In The Worst Possible Taste: Paperback writer

It's the dirty story of a dirty man...
- The Beatles, 1966

“So who’s Lauren?”

Beth hadn’t forgotten. It was Wednesday night, I was behind enemy lines, deep in persona non grata territory, where my existence would be denied if captured... Bethany’s bedroom in the Toogoods’ house. I’d never even been here before. Yeah, I know, I was going to marry a girl I’d never seen the bedroom of, and had I seen it, I probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. It was pink, fluffy, and painfully cutesy. Soft toys, frilly curtains… the best you could say about it was that it was very ‘Bethany’. But just being here was a massive achievement. I felt like a teenage boy on his first succesful sortie into his girlfriend’s bedroom. Her parents were away at a golf club function, her brother was on duty, we had a few precious hours to ourselves, time was of the essence if we were to properly defile this place with unholy erotic filth… and she suddenly wanted to know who Lauren was. I considered evading the question, but ended up busting out the Samoan sidestep and ran straight into/over/through it.

“Old flatmate,” I reported. “From up Rocky way. Like something out of Felafel. Rough as guts. Drank like a fish, swore like a sailor. Knew more about football than Rex Mossop has forgotten. Had noisy sex with guys we didn’t know most nights of the week. Uninhibited, perverted and generally nasty.”

“Sounds like your ideal girl,” she mused.

“Not so much,” I replied. “Don’t screw the crew. Well, try not to screw the crew. I did pretty well, with one or two minor lapses, which I blame on excess of alcohol and lack of action.”

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” she offered poetically. “So what became of her?”

I grinned. She'd love this. Possibly. “Lauren now makes copious amounts of money writing uninhibited, perverted and generally nasty erotic fiction under the unimaginative pen name of Mia Lauren…”

Beth’s eyes opened wide. She disappeared under her bed and emerged with a recent issue of Cosmopolitan. I guessed where this was going. Occasionally Cosmo or Cleo put together an erotic fiction digest to give away free with an issue as an enticement to buy their glossy insubstantial magazine rather than its glossy insubstantial competitor. I well remembered giggling through one with girl-next-door Sophie about a hundred years ago during one of our HSC study sessions, before they turned into ‘study’ sessions. From the instances I’d come across them (ooh err Matron) in recent years, usually via girlfriends who were readers of those magazines, I’d occasionally found her name among the contributors. I was a little surprised – her stuff seemed a bit too confronting, too little Mills and Boon and too much Penthouse Forum, but it seemed there was secretly a lot more uninhibited, perverted and generally nasty girls out there than even I’d been able to find. Which was encouraging.

“So this is where you get all your best ideas from, yeah?” I suggested. “And maybe why your sleep gets interrupted so much, given your choice of bedtime reading…”

“No… I just have a very vivid imagination,” she protested.

There’s lots of ways to fund your way through university. There’s Austudy, Abstudy and Mumstudy. There’s wage-slaving at Kmart or Maccas, waitressing or pulling beers in seedy backpacker bars. Or, like a guy I went to college with, there’s funding your PhD in computer science by counting cards at blackjack. He’s now head of IT at a major multinational and has been officially trespassed from every casino on the east coast of Australia. There’s also credit fraud, shoplifting, extortion, or selling your organs on eBay. Then, of course, there’s working at places where screwing the customer actually means screwing the customer. While most of the girls in your friendly neighbourhood brothel might claim to just be doing it to pay for their course fees, it’s not always a made-up fairy story for the benefit of stupid men as horny as they are gullible.
A friend of mine paid her way through five years of vet school through providing pleasure for a price. Let’s call her Michelle, since that was her name. Though Michelle obviously had to keep quiet about it under threat of being kicked out of uni, and lived in panic that she’d end up ‘servicing’ someone from her course – which was eighty percent girls so you’d think she’d have been OK, though you can’t always be too careful – she wasn’t ashamed of it. Michelle said it was empowering, liberating, and financially very rewarding, which was exactly what you’d expect her to say, like she was reading straight off the recruitment pamphlet. More to the point, she figured the number of disgusting, humiliating, bodily-fluid-smeared things she’d have to do on a given day at ‘work’ didn’t even come close to the number of disgusting, humiliating, bodily-fluid-smeared things she’d had to do in vet school, which was probably true.
Michelle’s argument sounded persuasive, but it didn’t have me quitting my part-time job as a Coles checkout chick. For one thing, while I had the two most important requirements for the job, as Michelle described it – a female body with all working parts included, and a healthy appetite for sex – I wanted to use my appetite on people I actually liked, or at the very least, was able to choose for myself. I’m old-fashioned like that, I guess.
What did have me quitting my job as a Coles checkout chick was my manager, who was an acne-scarred dweeb who lived with his mother. He’d reacted to me complaining about him brushing against me in the storeroom – on purpose, every day, with his little soldier at attention – by cutting all my shifts and putting me on nightfill. My flatmates were pretty cool about it. Dave, who I was doing first year arts with, was cool about most things. Mostly because he was stoned all the time and in the flat almost none of it, hanging out with his medieval society mates down at Clubs and Socs. We knew each other from going to school in the same hick country town, and had known each other long enough to know that while we were awesome mates, he wasn’t ever going to be someone I’d sleep with by choice, no matter how much cash was being offered. The feeling seemed to be mutual, largely because Dave was gay. He just hadn’t admitted it to anyone yet, including himself.
Our other flatmate, Mike, was also from up home, a friend of a friend of a former flatmate of someone’s brother, in the usual contrived way you end up finding flatmates at uni. He was an engineering student on an industry co-op scholarship, so he had plenty of money. Ironically, if it came down to it, he’d have needed to offer a lot less than Dave to get what he wanted from me, if either of us were dumb enough to try screwing the crew. But that was a hypothetical, as neither of us seemed to be struggling for attention from the opposite sex. Mike was a good looking boy, six foot with a well-built physique; under it all, he was probably a nice, honest, caring guy, but he he hid this very well behind a streak of bastard which a lot of girls seemed to find very appealing...

