Susanna had a talent for words. This fact came to her as a surprise because for the most part her life had been shrouded in silence. Her first language was Auslan, one of the hand-signal languages invented to communicate with the deaf. Her tiny baby’s hands pulled rhythmically on invisible teats when she was hungry, milking the air. Her mother, a silent beauty smelling of milk and lavender, responded to her call by lifting one swollen breast out of her floral dress.

Spoken words were useless in Susanna’s home. Her parents’ hands could shout out commands, punish her naughtiness or soothe her into sleep with stories of little girls in the forest and big bad wolves made of hooked claw-fingers. Her name was a collection of letters spelled out on her fingertips.

It was a difficult word for a little girl to pronounce without the benefit of sound. She could spell it clumsily at first, but her mother pointed to the framed painting hung above her bed, Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi.

‘Susanna,’ her mother spelled out, her fingers graceful. She pointed to her daughter, ‘Susanna.’ The painting and the girl. Later, Susanna peered at the painting, the naked young woman illuminated by the spill from the moon. The girl in the painting held a flimsy bed sheet to cover her nakedness. Two clothed men stared at her and, although they seemed more thoughtful than lustful, something about the way they looked at her was unsettling. Susanna held her own bed sheet up, covering one of her own small breasts. The other was exposed to the moonlight. She imagined the two men hiding in the shadows and a delicious thrill, half fear, half pleasure, began to warm her stomach. She pulled the blanket up over her naked skin and closed her eyes tight, but whenever she peeked up at the painting, Susanna was always there. Naked, exposed.

She entered the world of spoken words hesitantly, her silence often misinterpreted as shyness. While the other children screamed and shouted, Susanna sat quietly, watching. The world of school was a barrage of noise. She sat through each day longing for the silent relief of home.

For her final assignment at university she made a silent film, a tribute to the older examples of the craft. In Susanna’s film the women expressed their passion with a fist held to the breast. The men responded with a widening of the eyes. Her assessors were confused. No words? they wrote beside her final grade. Perhaps you could have at least provided some emotive music. She left university for the last time stepping out into noisy peak-hour traffic, wondering what exactly she was meant to do.

For a time she helped at a school for hearing-impaired children, breezing from one gloriously quiet classroom to another, distributing cartridge paper and pots of paint. The children were not silent, they clattered and thumped like any children, they grunted and screeched occasionally. But eventually they would settle into a comfortable hush, and Susanna settled with them, completely content.

It was at this school that she met the man who would become her only lover, a deaf man, recently divorced. He had custody of his profoundly deaf son every second week and on the weeks in between Susanna would climb silently into his neatly turned-out bed. They would use their hands to break the silence, making words that were nothing but a dance of the fingers, a barely discernible sliding between the Auslan word for sex and the physical expression of the act itself.

David was a good lover, expressive. His fingers demonstrated to her what he could not say. His mouth, passive through the day, was put to better use in the evenings. His lips formed shapes that spoke to her body as words could not. His tongue found ways to express his desire without the use of vowels and consonants. She learned from him a language of love that was as utterly different from the general machinations of sex as Auslan is different from English itself.

The affair, Susanna’s first taste of love, stretched out through glorious months into ecstatic years. In this time there was only his body. She knew a little of his working life and shared a proud joy in the academic achievements of his son. But their evenings every second week were reserved almost exclusively for pleasure. It came as some surprise, therefore, when he turned up at her door on an off-week. She glimpsed the sweet purity of his son’s profile in the front seat of the parked car.

What I have with her, he signed, his mouth moving to form words he could not speak, is a real relationship. Susanna watched his lips and remembered what they had done to her body. The silent words mouthed into her most intimate places, the way her body would answer, silently but completely. Lifting and opening to him, readying itself for the conversation with the glistening moisture of anticipation.

What I have with you is sex. The most amazing sex, the most wonderful physical expression one body can give to another. But ultimately I suppose I need more than just sex.

Susanna stood in the entryway to the apartment block. It was a wintery evening and she hadn’t brought a coat. She still held her mobile phone with the words lit up on the screen: I need to speak with you. I am outside your building. Can you come down?

She remembered the first night with him, the great unveiling. He had spread her legs and knelt at the side of the bed. She should have felt shy, had been expecting to, but somehow his silence and his gentle pressure, parting her thighs, calmed her and filled her with a rush of desire for him. He was watching her closely and suddenly she felt like that other Susanna, Gentileschi’s Susanna, revealing more of her body to his gaze than she concealed.

He placed his finger at the edge of her hymen and with his touch she felt the wetness flooding past its shut-tight gate. That single finger felt like his whole body pushing into her. The tip of the lips the teeth the tongue and she was slippery as a fish and just as agitated, wriggling her hips to take more of him inside her. Just one finger at first but when it was completely inside she felt stretched to breaking and yet desperate for more.

He seemed amazed by her, amazed by her virginity and her body’s impatience to be rid of it. His face so close to the part of her that no one else had ever seen, watching her. He made the sign for slow down, both hands held out as if to measure the surface of something reclining, the right hand tilting up as if to halt her progress. Slow down, slow down, but even the act of signing was too much of a pause for her. Susanna lifted her hips, taking the stop sign of his hand and pressing it into herself.

So much slipperiness. So much sensation, the joy and pain of it fused, too much to bear, her blood slick on his fingers, his body quickly pressing forward into the path that they had just discovered. He shifted; the gorgeous pressure of his pubic bone where only moments before his tongue had been. Blood on her chest where he took her breast in his fist, blood on her face where she kissed him. She opened herself to him in a pact of spilled blood and when he came there was a second tearing, the condom destroyed, the pact sealed with the jet of his seed finding its way into her, a glorious tragedy, and they remained fused like this, slippery with sweat and blood and ejaculate and every movement of his hips fed her hunger again.

She remembered this as she watched him walk back to his car. Their similar faces turning towards her, the innocence of father and son staring at her for a final time. A twin goodbye. And then they were gone.

Her job as a sound assistant suited her well enough. It was because of the silence. Sometimes her only task in a day would be to drive from place to place collecting silences in her microphone. Ambient sound. She wore soft padded headphones that completely obliterated the world and with a flick of the switch she captured the sounds of empty places.

It was not silence really, because in this world there is never a total absence of sound. Instead she heard the location speak to her. Houses laid out their quietly settling floorboards, the tick of sunlight on roofs, the low growl of traffic held off by walls and glass and distance. Outdoor places spoke to her with leaf-rustling and grass-twitching, birds swooped in to add their comment to the sense of space, insects chirruped and clicked. Water dripped after rain; gurgled, almost mechanical, through a creek bed.

The empty spaces she recorded provided a levelling effect for films. The steady hum of life formed a meditative background against which the action could take place. Sometimes Susanna had to sit through a performance itself, checking the levels on the little VU dial as the actors ran through their scene time after time. It was a job that could be performed just as easily, she thought, by her ex-lover, a job for the eyes. And because of this she would put her big soft headphones on but not plug them into the equipment. She watched the rise and fall of the needles, adjusted the switches accordingly.

‘Did you like that last take?’ The actor who approached her was tall and too well muscled. She blinked at him through a fog of silence, reading his lips rather than listening to his words. She nodded, although she had no opinion either way. The needle twitched in the right manner three quarters of the way up the gauge, just as it had twitched on every other take, therefore all of the performances were similarly acceptable. When the actor tried again to make conversation, Susanna felt cornered. What did he want? She had never learned the truth about her beauty, the thick dark hair, the eyes so pale that they were almost unnerving, the body, rounded in the places where it mattered. She had never had the interest to notice the way men tracked her with their gaze as she walked home, head down, full of purpose.

‘People always say I could do radio. As a soundo, what do you reckon?’ the actor said to her then, and she was forced to slip the headphones off. The sound of the world assaulted her, the actor’s rich, over-trained voice.

‘I need to record the atmos now,’ she told him, and overhearing her, the first assistant director began to hush the milling crowd, giving Susanna the noise-filled silence that she needed to complete her task.

Susanna spoke when spoken to, a necessary exchange of meaningless words. Even the deaf are required to do this much to move around in the world. At home she sometimes played soft melancholy music while preparing careful dinners for one in her tiny kitchen, but mostly she preferred the quiet.

Her talent for words came to Susanna as a surprise, discovered quite by accident at the same time as she discovered the men. She had been thinking of David. She often thought about him. Since his departure she took her pleasure in a precise, solitary manner. She imagined herself back to her initial unravelling, the moment of pure discovery, her body opening to someone else, the rush as he came, a surprise full of excitement and terror.

But on this occasion it occurred to her that she had no photographs of him. It was a simple thing to type his name into her computer; she wondered why she had not thought of it before. A picture of his face would be enough, she expected, to transport her.

Of course it would be impossible to find him. His name was a common one and her browser filtered through every option, hooking on a million events and people that might or might not have had some relationship to the David who was the object of her desire. She chose one at random, a school journal, someone too young and too fresh faced. Another, the sale of a motorbike to someone with the same name but not the same temperament as the one she loved.

The third option was the turning point, as they would have said at work. The moment when the dark heart of the story was revealed, the actors turning on their better natures, chasing some false goal and tripping down the path of adventure or folly, racing towards their ultimate demise.

This third click of her finger brought the world to her in vivid colour. This other David materialised in her room. It was the same name, but certainly not the same man. This David’s body was turning towards fat, and his skin, darker than the love of her life’s, came from a warmer climate, some place equatorial.

Perhaps it was still there, for it was peppered with a glisten of sweat. A fine dusting of dark hair damp against almost-black nipples. And this man’s penis bore no similarity to the only member she had already met. This one was thick and meaty, the slightly flaccid flesh sponging out from short thick fingers, a blanket of skin surrounding it, a fat protective sock that lent the little protrusion inside all the tenderness of a startled animal.

But as she watched, the animal grew bold, thrusting its head out of its hiding place, abandoning its blanket. She stared, transfixed, uncertain if this man with the same name as the gentle lover of her memory was an actor or a phantom of some previous moment, endlessly replayed on the merry-go-round of the world wide web.

His greeting startled her. He leaned forward with his free hand, his left hand, and the misspelled words appeared at the bottom of the screen.

