March 29th 2014

The DVD wasn’t the one Vanessa had expected.

She paused in sipping her sauvignon as the title card faded up on her laptop screen, accompanied by an acoustic guitar riff.

Houston Lasalle Productions

Present

Huh? She’d asked to borrow an erotic arthouse coming-of-age flick, but this was– what, a home movie?

Sammy Sukjob

What the actual…

and

Shane Boxschafter

In

Oh guys, no you haven’t…

Any Which Where

The title was in boxy ‘70s font reminiscent of classic porn. It was accompanied by the parenthetical promise:

(There ain’t nowhere these guys won’t do it!)

An opening shot supported this boast. As band and vocals joined the acoustic, Vanessa’s best friend –blonde mini-bombshell Sammy Lasalle– materialised in close-up, her sky-blue gaze reflecting the intensity of the currently-being-fucked. She was bouncing vertically within the frame, momentum supplied by her fresh-faced boyfriend of two years Shane Houston, visible in the driver’s seat of whatever car they had rented. Either side of the vehicle great soapy mops were sloshing against the windows.

‘Harder, baby, we’re on the clock,’ Sammy urged.

‘It’s okay, I booked the Premium Service,’ Shane grunted in reassurance.

‘Oh God, sweetie, you give the Premium Service too…’

‘Christ, enough!’ Vanessa paused her friend on a giddy upthrust. ‘You two are as nuts as each other.’ Thank fuck it was me borrowed this. She speed-dialled Sammy, but it went to voicemail. A call to Shane yielded the same result.

Then his recorded message triggered mischief. Vanessa loved Shane to pieces same as she did Sammy, but she had previous when it came to fucking with the poor guy. ‘Hey, is that exotic motion picture actor Shane Boxschafter?’ she inquired, voice infused with smirking delight. ‘I’ve got an audition reel of you and your performance partner Sammy Sukjob in full technicolor action. Lovin’ your work. Call me.’

She clicked off, grinning at her own cheek. Her gaze lingered on the laptop screen.

Hmmm…

Sammy and Shane were like her family. Their friendship trio kept little in the way of secrets. Hell, the couple arguably wouldn’t have connected without Vanessa’s help. And creativity should be appreciated, right? She’d spruced the apartment, prepped the food... Vanessa had the luxury of time.

She topped up her glass, settled back and hit Play.

Now what was that song? Her friend Jared would have known the band. Then as accompaniment to Sammy and Shane’s frolics came the title line– Feel Like Makin’ Love*.