“Sound like anyone you know, Angus?” she asked impishly.

Over the years I’d dated a few girls who’d tripped over Lauren’s work, even a few who’d known of my connection to her - old flings and flames from uni who I’d linked up with during the band years. Beth, though, had been the quickest to join the dots. I was impressed… if a little nervous. Lauren’s male characters weren’t always noble and heroic; this wasn’t bodice-ripping chick lit she was writing. Not at that stage of her career, and this one was an old one – it’d been in one of her first published collections of stories, as far as I recalled. Sort of an ‘evolution’ of the one she’d been writing which had sparked the events now referred to as the Night of Duga Duga Bow Bow.

“Well, having known a few writers and journalists in my time… it’s very important, as I understand it, to write from your experience base...”

“Or she’s still totally hung up on you,” she contended.

As for me – Emily, since you asked; five-three, brown hair, hazel eyes, curves where they should be, told I’m pretty but not sure I believe it as it’s usually said by boys hoping for sex – I’d had no complaints, none I’d take seriously anyway. Anyway, Mike was understanding. Over our usual late-night beers he said he’d had the same problem when he’d worked at Kmart in first year before his co-op scholarship had come through. His manager was a pushy little bitch who’d used her looks and her tits to screw her way to the middle, and who’d been riding his arse at work for weeks, because she secretly wanted him riding hers.
“How’d you deal with?”
He shrugged. “Banged her on the lunch room table after closing, then handed in my resignation letter. How else?”
Useless advice, but at least he was sympathetic. As the bills started stacking up, though, he was getting less so. Since he usually had cash in reserve and we usually didn’t, he usually covered the bills up front and got our share out of us after, because it was less hassle than getting each of us to BPay our amounts individually before the bills went overdue. But it was only less hassle if we had the cash to cover our splits of the bills, and we had a lot of bills to pay. Power, gas, phone, cable TV – which I never actually watched anyway, given Mike had it practically superglued onto the sports channels – and of course rent. From the fuck-all that Austudy provided, I couldn’t afford to contribute to the weekly grocery shop, which made me even less popular as the boys had to buy home-brand baked beans and Tasman Bitter on their own.
A few months earlier I’d been seeing a rich, dull fourth-year guy who I’d ditched because I realised I was just with him because he bought me stuff, took me places and spent his inheritance on me. Right now I’d trade the moral high ground for a bit of cold hard pragmatism. I thought about calling him - well, OK, I did call him - but I couldn’t go through with it. In fact, in my weaker moments, I even thought about calling Michelle for a reference, but I just couldn’t stomach the idea of having sex with guys I wasn’t attracted to, no matter how lucrative it was. Mind you, seeing as though my luck with guys had disappeared along with my income, my standard of living and the goodwill of my flatmates, my minimum cut-off point was becoming more of a sliding scale. And the only person I seemed to be having a regular, healthy, imaginative sexual relationship with, was myself. In fact, the frustration of the rest of my life going to hell meant I was making a trip to that well a lot more often than you might think necessary.
Which explains, or is at least my feeble attempt to explain, why Mike found me in the bathroom at three in the morning on a Monday getting myself off with the detachable shower head.
I’m not sure which of us was more embarrassed. Deep down, he was a nice, well-brought-up guy, no matter how shabbily he treated some of those girls he’d been with. The ones I could hear him banging through the wall between our rooms. And, more often that I’d have liked, directly up against the wall between our rooms. Then again, the banging on the wall (in every sense of the phrase) had been a little quieter recently, so maybe he was going through a bit of a dry spell as well.
“Don’t stop on my account,” he remarked.
We shared an awkward, sympathetic smile. Next-door neighbours on Struggle Street, that’s us.
“No, seriously,” he said. “Don’t stop.”
And I realised there was a little more steel behind that smile than I’d originally thought. And I also realised just how hard he was getting through those cotton boxers. And how that realisation was affecting me. ‘Don’t screw the crew’, ran the mantra in my head, but that was an argument for a sensible hour of the day. Right here, right now, it was three in the morning, I was horny as fuck – even more horny than I was embarrassed, and I was very embarrassed – and hell, maybe if I did, it’d mean he’d be less likely to tell everyone we knew that he caught me playing with myself in the shower at three in the morning.
So I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and put on a little show for my favourite flatmate. The thought that Michelle probably gets paid very good money to do what I was doing for nothing more than entertainment, did spike through at one point, but I pushed it aside and concentrated on those lovely images that were scrolling through my mind… including, I’ll admit, the delicious thought of having a good-looking boy getting off on watching me. Every pang of pleasure was doubled with the thought that he was getting off on this as much as I was.
I was close now, God I was close. Dave wasn’t home, so we were alone and I could be as loud as I wanted, and I wanted to be loud, for the benefit of both of us. The insistent invasions of my fingers, coupled with the achingly beautiful rhythmic pressure of the water from the shower head on my clitoris, meant I’d pretty soon have little choice but to be loud. Curled up on the plastic of the shower recess, I felt it subside gently with his footfall, felt his hand tracing under my chin. I opened my eyes, because he told me to. Now naked from the waist down, he was blocking out the dim light from behind him, like an eclipse. Might have just been my perspective, but he looked enormous, and as close to bursting as I was.
“Open your mouth, Em,” he said. He sounded remarkably calm, the antithesis of the enormous pulsating urgency currently dominating my vision. I shook my head, too astonished (and a little distracted) to speak.
“Open your mouth,” he repeated, “and we’ll forget about the phone bill for last month.”
I ran my tongue around my mouth. Did he really mean what I thought he did? The only answer, of course, was are you kidding, of course not, that’s disgusting, get the fuck out of my shower.
My actual answer, however, came out more along the lines of:
“And the gas bill…”
I couldn’t believe that thought had surged, fully formed, out of my mouth and into the room. No getting it back now, I supposed.
“Don’t push your luck.”
Fuck, this was hot. I ran my tongue around my lips again, then hesitantly slithered it over the head of his gorgeous cock. Teasing him. He didn’t like being teased. He didn’t like being called Mikey, either.
“And the gas, Mikey,” I cooed.
“...And the gas,” he conceded.
“Good boy,” I murmured. “Shall we call it a deal?”
He nodded. And then I sucked his brains out.