Why dont u take yor shirt off sexxy.

Susanna recoiled from the computer as if stung, remembering the webcam. The little dot in the top centre of the laptop. A device she had never used, assuming that she would have to do something, maybe go into settings, even to turn the thing on. She reached behind her and grabbed the first thing that came to hand, the scarf she had been wearing when she arrived home. She flung it over the computer, capturing the webcam in its folds as she might capture a Christmas beetle to stop it tangling in her hair.

Behind the drape of the red scarf she could see the man working on his fully erect penis. She put her hand to her chest, noticed the wild beat of her heart and tried to calm it with deep regular breaths.

There were new words on the bottom of the screen. She could see a few of them and it was the words that lured her to lift the edge of the scarf. If she left it draped over the top part of the computer she would be free to watch and not be seen. There was some comfort in this. She adjusted the fabric and concentrated on the words.

Have you gone drling Come back you were soooo hot

She thought about it. She reached out for the keyboard, shy Susanna who could never be drawn into a conversation. She found her fingers trembling a little on the keys.

I am still here. I am watching.

your camera drpped out. His one-handed jumbled conversation. turn yr caera back on u so hot

And Susanna, calmer now: I will watch but you can’t see me.

ok. do u like what you c

I can’t see the bottom of your hand, I can’t see all of you

Tell me wht u can c hottie. say those drty words

I can see your cock. A little blush, a little wave of adrenaline racing along her veins. I can see the head of your cock and the shaft and some of your hand. I can see your nipples, you have dark nipples. I can see your hairy chest but the camera stops short of your neck. I can’t see your balls.

u want to c my balls?

I am curious. I have only seen one man’s balls

tell me what his balls r like

She typed quickly and with a growing confidence. She felt the rise of her own pleasure. It was like that first time, the quick insistence of her lust rearing suddenly, obliterating her shyness as it warmed her loins.

Smooth. Almost hairless, tight, and with a little dark line running down the length of them. When he came they tightened in my mouth. I liked that. That physical expression of his love. The way his balls tightened and his hand on his cock quickened and then the sight of it, the thick semen spraying up onto his stomach.

She was certain she had conjured it. His orgasm coincided perfectly with her words. She watched as the pre-come leaked down over his fingers and suddenly it was more than that, ejaculate spurting higher than she expected, splattering up onto his chest, spraying pearly drops onto his tight black nipples. The little aftershocks, the dying spurts leaking down the length of his still-hard shaft. She watched, shifting in her chair, uncomfortable in her state of arousal.

The screen dipped to black, the connection gone. Her love’s namesake disappeared forever. Then, before she had time to reach out and close the computer, the words, those fateful words flaring up onto the screen.

Another partner is waiting for you. Would you like to play?

Her clitoris hummed, her own juices had begun to leak out from between the lips that were already swollen with excitement. The words flashed in a rhythm that she could easily settle into.

Would you like to play? Would you like to play?

Susanna checked that her scarf was still securely fixed over her webcam. She reached out to the keyboard and tapped lightly with her index finger. Yes.

Yes. She did want to play.

The combinations were endless. Their conversation was mostly the same, Female? Turn your webcam on. How old are you? Please turn your webcam on. Are you touching yourself?

Susanna did indeed touch herself, and she always answered yes.

It is difficult to type with one hand. Susanna soon realised that the mistakes of her first headless man were common ones, letters misplaced or repeated, no capitals or punctuation, vowels dropped, a sentence broken down to its most simple form.

She preferred to give the conversation the benefit of both her hands, pausing between sentences to slip her fingers under her skirt. Mostly she remained clothed. Occasionally she loosened a button or two to comply with the more realistic requests of her blind lovers: oh I wish you would squeeze your breast for me. I want you to pinch your nipple.

She did not, of course, accede to every ham-fisted demand: are you fingering your arse? stick your fist in your cunt. Often they didn’t request anything at all, happy enough to read her account of what she might be doing, or might do with them.

She found her repertoire for sex too easily devoured by the hours she spent at the screen, and learned to become inventive, to amuse herself as much as the headless torsos endlessly stroking themselves before her. She invented scenarios that had never occurred with her first and only lover.

She described a kitchen not unlike her own, high stools similar to the one she perched on, the laptop open on the kitchen bench. She bent herself over the stool in this particular fantasy, drew for herself a picture of her own buttocks raised high, the lips there parted and gleaming with a dewy moisture. She had the idea that he—this headless torso of one man or another—might slide his penis up against the moisture of the lips, taking his pleasure from this external friction. She had once, she told a faceless stranger, had her lover use the space between her generous breasts to find his joy. She squeezed them tight around his cock and encouraged him to aim at her chin. He coated her cheeks when he came, a drop of semen lodging in the corner of her eye. This was the only reason that they never used this position again, she said, bringing the focus back to the game at hand. Bent over the kitchen stool with the moisture from her cunt providing a slippery kind of pleasure, she had found that spilled seed could shoot up and out over the buttocks. And if he were to gently rub this into her skin then she might enjoy a slippery pleasure of her own.

His name was Aaron Fitzgerald, although of course that may just have been the name he used in this private part of his life. He was nothing particularly special to look at, average build, not fat but not slim either, a little hair on his chest and lining his nipples, but not a pelted beast like some of the men she had ‘known’. He had a foreskin, which perhaps fixed his age as under thirty, although she could not be sure of this. It was something she had read somewhere and the idea that all young men had foreskins had stuck with her. It was certainly true that most of the older men on the internet, grey-furred bears, or men with wrinkles on their chests, had penises without any foreskin at all. The physical patterns had begun to emerge for her. Older men were without foreskins, younger men came too quickly, often before her scenarios had had time to settle into a natural rhythm.

Most of the men responded to her delicate inventions with coarse words like cunt and cock and slut and whore. They liked their sex talk simple and direct: she was happy to play within these rules as long as they were prepared to indulge her when she lucked onto an arousing new idea. Most of them were happy to let her take the lead as long as she kept the talk within the boundaries of sex and didn’t stray into long descriptions of midnight parks or the creaking gothic corridors of abandoned houses.

Her time with Aaron began just like any other, a faceless torso gently stroking an erect penis. It started as it always must.

Are you male or female?

Female.

Really? Truthfully.

Truly, I promise.

There is no truth in places such as these.

A deviation from the general script; by now they would almost always be talking about her breasts at the very least, and had usually made it to her vagina.

I am being truthful and I will prove it. If I were a man, would I admit that I have my period as we speak? Would I tell you that the very act of pleasure will be tempered by a dull ache in my belly, and enhanced by the freshly inserted tampon that will act like a little dildo during the act itself? I can assure you there will be no spillage.

I have no aversion to spillage. The headless torso held his penis in his hand but ceased to stroke it. The organ was large; politely firm but not boyishly over-eager. I assume you are not averse to some amount of spillage on my part during our brief but, I trust, sweet conversation?

His one-handed typing was superb. He was the only torso she had met who used punctuation despite the impediment of simultaneous masturbation.

I would be disappointed if there were no spillage at all. I might take that as a personal slight.

Oh I don’t think there is any chance of that. Even from these preliminaries I can tell that we will come to a mutually satisfactory conclusion.

Aaron kept up the accurate typing with his left hand while treating her to a slow, stimulating display of his excitement with his right. Susanna launched into a favourite scene, imagining that she would lead the way with the story and the characters, only to find Aaron equally skilled in wordplay and narrative drive.

She began in the back of a taxi cab and Aaron quickly delivered them to an art deco hotel. To her surprise he began to describe the building. The windows were illuminated in a russet glow by the large orbs of red suspended within. He described the flock wallpaper, gold but with a raised butterscotch velour that stroked her shoulder as they travelled down the corridor.

If anything, his descriptions made her hungrier for the main event. He slowed the pace of their encounter with theatrical flourishes and by the time they closed the door of the hotel room Susanna was desperate to tear the clothes from his already unclothed chest and touch the undeniably hard, twitching penis that was now the complete focus of her attention.

When the moment of completion finally arrived she found her hand moving of its own accord off the keyboard and onto her mouth, her head snapped back on her neck, the throat exposed, her nipples tugging urgently at the cotton of her shirt. If she had had her webcam unveiled he would have seen the whites of her eyes as she gazed towards her ecstasy— it seemed to reside somewhere near the light bulb hanging above her head.

Unlike most of her men, Aaron waited for her to compose herself. He adjusted the webcam so that his penis was respectfully out of shot and instead gave her a courteous view of his chest; it was unsullied by emissions, which he had caught discreetly in a tissue at the climactic moment of their tryst.

Are you there?

Totally.

You were gone so long I missed you, my dear.

Oh I was here, just occupied in other ways.

Satisfactorily, I hope.

To say the least. And then she said what she had never said to any of the other faceless men. It seems a shame to end such a good thing when it has only just begun.

Well, Susanna (she always used her own first name; the surname she used, Nabokov, was not her own), it doesn’t have to be goodbye, you know. We could easily exchange Skype addresses and reconvene at our leisure.

Susanna paused. She pushed her stool away from the computer and stepped back. At this distance she could see the image on the screen for what it was. A youngish man, of average build, no distinguishing features. No head, and now not even a penis to identify him.

It is just a shame. We have only seen one aspect of each other and people are such complex creatures. You could be my Lo. Plain Lo in the morning, Lola in slacks, Dolly at school and Delores on the dotted line.

She recognised the quote.

Very impressive, Aaron Fitzgerald.

Not too impressive because that is the only bit from Lolita I remember and even then I don’t think it is quite right.

Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

There you have it. Susanna, Susie, Suse.

But what can I do with Aaron?

I don’t know, said Aaron and because she could not see his face she had no idea if he was smiling. But if you give me your Skype address perhaps we’ll find out.

They met most nights after Susanna finished work. Aaron was never her only appointment of an evening, but on many nights she had him open in one window while she watched a stranger stroke himself at the same time. Mostly they met on a chat field, a little window of words with no visuals at all. He liked to know who she was talking with, the name they used, the conversations they responded to. Scare him he might say, take him out into the woods in your car. Aaron had an eye for the macabre. Sometimes it was Aaron’s words and not Susanna’s that she fed to the hungry stranger and there was an odd excitement in this kind of exchange. It was as if she were watching Aaron make love to the stranger.

