught, and without risking disease or hurting anyone.’
‘Or something we’ve already done,’ said Gabbie, looking pointedly at Joan.
I nodded. ‘I’m stuck,’ I said. ‘I really do need your help.’
‘How tragic is that,’ said Gabbie, laughing.
I was thinking they might come up with sex on a beach or in a sleeper train, or being ravished by a highwayman, but no: once they got going and were halfway through the Baileys, they were swapping real-life sexploits.
One had had sex on a cross-Channel ferry in the 1970s with a Frenchman she picked up in duty free, and when he told her that he wanted to see her again and asked for her name and telephone number, she lied through her eye teeth and told him her name was Freda and that she came from Margate.
Another had had a three-in-a-bed session with two builders who came to fix her parents’ roof when she had been home from college in her twenties. Another admitted to a drunken lesbian romp while on a painting holiday in Tuscany – as she said, it wasn’t something she particularly wanted to do again but she was glad she’d tried it. Which really did make it sound a bit like abseiling or hang-gliding – but she did add that it was incredibly refreshing to have sex with someone who actually knew where all your bits were.
I made notes – lots of notes.
‘Oh, and then I went out with this guy, after I split up with Keith. Do you remember Stuart?’ asked Gabbie. ‘Big, sort of gingery?’ She mimed tall with hair.
We all nodded.
‘He used to like to spank me.’
I stared at her. ‘And did you like it?’
Gabbie shrugged in a non-committal way. ‘It was OK, I suppose. I think he was hoping it would turn me on, but it didn’t. He kept saying that he’d really like to tie me up.’
‘Oh, we tried that,’ said Helen. ‘The kids were at my mum’s for the weekend. We did the whole thing: candlelit dinner, sexy underwear, silk scarf for a blindfold. Gav in this silk bathrobe I’d bought him for his birthday.’ Helen grinned. ‘God, I mean, he spent hours. It was fabulous. The only trouble was I wriggled so much that he couldn’t get the bloody knots undone when we’d finished and had to cut me off the bed with a pair of scissors. I’d got a blindfold on, so it wasn’t until he took it off I realized he’d used Molly’s skipping rope. God, she was livid.’
‘I blame Cosmopolitan,’ said Gabbie, sucking chocolate out of her teeth.
‘I’ve always fancied doing that,’ I said, casually. ‘Being tied up.’
‘You should suggest it to Ray,’ said Joan. ‘Lots of men get off on that kind of thing. You know: helpless virgin, tied to a bed.’ She rolled her eyes and waved her hands, squealing, ‘Help, help,’ in a very passable impression of Penelope Pitstop.
What I didn’t tell them, and had never really admitted to myself until then, was that I’d fantasized about being tied up and spanked for years: not all the time, obviously, and it wasn’t my only sexual fantasy, but it was there, carefully hidden and tucked at the back of my mind, and it was something I constantly revisited. The idea was a huge turn-on and had been for as long as I could remember – certainly long before my thoughts had turned to sex.
When it came to playing cowboys and Indians as a child, I had been the one who always volunteered to be held captive and tied to a tree. Want someone to hold hostage or whip until they give up the whereabouts of the cowboy encampment? Oooooo, oooo, yes please, that’d be me.
As I got older the fantasies became more explicit, and eventually sexual, and evolved to being put over someone’s knee and soundly spanked, or being whipped with a riding crop, tied up or down, and made to do all sorts of interesting naughty things that my mother never told me about and certainly wouldn’t approve of. But in all that time I had always kept these thoughts to myself. There was a part of me that was afraid to admit how much the idea excited me.
‘Bob used to like me to tie him up,’ said Joan conversationally, ‘and thrash him with the cane on the feather duster. It wasn’t really my kind of thing but he liked it. I used to find the feather duster upstairs in the bathroom and think: Oh, here we go again. He bought me a French maid’s outfit the Christmas before we split …’
In my fantasies the someone who did those wonderful things to me was always a broad-shouldered, dashingly handsome Prince Charming, who was good-looking in a clean-cut preppy kind of a way, and who was totally in control. He didn’t say very much because, as is the way with fantasies, he always knew exactly what I wanted and when I wanted it, and was terribly good at giving it to me right on cue.
I’d be wearing high heels and I’d squeal in a girlie way, and after he had spanked me he would carry me over to a big four-poster bed and tie me down and blindfold me, before going to work with his knowing fingers and even more knowing tongue; then, when I was baying for more, he would make love to me, long and slow, until we both finally came. Visually it was a treat of rich colours, soft leather, huge four-poster beds, hairy chests and muscular torsos, and it was a fantasy that I kept on having, as I reworked the details.
I’d never told anyone about wanting to be spanked or whipped or tied down, because I was pretty much convinced that I was alone in thinking those kinds of things and finding a sexual charge in them. I assumed that they were definitely too weird to talk about, and certainly way too weird to do anything about. Yet here were my best friends talking about exactly that. Maybe what I wanted wasn’t that unusual after all.
As I’d been taking notes, I was the only one who hadn’t had a drink, and I drove home thinking through what the girls had told me. Looking in through the sitting-room window, I could see Ray slumped on the sofa watching TV in his tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt. We’d been together for a long time; we had kids, dogs and a home together. Things weren’t great between us. Money was tight, and while I was working every hour I could to try to keep our noses above water (he had been made redundant in a departmental rationalization and was now back at college, retraining), he refused to help by even thinking about a part-time job or helping round the house. As far as he was concerned, all that, and the children, were my responsibility, whether he was working or not. I was tired in lots of ways.
