New Brunswick, Canada 2024
After a hard day at the venue site I retired to The All Seasons Inn in Sussex for a well-earned, if amateurishly cooked, steak. I had been seeing a lady socially for a few days and arranged to meet her in the restaurant there on my way back to base. Carrie was thirty-two, five feet four or five tall, slim with a pound or two to spare, but not the greatest conversationalist on the planet, God love her. She was quite attractive though. She had dark hair to her shoulders, lightly tanned skin, and could suck the lacquer off a snooker ball. After dinner she asked if she could follow me home to the cabin I was renting deep in the woods for the summer. I knew she was just being nosey but I couldn’t resist her as she looked at me with her bright blue eyes and smiled hopefully.
She wore a loose white blouse and was poured into a pair of cut-off Levi’s which left nothing to the imagination, and she didn’t wear a bra. Something stirred in my penis when she squeezed my hand, so I agreed and enjoyed watching her climb into a huge, white Dodge Ram that should have had a petrol tanker attached in order to replenish the vehicle with fuel as it drove along.
“What are you doin’ with all those books, Brian?” she said, pointing at the coffee table when we walked into the cabin. “Will you read them all?
“There’s only six and I’m here for six weeks, Carrie, so yes, why wouldn’t I?” I said.
“It looks boring, do you not watch TV?”
“I prefer not to,” I said, “the TV is shit over here in any case.”
“What’s it like in Ireland?”
“Shit, too,” I said, “but the adverts don’t go on for hours at home and the BBC doesn’t have ad breaks.”
She picked up one of my books, The Instruments of Darkness, by John Connolly. She riffled through the pages absently and peered at the back cover.
“What’s it about?” she asked.
“I haven’t started it yet, Carrie,” I said, “I’ll tell you when I do.”
“Is it a detective book?”
“To a degree, I think they’d be classed as a mystery series following the investigations of a haunted detective who works cases that blur the line between the criminal and the supernatural.”
“It wouldn’t be my idea of fun.”
“Do you read at all, Carrie?”
“Yes, of course I do.”
“What do you read?”
“Erotica,” she said.
“What kind of erotica?”
“What do you mean, Brian?”
“Can you give me an example of something you’ve read?” I asked.
“Fifty Shades of Grey,” she said.
“Ok, I’ve heard of that but I haven’t read it, who’s the author?”
“I have no clue.”
“Any others?”
“I get most of it online on Literotica, a couple of swinger sites, places like that,” she said. “Just Google ‘sex stories’. There’s loads of them, Literotica is about the best of them.”
“I see,” I said, not aware of any, “I might try it if I get time.”
“Try it! All my friends love Literotica, Brian,” she said.
“Show me a story,” I said, pointing at her phone as I opened a bottle of Jameson’s Crested that I’d bought in Dublin Airport Duty Free on my way to the plane for the flight over to Canada.
“Can I have one of those too?” she asked.
I poured her one and sat beside her as she toggled her phone’s browser. She found what she was looking for and handed me her phone to read it. It was a story in the Loving Wives Category called ‘Bride Shared on her Wedding Night’. I began to read and laughed to myself.
“What’s so fuckin’ funny?” she asked.
“The first line.”
“What?”
“Straight in with ‘My cock was buried ball’s deep in her just married pussy as she screamed in multiorgasmic arousal.’
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Apart from the punctuation and spelling, it’s not erotica, Carrie. It’s porn.”
“It’s erotic, Brian, you can’t deny that, it gets me hot every time I read it.”
“It really doesn’t do it for me,” I said, “it wouldn’t be my cup of tea at all.”
“Everyone I know likes erotica.”
“I do too, Carrie,” I said, “but this isn’t erotica. I take it that there are no editors on this site because any editor with a fucking brain would reject something like this out of hand. Look, read further, he’s been fucking her for an hour and has had eight orgasms, covering her in semen every time. It’s just not humanly possible. It’s a caricature.”
“So what is your idea of erotica?”
“Oh, I don’t know offhand,” I said. “I’m no expert, but I suppose my reference would be Lady Chatterley’s Lover. That is erotica. Everything is simply alluded to and described almost poetically using prose, cadence, tempo, and language that is sympathetic to the narrative of the physical and sexual interaction of a couple. Nobody is balls deep in anything and a pussy sits beside the fire on a stool lapping milk from a saucer.”
“But it’s just fiction,” she said.
“Yes it is, you’re quite correct,” I said, “but it’s not erotic fiction and you’d need a gallon of semen to cover anyone with it, especially in the hotel room that your new husband will return to in ten minutes time. I mean, who’s going to clean it up before he arrives? And where are her knickers gone? I’m sure he’ll notice that she’s not wearing any.”
“What’s that Chatterley’s book about?” she said, “I never heard of it.”
“I’ll concede that it’s an old book, but it’s written in an erotic way,” I said. “Maybe it has been brought into the modern era by adding certain words and themes, but the ethos is still relevant.”
“You told me that you wrote a couple of books.”
“Six, yes.”
“How would you write erotica then?”
“Oh, you’re putting me on the spot, Carrie,” I said, “I’d have to develop some semblance of a believable plot that would explore the character’s personality, motives and sensuality. I think a place to start would be to buy a book of modern erotic fiction and see what it’s like, just to establish the modern form of the genre.”
“That all sounds very boring and flowery, Brian.”
“That’s a bit harsh, Carrie,” I said. “There are many ways to build arousal and desire through flirting, double entendre and stuff like that without the use of crudeness.”
She grinned. “Give me an example.”
“You’re just being a dirty little girl now, aren’t you?” I said, grinning back at her.
“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Brian.”