Blindfolded as he was, and vulnerable, Aaron would pretend to be Susanna, tying the stranger up on some deserted shore, stroking the delicate skin on the inside of his thighs to distract him from the encroaching tide, entering him only when the water had engulfed them, his defences eroded by the warmth of Aaron’s mouth on his penis, his body overloaded by the sensation of the spume and the seaweed wrapped around his chest.

I like to penetrate a man, Aaron-Susanna would say to him. I like to feel him opening to me, the tiniest bit at first, just a finger. Can you take a finger?

Yes.

You can show me if you like. I’d like to watch it. I have a strap-on dildo with me and if you show me you can take a finger, yes, like that, show me on your camera, we will ease my dildo in just a little at a time.

In this way she became Aaron, Aaron became Susanna, together they prised their partner open and Susanna would describe to Aaron what she saw.

He’s angling the webcam down. More lube for his left hand and his finger. Just his right index finger. He’s doing it now. He’s spreading his legs wide. Right up to the first knuckle. He’s doing it. He’s doing it while I watch.

Susanna became more bold with Aaron encouraging her towards wilder and wilder requests. Sometimes she stepped away from the laptop, her heart racing, her eyes wide. She barely recognised herself at all. This strange alliance with Aaron had changed everything. Alone, Susanna was good with words. Together with Aaron she was frightening.

Hello, Susanna? My flower? Are you there my Susie-su, my Susie, my Su?

Got to go. Bye now.

And with a quick tap of her finger she was released from their devil’s pact. The man on the video chat would click over to some other anonymous soul, less threat, more cliché, and eventually work himself up to a disappointing spend.

On the nights when Aaron took Susanna right up to her line, or even across it, she retreated from her internet playground and immersed herself in other things.

She busied herself making elaborate desserts, crème brûlée in a ramekin for one, beignets, profiteroles, éclairs. She put on music to fill the space where their frenzied conversation had been silenced. She picked up the scarf she had been attempting to knit for months and managed to add a few more rows of dropped stitches and wavering tension.

She was constantly distracted by the laptop, sitting innocently on the bench, and when eventually she gave in and reached for it he was always there. Waiting.

Missed you, he would say, and she suspected he said it with irony. She was certainly not the only person he was chatting with. Sometimes he even described to her the person on the video link.

A man. I have no problem with a man. His cock is bigger than my own. He shaves his chest.

Or once: I should tell her not to put her face on camera, anyone could be recording this. She looks no more than 18. Imagine if she is underage. Would I be more or less excited if she turned out to be 15? Her vulva is very fresh and pink. She shaves. At least I hope she shaves, wouldn’t it be awful if she were just too young for pubic hair? It makes me soft just thinking it. Her breasts are tiny little things but her nipples are so large and so very hard. And that isn’t lube. I can see it isn’t lube. She is pretty (so young but not too young after all) but I wish she would hide her face. She seems so vulnerable. Should I tell her what a predator I am? Should I warn her to be cautious? Ah good. She has figured it out for herself. Goodbye my sweet, brief tryst. Hello, hairy cock and balls. He’s telling me what he would do to me if I were a girl. I am concerned for that girl. I wish she had stayed longer, I would have had a talk to her about it. I should have. I got caught up in the excitement of such an exquisitely formed vagina. Okay, hairy cock and balls has come. Next. Tedious. You certain you don’t want to turn your camera on?

She was tempted. Sometimes when his cleverness made her laugh or when together they took some poor torso out into the woods and unleashed their brutal fantasies upon him, at these times she would almost suggest a visually enhanced date. She imagined that she would take her clothes off at his insistence and touch herself, as he had been touching himself when they first met. Then she thought it would be tame, somehow—bland, simply to find her pleasure alongside him after all the dark paths they had tripped down together. She never followed up that particular whim.

Turn your camera on, he told her.

And she said, Not quite yet.

Things progressed in this way for so long it seemed they had become like an old married couple. Often they abandoned the talk of sex to discuss world events, environmental disasters, politics. These conversations would be interrupted from time to time: Hang on, what have we here? Is that? I think this person is a hermaphrodite. I have never seen a hermaphrodite in the flesh.

Goodness, no. What can you see? Describe him—or is she a her?

Sometimes Susanna forgot that this was a twilight landscape in which they met; that it was not one thing or the other, not real and yet not completely fantasy. Sometimes she caught herself divulging little moments from her day and wondering if she had given up too much information. What if he became obsessed with her? But was she not a little obsessed with him? Didn’t she dream of him, his ordinary body that had become extraordinary, the polite but sensual movement of his hand on his cock?

‘So, you’re single?’ asked one of the actors, the latest attempt to woo her away from her little bubble of silence and out into the noisy world of human interaction.

‘No,’ she said and was surprised to find that she really did not see herself as single at all. Aaron Fitzgerald was an odd kind of companion but he was under her skin now, in her blood. Sometimes she found herself using one of his turns of phrase. Once when introducing herself to a new director she said her name was Susie-su and was startled at her own use of the word, his name for her and no one else’s. His Susie-su of the handcuffs and the deserted buildings was striding out with quiet Susanna into the world.

On this night they had abandoned all their partners. Susanna had tired of the endless parade of torsos, Aaron had not even pretended to be interested in them. Instead he settled in to their private chat, a flirty little adventure involving a red strapless dress, a restaurant and no underwear at all. She noticed he was particularly intent on describing each course. The entrée, which was made of foam so light they might be eating nothing but the crest of a wave; the fish, stuffed with herbs and steamed in a delicate sauce of butter, almonds and white wine.

He was moving onto the dessert when she heard the sudden screeching crash, the tinkling clatter of glass shattering onto asphalt, a sound of collision so loud and clear that it might have been her own apartment block assaulted by an angry driver in the car. She forgot the fantasy meal entirely and darted to the window. There was a crowd gathered at the corner of her street and a carpet of glass glittering in the streetlight, but the car or cars involved were around the corner and out of sight. No matter how far she craned her head out of the tiny window she couldn’t see them at all.

It was ghoulish, she knew, but she thought perhaps she might sign out of chat and take the lift down to the foyer to join the crowd. Her curiosity would torment her if she did not placate it. She paused at the window, considering. Just a quick interruption to their evening. She would make an excuse, tell him that she was just popping into the lavish restroom, make it a part of their play. She raced back to the computer, but there was already a message flashing on the screen.

Hang on Susie-su, there has just been some kind of an accident. Back in a sec.

She rested her fingers on the keyboard. Stared at the cursor flashing in the chat window at the bottom of the screen. The wallpaper visible on the screen was the print that still hung on her bedroom wall, Susanna and the Elders, the Gentileschi painting. She stared at the old men leering at the coy young girl, so beautiful and so unsettling. Susanna felt an odd unease rising in her gut.

Crazy accident.

The sudden text at the bottom of the screen startled her. She found herself flinching. Taking a deep breath, lifting her fingers off the keyboard as if they had suddenly grown too hot to touch.

Glass all over the road.

She stood and moved back towards the window. A crowd still gawking, the distant sound of emergency vehicles shrieking towards the scene.

Susie-su?

Susie?

Susanna? Are you still there, my lover?

Susanna centred her fingers on the keyboard. The little raised dots on the F key and the J letting her know that she was in the right place, hands centred, everything in its place.

Sorry, I’m here, Aaron.

Wouldn’t it be awful to crash a car like that? One minute wondering if you remembered to pick up milk, the next— so awful.

Are the police there?

Not yet but I hear sirens.

Susanna could hear sirens.

There are people staring. Why are we so drawn to accidents? A vision of tragedy, schoolyard brawls. I thought about going down for a look.

Down?

Downstairs. I live in an apartment building.

Odd. Susanna told him. I always imagined you lived in a house.

Where would we be without our secrets, Susie-su? I am almost certain that if you knew me in the real world, you would not speak to me anymore and I could not bear the separation. I think it is best like this, don’t you? I don’t understand why people spoil what’s beautiful by meeting up to drink cheap beer in a sordid pub.

Or fine wine in a high-class restaurant.

You would hate me, Susie-su. You would be bored of me in a second. But here we are in a restaurant of our own invention and you are captivated by me just as I am by you. Let’s stay here and drink a toast together. Although I hope you are wearing your panties. I think that gentleman at the table by the window can see up your skirt. Do you see the way he dips his head? And he is sweating uncomfortably.

Don’t you want to wait till the ambulance arrives before continuing our meal?

Not to worry, my dear. They have arrived already.

And they had. Susanna glanced towards the window, the rhythmic flare of lights cutting the darkness of the street, the sound of the sirens snapping off one after another, police, ambulance. Perhaps even the fire brigade. She no longer felt like going down to the street for a look.

Susanna didn’t know her neighbours. It was in her nature to slip quietly home, swiping her pass card outside the sliding glass doors, entering the modest foyer with her face turned resolutely to the floor. Sometimes she was forced to share the lift with one or another of the residents.

There was often a middle-aged woman, downturned mouth, a face that had once been pretty soured by a lifetime of disappointment and regret. Her fingers were yellowed by cigarettes and there was always a long thin rollie twitching between her fingers and a backup lodged securely behind one ear. Her hair was probably grey but seemed brown, nicotinestained. She sometimes had a name tag on her blue pinafore that suggested her name was Carole and wished you a nice day.

Carole always rolled her eyes when stepping into the lift. Susanna never took it personally. If the lift stopped for anyone else Carole would mutter, ‘For Christ’s sake,’ under her breath. Apart from Carole, Susanna knew only the maintenance man who lived on the ground floor, a cheerful emphysemic old soul who went as bright as a beetroot if he had to weed a flowerbed or walk up even a single flight of stairs.

She left for work later than usual. Normally she liked to beat the morning traffic, rising before the other people in her building, her shower water travelling down the rusty old pipes, gently easing the other residents out of their dreams. She liked waiting for the bus alone, or sometimes with a nurse who lived down the road.