Vanessa smiled. Oh you guys…

~~~~

‘I don’t believe this is happening.’ Sammy felt the same whole-body chill as when her boyfriend had first revealed the situation. ‘How could we let that happen? How did it happen?’

‘Strictly speaking it wasn’t we,’ Shane observed too logically to be borne. ‘You re-boxed the DVDs. You even said “Wouldn’t it be awful…”’

‘I remember what I said,’ she snapped. Her enforced calm was giving way to a creeping rant. “…If the discs got mixed up. It’d be like that scene in Atonement.” Well ha-fucking-ha, it’s a damn sight worse than freaking Atonement. We haven’t typed Keira Knightley a letter with ‘cunt’ in it, we’ve released a sex tape. Sex DVD. Whatever the fuck. God, this is karma!’

Shane looked perplexed. ‘For?’

‘Being tight-asses. Downloading and burning movies. If there’d been proper labelling, I’d never have confused the discs. “Piracy is killing the movie industry”, right? And as payback our naked asses are going to be out there on full display.’

‘Yes, and your ass got a whole lotta screen time.’

She stared into the cornflower-blue eyes of her partner, momentarily robbed of speech. ‘How is that helping?’

‘I was just…’

‘Well don’t just. Don’t even. Is this sinking in? We’ve sent a comedy sex-show into the wild blue, you and me in flagrante defuckto, and you’re reacting like… Christ, I’ll try Vanessa again.’ She fumbled for her cell. ‘At least it’s only her.’

‘Yeah, but she borrowed it for her artsy friend. You know, the hot insane one.’

Sammy’s heart sank to the bottom of her ribcage. ‘Cherry? Oh God, I’d forgotten.’ I was too far gone on merlot that evening, heaven help me.

Most of Vanessa’s friends were artsy, but Cherry’s work accessed higher levels of bohemian cray– octo-limbed sex sculptures and carnivorous vaginas were the least of it. If she’d acquired the recording, it might be featuring in some mentalist art installation by now. Plus, Cherry had friends who had other friends. If one unscrupulous individual digitized the damn thing, who knew where it might land?

Any Which Where was a quality production after all.

‘Why?’ she demanded mournfully of her beau, rebuffed again by Vanessa’s voicemail.

‘Why what?’

‘Why’d you have to make it?’

‘The super-cut? I thought you loved it.’

‘I did. I do…’

‘“Best birthday gift ever.” You said it reminded you what a “hot connection” we have. Sammy, I asked you to marry me off the back of your reaction.’

‘I know…’

‘You said “Yes”.’

‘I did. I meant it. I still mean it. Not the fucking point! We’ve lost a DVD copy of us screwing the bejesus out of each other in… in… dumbass fucking places, and somehow you’re still calm. We’ve got responsible jobs now. Families who haven’t disowned us. Yet. Certain moms…’ She poked her fiancé of three weeks in the chest. ‘…Are big deals in the Presbyterian Women’s Association! Think on that!’

Shane gripped her shoulders and brought her down with near-supernatural composure. ‘Look– maybe Vanessa still has the DVD. And we’re due at her place tonight. Fretting won’t help... Let’s just go get ready.’

‘Sooner the better– don’t care if we’re unfashionably early in the circumstances.’

‘Sure, whatever. Deep breaths, it’s going to be fine.’

‘It’s going to be fine.’

‘That’s right. Still…’ His face twisted into a grimace. ‘Can you believe the shit we’ve filmed ourselves doing?’

‘Oh God,’ Sammy wailed. ‘We must have been out of our minds!’

~~~~

‘Jesus,’ Vanessa muttered as two years’ sex highlights unfolded before her. ‘You two must be out of your fucking minds!’ Damn, Blue is the Warmest Color couldn’t have been any rawer.

Not that Shane had seemed freaked out when responding to her sex-movie phone message. Maybe at first… Once his shock had subsided, however, a whole other response had kicked in.

‘Vee, don’t tell Sammy.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t let her know you have it. Leave that to me.’

‘But…’

‘C’mon, Vee, this is gold. You gotta give me this. After the shit she’s pulled? You aiding and abetting some of it, don’t forget.’

‘How could I?’ Vanessa’s recalled Sammy’s ‘courtship games’ with painful clarity.

‘Then say nothing. Straight-to-voicemail kind of nothing. Please. Allow me a win here.’

The boy undeniably deserved one. ‘Okay, Shaney-dude,’ she conceded. ‘I just hope’ (she normally used this phrase to Sammy) ‘you know what you’re doing. Hey, let her off the hook before you get here, okay?’

‘Of course. Hey, you haven’t watched it, right?’

‘Noooooo,’ she reassured. Not beyond the opening sequence. ‘Go have your fun. I’ve got dinner to prep. Bye!’

Well I’m damn well going to watch it all now, she immediately promised herself.

The opening ten minutes didn’t entirely make good on Any Which Where’s premise. Carwash fucking was inventive, certainly, but what kinky suburban girl hadn’t been drilled before a full-length mirror in her parents’ bedroom? Scarcely original. Frickin’ hot though…

‘You like watching yourself getting fucked in Mommy and Daddy’s room?’ Shane inquired, training the camera on the mirror so that both he and Sammy were framed full body. Knelt nude on the Lasalle parents’ boudoir carpet Shane proved pleasingly buff– stretching tall and pulling Sammy up with him. She was butt-naked too, jangling bracelets aside, her blonde hair and pert tits similarly a-quiver as she took it hard from behind.

‘Uh-huh,’ she answered his taunt. ‘You like fucking daddy’s girl right in his home? Not scared he’s going to find you making his sweet angel your dirty little bitch?’

‘She is my dirty little bitch,’ he snarled.

‘What is she?’

‘My dirty little bitch,’ he affirmed.

‘Say it again, you sexy motherfucker!’

‘My dirty– little– bitch!’.

‘Goddamn right. Now spank my dirty-bitch ass!’