Things were weird between us for a few days, as you’d probably expect. We kind of avoided each other, no after-work drinks on the back deck anymore. But our little noticeboard which kept track of all the outstanding bills, suddenly had my name ticked off on last month’s gas and phone bills in Mikey’s careful handwriting. And suddenly I wanted to be caught playing with myself a lot more than previously. I seemed to be practising more regularly than usual, just in case. And Mikey seemed to be featuring in my visualisation exercises a lot more than they’d ever done before.
He stopped by my room on the Thursday after our Monday morning ‘episode’, so maybe things were getting back to normal. I was pretending to study on my bed, having given up pretending to study at my desk.
“Hey, Em,” he said. “Up to much?”
“Nah,” I said. “You?”
“Being the bearer of bad news.” He held up a sheet of paper. “Power bill for this quarter.” He tossed it onto the bed, where I picked it up. Ah. It was big. And not in a good, Mikey-sorta way. I rolled over onto my stomach, tossed it aside and pulled a face.
“Not good?”
“Not good,” I said.
“Don’t worry,” he replied. “We’ll figure something out.”
“Will we?” I mused. We? “What sort of something?”
His hand traced gently against the back of my thigh.
“Something... mutually acceptable.”
His fingertips reached my shorts, which probably weren’t going to defend my honour long. It wasn’t like I really wanted them to. He dipped his fingers into the leg of my shorts, tracing his fingertips along the quickly-dampening mound between my thighs. Even if I’d planned to pretend I didn’t want this, my body was betraying me. His hands quickly tugged my shorts down, then I pushed my hips up at him to help him peel my undies off, giving him as much access as possible for those dextrous fingers to do their work. I felt so dirty, and horny, and so very, very wrong. But this boy was going to fuck me, and he was even going to pay me for the privilege. My secret stash of condoms in the bottom drawer was quickly overcome, I felt the pressure of his weight over me from behind, his fingers teasing me apart, then… Oh Jesus. Oh Jesus fucking Christ. And I wasn’t even religious…

Beth had such a lovely speaking voice when she was reading aloud, I had decided.

