“She’s a cow! A real fucking cow!” Prissy exclaimed, blowing smoke into the air of the pub where the wisping blue vapour was sucked into the smoke extractor. “I don’t know why I stick with her!”

“Me too!” agreed Cath. “My Jayne’s so fucking uptight. All she fucking wants to do is sit in and watch telly.”

“So, you ditching her then, Cath?” Emily wondered. “You know, like you said you would?”

Cath coughed. She didn’t really want to diss her lover like that. After all, Jayne had been real sweet to her today. And last night, when they were in bed together, Cath knew it was love she felt for her older partner. But then if there was any girl whose knickers she’d like to pull down and whose pussy she’d adore putting her tongue to, it was Emily.

“Yeah!” she said, not really convincing even herself, and flicking the ash from her ciggie into the ashtray. “Yeah, I reckon I will. But she still licks clit like a champion.”

“So does my Tina,” agreed Prissy, smiling at her two friends, balancing her cigarette between her forefinger and thumb. “But she’s a fucking cow, all the same.” She looked at Emily with a sneery smile. “So you still between lovers, sweetheart?”

“Yeah!” said Emily, brushing her fingers through her short hair so that it stood up in the thick gel. “But that doesn’t stop my love life. No fucking way! I’m having more fun now than I ever had when I was with Marlene. I don’t miss a day since I ditched her. She still phones me up and all. I guess she wants her k. d. lang CDs back, but, fuck it, she’s not gonna have them. Nor her Polly Harveys.”

“What’s it like talking to her?” wondered Cath, afraid that her interest might betray her own true feelings for Jayne. “You’n’her were real close. A real item. You’d been living together for years!”

“Well, she gets real blubbery on the phone. Still cries and everything. Like a fucking baby. She’s a fucking embarrassment. I don’t regret ditching her at all. And it’s great having the flat to myself again. I can invite back whoever I like. Y’ought to put your money where your mouth is, Cath. Ditch Jayne. I mean, she must be fucking forty or something!”

“Thirty-seven next month,” said Cath, almost instantly aware that this concern about her partner’s birthday said more than she’d intended. She didn’t want Emily to think she didn’t want to go back with her to her newly vacated flat.

“Well, whatever! She’s too fucking old for you. And it’s not like when you got your own place you don’t get pussy. I mean, you know that Sally…”

“Sally!” Prissy exclaimed with a laugh. “You didn’t, did you? She’n’Pat, I thought they were welded at the hips!”

“Fucking femme fanny! Good she was. And d’you know, she’s got this cute little ring in her clit and guess what else?”

“What? She got pierced nipples as well?”

“No. A tattoo just over her shaved pussy.”

“A tattoo! Fucking hell!” Prissy remarked, leaning forward, her face ever so close to Emily’s. This irritated Cath who wanted to be the one getting that intimate. And who wanted to be the one who placed a hand on Emily’s thigh almost bursting to get free from those deliciously tight jeans.

“It’s kind of like a love token. It’s a tattoo that reads ‘Pat’ in kind of Gothic script. They must have been together since they were goths or something.”

“I remember that! Fucking black jumpers and eye-liner and everything!” Cath said.

“You were a bit like that once, if I recall,” said Prissy, with not such a pleasant smile. “You used to be into all that goth shit.”

“Yeah! Well, that was years ago!” said Cath, fuming from Prissy’s unsubtle reminder.

“Whatever!” said Emily, who wanted the conversation steered back to her sexual triumphs. “So, it wasn’t just Sally I ate out. It was also Pat as well. And fucking tasty, it was too!”

“Oh! You lucky bitch!” Prissy shrieked. “I’ve always wanted a taste of Sally. She’s such a pretty girl! Wooh! Those lips of hers! It makes my pussy drip just thinking about her.”

Emily placed a reciprocating hand on Prissy’s bare knee below the culottes she wore. “It’s not dripped down this far!” she said with a conspiratorial laugh.