She hollered the last and Shane whacked with correspondent ferocity. Then he threw her down, gripped her cutesy butt-cheek and tilted the camera to record his cock’s sawing motion between her waxed-clean pussy lips. ‘You’re going to love watching this back, Sam…’

‘Sweet Jesus I should not be seeing this,’ Vanessa breathed, her fingers tugging at her jeans’ buttons. (An image of the pair smiling in festive sweaters on their recent Christmas card leapt to mind, its wholesomeness jarring stupendously with their porno proclivities.) ‘But guys, it’s so good.’

The action cut to a power-shower– not, Vanessa suspected, the Lasalle household this time. The steamy environment plus a camera on a shower-cubicle shelf restricted the visuals, but the Boxschafter/Sukjob star combo compensated with their breathy dialogue.

‘We’re really doing this?’ the male lead marvelled, shafting his lissom co-star against the tiles.

‘My pussy’s stuffed with your cock, stud, so I guess we fucking are!’

He squished his body harder into hers eliciting a high-pitched squeal, whereupon he clamped his free palm (the other clearly employed in hooking her raised thigh) to her mouth.

‘Shhhh!’ he hissed. ‘My parents…’

‘Won’t be up yet,’ was Sammy’s muffled sentiment, one proven alarmingly over-optimistic by an off-camera door-knock.

‘Helloooooo?’

Vanessa jumped in her seat like she’d been caught wet-fingered, her free hand leaping to her mouth. Shane and Sammy had meanwhile stalled in their on-screen coupling.

‘Mom?’ Shane’s face was visibly contorted with horror through the steam.

‘That you, Shane honey?’

‘Yeah– showering first,’ he called frantically over the jets. ‘I mean I guess I’m first. Sam’s still asleep in the guest room. Or at least I’m sure she is, I haven’t looked, but... You know, she’s… she’s a heavy sleeper. So she tells me,’ he added, wincing.

Vanessa’s laughter mirrored that of Sammy, though the latter’s was stifled by her boyfriend’s palm.

‘Well breakfast will be ready soon,’ Shane’s mom announced. ‘Should I call on her?’

‘No, let her sleep. You sort out breakfast, I’ll knock her up shortly. Her door I mean.’

‘Okay, sweetheart. It’s bacon and eggs, so don’t be long. I’m sure Sammy’d like to start the day with something hot inside her.’

‘Oh… absolutely!’

The sequence ended with Shane’s head wilting against his giggling nude girlfriend, and Vanessa could only guess whether the shafting had been resumed to completion. Sammy had recounted the incident once… We were so close to getting caught out. The look on Shane’s face! They had survived the moment, however, Shane’s sweet, devout parents remaining none the wiser. Vanessa had simply never expected to view it all.

Nor had she anticipated witnessing what scenarios ensued. Take the nightclub restroom stall, hardcore dance beats filtering through to accompany the couple’s urgent pelvic union, as Sammy held aloft the device that was shooting their selfie fuck-vid.

The same girl was speaking into a viewfinder next, a movie-screen flicker on her face, right arm stretching from view and generating a ragged male panting with its up-and-down action. (‘Guess who I’m jacking off in a theater. Again. Only capturing it for posterity this time. Good job we bought the big tub of popcorn.’)

After that came alternating shots, the pair filming each other simultaneously with the results niftily edited in post. He was lying on the picnic blanket, she was riding him with the skirt of her summer dress flowing discreetly around his thrusting groin during a Central Park coitus.

Classic box-ticking on the old Fucket List with digital proof of every artfully accomplished sex act. By the time Sammy was cumming amid the baguettes and pinot grigio, Vanessa was three knuckles deep in her own pussy, panty change well overdue.