Now she delayed her shower, staring down at the waking street, watching the remnants of the shattered glass picking up the colours from the sunrise and turning them to fairy dust on the road. A cyclist rode over the glitter and she leaped at the sound of a tyre popping. The cyclist dismounted, flipped the bike onto its handlebars and crouched, a blaze of yellow lycra illuminated by a ray of morning light.

She ate her breakfast at the bench. The laptop sat beside her, a mute reminder of the night before. Somewhere in the building Aaron would be waking up or sleeping, or stepping naked from the shower. Somewhere within easy reach. She started the oven. Baked eggs and pancetta. She had time now, plenty of time to indulge in a proper weekend breakfast. She set the coffee pot on the stove.

Susanna often heard the next-door neighbour coming and going, and she would wait till she heard his door shut and the sound of the lift chugging away before she left her apartment. She didn’t want the embarrassment of bumping into him in the corridor. But one time she had had her own hand on the door handle, the door a fraction open, preparing to step outside and brave the world. The sound of the neighbour made her pause. She waited. Just the one set of footsteps, light but confident. She caught a glimpse of him passing through the fractionally open door. She thought it was a man at any rate; she could not really be certain. Maybe it was a masculine woman with cropped hair.

Now she bent towards the keyhole of her door, a tiny scrap of light, just enough to confirm what she had suspected. The neighbour was a man. A man in a blue shirt with a leather satchel. That was all she could see—she only had a scrap of torso to work with, but she was used to that. Unlike the other men, her men, there was very little skin to distinguish him at all. He seemed to be of fair complexion, though she had just caught a quick flash of arm, and there was a sizable masculine bulge in the front of his jeans. She rested her hand on the lock, listened for his footsteps till she heard him pause at the lift, the distant rumble of the mechanism trundling down. Only then did she open the door, as quietly as she was able, gently easing the lock free, pulling the heavy length of door towards her cheek.

He was facing the lift. Medium height, medium build, brown hair; she had never seen Aaron’s hair. His hand balanced on the soft laptop case slung over his shoulder. She studied his fingers. Were these Aaron’s fingers, the hands she had seen a hundred times? There were no distinguishing features on them at all, no scars, no tattoos, no hair to speak of. Aaron’s hands were the hands of any man, the hands of this man, perhaps, or of any other man in her building except maybe the wheezing maintenance man, who sported a spread of liver spots all the way up his arms.

The lift doors opened, the man turned suddenly and Susanna quickly pulled the door closed.

Peak hour for the lifts was between 7 and 8 am. Susanna chose her best dress, a butterfly-blue cotton check with a skirt that kicked out playfully over a white petticoat. The neckline was low, or at least lower than her usual skivvies and turtlenecks. The plunge of it rested squarely on her chest: just above her cleavage, but not so far above that there was no hint of what lay below. She tied her hair back with a black velvet ribbon.

Ridiculous, of course, to think he might recognise her. She had never even let him glimpse beyond the drape of her scarf. Sometimes she played brunette for him, sometimes redhead, sometimes blonde. She had even let him rest his hands on the silky waterfall of her dark Japanese bob while she played geisha with one of the anonymous men. Still, Susanna had chosen matching underwear in bright blue silk; lace, with elegant blue cups in shades of cornflower and summer sky. She wore her evening perfume, usually reserved for Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the parties at the office that she went to reluctantly and left early, to the disappointment of every heterosexual man and gay woman in the crew.

She took a breath and stepped out of her flat. She dragged the door closed behind her and locked it. Seven doors rose from the faded brown carpet. Seven doors stared morosely at the same flock wallpaper she and Aaron had borrowed for their sexy motel adventure. All the elements of her online chatting were around her at every moment; the pressed metal ceilings that she passed under, the gardenia bushes with their blowsy petals dripping sweetness into the humid air.

She pushed the lift button and waited. The doors opened on a forbidding crowd, doubled in the mirrored walls and partly obscured by patches of rust and scratches and the remnants of spraypaint, the forlorn tag of some lost youth.

There were three women in the lift. Four including herself. She smiled at one of them, and discounted her. Three men, one with a tight belly spilling over his pinstriped pants. Two possible Aarons, one youngish, perhaps twenty-five, the other in his thirties. Both of them trim and well dressed and with equally anonymous fingers clutching a briefcase (the younger man) and a laptop bag (the older).

There was a cocktail of scents, soap, lavender, aftershave and, oddly, the smell of almonds. She tried to match each smell to one of the bodies but it was impossible. The lift stopped at the floor below and everybody shifted against each other. She felt the touch of a hand at her thigh. Her heart leaped. This could be Aaron, brushing against the fabric of her dress. But no. A sidelong graze from a small ginger woman who smiled cheekily and shrugged when Susanna caught her eye. The man who entered the lift was yet another Aaron, sandy-haired this time, hands free. She noticed the bulge of a wallet in his back pocket when he turned around to face the closing doors.

She had brought several of her men to this lift. In one scene the lift had broken down. Susanna and a torso were already taking advantage of the enforced delay when a third participant was introduced, a maintenance man more like Aaron than the old gentleman of the ground floor, carrying nothing but a wrench and a hammer and a large grin to indicate his approval of the activities being performed on his watch. She had never been in the lift with so many people, in real life or in fantasy, and she blushed, wondering what kinds of scenarios might actually occur.

The lift doors opened again, but the woman who stood outside shook her head. ‘Too full,’ she said, ‘I’ll wait for the next one.’

Two floors later they were all expelled into the foyer, three Aarons and a handful of others wandering off towards their day jobs. She had half-planned to follow him. Now she was torn. She stood in the foyer as each of the Aarons walked off in a different direction.

When they were gone she moved out onto the street, turning the corner of the building. There was nothing left from the accident except a scatter of glass and a twisted scrap of metal that might have come off the bumper of the car. No blood, no painted outline of a body, nothing to prove it had ever happened. A critical turning point in her life and nothing for her to souvenir at all. She looked up to the building, thirteen floors, seven doors to a floor. There were ninety-one potential doorways; but she would find him. She was determined to find him. Aaron Fitzgerald, her Aaron, the second love of her life.

She turned and walked towards her bus stop, startling in her blue checked dress. She saw them watching her, saw their heads turn and their eyes caress her calves, noticed this for the first time. For the first time she herself was looking, watching, wondering. Men streamed from her building. She had no idea that so many of them lived so close by.

She stood at the bus stop and four more Aarons joined her in her vigil. Women too, but they were not what she was looking for. A teenager in school uniform asked her for a light and she shook her head. Not what she was looking for at all.

The postman left mail in a row of wooden boxes on the ground floor. They all had locks, a metal clasp and a padlock; each was labelled with the name of a resident, but most of the residents named were long gone. If you were to believe the labels on the boxes you would imagine that Susanna was a Mrs Edith Long. In fact Susanna had toyed with using this name. She liked the juxtaposition: the properness of Edith against the lewdness of the task at hand.

There was mail for her today but nothing to become excited about. A bill, a sale catalogue, a small cheque for some freelance work she had been involved in, a balance of sorts. She took the envelopes out of the little wooden pigeon hole. The box next to hers belonged to her neighbour, her first Aaron, the man of the blue shirt and ordinary hands. The end of an envelope protruded. It was not difficult to pull the letter out of the box and even less difficult to conceal it among her own. This was not something she had ever done before. She felt the sweat spring to her armpits and was grateful for the breezy sleeves of the blue checked dress.

There were other mailboxes. She realised this just as she found herself beside the lift doors. Some of the boxes were locked, of course. But some had letters sticking out and some of them had lost their padlocks over the years. A couple had lost the top of the box altogether.

She let the lift doors slide open and stood, staring back at herself in the mottled mirror. The lift doors closed with a tired old rattle and she was walking back around the corner to where the letterboxes were. A treasure trove of coloured envelopes. Susanna walked the length of them as if she was momentarily unable to find her own. She glanced over her shoulder quickly as she moved from box to box. Speed was important. There were a few that would not yield their multicoloured treasures and she scrambled at the tiny openings, her fingers sweating, her heart a-clatter. Enough envelopes to fill her handbag; more tantalisingly out of reach.

The sound of footsteps and the chatting voices of young women. She turned and walked past them, two spike-haired beauties, and Susanna trembled as she passed, raking the ground with her terrified stare.

She pressed the button for the lift, clutched the bulging handbag to her waist.

‘…yeah but he doesn’t know what’s good for him.’

‘You’re good for him.’

‘Exactly. Exactly what he doesn’t know.’

The girls had checked their letterbox and stood empty-handed behind her. There were letters peeking out from under Susanna’s elbow. She turned her body to one side, angling her handbag away from the girls.

‘I wish I was gay,’ said one of the girls. Green gelled hair, a band T-shirt, ripped at the neck. ‘I’d show him what he was missing.’

The other girl shushed her and laughed. They were looking at Susanna, she knew they were. She felt the blush rising in her neck. When the lift doors opened she hesitated. Wondered if it would be conspicuous to change her mind suddenly and take the stairs.

The girls pushed past her, she followed. The mirrored walls reflected her handbag, letters pushing at the mouth of it, a name poking out that was not her own. She shifted her elbow but that revealed a different name on a manila envelope, the letters too large to be concealed. As she reached past the girls and pressed the button for her floor, there was an awkward juggle with her satchel and several of the letters spilled out onto the floor.

Susanna rushed to pick them up but the green-haired girl was already on her knees.

‘It’s cool,’ she said and scooped up a bill for Mr A. Lee on 6 and a postcard for Julie McKinnie in 12D.

‘No one writes letters to me,’ green-hair said without seeming to notice that the letters in her hand belonged to several people, none of them Susanna herself. ‘It’s just text me or email me. A valentine’s SMS, can you believe it?’

‘It’s just work,’ said Susanna. ‘Nothing too exciting.’

‘I get excited if there’s junk mail in my box, you know what I mean?’

Susanna took the letters from the girl’s hand, among them a catalogue from a local dress store with no address at all. ‘Here,’ she said and handed the catalogue to the girl. ‘Have some of my junk mail. I have too much already.’

Green-hair laughed, then shrugged as the lift doors opened at her floor. ‘Catch you round the lifts sometime.’