So that was how it began. It wasn’t a formal arrangement, but it was an arrangement nonetheless. My body, for his wallet. He’d ‘look after’ my bills – rent notwithstanding, that was still my responsibility – and in return he could have me whenever, whereever, however he liked.
Of course, had I realised what a dirty boy he really was, I would have negotiated my price a bit more carefully...
At first, it was great. He was great. He was imaginative, energetic, and always treated me with respect. He made me feel good about myself, which I hadn’t necessarily expected when our ‘arrangement’ had come about. More to the point, he made me come, a lot, which I definitely hadn’t expected. He didn’t have to, but he wanted to. He got off on it, on bringing me right to the brink, holding me there as long as I could stand it, then plunging over the edge into the abyss with me. That’s a metaphor, in case you were wondering. I’m not good with heights.
But here’s the thing, I was actually happy. All my bills were paid, I had it made in the shade, and I was getting more sex than I knew what to do with. First thing in the morning, in the shower, getting ready for uni. Home for lunch, a quickie on the kitchen bench. And then, when the day was done, particularly if we had the place to ourselves, those long, luscious evenings of hot, hard fucking until we were both too sore and spent to go again. Until next morning, when I knew he’d be hard as hell all over again, and insisting that I had work to do…
After a week or so I was wondering whether to suggest calling off the ‘arrangement’ and just making him my boy for real. But I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t have a job (not that I’d been looking that hard), I still couldn’t pay my bills, and I wasn’t sure he actually liked me as anything other than a dirty little whore who was willing to do just about anything for his money.
But he wasn’t happy. Maybe it was the dodgy morals of our situation, maybe it was his life in general. His grades weren’t great – probably because he spent a lot of time drinking and fucking instead of studying – and he was under a lot of pressure to pull finger and hit the heights, particularly from his family and from the scholarship people, whose cash came contingent on high academic standards being maintained. Whatever the reason, he started taking it out on me. Sometimes he even took it out in public and used it on me. He knew I was being a dirty little whore, and I knew I was being a dirty little whore, but the first time he actually called me a dirty little whore while he was screwing me was an eye-opener. I didn’t like it much, but he did. As the days passed it wasn’t an isolated incident. He seemed to get off on mistreating me, and the more of it he did, the more of it he liked it. The more depraved and degrading, the better. Not just names, either. He’d make me go down on him after we’d had sex, getting off on watching me taste myself on him, enjoying me trying to hide my discomfort and shame. He’d spank me while he pounded me from behind, slapping my poor little arse until it was red – and, to my eternal guilt, I let him, because it felt really fucking good so long as he was pounding into me, and because deep down, I probably felt as worthless as he liked to tell me I was.
He played games, too. He knew I was a little emotionally vulnerable, that I might be thinking about whether we could be more than financial fuck-buddies, and liked toying with me over it. He took me out to dinner one night, at a nice Italian place near where we lived. Was this a date? Was this a game? I didn’t even want to guess. But he was charming, and sweet, and splashed out on a nice bottle of wine and even a single red rose, and we laughed and chatted and made eyes with each other as we decided on our orders.
“Should have turned this off,” he remarked, fishing out his mobile, then not-very-surrepticiously sending a text to someone or other. My phone sounded off. He looked bashful, and very cute. I smiled at him. Times like this, he was definitely verging on boyfriend material. I’d decided he was getting anything he wanted tonight, whether he was paying or not.
The message was abrupt.
‘Your entrée is under the table, you dirty little whore.’
Looking up to meet his eyes, they indicated he wasn’t even verging on joking.
Bastard. Fucking bastard.
But I knew what side my bread was buttered on. I glanced around the room, just to make sure noone was paying us any attention – no surprise that he’d picked a table in a dark, distant corner of the room – and slithered down beneath the table, hidden behind the long overhangs of the tablecloth, to do what I was told. Meanwhile, he sat calmly at the table, as if nothing was going on. He even flirted with the dusky, big-boobed waitress as she took his order, while I was on my knees in the darkness, trying not to bang my head on the table, trying hard not to make any giveaway noises, but secretly wondering what would happen if I, say, took a big bite right about now. But I didn’t. I was a good little whore. Guided by his hand on the back of my neck, I sucked and sucked until I felt him filling my mouth, and tried to swallow it as best I could – something I’d never gotten used to, and never really wanted to, but which he’d started demanding because he knew I hated it. And all the while, with the humiliating realisation that what he was watching at that very moment, and what he was thinking about, was that gorgeous waitress and her gorgeous arse sauntering away to the kitchen.
Needless to say, the rest of the date didn’t go particularly well.
I came very close to telling Mike to shove his ‘agreement’ up his arse that night, but he was back to being sweet and considerate for the next few days again, almost like he regretted using me so callously – he only called me a dirty little cock-craving slut when he thought I was horny enough to agree with him, or when I was horny enough to make it an undeniable fact – and I decided I liked him again. I wished I didn’t, it didn’t reflect well on my state of mind or my self-esteem to be developing a serious crush on the boy who made me go down on him in Italian restaurants. Besides, he’d invited me to his scholarship awards evening on Friday night, and that was a proper cocktail-frock-and-makeup deal. He could have been Hitler stomping on kittens and I’d have been there. Every girl loves playing dress-up, and anyway, I had a feeling Mikey would look very good in a suit.
Turns out, he did. And he said I looked beautiful, and almost seemed to mean it, while restraining himself from mauling me while zipping me into my dress, which meant I was falling for him a lot more than was advisable. Dave, on one of his rare nights at home, gave us his blessing, said we looked quite the cute couple. Mikey squeezed me a little with his arm around my side as he said that. The event was in the ballroom at the Stamford Plaza, indicating the sort of money the industry partners were tipping into the scheme. Pre-dinner drinks were top-shelf and plentiful, and I’m not the sort of girl who can argue coherently with free champagne. Well, I can argue all you like with them, it’s arguing against them that causes me problems. By the time we were ready to be seated for dinner, we weren’t really trashed, but maybe a little toasted. OK, we were trashed. And in need of what Mike liked to refer to as ‘the facilities’. He made for the gents and I for the ladies, both doors situated down a surprisingly darkened corridor off the main banquet hall.
I did what I had to do, and emerged. A hand grasped my wrist, and I found myself being bundled into a small, dark room, probably some sort of storage room. Mike was behind me, his breath on my neck, his hardness pressing urgently into me through the flimsy material of the dress. I knew what was coming next – me, if I was lucky.
“Gently,” I hissed. “It’s expensive, and it’s borrowed…”
His dismissive chuckle suggested he couldn’t care less; the brusque way he grabbed the hem at the split between my legs, and wrenched upwards, proved it. Arrogant evil bastard Mikey was back. I knew he couldn’t stay away for too long.
“Too fucking poor to buy your own,” he teased. “Too poor even to afford knickers, apparently. Or maybe it’s just that you’re a filthy little slut.”
I considered another informational seminar on the merits or otherwise of the Visible Panty Line, but figured he wasn’t listening. I just closed my eyes against the darkness and let his hands roam where they wanted. To be honest, I wasn’t into it to begin with – not as much as he was – but the champagne had gone to my head, and that mixed with the claustrophobia and his intoxicating pheremones meant I was soon losing my will to resist, and started wanting that big angry thing inside me as much as it wanted it too.
Come on, you arrogant, evil bastard. Do your worst. You won't last long.
I sank back against him as he penetrated me from behind, bending his knees to equalise our height difference, then grabbing my hips and roughly pulling me up to his height. I pushed my hands against the wall and held on for the ride. One of those lovely hands slithered down my cleavage and squeezed my nipples pointedly, just the way I liked it; the longest fingers of the other found their way through the soft down between my legs and began teasing me, likewise. He wasn’t being deliberately unselfish; pounding me while I was convulsing in climax was just about his favourite way of having me. He was goooood, and I couldn’t stay quiet about it. He pinched me, and I cried out, louder than I should have. And in that moment of self-awareness, I had a horrible realisation. Or maybe two. One, he was bareback. There was nothing between us, nothing at all, so if I made him come, there could be dire consequences. I’d started back on the pill a few weeks back – partly in hope that he would turn out to be boyfriend material, partly because he felt a proper dirty little slut should be offering her client unprotected services - but it was probably too soon. And two, I suddenly remembered something about Mikey's declared attitude to contraception: 'Up the bum, no babies!' It was the fact that he declared it when MCing a mate's wedding that probably tells you all you need to know about Mikey. Or his mate. Or the hick town we all came from. I knew what was coming next, and based on my generally rocky previous experiences, it almost definitely wasn’t me.
“Gently,” I pleaded, because that always worked with him... good plan. He told me to relax. Told me not to pretend I’d never done it before. And not to pretend I didn’t love it. The correct response to that was no, I didn’t and don’t love it, you’ve just gotten me drunk on a bottle of champagne in an hour and defiled me in a broom cupboard. But Mikey, and his fingers, and that fucking bottle of champagne, and my own stupid libido, all worked against me. My actual response was God yes, I loved it, don’t stop, deeper baby, don’t fucking hold back, harder, faster, more, I’m your slut, I’m your whore, I don’t care how much it hurts tomorrow, make me fucking come you fucking bastard… He did, and I did. So hard that I almost climbed up the wall with my fingernails.
So, given the amount of noise we were making, it wasn’t that surprising that we were discovered. It was just a little unfortunate that the discoverers were the chairman of the industry panel which conferred the scholarship awards, and his devoutly Presbyterian wife.