And that was before the movie got really crazy. ‘Sweet Lord– seriously, dudes?’ Vanessa edged on through the escalating madness.

~~~~

I really should tell her.

A younger Shane couldn’t have sustained such deception beyond thirty seconds. But dating Sammy Lasalle had changed him. He hadn’t so much upped his game as learned a whole new one, subsequently trashing its rules in frustration and inventing his own. That’s what he was doing now, and it felt awesome.

Sammy squirmed beside him in the taxi ferrying them from their apartment off Delancey to the one Sammy had shared with Vanessa on the Lower East Side. A short ride, had it not been for a rush-hour Delancey Street gridlock. The delay was taking its toll on her nerves.

‘I just want to know, that’s all. Find out who the fuck’s got it. How many people have seen it so far.’ She was delectable, fretting in her floral-blue print dress, tugging the skirt down her thighs in an uncharacteristic show of modesty. Their taciturn cab driver paid them no discernible attention.

‘Maybe no one,’ Shane suggested charitably, before admitting ‘Or… conceivably hundreds.’

‘Don’t say that!’ Sammy cringed. ‘Don’t you get it? They’ll see it all– every filthy fuck-word, every thrust of your cock inside me, every fleck of cum-splatter –Christ there was soooo much cum-splatter– suffering shit, we won’t be able to leave the apartment again, we’ll have to be hermits and order take-out. Why aren’t you freaking the fuck out about this?’

‘No point,’ Shane said, keeping his fatalistic demeanor intact. ‘I guess I’ve always kind of known it would catch up with us. God, if you think about it, it’s just the next level of what we were already doing. Our thing, right?’

‘Right??? Wrong!!!’ Sammy’s face was a mask of incredulity. ‘Hello!’ She rapped clenched knuckles on his head. ‘Our “thing” is danger. You know, not getting caught? We like a bit of naughty, in-the-dark, behind-the-door, you’ll-never-guess-where-we-did-it fun. It’s our secret. That’s a far fucking cry from parading our throbbing genitals for the viewing horror of family and friends!’

‘Okay, you make a point…’

‘Goddamn right I do. One that’s kind of fucking key to this mess. And what’s with all this… contrition on your part? It would always catch up with us? Like I made you do those things? Like you weren’t at least as keen as me? “How about trying it in a Bounce House, Sam? I’d like to fuck you in a ball pit. Think I could get you off on a roller coaster?” Goddamn, you loved that shit!’

Her diatribe triggered a response right from Shane’s gut. ‘Yeah? Maybe I did. And maybe I had to learn to love it.’

Sammy was momentarily knocked back. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean maybe I had to embrace your… your patented brand of crazy to survive in this relationship.’

‘My…’

‘You remember how we met, yes?’

‘Yeah, I remember…’

‘Which was…?’

‘At your damn workplace. Shane, what’s this got…’

‘Where you did what? Go on, remind us both…’

‘Okay, I blew you.’

‘In memorably weird circumstances. Sammy Sukjob from the start. And it was only the start. Our first movie theater visit? Creeping into my room at mom and dad’s? Up against our ‘favorite tree’ in Central Park?’ He counted them on his fingers as he listed. ‘I never knew what to expect next.’

‘And you loved every frigging moment.’

‘Okay, maybe– but you always had me on the back foot. Pulling your outrageous stunts. Mindfucking me some way every damn date, Valentine’s Day included. I couldn’t ever beat you, so I joined you. She wants crazy, let’s get crazy. She wants to tape it, let’s tape it every-damn-where. Bring it on. I even compiled it on that disc for your birthday. All you had to do was put it back in the right box!’

Sammy gasped her outrage. ‘You were there too, Shane Houston, so fuck you!’

‘Fuck me? Fuck me? As you’ve made painfully clear, Sam, this might well have fucked us both!’

She stared back at him, fraught with renewed panic.

‘Tell me something…’ The cab driver’s voice startled them both. ‘Don’t mind my asking, but… do you guys ever get a room?’

~~~~

Vanessa didn’t know which was worse– watching the recording at all or doing so when its sexually enthusiastic subjects were that evening’s dinner guests. But Any Which Where was beyond mesmerising, and here she was watching it a third panty-drenching time. The footage from beaches and darkened alleys and hotel balconies was arresting (and frequently arrest-worthy), but it was the more inspired choices that kept her truly riveted.

Her favourites were cued by the intertitle: Sammy and Shane’s Great American Rode-Trip. One or other of the pair would supply the exact location during each copulation, aiming the words at a strategically placed camera if holding the device had proved impracticable.