If you asked him, Ray would tell you with some pride that he was an old-fashioned man – a man who liked his wife at home. A proper family was what he called it. He’d probably have had a heart attack if I’d mentioned the whole tying-up thing. He was, and still is, a very practical man, a careful man; for him romance, luxury and adventurous sex were things other people had and I’d always felt he rather despised them.
As I unlocked the front door I thought about what Gabbie had said about sharing my fantasies with him, and realized with a growing certainty that it was probably too late.
Ray didn’t even look away from the TV as I slipped off my coat. ‘How did it go?’ he asked.
‘Oh, OK. I just want to get some of these notes down before I forget them,’ I said.
He nodded, eyes still firmly fixed on the TV screen. With a sigh, I walked over to the computer, turned it on and got to work.
Over the next few weeks in every spare moment I worked on my first erotic novel. I reworked my friends’ adventures and wove in all the things that turned me on. And more and more I had a sense of escaping into a fantasy world where anything was possible. I started to write all those things that had fuelled my fantasies for so long – and it was heady stuff. Most of them revolved around a tall, dark, handsome older man, who took control, and understood the heroine and what she needed and wanted, and gave them without question – with unconditional love and understanding. He was my Prince Charming, the alpha man of my fantasies.
I wondered, as I wrote, if that was what I thought I’d seen in Ray when I first met him. He was fifteen years older than me; I’d been working in a hotel for the summer when he asked me out. I’d seen him as capable, strong and silent. Things that at eighteen I had naively taken as positive qualities had, over the years, revealed themselves to be altogether less positive, and traits that probably a woman of his own age would have instantly recognized. He was stubborn and uncommunicative, and had, I suspected, chosen a much younger wife so that he could try to mould her into the woman he wanted. We got along fine until I wanted to grow up and have a life of my own.
Although I hadn’t anticipated it, writing erotica was the perfect escape from the realities of a crumbling marriage. All those things that I’d never told anyone before, all those things I had longed to explore, finally had a place and a purpose.
I also spent a lot of time doing research on the internet, which up until that point I’d mostly used to buy shoes and books. Not altogether sure what I’d find, I was nervous, excited, sometimes shocked and sometimes delighted. The internet opened up a whole new world. I rapidly discovered that far from my being alone in my fantasies there was a whole sub-culture out there that I had known nothing about, and lots and lots of people who felt the same as I did. I wasn’t so much relieved as stunned. And even better was that I found I had a name: I was a submissive.
In my fantasies, at least, I was a submissive – the one who gets spanked and tied up and gets all the attention. Submissive. I certainly didn’t see myself as submissive in real life, but sexually I could see that it was a good fit.
Having sold my first attempt at writing female erotica, I wrote more – a lot more. The stuff that had fuelled my fantasies for years was suddenly fuelling my fiction and my finances; and having finally found a home for all those things I’d been dreaming about since my teens felt good. Having an outlet for my innermost thoughts helped paper over the cracks in my increasingly unhappy marriage, and I was having the best sex of my life, albeit on the page.
Over the next five years I wrote twelve novels and countless short stories. The books and short stories always involved some degree of bondage and submission, and other sexual shenanigans that can be loosely described as S&M (sadism and masochism) and BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism), but in all that time, as I was writing about it and fantasizing about it, I never once tried any of it – not one single glorious black-leather, high-heeled, handcuffed moment of it. And Ray never read my books. Not one, ever.
Books, as Ray was eager to point out to anyone who would listen, were not his thing – and eventually, neither was I.
Finally the cracks just got too big and we separated. We were divorced within a year. It took me a while to get myself together, but after a few months I started, very tentatively, to date again. Fresh out of a long-term relationship, I wasn’t altogether sure exactly how or where to begin. So after a few false starts I turned to the place where a lot of us begin again: internet dating websites.
I think we’re often drawn to various incarnations of the devil we know – a type – and, having been married a long time, I certainly was. The men I dated after leaving Ray all seemed to have been cut from the same cloth. I was obviously doing something wrong. The men were all steady and practical, and I was still having married sex; I was just having it with new men.
Then along came Henry, my first attempt at trying to combine what passes for normal with some of the things I’d been fantasizing about.
After two glasses of house red and a light supper on our first weekend away together, I asked Henry if he’d ever thought about spanking anyone. You know – for fun. His eyes widened and his face took on an expression similar to the one I’d last seen on the face of a woman I’d offered a bacon butty, seconds before discovering she was a hard-line vegan.
Henry visibly stiffened and said, all outrage and horror, ‘Good Lord, certainly not! What on earth do you think I am – some kind of a pervert?’
Well, yes, hopefully.
‘Don’t you have any fantasies?’ I pressed, emboldened by strong drink and a nasty sinking feeling. The relationship had been pretty much doomed since lunchtime, when we’d been about to go Dutch on an uninspiring quiche and green salad when Henry had pointed out that actually I’d had a cappuccino and a sweet.
‘Of course I have fantasies,’ he said, ‘but mostly they involve world peace and captaining the English cricket team during a one-day test at Headingley.’
Buddhists, what can I tell you?
So how did he feel about underwear? What sort of thing did he like? I asked, giving it one last shot and my voice dropping to a seductive purr.
‘I haven’t given it a lot of thought, to be perfectly honest.’ He paused and then said, ‘Something from Marks, probably.’ I watched him slipping a bread roll into his pocket in case he got a bit peckish later. It wasn’t the answer I’d hoped for, to be honest.