‘Yeah, thanks.’

The girls stepped out, the lift doors juddered closed and Susanna relaxed into the joy of sudden silence.

The envelopes were laid out across the floor. It was a reconstruction of the building, a core sample, the letters representing the names of people inside, the virtual units laid out one above the other. Susanna wandered through her building, stopping to check on Amy Evans in 2B, Jeff B. Gibbon in 7F, Tim Bachellor, Greg Davies. Not a single Aaron among them.

There were, of course, missing pieces of the puzzle. Apartments that were not represented. Not a single piece of mail for floor thirteen. There were also men who might have been another incarnation of her Aaron Fitzgerald. Alan Francis was a likely candidate, as was Andrew F. Lane. Susanna perched up on her kitchen stool and looked down at the paper representation of the building arranged before her. She could see her own flat, a bill, a cheque, a catalogue.

He would be waiting for her to log on. Somewhere in the building he would be waiting for her.

I missed you.

Did you?

It is unlike my Susie-su to be so late.

Big day, she told him, and then I had to go through so much mail.

A paper trail. I long for the days of a paperless society. Almost upon us. I rarely get any mail at all.

She squirmed. It would be so simple just to ask him— but when you do get mail, where does it go to? What is your address? Your unit number? But all of these questions would break the veil of anonymity they had woven between them, Magritte’s blind lovers, the exquisite braille of the internet.

Perhaps I should write to you.

Start a letter now, here. Begin it, Dear Mr Fitzgerald.

And then how do I send it?

Simplicity itself. You just press the enter key.

And what if I wanted to send you a lock of my hair, a tribute to the romantics?

Oh? Then you would press it between the pages of a webcam. But that would be a shame because, Suse or Susanna or Susie-su, you are my blonde Venus, my dusky Moor, my Eurasian delight with skin as fine as calf leather slippers. Even a lock of your hair would pin you down like a butterfly, diminish you, corral you. You were right, my divine smorgasbord of S. I remember how I used to beg you to lift the edge of your scarf just an inch. I wanted to defile just a little fraction of your breast, peer into your dusky hollows, touch my tongue to my computer screen where the wide-spread glistening vision of your sex would be revealed to me in exquisite detail. All this I longed for, and you resisted my advances sagely. You are the wise prophet of my fantasies and because you have hidden yourself from me you will be so for eternity, never to be diminished by the truth.

So, Aaron, do you feel you have been diminished in my eyes? I have seen your chest, your cock, your balls. I have seen the fountain of your emissions and the pleasure that you conjure from your body with your own pretty hand.

How sad for you, dear S. I have allowed myself to become a thing of two dimensions, flat and trapped forever. You will never truly believe that I am dark and muscular, bending you roughly over the rocks on some secluded beach, thrusting the dark thick meat of my engorged penis into the delicate flower of your body. I have destroyed the chance that you might see me as some nervous boy, my tiny cock so shy that only your teacherly lips will draw the tentative semen from my loins. You will never believe me when I tell you that my fingers are soft and so finely formed that when you place them, trembling, at the entry to your cunt and slide your hips forward onto my virgin touch, my whole hand will slip inside with barely any resistance.

The truffly feast of your chest—average chest—and the juicy meat of your cock—everyman penis—and your hand, the careful rhythm of your hand—which could be any hand but so expertly manoeuvred, she had noticed—these things delight me, and despite the fantasies that we have indulged in, despite all of these well-played games, when I am finally alone in my single bed it is your hand that comes back to me, your real and corporeal penis that enters me where my own fingers are preparing the way.

Fantasies. The pause following the word betrayed his disappointment. Oh wonderful Susie-su, my love, my treat. For you they are fantasies but for me they are the very essence of the thing itself.

Susanna squatted by the door.

She had always had a particularly intense relationship with the hour between two and three in the morning. This was the time when she woke from restless dreams, her legs clamped around her pillow, the damp muskiness of her juices staining the red pillowcase even darker, the last pulse of her pleasure rippling through her body. When she was a child she had believed that nocturnal visitors climbed through her window at this witching hour. Perhaps it was the men watching Artemisia’s Susanna from their position above her bed, but in dreams it was always a succubus or an incubus—she didn’t care which, but a visitor of some sort anyway. The evidence would be spelled out in the dampness of her budding breasts, the ragged red welts on the insides of her thighs, marks of a dream lover scrambling for purchase at the lip of the virgin well.

As an adult Susanna began to see that the incubus was nothing but her own hand, working hard against her skin as she slept. The power of her lust, once piqued, seemed unfathomable, and she would fall between sheets still slippery, dewy from her last encounter, only to be ravaged by the astonishing force of her own imagination.

She checked her watch. 2:05. Perhaps he would slip up next time they met; reveal some small detail of his life, his sleeplessness, the shape of the moon at precisely this time of night. She could see very little from where she crouched by the door. The arm of a couch, leather, dark leather; black or perhaps midnight blue. The only light spilled, pale and tinged with blue, from a television outside her line of sight.

She could hear it, of course. This was what had alerted her to the act in progress in the flat next door. The man’s actorly groaning, the breathy high-pitched climb towards ecstasy of the girl. The sounds of simulated pleasure. And, underlying them, a background soundtrack of the wet, succulent machinations of the act itself. Her neighbour, naked on the couch.

She confirmed this with a small shift of her body. The spread of his chest suddenly slipping into the sliver of her view. A chest that could be his chest, her Aaron’s chest. An everyman’s chest and a penis as average as a size seven shoe. She watched as he stroked himself. On the internet the men were much closer to the camera. Their performances were for her gaze. This was a less expert demonstration. Her neighbour stroked his penis, stopped, leaned forward, pressed a button on the remote control. The sound of the woman’s orgasm was suddenly repeated, the very apex of the crescendo rehearsed again and again, like a pianist mastering a new scale.

Susanna watched. The engorged cock lost just a little ground as its owner fast-forwarded or rewound the sequence of events on the obscured screen. When he leaned back into the couch and took himself in hand once more the sounds of sex had changed: guttural groaning from the woman, a quick leap of the penis in Susanna’s truncated view. She heard the male voice coaxing just a little more, that’s right, almost there, relax, oh god, look at that, sweet fucking Christ look at that beautiful…ah there, ah there. Oh man if you could only see what you look like now spread out like this, oh fuck oh fucking hell, so tight, your sweet little hole is so fucking tight.

He shuddered, he twitched back onto the lounge and the sound of his skin was a rude rasp against the sweat-wet leather. He came.

If she’d had her own remote control she would have used it to rewind and play, rewind and play until she was sated, gorging on that one acute moment of pleasure. She was dressed in a cotton shift, white like the nightclothes of the little girl who used wake to the succubus groan. The child grown tall had long abandoned the use of frilly knickers, and now the juices dripped freely, drawing a slippery accusing line towards the place of her unrest.

She glanced around, scanned the darkened corridor, tiny down-lights dripping a treacle glow onto the brown furred paper of the walls. The doors were all shut tight. 2:25. Her knees ached from squatting, her back cracked when she leaned back against the door. The man was dabbing at himself with a tissue, pulling on boxer shorts, standing, shutting off the low guttural groans.

Wait! Wait! pleaded the woman in the gravelly croon of a jazz club star. Too big! You are too big, you’ll tear me apart. And then the voice of her partner, warning, You think I’m too big? You better get ready and relax because I’m going to show you there’s room in there for two. A little shriek from the girl, the neighbour pausing with the remote control in his hand. His interest suddenly piqued, disturbing the flaccid little hang of the penis nestled inside his shorts.

This is my brother, Bob. Bob, this is Scarlett. Do you like what you see of her?

Another voice, a baritone. I love what I can see of little Scarlett. Look how much I like you, little Scarlett. Do you want to see how much? Close up? Here right up close to your face? Better use lots of spit, little Scarlett, get it nice and wet deep down there in your throat and if it’s lubed up just right, then brother Bob won’t hurt you very much at all.

The sounds of feigned pleasure, the sounds of simulated pain. The neighbour turned the television off and all the play-acting was replaced by silence. Susanna watched him adjust his vaguely interested penis in his boxers and scratch his chest distractedly, then her spyglass theatre was plunged into darkness. She stood quietly, tiptoed back towards her own front door.

She closed it behind her and leaned against it. Touched her breasts, feeling the steady thud of her heart. Then, when she was certain that the rhythm of it was no more aroused than usual, she let her hand slide onto her breast, massaging the nipple, feeling the comforting weight of flesh slip into her hand. She liked the feel of her breast in cotton. She liked the way the nightdress slid up with the barest caress, exposing the bright sheen of moisture on her thighs, the humid damp of the tangle of hair. She didn’t shave herself as the women on the internet shaved. There was no one to care that the view was obscured; no one to see how thick and forested her crotch was, to smell the gamy scent of it, like a wild creature gone to earth.

She let her fingers slip into herself, this torso, this new torso a real man’s body, this real man sleeping in a real bed a matter of metres from her own. She fingered herself and touched her breast and her mind was aflame with a real man pulling his cock in her very real apartment building, with the invented pleasure echoing out like a soundtrack to his ministrations.

She came too quickly, an unsatisfying end to such a vivid first experience. It could have been Aaron working himself to orgasm in the brash light of a television screen, it might have been her Mr Fitzgerald. But the spasms of pleasure were sharp and dissipated quickly. If that man had been her lover—surely her orgasm would have shattered her world. She felt sure that her body would have responded more fully to a brush with the familiar.

She wiped her hand on the cotton of her nightdress and pushed away from the hard wood of her door. It was coming up to 3 am. She drank water, splashed some onto her flushed face, and slipped quietly between the crimson sheets. There was a sound, some low drone. Perhaps it was her neighbour tripping into a deep sleep, the succubus climbing up onto his bed, you think I’m too big? You’d better get ready and relax because I’m going to show you there’s room in there for two.

Susanna wondered if his sleep was restless, if he sensed her sleeping through the thin dividing wall. How easy it would be to drill a hole between their rooms, the kind of glory hole they might make in one of their scenarios: a place for the occasional protrusion of his penis, anonymously grand and angled perfectly for her own separate pleasure. If this was Aaron in the apartment next door she might suggest it, but it was not Aaron. This was some other stranger, snoring quietly in the room next door.