“It wouldn’t take much to get me moist, sweetie!” Prissy said. She took her hand off Emily’s thigh, pressed it hard on her hand and dug the fingers into the thick flesh.

Shit! Cath could see where this was going. When Emily had phoned up to say she was going down to the Half Moon in Clapham and could Cath come along, she’d made no mention of Prissy being there. All that wasted anticipation on the tube, stop after stop on the Northern Line, for what? She wished she’d not been so nasty now to Jayne when they’d parted. It looked like she was going to have another evening where she’d return to her lover only to admit there really was no one else in her life than Jayne and her beautiful breasts.

Well, fuck it! Cath grimaced as she pulled out another cigarette, now feeling quite excluded while Prissy and Emily continued their rather detailed account of Emily’s lovemaking. She loved Jayne. She might be twelve years or so older, but theirs was a love worth more than an evening in Emily’s bed. However much she rationalised about it, she still felt deprived of the fun she’d promised herself and the prospect of which she’d so enjoyed taunting Jayne with.

She surveyed the pub around her. Why had Emily insisted on coming to a place like this where three young women with short hair and uncompromising swagger would only look out of place? It wasn’t that Emily was in any sense ashamed of her sexual preference, but this was no dyke bar. Most of the clientele were men, and the few women were generally in mixed company. In fact, the only other group of women unaccompanied by brutish men, sitting in front of their Bacardis and Coke, were probably the least sympathetic of anyone to Cath and her friends. She stubbed out her cigarette and let her ears focus again on Emily’s boasting, this time about some cute girl she’d seduced on the Central Line.

“It was only when I kissed her she knew what the game was,” she laughed. “Sometimes a girl just can’t see what’s coming however bloody obvious you think it is!”

“And did you?” Prissy wondered.

“It was fucking touch and go, I can tell you! I could see she was wet. Well, you can, can’t you? But I had to be subtle. Push too hard and a girl runs away. But, yeah, it only took a few drinks in the New Inn and having to listen to her moans about her fucking boyfriend, and we were back at my place. Not the best pussy I’ve tasted, but better than my vibrator.”

Would Cath get to taste Emily’s vagina? It seemed increasingly unlikely. She remembered Marlene’s comments about how Emily shaved it sometimes. Would Emily be shaving it now? Or was she sporting a full bush? It didn’t look like Cath would ever find out.

“’Scuse us!” Cath announced heading off to the loo. Perhaps if she brushed her short hair, maybe re-applied that natural-look lipstick that gave her lips that seductive pout, Emily might see that of she and Prissy, it was Cath who was the most deserving.

Her hopes rose as she admired herself in the toilet mirror. She’d made such an effort. That new micro-check shirt she’d bought. The hip-hugging jeans she’d spent nearly a hundred quid on. The leather jacket with the silk lining that she only wore on special occasions.

It was obvious when she returned to the bar that it was going to be Prissy, not she, who would get to know Emily better tonight.

“You don’t mind, do you?” said Emily with a barely disguised smirk, “but I feel real tired. You know, these late nights can really fuck you up!”

“And I only live down the road,” said Prissy. “Shame you’ve got such a long trek back up North. You really ought to move down here some time. South London’s really happening, you know.”

“’Specially round Battersea. When you ditch Jayne, give it a chance. It’ll be worth it!”

Cath was left alone in the bar, vulnerable and lonely, watching Prissy and Emily leave together, not caring at all what people thought of them as they put their arms around each other. With the last dregs of her wine, Cath was beginning to care very much what the other people in the bar thought of her. Could they see the mortification burning off her cheeks?

She pulled out a cigarette and hid herself behind the comforting veil of smoke while she fumed in equal measures of disappointment and uncertainty as to what to do now. It seemed too early to head back to Clapham Common tube station and the Northern Line.