I’d decided to move out. I couldn’t see any other way out of the vicious circle of depravity which my ‘agreement’ with Mike had led me into. A friend from Coles, who’d also left around the same time I had, got me a job at the uni library where she worked. Hours were flexible, pay was good. Real good, actually. So I had employment, and didn’t need Mikey’s charity any more; at a stretch, I could even afford to break lease. No matter what I really felt for him, and God knew what that was or meant, it couldn’t be anything other than weird if we were still living together after all that. It’d been weird enough for the last week since the Stamford incident as it was. We hadn’t spoken to each other, hadn’t even made eye contact. Whoever wrote the commandment ‘Don’t screw the crew’ knew what they were talking about. It fucks things up.
When I went to tell him I was leaving, I found him in his room, in the dark. He was sprawled against one of the walls, with a lost, faraway look in his eyes. I’m a sucker for lost boys, so I didn’t thank him for that. I told him I had a new job and was moving out. He nodded, like a guilty man hearing his sentence. I asked him how he was doing.
“Shithouse,” he replied with a sardonic grin. “Co-op’s cancelled my scholarship, as you can probably guess. In fact, the faculty have strongly suggested I fuck off and find a career path other than engineering, after the mess I’ve made of my reputation. The phrase ‘completely unemployable’ might have been used. Might go into chemistry or physics or something. Or go wash fuckin' windscreens at traffic lights.”
And then he said something I really didn’t thank him for.
“Worst part is, I deserve every bit of it,” he exhaled. “Karma smackdown for being such a bastard to you. Earned, deserved, delivered.” It was probably as near to an apology as I was going to get from the arrogant, self-absorbed prick, I told myself. Don’t get sucked in. Which he then ruined by looking up at me with puppy-dog eyes and saying, “Em… for what it’s worth, probably not much… I’m sorry, babe.”
“Easy for you to say,” I replied sharply.
“You think so?”
Not really. He said sorry about as often as John Howard, meant it even less. But he meant it this time, or seemed to. I hated him for making me care whether he was going to end up destitute on street corners. And for the guilt, and the humiliation, and most of all, the shame that still burned deeply inside me. After the Stamford incident, it wasn’t the only thing that did. Put it this way, it’d be a while before that option was revisited.
I sat down next to him on the floor. “You going to be all right for money?” I asked, keeping it professional.
He shrugged. “We’ll find out when the first bills start rolling in, yeah?”
Which meant, in a word, no.
I looked at him. Dammit, boy, you’re not as sweet as that cute face of yours would make me believe. You’re nasty and arrogant and given the chance would like very much to treat me very badly. So why do you deserve a reprieve?
Simple. You’re incredible in bed, and I’m probably in love with you. Because I'm dumb like that.
“No good, huh?” I mused, tousling his hair. “Hey, don’t worry about it. We’ll work something out.”
He looked a little surprised.
“Will we?” His brow furrowed. “What sort of something?” With a look that hoped I meant what he thought I meant, even if it meant he’d be volunteering himself for missions unknown in territories unexplored and dark. That look of anticipation stirred my juices as much as ever it had. That, and the thought of those fingers, and that tongue, and the question of whether he was worth keeping around just for that. Was it even a question? Worth it for anything and everything I’d ever wanted from a boy, whenever and wherever I wanted it?
“Something... mutually acceptable.”