‘Here we are by Lake Placid in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains,’ Shane announced, as he powered from behind into a bikini-clad Sammy on a muddy stretch of shoreline. They’d positioned themselves to showcase the lake’s crystal-blue, forest-fringed attributes, but Vanessa was more taken with the shit-hot vision of a mud-smeared Sammy getting her cunt smashed.

‘Don’t stop,’ the leading lady told her brawny alfresco lover, groping beneath her own bikini-top in her ardour, ‘or I’ll think a big-ass fucking alligator’s got you!’

Cut to coupling on a car hood in shaky close-up, Shane on hand-held camera duty as he impaled his spread-wide girlfriend. This setting was broad and sparse, two-lane blacktop stretching to the horizon, as sweat popped on both partners’ naked skin. Shane spun the viewfinder even as he fucked his moaning Sammy, bringing into frame a road sign bearing the legend Route 66.

‘Check out where we’re getting our kicks,’ he panted. (Vanessa laughed as she frigged.)

‘Near Albuquerque,’ a scarlet-faced Sammy specified. ‘We’re gonna fuck our way to California.’ The sentiment drew a spirited bout of shafting from Shane, resulting in complete loss of visual coherence.

However wobbly or limited the shots, though, it was all wildly erotic. Vanessa finger-fucked herself as Sammy got eaten out on a sunset-bathed Santa Cruz boardwalk. She rubbed her clit frantically as her friend took hard cock up against a giant Californian redwood. She held herself right on the brink as the slinky blonde bounced in cowgirl euphoria, Yellowstone’s hot springs jetting steam into the atmosphere behind her. ‘Jesus,’ the lithe starlet moaned, ‘I’m straddling one active fucking super-volcano and he’s about to erupt!’

And with that he did, and so did she, in a cine-montage that spliced together the climaxes of multiple fucks. Sammy creamed and squirted all over her boyfriend– his fingers, his face and his cock. Shane emptied his balls, bloating his girlfriend’s cheeks, splattering on her tits and pumping her cunt full, so that great gloopy strings trailed from her as he withdrew. It was one great home-movie orgy of lustful romance and Vanessa came to it long and hard.

She lolled afterwards in her chair, fingers and thighs soaking. Christ, there are times I envy you lunatics.

Then she snapped back into reality and an awareness of the time. Shit, she was reeking of her own juices. Having re-boxed the disc, she hit the bathroom, head full of the madness she had witnessed.