She glared at the women on the other side of the bar as one of them poured more coke from her bottle into the small glass. She couldn’t very well show herself up in front of them, could she? She’d have another drink, just to show how little she gave a fuck for being abandoned by her friends. Perhaps they’d think she was waiting for another friend.

If only!

Cath stood up and wandered to the bar which was thankfully quite empty and ordered another glass of sweet white wine from the geeky looking barman. She glanced nervously at her leather jacket slung over the chair by the table where she’d been sitting. Perhaps those women would be useful, after all, by keeping an eye on it.

“I’ll pay for that and I’ll have a single bourbon as well while you’re about it,” a man’s voice announced.

Cath turned her head, her first instinct to decline the offer. Men and she didn’t mix, especially one who spoke in such an obvious American accent. He looked at the man who’d made the offer. He was in his mid-thirties, stocky, sporting a grey check jacket and no tie in the buttoned-down collar of his brush cotton shirt. Cath, who had an eye for these things, could see that nothing he wore came cheap.

“Gee! I hope you don’t mind me buying you a drink,” he said with a broad smile, “but I’m an American, as you must have guessed, a New Yorker, and that’s just how we do things. So, don’t feel obliged to do more than take your drink and sit down. I won’t hassle you if you don’t want me to.”

“New York?” asked Cath, despite herself. She’d always wanted to go there, but there’d never been an excuse. Jayne much preferred heading south for the sun. But what tickled her was his accent.

“Yeah. New York. Best city in the world. ‘Cepting London, of course.”

Cath smiled despite herself. It was just like in the movies. ‘Noo Yawk’. The American accent was so funny.

“Yeah, I’m here on business. A lot of business, mind you. My company’s kept me here for a couple of months sorting things out for them. It’s a drag living away from home. So, you a Londoner?”

“Yeah,” said Cath, hesitating between returning to her seat and the fact that there was bugger all for her to do when she got there. She hoped this guy wouldn’t spot the slight Brum accent she’d never quite managed to lose in all the years she’d been in the capital. But an American wouldn’t know the difference, would he?

“Great city, London. And Clapham’s not bad either. This where you live?”

“Islington, really. North London.”

“Gee! I’ve never been there. I’m sure it’s a real cool part of town. By the way, my name’s Gareth. What’s yours?”

“Cath.”

“Well, Cath, I don’t really want to bother you if you don’t want me to, if you’re waiting for a friend and all. I’m just a lonely yank in town who doesn’t know anyone. But it’s been real good meeting you.”

He took the glass of whisky that the barman offered him and handed over a note.

“Have a drink on me, bud.” he said to the barman and handed Cath the glass of wine.

“Not the best vintage,” he continued as Cath picked up the glass and took a small sip. “You sure you don’t want anything better?”

Cath didn’t really know that much about wine. She didn’t drink much normally. “It’s fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

There was an awkward pause while Cath wondered what to do. Just returning to her seat seemed wrong. Gareth smiled and half-turned away. It couldn’t do any harm to be polite could it? It didn’t look like he was trying to pick her up or anything. He’d get a real shock if he thought she was a likely prospect!

“So, where d’you come from in New York?” she asked.

Gareth turned back, a broad grin on her face.

“Manhattan. Lower West Side. I’ve got a great view from my apartment. Do you know New York?”

Cath shook her head. “What’s it like?”

“Well, now you’re asking,” Gareth said with a smile.

He launched into an enthusiastic account of a city that fascinated Cath. It certainly wasn’t only skyscrapers and car chases and Central Park. There was so much to the city. The financial district where he worked. The park where he jogged every day when he could find the time. The very many and varied restaurants. The museums and art galleries. The department stores and theatres. The Rockefeller Center. The Empire State Building. And, most of all, the night life. It was mad. A night life far wilder than Jayne had ever allowed her to have.

And then, Cath didn’t know how it happened, the conversation centred not on New York and the fabulous views from above, looking down at it from the top of the South Tower at the World Trade Center, but on her. And now it was Cath, not Gareth, who was doing most of the talking. And it was like a sudden relief to be able to talk about herself to someone who didn’t know her at all, about things she found difficult to talk about with friends and just as difficult with Jayne.

