the romantic surroundings. Not a sausage – not even a blooming chippolata. In the realm of foodstuffs he is more like a soft roe waiting for a small bit of toast to make a cocktail snack for a midget. I raise my fingers slowly to my mouth and start blowing on them. ‘What are you doing now?’ This time Valentina sounds irritated.
‘My hands are cold,’ I say. ‘I’m trying to warm them up.’
‘Typical English,’ she says. ‘Cold ’ands, cold ’eart.’
‘We say cold hands, warm heart,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘It means if you have cold hands you have a warm heart.’
‘Why?’
I think hard. Yes, why? ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘It’s like lucky in love, unlucky at cards.’
Valentina sighs and lies her head back against the pillow. ‘I never understand the English,’ she says.
‘No,’ I say. ‘It does take a bit of time. It’s not easy to get inside another person.’
Valentina turns her head and I can see her eyes glistening in the darkness. ‘No,’ she says with feeling. She moves over onto her back and holds out her wrist towards the curtain so that she can read the time. ‘Look. I think you want to make love to me. That is what we agree, no?’
‘I do,’ I say. ‘I just don’t want to rush it.’ I put my hand on her shoulder and she winces. ‘See?’
She looks up at me and then suddenly pulls me on to her mouth so hard that our teeth grate. Without taking her north and south away she rises up and presses me back against the pillow. She is stark naked and her breasts flop against my chest. In goes her tongue and her spare hand dives down to the root of my problems. ‘A–a–a–a–h!’ she says. ‘This eez what we are waiting for. No?’ She makes a growling noise and disappears under the sheets. I watch her billowing down like a snowball turning into an avalanche and then with another growl she parks her molars round my hampton. By the cringe! This is romance with a capital ‘Argh!!’ I have heard of blow jobs but this is more like a testicular typhoon. This girl’s suction power could put Hoover out of business. I only wish that I could say that it was having a positive effect on my growth potential but it isn’t. This is terrible. Normally a bird only has to blow my old man a kiss and it rakes the skies like an anti-aircraft gun. Now it is slacker than a trainee wolf cub’s granny knot. What has happened? If a blow job fails then what help is there for me? This must be the beginning of the end – or the end, more like. I might as well start looking for a hobby – like diving off Nelson’s column with a Mills bomb in my cakehole.
‘Gentley, Bentley,’ I say. ‘There isn’t a fire, you know.’
‘You can say that again,’ says the bird unkindly. ‘I ’ave never known a man like you.’
‘That’s your bad luck,’ I say. ‘I can’t help having a bit of refinement of feeling. I’m a roman candle not a bleeding thunder flash.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she says.
‘I don’t expect you do,’ I say, swinging my feet off the bed. Frankly, I am pissed off and the first satisfaction of the afternoon comes in knowing exactly what I am going to do next – get dressed and get the hell out of it. I am not really angry with her, just myself. I was a prick to ever get mixed up in this scene. I feel in the Hush Puppies and recover one of my socks. ‘Bugger!’ I say.
‘What’s the matter?’ She sounds genuinely puzzled. I turn and there she is. Sitting up in bed with her hair over her eyes and one of her breasts sticking out at an angle so that you can see its silhouette sharp as a knife. She looks like somebody else. I wouldn’t recognise her. I don’t recognise her. She is someone else. Not the bird I was getting uptight about but a warm, curvy, screwable chick who is suddenly popped up and propped up kissing inches away from me. I move my head forward and her mouth twists and opens fractionally. I pause and a great relief surges through me – all through me. We twist a little more and like two pieces of a lock clicking together to a predestined pattern we kiss. It is so nice that we do it again. And when we break for breath we nuzzle each other. She rubs her nose up and down my cheek and I push my lips into her hair and brush against her ear. The tips of her breasts touch my chest and because it is unexpected and delicate and very, very teasing it is far more exciting than the blow job – the big blow job, the hurricane blow job, the sensational suck that yielded no sensation except despair.
‘Hello,’ I say – because I am meeting her for the first time.
‘’Allo,’ she says.
She tilts her mouth up and gently takes one of my lips, her eyelashes lying flat against her cheeks. I slide my arms round her and encase her thin frame. How powerful I feel when I see my forearms near hers. How like a giant dealing mercifully from strength. I place my hands tenderly on either side of her cheeks and kiss her gently, marvelling at how easy it all suddenly is. I have stopped thinking about my body as a separate entity from my feelings and am just coasting, letting things happen. I move my chest from side to side so that I can feel the nipples hardening and tug back the sheets that form a skirt round Valentina’s waist. She moves so that she is kneeling and I drop my hand and raise my finger pads under the moist arch of her parted legs. Uhm! That responsive, wanting slipperiness charges me like a battery. I kiss harder and glide two fingers deep as they will go. Valentina shivers and tightens her teeth about my lower lip. She makes a noise at the back or her throat and closes her hand about my cock. Yes, my cock. I had forgotten that. Now it is primed. Hot. Furled. Eager. Valentina pulls at it impulsively and sinks back against the bed drawing me with her. How strange that it can now be so easy. Perhaps the strangeness is that it was so hard before. Valentina is now breathing deep and irregularly as if suffering from a fever. Every breath seems to be launched in uncertain anticipation of what is now inevitable.
I lie over her and enjoy the feeling of warmth that binds me to her. Physical, mental, everything. Very natural. Like the position of my body. Where it ought to be. I rise up and start to slot myself into her. Very slowly because the pressure of her arms on mine and her half-open, tilted mouth tells me she likes it that way. Inch by inch till she sighs, purrs and folds her arms to me. I leave it there and then start to rock. Very, very gently at first. She nods with the rhythm and as she presses her lips together I feel the muscles tightening about my cock. She can grip like velvet fingers and I feel myself being drawn Out as if strong threads run deep into my body. She fastens herself to my mouth and her tongue drives in and out in time with my cock. Up and down my back run her fingers and they slip down to dive between the cleft of my arse. The orgasm is building and I clamp my hands to her and impose my own rhythm. Her mouth breaks free and she digs her nails into my back calling out in Italian. I start to yelp as the juice runs through me and we gasp, groan and sigh until we lie hot, sticky and contented in each other’s arms.
CHAPTER TWO
In which Valentina’s mum arrives and an unexpected love idyll is rudely interrupted.
‘Boum!’ The noise comes from a long way away, echoing through the house. I don’t take a lot of notice of it but burrow deeper into Valentina’s warm, friendly body – but Valentina’s warm, friendly body suddenly isn’t there any more. It is sitting up and looking anxiously towards the door.
‘Basta!’ she hisses. That is not very nice, is it? After all we have been through. It is only afterwards that I find it doesn’t mean what I think it does. ‘Mamma!’ Now I know what that means – trouble. The sound was the front door slamming. Suddenly I am very much awake. For the second time I swing my legs off the bed and start searching for my clothes.
‘Valentina!’
She has her sweater over her head in half a second flat – not flat, very curvy. ‘In the cupboard!’ she hisses. I grab my shoes and scuttle through the door. She picks up a sock and throws it after me. The door closes with a scraping noise. It is not a clothes cupboard but more like a stock