A ball pit, she pondered as she mopped herself, recalling Sammy’s periscope-like emergence from beneath the surface. How do you arrange a fuck in one of those?

~~~~

Sammy and Shane barely spoke for their journey’s remainder. Only outside Vanessa’s apartment, having knocked twice to no avail, did Sammy find her voice again.

‘This is it. Either Vee still has the disc, or…’ She imagined the weight of future humiliation and cowered beneath it. ‘Where the hell is she now?’ All patience shot, she went rummaging in her purse.

‘What are you doing?’ her fiancé inquired.

‘Still got a key.’ She opened the door and bustled inside, Shane protesting behind her.

‘Sam, you can’t just…’

‘Vee? Veeeeee?’

Silence. A variety of aromas was drifting from the kitchen with no sign of the chef. Had she gone to the store? If so, where might she have left the disc? Frantic, Sammy scoured the living-room, delving with especial ferocity into the DVD drawer under the television. ‘Come on, come on, come on… Please be here. Pleeeeeeeeease…’

‘Sam, you don’t live here anymore,’ Shane pointed out.

She stared at him askance. ‘Help me,’ she exhorted. ‘Go– look– find!’ She went burrowing again, before finally noticing that Shane had vanished into another room. Specifically, Vanessa’s. Rushing inside, she found him hovering at their friend’s work desk.

‘Well? Anything?’ She glanced around, all hand-wringing anxiety.

‘No,’ Shane said, his voice flat. ‘Nothing. It’s not here.’

Sammy’s whole body clenched with horror. ‘Oh God…’ The tears that had been stinging began to well up properly now. ‘Oh baby, it’s gone. It’s out. People are going to see us –God knows how many– doing everything. Oh my fucking fuck, we’re doomed. Shane, what are we going to do?’ She clutched her purse with both hands, salt water spilling down her cheeks.

‘Look, it’s okay,’ he said, gripping her arm.

‘How is it okay?’ she lamented, beyond consolation.

‘You see they would see everything. Unless…’

‘Unless what?’ she asked weakly.

‘Unless it was Vanessa who discovered the mistake.’ She stared, blank with incomprehension, at his jaunty smile. ‘Unless she called me. And I, you know…’ He pulled a sheesh kind of face. ‘…Omitted to tell you. In which case I might’ve just…’ He reached under his jacket and magically produced a DVD case branded with permanent marker. ‘…Found it right here on her desk.’

Sammy took the case, staring at her own writing in wonder. Various emotions were rushing her, only one of which was relief. ‘You…’ She wiped away tears with her wrist. ‘You omitted to tell me?’

He flashed her a grin. ‘I think the term is… Gotcha.’

Sammy swallowed, sniffed, and fixed him with a stare. Shane had been imagining this moment all afternoon as one of supreme victory. The storm he forecast in his fiancée’s jaw-dropped face, however, provoked nothing but wariness.

‘What?’ she said, investing the syllable with an impressive degree of menace.

‘Gotcha,’ he repeated, attempting more whimsy than before. ‘Joke’s on you. Ha!’

‘Joke’s on… Wait, you let me go through all of that, because…?’

He’d got this far. Time to say it. ‘Because you owed me.’

‘I owed you?’

‘Yup.’ He shrugged. ‘What I said in the cab– I wasn’t lying. You’ve pranked me so many times, and I have never got one back. Not once– till now.’

Any hope of the storm’s passing foundered on Sammy’s expression. All he could do was forge on. ‘And when the opportunity arose, I couldn’t not redress the balance, especially with what I’ve had planned.’

‘And precisely what,’ she asked, like gelignite on a vibration plate, ‘have you planned?’

Christ, Shane thought, here goes. ‘To rerun your birthday, only properly this time.’ He reached into his jacket and took out the box. Then he scrambled onto one knee and flipped it open, revealing the moissanite stone set in white gold– the ring she had so admired when they searched together online. ‘Sammy Lasalle…’ Due to her look of stunned ambivalence, he forewent any dramatic pause. ‘Will you marry me?’

The ensuing pause stretched out like elastic, until Sammy finally responded.

‘You bastard,’ she hissed through her even white teeth. ‘You fucking, fucking bastard.’

Shane considered this a moment. ‘Is that a “yes”?’

‘Get up,’ Sammy ordered him. He clambered from the floor, still hesitantly proffering the studded band. She glared at him.

He bore her gaze stoically, finally venturing, ‘Well?’

Sammy flung her purse and the DVD aside and snatched the box from him, plucking out the ring and flinging the box after the other items. The band she fitted on the appropriate finger, flexing her hand while studying it, before giving him what might best have been described as an approving grimace.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes I’ll marry you, you total fucker.’ She spat the last part in a mounting rage.

‘Good then,’ Shane replied, his relief superseded by that anticipated tide of victory.

‘I should kill you,’ she said, prodding his chest with the fingers of both hands. ‘Not marry you– I should fucking kill you.’

‘But you’re not going to.’ He gripped her wrists to prevent further poking and each pushed against the other. ‘You don’t really want that.’

‘You think not?’

‘No. I think you want to fuck me.’

‘Oh do you?’