The conversation wandered along with Cath and Gareth back to where her leather jacket remained untouched on the back of the seat. Gradually, Cath found herself talking about her love life and her discontentment with the limitations on her freedom. Having an older lover really stymied her style. When she went out to nightclubs she couldn’t really go with her lover and she found it difficult to be as free with her body as she’d like to be. But for some reason, although she was specific about Jayne’s age and the way she seemed to get more pleasure from reading books and watching television than snorting lines or dropping pills, she was consciously vague about her lover’s sex. Or even that of the people she chose to have sex with.

“So, you like a line, do you?” Gareth wondered when he returned with another glass of white wine, a rather better quality label than she usually drank. “I take it you mean coke?”

“Yeah. Charlie. Ching. Whatever!” Cath boasted, though in truth she rarely partook. But she wasn’t going to let on.

“I just happen to have some quality Colombian I brought over with me,” Gareth remarked with a smile. “I’m not a cokehead before you say anything. I just like the odd line. It helps a busy day go by better.”

“Colombian?”

“It’s good stuff,” Gareth reassured her. “But you were saying? That deadline you’re working toward?”

Cath returned to her account of the software system she was helping to install, naturally inflating her role in its delivery. As a very junior programmer, or ‘software engineer’ as Gareth flatteringly termed it, she really had a minor part to play. All the while at the back of her mind she was wondering about Gareth’s quality Colombian. It would really piss off Jayne if Cath had a line or two. She was always snotty about any of the drugs Cath took. Even smoking dope in the house was something Cath had to be diplomatic about. She could really boast to her friends what it was like to snort quality coke. She was sure they’d no more real idea what that might mean than she had.

Gareth smiled all the while. Occasionally he interjected an encouraging comment, deliberately accentuating his apparent naïveté. His green eyes sparkled and his smile lit up a face that as Cath’s vision became more clouded with alcohol (how many glasses had she drunk now?) became steadily more reliable and attractive. Cath puffed away at cigarette after cigarette, Gareth steadily sipping his bourbon and refusing the offer of a cigarette himself.

He noticed that Cath’s glass was empty. He indicated it with a finger.

“I’m staying in a condo, company let, a flat the company uses to house its executives when in London, just round the corner from here. It’s only five minutes walk. If you like I’ll let you sample some of Colombia’s finest.”

Cath paused. Was this guy hitting on her? She was normally wary with men. After all, they were the enemy, weren’t they? But it wasn’t as if he’d been trying anything on, was he? And there was plenty of time till the last tube home.

“Yeah! Why not? Let’s see what Colombia’s got to offer.”

Cath was very impressed by Gareth’s flat when they got there. It wasn’t cheap, that was for sure. It had a really grand reception area. And when he opened the door, she could see the place was huge. Everything was just that bit more splendid than she was used to. A massive living room with a widescreen television. A plush leather sofa and armchairs in the living room. And on the walls were framed pictures of English landscapes and views of London.

“If you don’t mind, Cath, could you take your shoes off? The carpet, you know.”

“Oh okay!” Cath agreed, slipping off her moccasins and walking across the thick, luscious pile carpet to the sofa onto which she slumped, her head still fuzzed with wine.

Gareth knelt by the small glass table next to the sofa and began chopping up a line of cocaine with an American Express platinum credit card. He did it with expert promptness, gathering the white powder into four long thin lines. He smiled at Cath and rolled a crisp twenty pound note into a neat straw.

“You first,” he offered.

Cath knelt down and snorted the line through the note. She felt it burn the side of her thin nostrils and the grains pass through the back of her throat. She coughed. Fuck! It was a good hit! Almost instantly she got that weird buzz of clarity that obliterated the fuzziness of alcohol. Although her thoughts now seemed to be in a clear focus she was aware they were really no less scattered than before.