Most of the residents of the building were sleeping. She knew so many of them by now. She had read of Angela Loon’s debts and the possibility that a company might repossess her car. She pressed her hand against Angela’s door, sleepless at 2 am, wishing for some end to her worries. She had seen the letters to Henry Cleckheaton from his eight-year-old son, the photographs of fish dragged, boy-sized, from rough seas. Looking forward to my birthday breakfast when I get back. Mummy says I shouldn’t ask what you have got me but I think it is a fishing rod of my own but one that works on the beach because mummy doesn’t have a boat like Uncle John.

The cute row of kisses at the bottom of the page did not dissuade her from crouching low to peer through the keyhole while Henry Cleckheaton walked from his kitchenette and back to the table—trailing the glorious scent of buttered toast. Susanna clutched her stomach with a wave of hunger; she was hungry also to see more of Henry. Another potential Aaron and, after days of wandering through sleeping halls, finally she’d found an Aaron awake when all the other Aarons were asleep.

He opened his laptop, a good start. She saw his face illuminated, his fleshy pout, the pale, almost white shock of hair, the startlingly blue eyes. Her breath made the paint of the door bead with condensation. It seemed he would stare into the computer forever without making a movement or a sound. She wanted him to take off his pyjama pants; this at least, just a quick look at his penis, the presence or absence of a foreskin, might eliminate him.

Just when she imagined that he would sit forever like this, frozen in a pose of concentration, Susanna heard a thin voice, cracked with sleep.

‘Henry?’

A man’s voice, a high-pitched bluebird of a voice, sweet and musical. She had imagined from Henry’s correspondence that he lived alone.

‘Henry? Come to bed. You are always on your computer. It is bad for your eyes.’

Henry turned to the place beyond the scope of Susanna’s keyhole. He smiled, a smile that lit up his pretty face and made her heart and her loins ache a little. Such a gorgeous smile, angelic. He was, perhaps, in his forties and therefore just outside her target group. Most of the men over forty she had encountered on the internet were circumcised. Most had the odd grey hair around their nipples or peppered through their pubic hair.

‘You are not playing that godawful game again, are you?’

‘Perhaps, my pet.’ The angel glowed with a screen-blessed halo.

‘But I am disappointed. You should be looking at porn like a normal red-blooded male. Not running around some deserted pretend island like a child.’

‘This game is not for children, Dimitri.’

‘I know another game that is not suitable for children.’

‘Is it hard?’

Henry was. She could see the outline of his cock tenting his pyjama pants as he stood and gently closed the screen.

‘I’ll teach you. There aren’t very many rules.’

‘Oh. I am fond of rules, though. Without rules we have nothing to push against.’

‘I have something for you to push against. And so do you, I can see it from here.’

She wanted the invisible stranger to wander out into the diningroom. She wanted the coupling to occur in the tiny fragment of the room available to her prying gaze. She wanted so much to see this combination of male flesh, something she had not yet seen on the internet, the kind of game she and Aaron might play with some unsuspecting torso. But the intensity of her desire would not make it so.

She was treated only to some creaks which must have come from the loose or overstretched joints of Henry’s bed. There were a few grunts and at one point a little giggle, muffled by bedclothes or perhaps a pillow. And after this, little easy settling sounds.

Susanna stood and walked slowly past the other doors of other apartments. No one awake now but herself. Henry was still an option for her. Despite his Dimitri it was clear from the letters of his son that he had once been with women too. You are always on your computer. It is bad for your eyes. Perhaps this was all the hint she needed. A man of average build with a computer habit and a fluid sexuality, easily aroused.

Back in her apartment she pinned his letters to her cork board of possibility. It was thinly populated: her direct neighbour, who still remained anonymous because the lock on his mailbox was still firmly in place, and Henry Cleckheaton. The definitely-nots were laid out on the diningroom table. Women, older men, the very fat and the very thin. She sat at her kitchen bench and ate buttered toast and opened her laptop, but of course he was never online at this time in the morning.

Hi there, typed a big swollen torso with a tiny sausage of a penis.

Hi, she typed back.

Female? Male?

Female.

Age?

Old enough.

Turn your webcam on, let me see your pussy.

No. But I assure you I have one, and if you touch yourself for me I promise I will be touching myself too.

James Bacon was reading Lolita. It was not much to go on, but as she stood beside him in the lift her senses clicked over to high alert. She noticed the caramel smell of his aftershave, his smooth jaw, his over-long eyelashes and the little grin that kept flicking up to kiss his perfectly formed lips. She had read the book a dozen times and wondered which part of the narrative was resonating, which literary touch was making this young man smile. James Bacon lived on the floor above hers. The room directly above, in fact. Sometimes, not often, she heard his footsteps. Once she heard something fall and shatter on her ceiling.

James was young, a potential Aaron if there ever was one. She had read his phone bill and seen that his internet usage rivalled and sometimes surpassed her own. Apart from this his mail was sparse, bills mostly, a card from his mother on his birthday: Dear James, enjoy your day. Love from Mum. He subscribed to magazines she liked, the New Yorker, Gourmet Traveller, and surprisingly, because it was really aimed at girls, Frankie. Once there was a letter from the library: a reminder to pay his overdue fine.

The boy was a reader. He was clean. He liked at least one of the books she loved. She stayed with him, missing her own floor, allowing the surging tide of the lift to deposit them both on his floor. She laughed a little awkwardly.

‘Oh dear. I didn’t press the button. I’ve missed my floor.’

James Bacon smiled and winked in quite a winning way. ‘Do you want me to walk you home?’

She would like that, she thought, she would like that very much. But instead she found herself blushing, holding the old, uncooperative lift door open as James Bacon stepped outside and onto his own floor.

‘I live up here, if you ever get lost again,’ he told her and Susanna was sure she detected a quick flicker of his eyes up and down her body. Just a glance, but she felt herself respond, her nipples pushing back against the pressure of his gaze. She let go of the lift doors and retreated back into the mirrored gloom.

‘9F,’ he told her quickly and then mouthed the words again, gesturing behind him back into the dingy corridor before the lift doors clattered shut, abandoning her to the astonishment of her own reflection.

I have to go now. He cut off their meeting abruptly, and this wasn’t the first time. Sometimes Aaron disappeared for hours at a time, returning with one or another invented sexual exploit to charm her with. He wasn’t hers exclusively and Susanna wasn’t here expressly for his purposes. She had other people to talk with, the passing parade of the torsos, but tonight she found their endlessly reiterated masturbation tiresome. She prematurely ended a tryst with an older man and snapped shut the laptop. Stood and paced about her apartment, glancing up at the ceiling with its old pressed-metal curlicues. She listened, but there was nothing but silence. She ate cheese and crackers, drank one glass of wine and then, possibly too quickly, another. She lay on the couch, but there was the ceiling, mocking her.

Her own copy of Lolita lay, as always, beside the couch: her favourite book in all the world. She had picked it up, an old annotated edition with the smell of an antiquarian bookshop, the smell of childhood, hidden away in the corner of a musty shop. She had been with her mother, diaphanous and gauzily sunlit by the window, deep in silent flirtation with the man who owned the place, the slow creep of his hand onto her thigh, the pleasures of a nymphet. Susanna was sure that she was still one of Humbert Humbert’s nymphets although she had already stumbled into an awkward puberty, not yet blossomed into the beauty that she would become.

She stood and checked her dress, acceptably pretty, and picked up her keys from their place in the fruit bowl by the door. She locked it and tucked the key into a pocket. Ninth floor. There was no reason for her to be nervous but her palms were sweating anyway. A casual and perfectly explicable stroll, nothing more. She walked down the empty corridor. Her feet made barely a sound on the faded carpet. The light was misfiring, flicking on and off. She would let the caretaker know when she saw him next. I was just coming up here to check the light—I noticed it was misbehaving.

Misbehaving. Such a word. Not a word to describe a light bulb, but quite appropriate for the thing that Susanna did next.

His door was open. He was nowhere about. She stood in the corridor and negotiated an ethical warren of possibilities, until two possibilities emerged from the chaos. She could turn and go back to her own flat or she could walk into James Bacon’s apartment: the same position as hers, but one floor above.

She crept inside. No sign of him in the livingroom that was an exact mirror of her own. Like her, he had a bookcase beside the couch. She glanced at it, recognising several volumes that she owned herself. Steinbeck, Eugenides, Nin, Salinger, Canin and, surprisingly, Fitzgerald.

A sound. Footsteps and voices, or at least one voice. The sound came from the corridor, her only path of escape. She knew the way to his bedroom, of course, down a hall and to the left. His wardrobe, like hers, was recessed and, like hers, unrenovated. It smelled of his caramel aftershave and shoe polish. Male smells. She hadn’t smelled anything quite so masculine since she last saw David. The astringent reek of a male armpit, the strong, thick fug of a man’s shoe. She took a deep breath and held it as she heard the sound of the front door closing. A little bell of laughter.

His voice: ‘I should get that fixed.’

Her voice, whoever she might be: ‘I do think it’s romantic that you came downstairs to meet me. Escort me, so to speak’

More laughter.

‘I know you’re going to think I’m lying, but I’ve never, you know…’

‘Hired a woman for sex before? I believe you.’ Her voice was high and slightly grating. ‘Someone good looking as you doesn’t need to buy a girl.’

‘Treating myself tonight.’

‘Well let’s get straight to sweets, then.’

The sound of their voices getting louder as they moved down the little corridor towards the bedroom. Susanna crouched back as far as she could. She was surrounded by trousers. Pinstriped ones, black ones, fine soft cotton, the rough scrape of denim jeans.

The cupboard door was of slatted wood. It was dark inside but the lines of light draped themselves across her face and neck. Through the gaps she could see James and the woman, her short skirt tight around her hips, the low sweep of her singlet top. She was wearing stockings and when she turned to rest her hands on his shoulders, Susanna could see the straight black seams running up her shapely calves. Her hips swayed. She took his hands in hers and slid them onto those shapely hips and suddenly it was a dance.