Beth tossed the little book away. It had served its purpose.

“Come on, boy. You’ve got work to do.” Her intent was unmistakeable. Anything and everything. Now.

“On top of all these cutesy stuffed animals?”

I liked the idea, don’t get me wrong. I was just looking for confirmation. Nothing like a cry of ‘Not on Mr Cuddles!!!’ midway through the throes of passion to royally fuck the moment. Believe me, I have been that soldier. The crap that first year girls (occasionally up to third year girls) fill their bedrooms with is still astonishing. And there’s nothing like a Garfield in the small of the back when being ridden reverse-cowgirl to concentrate the mind, if not require the osteopath.

“Especially on top of all these cutesy fucking stuffed animals,” she demanded, tugging off her jeans. “Look, I’m even wearing my My Little Pony knickers... hey, you can say I’m sick but you can’t say I’m not committed.”

“Why the hell do you have My Little Pony knickers?”

“Because they were out of Rainbow Brite ones,” she replied, as if if was the most obvious answer in the world. “The real question is, what the hell are they doing selling them as size six G-strings…”

We didn’t get to the bottom of that conundrum, but we did have particularly excellent sex, no doubt enhanced by the deeply textured layers of wrong which my girl had carefully lathered all over the experience. Afterwards, she rested her head on my chest and traced her fingertips in little circles and spirals on my breastbone. It was as close to post-coital cuddling as we’d ever found ourselves, at least in the Second Coming (ahem) of our relationship. After a few moments of lovely naked silence she asked me what I was thinking, which was always a mistake.

“Which of us is the most messed up,” I admitted.

“In general, or…”

“Sexually, mainly,” I clarified, though it’d be just as fair to extend the analysis.

Beth smiled. “Any conclusions?”

“Not really,” I conceded. “In fairness, I think it’s probably a score draw.”

“I can accept that,” she offered. “Sounds like your friends Emily and Mikey…”

I rolled my eyes. I could guess what sorts of questions that was leading to.

“I’d probably have hated being called Mikey too,” I remarked.

A little more lovely naked silence.

“Well?”

“Well what?”

“You know what I want to know. How much truth, how much fiction?”

I laughed. “You’ll be disappointed to hear that both Lauren and I managed to pay all our bills pretty much on time. And we only fell into bed two or three times, all but one of which was after we’d stopped living together. She was writing then though, I think. Seems to have a talent for it.”