Gareth snorted a line himself with the note and passed it back to Cath. She picked it up, and now with her left nostril, which was a somehow less effective hoover, she snorted it down, stopping briefly half way and then recommencing. Overwhelmed by the impact, she collapsed back on the sofa, somehow unable to do anything more coherent, let alone resume the conversation that had stopped mid-sentence before they entered the flat.

She laid back, a ciggie in her hand, but mostly burning out by itself, its ash dropping in pristine cylinders into the huge ashtray Gareth offered her. As she lay there she became gradually aware of a tickling sensation on her left foot. What the fuck? She looked down, along the leg of her denim jeans, to see Gareth holding her foot in his hands in exactly the pose she imagined Prince Charming would do while evaluating Cinderella’s foot.

“You have beautiful feet, you know,” he remarked with a smile.

“Do I?”

“Beautiful! I’ve always admired a good foot.”

He placed his lips on her big toe.

Cath shivered. But was it from fear, apprehension or something else?

Emboldened, Gareth kissed each toe, one by one, beginning with the big toe and working his way down, slowly and with no haste, to the smallest toe.

“You don’t mind, do you?”

“No. It’s nice,” Cath slurred.

It was true. Her senses felt somehow magnified and there was something very sensuous about those lips on such a sensitive part of her body. It was a part that Jayne rarely explored, and certainly not with the relish with which Gareth continued. Now on each toe of her right foot. And then with his tongue on the web between each toe. Gradually, slowly and surely, he took each toe into his lips, his tongue in and around the nails, the whole of her big toe inside his mouth: a dry and unthreatening fellatio of the toes. That sensation together with the effects of alcohol and cocaine was tickling another part of her, a part she was sure would never get stimulated tonight. Unless, that was, she managed to get home before Jayne fell asleep and she nestled under the duvet next to her, their naked bodies to be entwined in their slumbers.

Fuck it! What was she letting herself in for? Not since she was a kid, long before she was certain of her sexual predisposition, with Mark, who was even more nervous than she, and who made a total mess of the whole thing, had she experienced any part of a man touch any part of her.

“Are you all right?” Gareth asked, as Cath gave vent to an involuntary shudder.

Cath nodded. Somehow, despite the coke, she just couldn’t articulate in words how she felt.

“I’ve got a condom, you know.”

“A what?”

“A condom.”

Cath paused, frozen. What was this guy saying? This wasn’t right at all. She was a lesbian. It was women she adored. Not some hairy Neanderthal brute. She should just draw it to a close now. Get out. Go home. But, on the other hand, fuck it! This would really fuck up Jayne. Especially after Jayne had confessed to her that tearful, hysterical night what she’d done on the beach in Ibiza. Fuck her! Two could play that game. And Gareth wasn’t a bad looking catch really. For a bloke, that is.

And it wasn’t like she was going to be making love with Emily, anyway.

“Yeah!” said Cath languidly. “Whatever. Why the fuck not?”

She tugged off her jeans, a more difficult exercise than she remembered from last time she’d spent the night with anyone other than Jayne, and then unbuttoned her shirt. She sat on the sofa in only her cotton knickers and bra while Gareth stripped down to his crisp white boxer shorts.

“The bedroom,” he suggested, nodding to an open door.

“Yeah, right!” agreed Cath, undoing her bra and dropping it to the ground as she followed Gareth.

Gareth took his boxers off and laid them neatly by the side of the bed. She slipped off her knickers to lie on the sheets on the huge mattress, its duvet pushed to one side. She was now totally naked, her thick thatch of pubic hair on full display, as she regarded Gareth. It was the first time she’d seen a naked man in the flesh for an extremely long time. Not since she was a kid, really. And this was quite an odd sight. A trim form, but a waist as wide as a chest adorned with a bush of curly hair, hairy legs and, strangest of all, an erect penis where normally Cath expected to see nothing at all.

