LITMIR.BIZ

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disappointment you’ve so often felt. How many women get the chance to do this, with a man, to break their virginity? It must be utterly memorable for him, something to savour for the rest of his life.

      You tell him you want him to lick you, slowly, the inside of your wrist, and you push up your sleeve like a junky preparing for her first shot. Gabriel looks at you. He bends, hesitant. His tongue tip glides up your skin in one even, barely there line. Your eyes close, you let out a small gasp, his tongue stops. You take off his jacket, you unbutton his shirt, you find him, his vulnerability. His chest is cathedral-wide and your hands span its breadth like the vaults of a ceiling and you feel his galloping heart and you place your right palm over it, reading the race of it. He smells clean, pleasantly so, you can’t catch anything of his real scent. His body is young, not quite finished, it feels strangely untouched, maybe it’s the hesitancy in him, he’s all caged up. Your lips walk the softness of his inner arm, slowly, daddy-long-legs-soft, climbing the paleness. You look up and smile reassurance and for some reason you hold his head like a mother with a child and he begins to say something and ssssh, you whisper, no talk and you hold his face in the clamp of your palms and he’s concentrating so much, so intent, ssshh you whisper, ssshh, and kiss him slowly as if all the world’s tenderness is gathered in that touch and as you do it your hands snake softly to the eroticism of his hips.

      You kneel, unbuckle his belt.

      

      His penis curves gently to one side, it’s large; it always surprises you how big they can get. He is looking down at you, he is breathing fast.

      You hold him, you lick him, soft, so silky soft, the tip.

      He laughs nervously, he can’t relax. He tries to push you off. You propel him, gently and firmly, on to his bed, on his back. Remove your clothes, quick; wet, so wet.

      You sit, very slowly, on to him.

      Ease down, slowly, feel him all the way. And then you just sit, for a moment, you are filled up and you smile into his eyes and very slowly you tighten your muscles and gather him inside you: you feel Gabriel with your skin. He looks at you, all wonder and surrender and shock, and you throw your head back, you can’t look at him any more, you need to savour this moment alone. You keep on moving on him, slowly, rhythmically, with your eyes shut, ssh, you tell him, sssh, as he begins to say something, as you talk to him through your skin, you lean forward, you brush your fingertip on his lips, sssssh.

      And then he comes.

      He’s appalled; it’s so quick.

      You smile, you stay sitting on him, feeling him in you, feeling him go soft. This, too, is delectable. Your hands fan upwards on his belly and his chest, savouring his surprisingly soft skin, untouched for so long by any other woman and you bow your head and kiss him, in gratitude, on the cleft of his neck. You didn’t orgasm, you didn’t learn anything new but it’s a start, a lovely one: for it’s the very first time you’ve been totally in control. Woemen bare rule over men.

      You climb off him. Stretch languidly, your palms turned to the sky as if they want to push it up. You feel like a cat on a favourite armchair it’s never usually allowed on, thrumming with warmth and sunlight.

      

      Gabriel rolls over on to his stomach. You walk across to him, lie beside him; your fingertips slip over each bump of his spine.

      There was another time, he says, without looking at you. Your hand stops. It was my twenty-first, he says. I got drunk. My parents had thrown a big party for me. There was this girl, just some girl, a family friend, she was drunk, too, and we went up to a bedroom at the top of the house. But as I tried to go inside her I just…went limp. All I could hear was Clare’s laughter. I couldn’t go on.

      You wing your arm across him, you squeeze his shoulder. Gabriel turns to you, he props his body on one side with his hand on his cheek.

      So…thanks, he says, awkward, shy. Then there’s a pause, and his impishness slipping back. What happens next?

      You shake your head, you cover your eyes, you laugh: no, no no, we have to stop, all right?

      Excuse me, madam, but you are not leaving this flat.

       Lesson 71

       those who eat too much should remember that they are robbing those who have not enough

      Walking by the river to the tube.

      The Thames the colour of cold milky tea.

      Feeling intensely alive, as if years have been stripped from your body. Feeling engorged between your legs, plumped, softened, filled up. Smiling into the impatient dusk and flitting your fingers to your nose at the cocktail of smell, at the stamp of two bodies upon them.

      Feeling as exhilarated as a teenager who’s just finished the last of her exams, and the glorious stretch of the summer holiday is ahead of her.

      

      But that night you’re awake, vastly awake as Cole presses his trusting warmth into you. His hand rests on your hip and your eyes are owl-wide with this appetite for something else unleashed, it’s all violent and terrible and exhilarating within you. Did Theo ever feel like this? Did she have guilt? Would she now happily resume her life? For you’d dreamt not so long ago of one transgression, just one, stemming the tide of marital disintegration and flushing you out, so you could begin, afresh, your married life; and never look back.

      Your teeth nibble at a stubborn flap of skin on your lip, they nibble until there’s a warm rush of blood in your mouth.

       Lesson 72

       it is everyone’s duty to be kind to and help her fellows as much as possible

      So it begins.

      A weekday afternoon. Once a week. Always Gabriel’s flat.

      You’re a good teacher, you always have been, and now after years of being the good teacher you don’t want to just give, you want something back. There’s one condition, you make it clear from the start: this arrangement must not, in any way, intrude upon your regular life. It’s the only way you can make it work. When the lessons come to their end you will both disappear back into your worlds so that in the future, if you ever pass by chance on the street, you will not acknowledge each other or what you have done during these weekday afternoons in his flat. This will free you to explore exactly what you want. There’ll be no photographs, no letters, nothing concrete about any of it, nothing to seize as proof. Memory is all that either of you will be allowed to keep. The rules come quickly and clearly, and make it easier to justify what you’re doing.

      

      Once a week. It’s the only time you meet. For the rest of your waking hours you feast on the memory of what you’ve done.

      The throb of that.

      

      He opens the door in his suit, always, as if he’s just come from work. The air in his flat smells of inner London, of too much traffic standing still and the taste of iron is in your mouth. Business people walk by his ground-floor window, chatting on their mobiles, in their clattering heels and brisk shoes. It makes the lessons seem more wilful, childish, indulgent, like a sunny afternoon stolen from work, spent, secretly, at a film. But worse, much worse.

      

      So, week by week. Slowly, you do not hurry. You feel you have all the time in the world to savour each other, having rushed in with that first, miraculous fuck: it was just a start. There’s so much to learn, now. For both of you, for as you teach him you’ll be teaching yourself although he doesn’t have to know that.

      A rough agenda is set.

      One, the removal of clothes. You learn his skin, inch by inch. He, yours.

      Two,

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