Emma’s new role in Harlot TV took her out of the studio background and into active involvement in the television station’s output, and, in recognition of her advocacy of the station, she was promoted to the title of Executive Producer. She was now involved in the executive decision‑making activities of many of the station’s new programmes, in particular those which she had recommended on the basis of her research.

She had also been given a company car, ‑ a luxury which she didn’t really need in a city with good public transport. But she was very grateful for not having to travel to work by underground and having to dress for the occasion. Now she was able to take her nudity with her to the garage attached to the flat, along the slow‑moving traffic, where she avoided the voyeuristic glances of other commuters, and from the television station’s underground car park to the studio. All she ever needed to wear were a pair of sandals to protect her feet from chafing on the pedals.

Much of her work was involved in the production of St. Denis Road, a soap opera that Emma had suggested to the board on the basis of the statistics she’d gathered on the international sales of sex programmes. She’d ascertained that sex soap operas were always initially quite expensive to set up, but that those which reached a certain standard found a ready and profitable international market. She also made suggestions on the structure of the programmes to permit efficient editing to meet different standards for different stations and, indeed, different countries. In many cases, this might involve shooting different versions of the same scene.

The suggested method was that certain regular parts of the programme would consist of sex scenes which could be defended as integral to the story (so that Harlot TV could fulfil the conditions of its 4X status). However, the filming of these scenes would be designed such that particularly explicit scenes could be removed in their entirety so that an edited version of the scene could be broadcast without affecting the series’ continuity. Furthermore, to ensure that the soap opera remained interesting even after the total removal of penetration, semen, oral and anal shots, it was necessary to have sufficient soft core titillation between such scenes. The general atmosphere of the soap opera was, therefore, of rather coy and playful scenes: where for instance water would be spilt on a woman’s chest and thereby requiring removal of her top, or a penis would be caught in a fly, interspersed by much harder scenes which could contain urination in the mouth, anal sex or double entry but could be removed without too much plot discontinuity.

One innovation, which quite pleased Emma, was to introduce children to the cast so that the programme could attract an audience of special interest without actually doing anything illegal. The justification was that as the soap opera was intended as an account of a normal suburban street, there would necessarily be children. As long as they were never touched by an adult and there was no hint of sexual activity, the children could be filmed having a bath, going to bed and sitting on the beach where nudity was relatively natural. Emma was convinced that the market for such coy child erotica would maximise the soap opera’s attraction and thereby its sales.

There were about half a dozen children in the series, from about eight to fifteen years of age. The fifteen year old boy and his fourteen year old girlfriend were permitted to kiss and even be filmed naked together, but the letter of the law was strictly observed. No close‑up crotch shots. No touching of breasts or genitals. No explicit discussion of sex. There were two boys of eight and thirteen, and two girls of fifteen and twelve. The fifteen year old girl was particularly fond of taking showers and of sporting activities like swimming and racing which normally don’t require wearing clothes.

The twelve year old girl, Maisie, was also often to be filmed without clothes, but Emma was intrigued to see that, unlike the other child actors, she didn’t immediately slip on her clothes after filming. She behaved totally naturally without clothes and often when the set was finished the only two characters still naked would be Emma and Maisie. Maisie had a slender frame which had lost its childhood tummy but hadn’t yet developed any breasts or pubic hair. Her dark hair was cut into a bob and her nose shone appealingly between apple‑shaped cheeks in a perpetually cheery face.

Emma immediately developed an affection for Maisie, perhaps because her natural nudity reminded her of when she first developed her naturist tendencies in childhood. She also remembered the somewhat less than sympathetic response of her parents when they became aware of her policy of nudity except when absolutely necessary. “Aren’t you thoroughly ashamed of yourself?” her mother would say. Perhaps Maisie would also need encouragement in her tendencies. Or at least a balance to the discouragement she might normally receive. At Harlot TV, however, nudity was no problem and nobody treated Maisie at all differently than was Emma herself.

After shooting an episode of the soap opera one afternoon, Emma was walking through the foyer towards the lift to the underground garage when she saw Maisie sitting on a chair in a sweet blue dress with white ankle socks reading a comic book. Emma wandered up to her.

“Are you waiting for someone?” she asked kindly.

Maisie looked up and smiled that beautiful little smile that Emma found endearing. “Not really. It’s just that my train only arrives once an hour and I’ve got absolutely ages to wait.”

“Oh, that’s alright!” said Emma, almost without thinking. “I’ve got a car. I can drive you home.”

“But I live miles away.”

“That’s no problem,” Emma said reassuringly.