‘Yeah, right here, right now.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Sammy’s glare burned into him. ‘Gonna fucking make me?’

Shane gazed on the certified, certifiable love of his life, then he gripped her blonde head, put his mouth on hers and kissed the suffocating fuck out of her. She grabbed back, stripping off his jacket, so that she could sink her nails firmly into his back. Spurred by the pain, he propelled her to the bed, mouth locked on hers, their tongues still battling for mastery until he threw her onto the covers like a doll. A pretty, delectable, scalding-sexy doll.

‘Come fucking get me,’ she demanded, brushing strands of hair from her panting face.

He was unbuttoning his pants as he climbed onto the bed, ripping them down to free his burgeoning cock, while she hiked her dress to her waist and slithered free of her panties. By the time he’d scrambled on top of her, she was wide-open, wet and ready.

‘I fucking love you, you crazy bitch,’ he told her, fitting himself to her.

‘Love you back, you scheming bastard,’ she responded, palms caressing his face and neck.

Shane thrust, filling her with swollen dick and unchecked desire. Sammy fastened all four limbs around him and howled her approval to the ceiling. ‘Oh God! Oh Christ! Ohhhhh fuck!’

Her lover gave her every ounce of pounding strength he possessed and she took it all, lips and teeth and nails all latched to him hard. She was only sorry they weren’t taping it.

‘I wanna make a sequel,’ she moaned as he ravished her.

‘Yeah?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘How about on Honeymoon?’

‘Really?’

‘Any Which Where: Euro Trip.’

‘Oh God…’

‘I’ll fuck you on the Eiffel Tower.’

‘Yeah?’

‘I’ll fuck you on the London Eye.’

‘You will?’

‘I’ll fuck you in the Trevi fucking Fountain!’

‘Oh Jesus God, FUCK!!!’

‘You like that, sweetheart?’

‘I love it! Oh baby, fuck my cunt and marry me!’

‘Gonna– do– both!’

Shane shafted hard till Sammy came bountifully all over his cock. Then he peaked and surged, gathering her tight to himself and clinging on, as he emptied inside her.

She made soft, incoherent moans of affection in his ear as they regained their breath, floating slowly back to the reality of their surroundings. Vanessa’s room. Vanessa’s bed.

‘Guys…’

Shit!

The pair leapt from post-coital haze to rapid action, Sammy pulling down her skirt, Shane hitching up his pants, as their scarlet-maned dinner host watched. Vanessa slid the bedroom door closed delicately. ‘Guess I’m gonna have to change my sheets. Or buy a new bed.’

‘Sorry,’ Sammy told her, as they hastily adjusted themselves, neither able to stop grinning. ‘Or I would be. That DVD business…’

‘I passed the message on,’ Vanessa said with a shrug. ‘More importantly, congratulations on your official engagement. Thin walls, sound travels. Classily done, Shane, romantic in its own freaky way. Sammy, the ring looks gorgeous.’

Sammy observed her adorned hand and beamed. A proud Shane squeezed his bride-to-be.

‘Speaking of thin walls…’ Vanessa took a preparatory breath.

‘Look, you said you didn’t want any fuss, but I figured your original engagement was worth a celebration, hence this dinner party. Thing is, I planned a surprise.’ She twisted one of her fingers anxsiouly as she spoke.

‘Reason I wasn’t here– I went to Grand Central to pick up some special out-of-town guests. Plan was, we’d be here before you arrived, only– well, you were early. Which has turned this into a… different kind of surprise.’ She indicated beyond the door. ‘The guests in the living-room could hear.'

Sammy and Shane looked at each other. They pondered Vanessa’s words for a moment, then burst into unified laughter.

‘Nice try, Vee,’ Shane said. ‘Early April Fool? Can’t blame you.’

‘You’re a sassy gal,’ Sammy said with a giggle, ‘and a great friend, but when it comes to pranking, you’re just not our calibre.’

‘Who’ve you got out there then?’ Shane asked, grinning. ‘Class of ’07? Our work colleagues? Our families?’

‘Guess they’ve heard it all now,’ Sammy said. ‘Might as well make them copies of that DVD. Let’s go say hello, Shane.’ Gripping hands, they clambered over the bed and rushed to the door, flinging it open– she, then he, calling out in greeting.

‘Surprise!’

‘Welcome to our world of fuck-’

A small crowd was gathered in the living-room, staring as one in their direction. Sammy’s parents had glazed expressions, while her older sister wore one of advanced mortification. Shane’s mom clutched her pearls, his dad resting a consoling hand on her shoulder. His fifteen-year-old brother was looking at him with a new kind of respect, while his 80-year-old Nana’s face was inscrutable.

The couple stood like waxworks– Shane’s shirt hanging partly loose from his pants, Sammy’s pink panties dangling from her right hand.

‘I love you two,’ Vanessa said quietly, swallowing her laughter. ‘Every time I lose my faith in romance, you bring me right back.’

There was an eternity of silence, finally broken by Shane’s Nana.

‘You’re looking terribly well, dears,’ she said chirpily. ‘Engagement really suits you!’

THE END

*Feel Like Makin’ Love was a 1975 single by English rock band Bad Company, a fact that Vanessa’s friend Jared would most certainly know.