Susanna’s late-night adventures were so numerous now that she had quite forgotten the limited extent of her experience. One man, the silent language of their bodies fused together, a soundless gesture of the hand, an inclination of the head, an arching of the hips, the communication of the deaf.

She had never seen another woman seduce a man. Never watched the slow unveiling of another woman’s breasts, the stretch of the cotton, the thumb looped under the shoestring strap.

The woman peeled her shirt from her chest and there was a bra, a black one made almost entirely of lace, more ornate than any of Susanna’s, red thread snaking through a flower pattern. When the woman slipped the tight stretchy skirt from her hips, there was a tiny scrap of fabric covering her pubic area. A matching flower pattern in a triangle barely large enough to cover her sex at all.

The woman stepped away from her dance partner, she swayed on her red stilettos, her garter straps caressed the cheeks of her arse. Tight smooth skin, round like two ripe fruits divided by the dark line of her g-string. She turned so that her back was to James Bacon, bent forward. Her breasts falling towards Susanna, pale as peaches in the dark lace cups. She saw him reach out and cradle them in the palms of his hands. The woman began to hum, a pretty tune, she rocked her body to the beat of it and he stepped towards her, pulled her hips back against his crotch.

He moved his hips to the rhythm she had started, the strange breathy notes tripping from her mouth. He reached out then and his fingers settled on her bra. Susanna remembered this inexpert fumbling. It was a game she often played with her former lover. New bra, new clips, new twists and tugs to be mastered. David had been good with his hands. His hands spoke to her and almost always it was only a momentary pause for him to find the clips and snaps and tug her breasts free. James Bacon was not so dexterous, and after a minute of tugging the woman stood and reached behind her and undid the clasps herself.

There were her breasts. Wondrous things suddenly revealed. Breasts like Susanna’s only heavier, pink tipped where hers were brown, the nipples long and almost like fingers, straws for men to suck on. He turned her around then and took one of those nipples between his lips. Susanna had never before seen a man suckling, the act so tender, his head held gently between her fingers, the red nails tangled in his hair.

As she watched his hand reach out to cup the other breast, the fingers encircling the engorged nipple, her own nipples clenched in sympathy. Her body was there, crouched in the darkness of the cupboard, and yet it was her own breasts being touched—caressed and gentled between his lips. She arched forward, her chest brushed against the slats of the door, her nipples snagged on the edge of the wood, she traced them quietly up and down.

She tasted saliva in her mouth. She could feel the hard little finger between her teeth, a phantom of course, because her mouth was empty, but like a teething child she felt her back teeth ache to chew on something.

Susanna watched as his hands slid around behind the woman. He gripped the cheeks of her arse in his palms as if he were weighing this part of her against the heavy breasts he had just relinquished. His fingers slipped into the crevasse between them, toyed with the tiny scrap of black cotton resting there. She noticed one of his fingers slip under the g-string, testing the position and shape of the opening there.

Susanna wanted to join them, she wanted to take his finger and press until it entered the woman, to add her spit to the scene, to ease the passage of his finger up to the knuckle. If this were really Aaron she would do just this. She stared at his fingers. Nothing special about his fingers, nothing out of the ordinary, no moles or liver spots or errant tufts of hair. Fingers like Aaron’s, or like any of her neighbours’. Hands like anybody’s hands.

She watched those hands creep lower, spreading the woman’s cheeks, the fingers testing. She saw the little unself-conscious gesture, the little rubbing, feeling the viscosity, the wetness there.

These things, these little human things that she had not known she was missing. Her time with the torsos now seemed simple and repetitive. It was mostly men who logged on to chat and when she had lucked on a rare session with a woman and her webcam, the fingers bringing forth the juices for her to view were the fingers of the woman herself. This flesh on flesh, she had been craving it; this intimacy. Even in the arms of a whore, this man seemed glorious in his pleasure.

And now she felt her heart skip a little as she watched the rouged fingernails take hold of his zipper and creep it down. The prostitute reached slowly, and there was a glimpse of flesh before she dipped her head towards his crotch and slid her crimson lips around his penis.

Susanna watched the dipping of her head. She saw the man hook his fingers through her hair, blonde, straight, tied prettily back in a ponytail. She saw his fingers (anybody’s fingers) wrap around the elastic band, a circle of thumb and forefinger around a slick chunk of her hair. Perhaps he was using her hair to control the rhythm of her mouth. It was difficult to tell how much pressure his fingers were exerting. She wanted the woman to take breath, move to one side so that Susanna could see the size and shape of the penis.

This could be Aaron. There was no reason to imagine this wasn’t Aaron, the books, the Nabokov and the Fitzgerald, the subscriptions to her favourite magazines. This was a kindred spirit with an appetite for sex in tune with her own. She watched him tilt his head back, moan gently. With one hand wrapped around the pigtail, the other now gentling against the woman’s chin, she watched him ease her head forward and back repeatedly, and she could only imagine the pleasure that this warm, wet caress would give him.

Susanna could smell her own sex, musky and damp. The scent of it mingled with the scent of his clothes. This is what they would smell like if they were together, she and he. This earthy moss was the union of two strangers, a strange and pungent alchemy. She shifted uneasily, careful not to make a sound.

He raised the woman gently, lifted her to standing. Her body obscured his. When Susanna tried to peer around her, she heard the rattle of a belt hanging close to her ear. She stopped, still as a statue, but the sound of her shifting had not carried. The woman undid James Bacon’s belt. The jeans dropped to his feet, his shirt was unbuttoned and abandoned to the floor. He stood naked to his socks and the frustrating obstacle of the prostitute’s almost-naked body hid the crucial part of the puzzle from Susanna.

They moved together to the bed, the woman pushing, the man stepping tentatively backwards. The woman abandoned her g-string, leaving her suspenders and stockings to hug her curves. He sat on the edge of the bed and she slipped into his lap like a gymnast. Susanna couldn’t be sure how long the woman had been holding the condom in her hand, but she produced it now like a rabbit from an empty hat. She slipped off him and here for the first time Susanna was treated to an unimpeded view.

His penis was completely erect, the foreskin stretched back but clearly present. The chest—yes, it could be Aaron’s chest. She crossed her fingers, held them against her breasts. She wished for this to be Aaron, her Aaron, her partner in sexual intrigue, her angel of the internet.

The woman put the condom on with her lips, dipping her head and taking him into her mouth, a slippery little inch at a time. When it was sheathed she shifted her weight and settled down onto him. Susanna peered through the slats at the vision of the woman’s body perched above him, sliding up and down on the sheathed cock. Susanna could see the pink lips of her vagina gripping the pale rubber stretched over the shaft.

Curious. Such a natural act, the same scene played out behind almost every door in their building, the same easy physical connection. His scrotum faced towards Susanna. She could study it, neat and high and tight, the pale scatter of hairs, the way the flesh shifted slightly with his rising excitement. She watched as he interrupted the woman’s rhythm, lifting her off his cock. When he laid her down on the bed her breasts remained pertly upright, the nipples still startlingly erect and pointing directly towards his face. He dipped his head to suck first one then another before pulling her thighs towards his hips and slipping his cock inside her as he stood at the edge of the bed.

Before his hips got in the way of her view, Susanna saw the woman spread wide, the secret core of her glistening wet, and open. The lips of her cunt a deep crimson from the friction of his penis, thinner than her own, but neater. All this was visible because the prostitute had not a single strand of pubic hair. Her vagina was clean as a teenage girl’s and Susanna wondered whether, with such a smooth expanse of skin, she could feel the little hairs on his balls tickle.

He groaned again and Susanna felt it in her own groin. Her thighs had begun to ache and there was an exquisite pressure in her bladder, the growing demand of several glasses of wine making their presence known. She slipped her fist between her thighs to ease the pressure, but she could not be sure if it was having any effect on her bladder or just further inflaming her swollen labia.

Hers were thicker than this woman’s, she thought. She had noticed, in the many evenings shared with Aaron and their various lovers, that the blood was quick to rush into the flesh around her vagina. She noticed how quickly her thighs blushed, her clitoris becoming engorged, a sudden burst of her own juices dripping out onto the quickly thickening lips.

There was, of course, no one to notice how swiftly she responded. Until this moment she’d had no one to compare herself with. She felt that under her pale cotton knickers there was a thick sheen spilling out and covering her fist. She pressed it harder against her crotch, her hips searching for the friction, her body quickly opening to the possibility of her fingers so close at hand. She almost lost balance and arrested her forward lurch only at the last moment, removing her left hand from its slow creep inside her frock and around her nipple; pressing it quickly against the wooden slats.

She was in a state, finding it impossible to settle, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, fretting that her movements would alert them to her presence. She pulled the damp fabric of her pants to one side and slid two fingers between her lips much as a mother might slip a comforter into an infant’s mouth.

She settled back, with a little shift to ease the cramp that was beginning in one calf. Her mouth still felt empty except for an excess of saliva, but her cunt was filled and this at least gave her some peace. A little twitch of her thumb and she slipped into that languid, narcotic state where desire clouds judgment and the act of sex becomes something pure and without regret. If James Bacon and his companion had opened the cupboard door now she would have spread her knees for them to see her open and wet and stuffed full with her fingers. She would have removed these fingers only if they promised to replace them with something of their own.

The cupboard door remained closed, the secret of her pleasure shut up safe. She watched his hips—did his rhythm match the careful stroking that she had memorised in her hours with Aaron? Was James a little quicker than her lover? Perhaps his thrusts were more forceful, less playful; but this was a real woman he was mounting. Perhaps in this situation he would have to adjust his style to match her own.

The woman, who had been quiet until now, began the slow breathy climb. It was the sound that Susanna recognised from her neighbour’s television, a stage whisper mounting breath by breath towards a full operatic scream. A soprano reaching the miracle of her climax, her chest heaving with the effort, her nipples trembling, her muscles tight and working with that singer’s perfect control to coax the same note from her partner.

Susanna’s hand slowed, then stilled. It was the sound that destroyed the moment for her. Her growing excitement suddenly deflated like a balloon. Even the idea of his spend, the pulsing gush of semen that she waited for every time she spent an evening with her torsos, even that promise could not keep her interested when the woman she was watching stretched and quivered beneath him, the note of her passion so ridiculously false.