And so Emma took Maisie down to her car, and drove Maisie to her home in the very outer suburbs which was actually a great problem getting to. The journey was a long haul through urban traffic where traffic lights frustrated any good spurt of movement. However, talking to Maisie took Emma’s mind off the journey. She’d never thought that the appeal of comic book characters, pop stars, school lessons or school friends could be so fascinating.

Maisie’s mother was a teacher at the local Further Education College and had divorced her father. Maisie had always been very keen on acting and her mother had been the one who’d encouraged Maisie to attend the audition for the part in St. Denis Road. She smiled cheekily. No, she didn’t think her mother really appreciated the sex content of the soap opera. Yes, she enjoyed working on it and she loved watching herself on television. Her mother had insisted however she shouldn’t tell her school‑friends about what exactly it was she was acting in, but that didn’t matter because none of her friends had ever heard of Harlot TV anyway.

Emma eventually arrived at Maisie’s home in a pleasant tree‑lined suburban street. She sat in the car, while Maisie got out and thanked her for the lift. Yes, she’d love a lift next time: it saved her train fare and loads of time. Emma watched Maisie go to her front door and briefly saw her mother: a woman in her late thirties with a thin face and mousey brown hair. She watched Maisie enter the house and felt a strange spasm of sadness as Maisie waved goodbye.

Emma drove back to her flat (a journey that took well over an hour), and on the way her thoughts were on Maisie. Such a sweet girl! she thought. When she got home, she found Charlotte in the front room watching a film by herself on the movie channel. “Hiya,” she said wandering over to the kitchen to prepare a small dinner (she didn’t feel hungry somehow). Then she went back and nestled against Charlotte. Charlotte was a little surprised, but responded by gently wrapping her arm round Emma’s shoulders.

Charlotte seemed much happier these days, Emma surmised. She knew that she had a new friend, but they never talked about it much. At first, Emma thought it was one of Sarah or Penelope who she’d known had been particularly interested in Charlotte, but it became fairly obvious that it was neither of them. Whoever it was, Emma didn’t care. As long as her best friend was happy, that was all that mattered.

Charlotte and Emma stayed enmeshed together in front of the television. Emma was engrossed in her thoughts but also concerned that Charlotte might think there was something wrong. At least Charlotte didn’t try anything on like she used to do. In fact, Charlotte’s apparent lack of sexual interest was the very reason that, for the first time, the two girls went to the same bed and slept together all night with their naked bodies entwined.

Emma wondered whether it was because Harriett was away abroad that she felt so empty these days. She received a regular flow of short letters and postcards from the different countries that Harriett was being filmed in. It was almost always a surprise to see yet another different postmark on the letter or very different country depicted on the front of a postcard. One week Uzbekistan, the next Slovakia and then maybe Kurdistan or the Kashmir. In all these places, Harriett would describe the sex scenes she’d been filmed in, what special friends she was now making love to and how much she missed Emma. The more passionately Harriett was making love and the more lovers she had, the more she appeared to miss Emma. She’d jogged round Hanoi naked (apparently a great sport in that naturist city). She’d swum naked in the Tigris. She’d made love to a transsexual in Detroit (famous for its sexual variety). It all sounded very exciting and Emma was very conscious of not being part of it.

Harriett’s and Emma’s lovers weren’t visiting so often these days. Susan had come round, but seemed more interested in chatting to Charlotte, who was again out, than anything else. And, no, she wouldn’t make love if she wasn’t being watched. Penelope came occasionally, but extremely irregularly and always unannounced. When Charlotte was in, she and Emma would spend time together, but what Emma wanted from Charlotte, and she emphasised it whenever hands wandered, was friendship not passion. They now always slept in the same bed, but Emma reasoned it was for the warmth and comfort of their bodies. She enjoyed Charlotte’s accounts of Josephine’s stories and was pleased that Charlotte had at last formed a true lasting lesbian relationship. She was surprised that it was one which involved very little of the penetration sex she’d enjoyed with Harriett, let alone bondage, anal or urination, but then Charlotte was a lesbian and Emma wasn’t.

Emma had got into the habit of taking Maisie home from work. In fact, she went considerably out of her way to be available to do so. But then, of course, you can’t leave a child to travel alone on public transport. You heard such stories! Emma shuddered to consider the idea of Maisie being involved in any form of child abuse. Some people (paedophiles or paederasts, she wasn’t sure) are so disgusting! She enjoyed listening to Maisie’s stories about school‑life, the other cast on the set and her mother. She discovered for instance that the fifteen year old boy wasn’t really interested in girls at all, let alone his ‘girlfriend’, and was known to have a relationship with one of the male actors. Also, this ‘girlfriend’ had slept with all the men on the cast and boasted about it. She would say “I’m not yet sixteen but I’ve had more than sixteen good fucks!”