“Writes from experience...” Beth teased. “In fact, the more I think about it, she does tend to re-use certain characters. Certain male characters... “Then, with a self-conscious giggle, admitted she’d read more than a few of her stories. “Usually in compilations, stuff like this… I mean, it’s not like I go looking for her stuff.”

“Avid reader are we, Bethany?”

“Not a lot. A bit.” She was seriously cute when she was embarrassed, particularly embarrassed and trying to lie, badly. “Hey, you’re a boy, you’re visual. I’m a girl, I’m literal. You like pictures. I like words. Creates the same result in the end, doesn’t it?” Verging on blushing, she changed topic. “Can’t believe you only slept with her three times, after all that.”

“Can’t believe you’re disappointed.”

“I’m not. Not as much as you are,” she replied.

“Not really,” I frowned. “Lauren was fun, but she wasn’t my type.”

“She was you in a skirt,” Beth ventured.

“Absolutely not,” I responded. “She never wore skirts. Too girly.” I laughed. “She’s settled down now though. Married. Maybe kids, not sure. Even moving into proper, respectable, non-erotic chick lit, as far as I understand…”

“Yeah,” Beth replied, indicating a shiny new book-spine on the shelf opposite, “but it’s still pretty full-on.”

“That’s a problem?”

“It is when a certain someone’s mother sees it on their daughter’s bookshelf, and needs to recommend something for her church book club…” A real blush that time. “She’d be a lot more mortified if she knew her former-potential-future-son-in-law was one of the protagonists…”

“Don’t tell me I’ve been given another run?” I grinned.

Beth wavered her hand in the air; maybe, maybe not. “Could be you, could be someone else. Hard to say definitively. I might have, um, visualised him as you… but I’m sick in the head, so don’t take my word for it.”

“Has she made me into a bastard again?” I wondered, with a bemused smile.

“You’ll have to judge for yourself,” she replied, eyes sparkling. “If you like, we’ll have our own book club session, compare notes and draw our own conclusions after we’ve read through thoroughly.”

“Individually?”

“No, together,” she replied, as though I was developmentally challenged. “How the hell are we supposed to make the most of the fun bits if we read it individually?”

“Good point,” I reasoned. “Not technically a book club,” I added, “more an excuse to read dirty books together.”

“That’s a problem?”

“Not at all. I can be non-visual if you like. Literal is good for me too…”

Beth went back to tracing abstract impressionist art into the light patina of sweat – hers and mine – on my chest. Suddenly, she laughed. Not happily, either. Bitterly.

“What?”

“I’m not dealing well with this, am I?” she marvelled. “I’m really quite shit at it.”

“At what?”

“At this,” she reiterated. “At dealing with you suddenly turning into a fucking rock star with so many notches in your belt it’d a wonder your pants stay on. Oh yeah, that’s right, they don’t.” She scratched her fingernails into my chest, not to hurt me, just to channel her own frustration. “It’s not your problem, it’s mine. I know I’m the latest in a very long line. I’m not the first and almost definitely not the last. I’ll stop fixating on it. And it’d be nice if you remembered me after, but I’ll understand when you don’t.”

“You going somewhere?”

“You are,” she reminded me. “Moving house, moving job. Back to reality. Your reality, anyway. Back to the models and soapie starlets… and athletes, and music journalists, and erotic fiction authors…” She realised I wasn’t really enjoying this line of conversation. “I’m sorry. Like I say, it’s my problem. It’s my ego, or whatever I have instead of one. I’d just like to think I made some sort of mark on you that might stand to comparison with Mia Lauren, or Olivia Kane, or that girl from Hi-5…”

I shook my head. “Never scored any of Hi-5, though one of the blokes looked a bit keen one ARIA afterparty… no, that was a gossip column beatup. Don’t believe everything Google or Wiki tell you. Though I did date one of the Wiggly Dancers though, does that count? Really nice girl. She was understudy to the girl who played Wags the Dog…”

“Great, so you’re a Furry as well? I knew I shouldn’t have let you in here with the stuffed animals…”

“One, that’d make me a Plushy, and two, she never wore the outfit out of business hours.”

“Even so,” she maintained, “you’re still a starfucker. What about that newsreader, that was a media beat-up too I suppose? Or both of the Veronicas? At once?”

“I was quoted out of context,” I replied. “Wishful thinking on my part mainly...”

She went on to rattle off a couple of other names, which our lawyers would prefer were let go through to the keeper, on the basis that they’d probably rather not be implicated in this tawdry muck. We rejoin after that seamless edit: “…Or Brooke Van.. thingy… the beach volleyballer who got in trouble for getting her clothes off for Ralph before Beijing, even though half the Olympic team had done the same for Black+White before Athens and Sydney…”

“I heard that,” I remarked. “She’s changed then, she used to be more uptight than an uptight thing on an uptight day. Most socially conservative woman I’ve ever dated, very old-school values. Made a mockery of the handkerchief and dental floss outfit she had to wear on court…”

“To be fair, she was wearing much the same in Ralph, just in different colours. My point is…”

“That I’m a slut. Yes?”