Thankfully it wasn’t that large. Or was it? Cath was ill-informed in that respect. Nothing, anyway, compared to the strap-on she and Jayne sometimes used. And nothing at all compared to the dildo they kept in the cupboard for extra special occasions. It was strange to see something connected physically with the body and twitching in such a peculiar way.

She let her head fall back on the pillow and let her thoughts wander as she felt Gareth recommence slowly and with no rush his circuit of her body from her toes to her crotch. His lips puckered and kissed their way up her thighs and burrowed into the hair around her vagina.

When Gareth finally penetrated her, it almost came as a surprise. Cath had become so accustomed to his tongue, lips and fingers as they stroked and lapped over her that she’d almost forgotten where the end of all this foreplay was meant to lead. On the journey she became looser, moist even, enjoying the nibbling of her coke-enhanced clitoris, glad he kept his tongue and stubbled chin away from her face.

It was a different sensation to strap-on sex. The penis was so warm and had a kind of plasticity that no dildo ever had. Her vulva had become so sensitive that she fancied she could even feel the veins on his penis throbbing as it slid back and forth so easily in her moist inner caverns.

Was she enjoying it?

Perhaps. Though she preferred to keep her eyes off Gareth, reminded as she was just who was fucking her, imagining to herself not only Emily’s body, naked and smooth, seeing at last those perky breasts that contrasted so much with Cath’s smaller, large nippled ones, but also, as so often when she was unfaithful, Jayne’s body and those breasts that fell so heavily on hers in the throes of their passion.

Then her body lost all tension and she pulled herself up and grasped Gareth around the chest, his arms sympathetically grabbing her shoulders as that familiar release of animal passion returned. Her thrusts reciprocated his, just as they did when Jayne pushed that realistic, perhaps idealistic, plastic toy inside her. For a few moments she didn’t care who was fucking her, man or woman, as she surrendered herself to animal passion.

At last, they parted and Cath watched with amused interest as Gareth removed the silvery condom from his now much smaller penis, a string of semen trailing from his foreskin to the aperture that had once been so tight on the erect member. It hadn’t been as smooth as that with Mark. In fact, on that occasion, it was only the second or third condom he’d unwrapped that had ever served any useful function at all.

She lay back and studied the ceiling, which was not nearly as high above her head as the one in Cath and Jayne’s flat in Islington. Nor was there that glorious rose around the light shade that she and Jayne loved to discuss as they lay back after their exertions.

As she usually did after making love, Cath began talking about so many things. The women in the pub who she thought had been sneering at her. The way she felt so cheated when Emily and Prissy had left her with only the company of a few sips of wine and a packet of cigarettes. The differences between the huge bed that dominated this correspondingly large bedroom and the one in her own bedroom. As she chatted she became increasingly aware that it was more a monologue than a dialogue she was engaged in. Unlike Jayne, or indeed most of the women she’d made love to, Gareth was almost entirely silent. He lay on his back, his arm around Cath’s thin shoulders, only occasionally grunting in response.

Fuck! That wasn’t right. Almost the best part of making love was the excited conversation afterwards that so often led to a reprise, or a series of them, of the lovemaking that preceded them.

“I need a fag,” Cath announced.

“Go ahead!” Gareth murmured, slumped in apparent exhaustion.

“Okay!” said Cath wandering into the lounge still naked and relishing the texture of pile carpet between her toes.

As she sat on the sofa, contemplating whether it wasn’t too late for her to catch a tube home or to spend the night in Gareth’s decidedly welcoming bed, she also wondered whether this moment of heterosexual love might indicate that, after all, she should be less discriminating in future about the gender of whomsoever she made love with.

Although she concluded she should cut her losses and spend the night with Gareth, more to worry Jayne than from any sexual desire, it was the sight of a man’s body naked with a now useless penis flopped on a thigh that resolved it for her.

Men might be fun when the going was good, but they were fucking useless afterwards.