Her mother was a teacher of Communications & Life Skills, English Language and Video Appreciation, and, though apparently a very good teacher, felt frustrated at her lack of career advancement. She had wanted to be an actress, but when she was young she failed audition after audition and was so thoroughly disenchanted that she opted for a career as a teacher instead. Also, Emma found out, her mother was very interested in her.

“Why’s that?” she wondered.

“I suppose because I tell her about you,” said Maisie. “She knows you’re an important person on the set and she wonders why you take so much interest in me.”

“I just don’t want to see you come to any harm going home from work.”

But Emma was aware that other people at Harlot TV had commented on Emma’s friendship with the young girl. One colleague, who had several children herself, told her that it was Emma’s maternal instinct. Emma didn’t want to tell her that whatever it was, it wasn’t a maternal feeling she had towards Maisie. What it was, she wasn’t sure, but she spent rather a lot of time thinking about the girl.

“Mummy would like to meet you, you know,” commented Maisie.

Emma felt a sudden rush to her throat, and in a slightly throttled voice she said “Is next time all right?”

And indeed it was. And the next time that Emma drove Maisie home, she took the car up the drive and followed her into the house. Maisie’s mother seemed startled at first and it took Emma a few minutes to realise that perhaps it was because the silly woman wasn’t accustomed to women walking around with no clothes. Maisie went to her bedroom from whence, just seconds later, thundered some of the pop music she particularly liked which to Emma’s ear sounded suspiciously like, if rather more lightweight than, the music she enjoyed at Maisie’s age. Maisie’s mother, Dorothy, smiled resignedly at Emma over her cup of coffee as if to suggest that she couldn’t help Maisie’s musical taste.

Dorothy was a slim small breasted woman with a broad smile which clashed with her weary eyes, which suggested a life of great disappointment.

“Maisie’s told me so much about you, Emma,” she said.

Emma smiled. “And she about you...”

“It’s strange for me to entertain with such strong principles ‑ in naturism and so on ‑ working for sex television...”

“It doesn’t matter,” smiled Emma, who’d heard this kind of thing before from other women. “I’m just doing a job. And one which allows me to be a naturist.”

Emma allowed herself to sink into a role which with the practice she’d gained with Harriett and her friends had somehow become easy for her, and that was to gradually steer conversation away from abstract notions towards sex. And so it was that before long, Emma and Dorothy were holding hands and looking at each other with obvious intent. Dorothy had never made love to a woman before, and Emma, in her practised way, reassured her that it didn’t mean either that she was a lesbian or that they were in any way emotionally tied.

“It’s only fun. And harmless fun at that!” she explained.

“Mummy!” Emma suddenly heard, and then felt Dorothy’s hand disengage from hers. She looked round to see a naked Maisie standing at the doorway and smiling cheekily at the two of them. Dorothy was still fully clothed but her clothes were rather unruffled and her hair had fallen untidily onto her face.

“What is it, dear?”

“Just saying good night, Mummy,” Maisie said, who walked up to Dorothy and kissed her. Then in the same spirit, she kissed Emma on the lip, and disappeared off to bed. Dorothy smiled at Emma as she watched Maisie going upstairs to bed.

“I think Maisie’s a bit like you with regards to clothes,” Dorothy said with an apologetic tinge to her voice.

“And a very good attitude it is, too,” laughed Emma, undressing Dorothy.

Perhaps it wouldn’t have happened like this if Harriett had never introduced Emma to sex, or perhaps if Harriett were here and not fucking in Burundi, but the result was that the following morning Emma and Dorothy were breakfasting together with Maisie after a night which for Dorothy had been a sexual adventure she’d never experienced before. This need to explain herself wearied Emma somewhat who, after all, had heard it several times before from other women, and, to be honest, had felt rather distracted from exertion during the night. In fact, as she finally closed her eyes after Dorothy had given up stroking her clitoris, the abiding image in her mind was that of the naked Maisie framed in the doorway as she went to bed. It was with a tremor of excitement which almost upset Emma’s cup of tea, she saw a naked Maisie enter the kitchen to join them for breakfast.

“Oh! You’re still here!” Maisie said to Emma.

“Yes,” said Emma, smiling as welcomingly and naturally as she could, but nonetheless suddenly aware that it was not just her relationship with Dorothy that had changed overnight, but that with Maisie had also changed irretrievably. “I’m still here!”