It was quiet in the office without Sandra. She was my business partner and we had been working together for two years, ever since shaking hands on the arrangement to combine our talents in an advertising agency, she as graphic designer and I as copywriter. We enjoyed our working life and had had the good side of each other without the mundane reality of domestic life. Sure, we had business matters to deal with, but we agr...

My phone rang, which was a surprise. I'm not a great one for chatting, and my friends know that. But it was Mary, so she probably didn't want to just talk. Mary and I had a nice, relaxed relationship. We would meet every couple of weeks or so for a drink, a meal or as each other's plus-one for a function. And we would always end up in bed together, and it was always great, because we had similar ideas, likes and dislikes....

I had known Caroline and Wendy for more than two years because they were part-time workers for the firm where I spent all my time staring at a computer screen in a job I didn’t like much, but which paid the bills. Caroline was medium height and generously shaped, with quite big breasts and a bottom that could be described as ample. She wasn’t overweight, but comfortably upholstered like many mothers of her age, forty-ish,...

Jackie’s house was in what I suppose you would call (in the UK, anyway) an estate. Not a council estate, but a group of privately owned houses, all in a similar style and each with a little garden at the front and at the back. Hers had two bedrooms, a decent-sized lounge and one small bathroom. I’m telling you this because she seemed quite proud of it and showed me around. She had had a little garage built on the side, an...

Maria Espalda gazed out of the window of her little shop in the hills of Derbyshire. She thought about her life and wondered seriously how on earth she had ended up there. Her hand strayed inside her shirt and she adjusted her bra, then without thinking, the fingers ran down her body to her jeans and she very gently touched her pubic area, not attempting to stimulate herself but confirming that she still had those parts....

Rainy days of the soul... As I eased my car up the disturbingly narrow lane to our hosts' house, I saw Sylka sitting on a low wall by the door. Her husband came out to do the man-of-the-house business of showing me where to park and at what angle so I would stand a chance of getting out unscathed later. He was businesslike but friendly, his default setting. And Sylka just sat there, not exactly looking at me, but it was a...

The sun was always shining as I sat outside the New Moon cafe, which was behind a high wall by a beach. It was always sunny because I only used to go there when the weather was good. This was in Guernsey in the early 2000s, when the finance industry was booming, which was fine if you were in it, which I wasn't. For me it was just a very expensive place to live because there were so many people with so much money. I stayed...

Joolijools and I kissed as soon as we got in my car. She looked at me with those tired green eyes that expressed her sorrow that she wasn't Michelle Pfeiffer or even Audrey Hepburn. My hand automatically went around her head, with its permed middle-aged ginger curls, and pulled her large skull towards me and those eyes narrowed and closed as she gave herself to the kiss. Her tongue moved accommodatingly with mine, keen to...

Our first date with Geoff and Arlene had been a qualified success. That is to say, Tilly had had a good time with Geoff, allowing him to give her anal, and Arlene and I had eventually come to terms with each other to the extent that I had fucked her and rimmed her to orgasm. That was in separate rooms at their innocent little suburban home. Then, as Tilly and I discussed it afterwards, we had found ourselves agreeing that...

“So how did it go?” Tilly asked as we drove home from our first swapping experience. I gave her a fairly complete account of my hour with Arlene, how I had persuaded her to shower off the perfume and industrial-strength floral deodorant, and how things had improved after that. A fairly complete account. We were back in our own home by the time we got on to Tilly's story of her time with Geoff. “He's a strange guy,” she be...

Arlene is wearing a tight-fitting bright red dress. She has had her long blonde hair done and smells like she had just had a shower and then doused herself in perfume. She is carefully but showily made-up, the bold lipstick emphasising her quite prominent white teeth. And she is laughing too much, tittering at everything I say, because she's nervous. Within half an hour, this girl and I are supposed to be having sex. And...

Eve shifted uncomfortably in her seat next to me as we sat at her kitchen table and my hand reached the top of her thighs. She was teaching me the ins and outs of Microsoft Office, because I had a job interview coming up that required the sort of computer ability secretaries possess. I had been using Word for years, purely as a word processor, and I could do all I needed for my usual work, but with times being as tough an...

El Tablado is on the east coast of Tenerife and I was living there because it was cheap. Tenerife is a Spanish island off the coast of north Africa, so it has its own identity and is not sophisticated like Madrid or Barcelona. It was the weirdest town I had ever lived in, so small it was almost a village, with one small shop that was like the focal point and a little, cramped, dark, unattractive bar that was open only whe...

The Spanish embassy in Bogota, Colombia was awash with women. Working there, I mean. The ambassador herself was about seventy years old and although that doesn't make her ineligible in my book - and she was in decent shape and was probably quite a looker in her day – she had switched herself off sexually and exuded nothing, even in the intimate confines of the office at her official residence in the evening, when I was gi...

Edna and I had run out of time. Having found in each other a kindred spirit, determined to reconfigure sex as a natural pleasure that could and should be enjoyed without shame, embarrassment or selfconsciousness, we had had a few days of unimaginably liberating animal couplings with the important human addition of conscious affection. I was, as men would say to each other, shagging this woman, who happened to be one of my...