“No. Well, yes. But no, my point is… it’s a little intimidating, yeah?”

“What, for an ex-ballerina, former-AIS-scholarship-gymnast, Pilates instructor superbabe?” I quipped. “It’s just spin. The whole celebrity thing’s bollocks. They were just humans, just a bunch of girls I dated a bunch of years ago. All with a bunch of different quirks and neuroses which, combined with my own, meant I didn’t last more than a few months with any of them. They’re not even my favourite ex-girlfriends…”

“You have favourite ex-girlfriends?”

“Of course,” I remarked. “They’re usually the normal ones, and usually the ones who left me, rather than the other way around. I get that whole unrequited love thing going on. Hey look, I’m pretty sure that a certain ballerina-gymnast-sex-kitten still holds the all-time record for putting up with me in a long term relationship. That’s the mark you’ve left right there. The benchmark.”

“I thought we said we weren’t going to discuss the Dark Ages,” she replied. “I don’t know who you were in a relationship with, but it wasn’t me.”

“The Dark Ages,” I mused. “Nice.”

“Well, what do you want to call it? Two people pretending to love each other for mutual convenience. At least if we’d gotten married for tax purposes or Austudy it’d have been more legitimate.”

“So what’s this?” I asked.

“What else? The Age of Enlightenment,” she said with a little smile. “Nowhere near as long as the Dark Ages, but what burns the brightest, illuminates the most, even though it’s around the shortest, yeah?” She touched her fingertip to my lips. “Like your band,” she continued. “How many albums in five years? Four? Five? You said what you had to say, then disappeared in a ball of flame. Better to burn out than rust out. Compared to bands like U2 or AC/DC who’ve just been releasing the same album for the last twenty or thirty years…”

“Hey. I like AC/DC.”

“I know,” she said, “I’m deliberately winding you up ‘cos you’re cute when you’re angry.”

The Age of Enlightenment. I liked that. Not sure I liked the symbolism, particularly that around it all coming to an end sometime soon, but I liked the concept.

“Look, Beth,” I began, “what’s the point in any of this? What difference does it make? It’s not as though I sit around dwelling over guys you used to date at uni or whatever…”

“There’s not that many of them,” she replied, “and they’re very unspectacular. Nor are they listed on Wikipedia. And I’m not dwelling, or stewing, or fretting, or anything. It’s just… like I say, it’s something I’m taking a bit of time to understand. So I tend to ask a lot of stupid or invasive questions that sound like I’m obsessing, but really, I’m just trying to figure you out from the sum total of all the other experiences the global sisterhood has had with you.”

“And what’s the sum total saying so far?”

“Run,” she laughed. “Run like hell, he’s an arrogant selfish bastard.”

I nodded. “Pretty much what I thought they were saying about me.”

I’d missed the lovely naked silence, and here it was again. Even more lovely because the sparkle in Beth’s eyes was returning. Not just the regular shine, this was the several-carat sparkle that foretold fun naughty stuff might be in my immediate future. Also returning was my ability to do something about it.

“I’m going to regret saying this, I know. But I’ll say it anyway, and maybe you understand why now.” She crawled onto me and slithered my body so we were face to face, eye to eye. “Everything you’ve ever done to a girl, I want you to do to me. And everything you’ve ever wanted to.”

I didn’t really have much to say to that. Trying to figure out if I knew what that actually meant, and the full ramifications thereof. Everything? Even the stuff Lauren did? Not to mention the stuff she wanted to do?

“…Just warn me about the really funky stuff beforehand, OK?” she added.

I cleared my throat. “Um, we could be here for a while,” I pointed out. “And we’re lacking a bunch of stuff. Off the top of my head, we don’t have a trapeze, a Hills Hoist, a trampoline, or a washing machine on spin cycle…”

She giggled. “Not tonight. Well, not everything tonight. As much as you think you can manage before the fun police arrive home. I know you’re not as young as you once were…”

“And the rest?”

“We’ve got time,” she reasoned. “We’ve got an entire Age, after all. I’m twenty-five and it’s like I’ve only just discovered sex for the first time. Like Kylie Minogue being corrupted by Michael Hutchence…” She pulled a face. “Just so I know, everything doesn’t include autoerotic asphyxiation, does it?”

I grinned. “No,” I said in a strangled voice, grasping a hand over my throat. “Or at least you’ll have to… find… out… uhhhhhhh….”

Apparently, according to stuff, Kylie wasn’t as pure as the driven when Hutcho got to her. Apparently, the whole story that she was a sweet innocent little flower who Captain Leather Pants utterly defiled (if not deflowered) with the rank excess of his rock-god perversions, was a bit of a beat-up. Likewise, given Beth’s active, well-researched imagination, I doubted there was much I could show her that would genuinely surprise, shock or astonish. Like Emily and Mikey, deciding which of us was the more corrupted, or the more corruptible, was kinda pointless. But there was always worth in carrying out the experiment and not trying to make too many presumptions...