Without the pressure on her clitoris, Susanna was left with the insistent throb of her need to urinate. She wished suddenly for the performance to finish. She glanced at her watch, removed her slippery fingers from her body and pressed her palm against her vulva, her aim now to stop a flooding of a different kind.

James Bacon kept at his labour for another ten thrusts or maybe more, before withdrawing entirely. Susanna watched him turn to sit on the bed beside the prostrate prostitute. Her legs still wide, the lips still thin, redder now from all the activity that had been played out there. The heightened shrieks ceased instantly. She propped herself up on her elbows and raised an eyebrow at the hunched back of her current partner.

‘I suppose there is a reason I have never paid for sex,’ he told her, nursing the subsiding erection in his lap. Susanna had seen Aaron’s penis on many occasions in the minutes after their electronic couplings, the engorged flesh retreating into its tender blanket of skin. This was a similar event; but then, she supposed, all penises deflate in much the same way. A sigh of disappointment, excitement retreating. She could not tell even now if this was Aaron in the flesh or just plain James Bacon from apartment 9F.

‘You’re still on the meter, honey.’ The woman closed her legs and pushed herself up to a sitting position beside him. Her hand crept into his lap; circled the tender animal nestled there. ‘I’ll give you a blow job if you like. You’ve got ten minutes left, might as well not waste them.’

James Bacon shook his head. ‘I think I’m spent. Or at least,’ he laughed, ‘will not spend. An interesting experiment for me, but I think I’m just not that kind of guy. No offence, I hope. It was lovely while it lasted but…I have learned a lesson I suppose. I guess I’ll stick to internet sex from now on.’

The woman shrugged. She had done her job conscientiously, and she had her money. She got dressed in a cheerful, professional manner. He took her hand and pressed his lips to her fingertips. Gave her a lingering look, from the top of her pretty head to the bottom of her lethal red heels. He shook his head. ‘My, you are fine though. You are very fine. Good luck with the rest of your evening.’

She winked. ‘No luck involved, love. And no need to see me out.’ She turned and Susanna heard the muffled sound of her heels on the carpet, followed by the satisfying thud of the front door.

The cheeky smile that James Bacon had been sporting fell from his face so suddenly that it was as if a second Mr Bacon had suddenly materialised in unit 9F, this one as morose as the other had been chirpy. The new James put his hands up to his face and covered it entirely. Susanna could see nothing of him but the tip of his nose; it was taking large heavy breaths that filled out his chest.

His chest was something she had not yet focused on. Of course she knew Aaron’s chest, could have drawn it from memory, the size and shape of his nipples, the modest covering of soft hair. James Bacon also had a few hairs, the same dark brown as on his head, with the same gentle curl as those on his scrotum and trailing down the inside of his thighs.

But there was something not right. Susanna could not put her finger on it. Perhaps it was the sad spread of his nipples, lying so disappointingly flat against the soft skin there. Or maybe it was just the folds of flesh, the creasing of his slumped body; perhaps it was a mood that marked him as different from her Aaron. But certainly she began to nurse her doubts.

The young man took one breath after another. When he removed his hands he seemed just as before, the calm, slightly amused exterior returned. He reached into his lap and removed the condom that still clung to him despite the loss of his sexual appetite.

He shifted back onto the bed. He crossed his knees. Cock and balls, this is what Susanna saw. Cock and balls resting quietly and without urgency. Susanna felt another little jet of saliva shoot into her mouth, a response to hunger, a response to need. There were no more than four paces between her hiding place and his seat on the bed. In a matter of seconds his cock or his balls could be between her lips.

She remembered the slightly aquatic taste of male flesh, years distant now, but still just as sharp in memory. She remembered the seaside tang, the weedy musk, the slippery texture of pre-come that turned a cock into a delicacy—a shiitake mushroom in some viscous, piquant sauce.

She was caught again: between her need to take him in her mouth and the now quite distracting urge to pee.

James Bacon reached for his laptop. It had been lying on the table beside his bed and he perched it now on top of his pillow. He stretched out across the bed, lying on his side with his head perched up on the pedestal of his one hand, he turned the computer on with the other and waited. She watched him grip his flaccid penis in that gentle fist.

A reprise. That was a pleasant surprise, but how Susanna wished she could pause as she sometimes did in her late-night sessions with Aaron. Wait for me just a moment, and Aaron answering with an x that was a kiss.

Always, my Susie-su, x, but it would suit me better to go with you to the bathroom and sit the laptop on the sink. It would break my only rule, but the thought of you stretched wide, the abandon of your warm stream—I would devour the image as one knocks back vodka, with all the rough energy of a Russian peasant: the thought of your waters splashing against my thighs. Surely we know each other well enough by now. If only I could enter you with your bladder full and throbbing around my cock. If only I could remain inside you to enjoy the hot stream, your pleasure and relief trickling down over my balls. Think Susie-su: our final nod to decorum spent, you and I could fling ourselves into debauchery together if only you would take me with you when you go.

She would type: Be right back, and take the time to relieve herself alone. He had said once that only when she allowed him in to this final forbidden pool would the two of them truly become one. Till then they would be co-travellers, fond but separate.

Of course she had been tempted, her devotion to her Aaron had crossed over to a place that was wild and desperate and all-consuming. But she was still just Susanna in the day, quiet Susanna, shy, proper Susanna, and she had found it impossible to take the final debasing step.

James Bacon touched himself without urgency. The action on the laptop must have begun to interest him in a more immediate way, because he moved the computer back to its place on the bedside table where it would be safe from tipping and spills. He sat up.

Anyone peering into his boudoir through the tiny keyhole of his webcam would see the ubiquitous torso, the stomach, chest and nipples, the everyman hand and the steady rise of a penis that was just right: not so large as to frighten and not so small as to be no use at all. He stroked himself with such calm control that Susanna found her fingers travelling back to that moist opening once more. She was desperate to pee but the need only seemed to add to her desire. She pressed her thumb against her urethra and instantly her clitoris became a thick nub of erect flesh under the steady pressure. Three of her fingers were engulfed up to the knuckles, the fourth awkwardly pushed inside her at an angle, filling the space, stretching the wet flesh as wide as the mouth of a hungry fish.

She watched his right hand working on himself, an easy massage. His left hand reached up and stroked his chest and then, in a gesture that almost finished Susanna, he held his fingers to his nose, the delicate aroma of the prostitute still on them. He closed his eyes. Susanna saw his penis leap gently in his hand and then he regained control; she regained control. She held her hand utterly still to stop herself from falling over the edge of the void that gaped before her.

James Bacon seemed to be a few steps away from his ultimate excitement. He reached out with his hand, trailing the delicate eau de putain onto his computer keyboard, and, with a click of his finger, transported himself to another place, no doubt to sample some other visual treat. The gentle back and forth of his fist continued. This time he held the scented hand under his nose and breathed more deeply. Then, when he had sucked in his fill of musk and pheromones, he slipped one of his fingers into his mouth and slid it out again.

Susanna watched the string of spit tracing the journey to his lips. Her own tongue flicked out hungrily, her own lips moist now, her mouth aching with want. It seemed that she could taste the temptress, the pretty whore. It seemed that Susanna herself could detect the flavour of cunt in the air.

She was close, too close. She stilled her hand once more and concentrated instead on the exquisite pleasure-pain of her bladder. The thought of your warm urine splashing against my thighs…

She saw his penis twitch once more, a squirt of pre-come trickling down the glans. She watched him take the juice and add it to the slick layer of wetness, a snail-trail of sexual congress marking the place the woman had so recently anointed.

It was too much to bear. Susanna felt the sudden jet of warm urine trickle out around the stopper of her thumb. She felt its trail across her crotch, and flow down her thighs to pool in his shoes, James Bacon’s shoes, which were laid out neatly beneath her wide-spread thighs. She tried to hold in the flow, but the tensing of her pelvic floor only helped ease her towards the crest of her pleasure. She felt the pulsing begin. She felt her fingers crushed within the masticating jaws of ecstasy, the juices from one source mingling with the juices from another.

Just when she was reaching the very summit of her joy the cupboard door was rudely flung open. James Bacon stood before her, the bounce of his cock so suddenly within reach of her face. She saw herself as he would see her, her dress pushed up to reveal the lewd spread of her legs, her hand buried almost completely in the wet gape of her sex, the trickle of piss reaching its most furious flow, her lips moist and chafed by the restless worrying of her teeth, one breast lifted from its little resting place, the nipple protruding from the chaste neckline of her cotton dress.

She looked up into his face, surprised, concerned; but then with that dreamy melting unfocused dip of the eyes that indicates the inevitable approach of an orgasm.

‘Oh god help me,’ he said in a gravelly sigh. Then, with a laugh, ‘It seems my shoes have been baptised by the most sexy of sacred waters. From the body of an angel, no less.’

His penis twitched twice, a fat finger beckoning to her and she answered with a downward tilting of her head, her lips parting, the scent of his excitement, and, more strongly, the scent of her: the taste of her vagina on his cock. Susanna felt the last throbs of pleasure shudder through her and felt the sudden jet of heat in her mouth, the taste of Bacon at the back of her tongue, the salty tang of it trickling down her throat.

This was not Aaron, her Aaron of the late night communion. This was a stranger, someone beautiful but new. And when she eased back, took breath, gazed up at him, her cheeks flushed, her clothes damp and awry, suddenly it didn’t matter to her that this man was not Aaron at all.

James Bacon reached down and plucked her, doll-like, from her sated repose. He touched her chin and held her gently to him. He eased her mouth towards his.

A kiss. The second man she had ever kissed. A kiss that tasted of sweat and sex and a delicate mingling of male and female desire. Susanna abandoned herself to the kiss, and when she finally pulled away and took one trembling breath after another, he tenderly pushed an errant lock of hair away from her dark and smoky eyes.

‘Hello, my cupboard angel,’ he said. ‘My name is James Bacon.’

And, shyly, the startled post-coital Susanna of the silent daytime world opened her pretty kissed lips, and said hello.