It was two weeks before Christmas and I had been compelled to swap the heat of the Caribbean, where I was living, for the chill of England. Family business. A funeral, in fact.
I was travelling in the warmest clothes I had - a thick cotton suit that I could never wear in the tropics because it was just too hot. But having been living out there for a few years, I didn't have a coat or an outdoor jacket, or even a sweater or fleece.
That. though, was not the main source of my disgruntlement. I had left behind a world of sexy black women to come to a place of pale skin. Not that I want to disrespect white girls, or women of any colour and shade. I grew up with the sweet nectar of white girls on my fingers and later my cock. It's just that recently I have become partial to dark chocolate. I don't really know why. The feel of their skin, the way they use their tongue when they kiss? Maybe.
Their willingness to get down and dirty? Again, maybe. You can't generalise about black women any more than you can about white English girls or Japanese girls. There are those who love sex and are uninhibited and there are those who are more reserved. But I had been finding that the Caribbean women suited me, and I was now middle aged, when dark skinned women seem to come into their own. They can handle the extra weight that comes with age and their skin still glows and their lips are still plump.
Whatever. This is not meant to be an essay on the delights of black women, I'm just thinking out loud.
I had to get a coach home because my destination was hundreds of miles from Heathrow. There were two queues and as I shivered in one I became aware of a woman about my age in the other. Every time I looked at her she was looking at me and it turned into a game, with her averting her eyes a nanosecond too late and finally smiling because the game was up. In a few seconds we had established we were interested in each other.
She was wearing a cheap white fur coat and her hair was straight, silky and blonde. But she was black. African-looking. I watched her as she walked off into the coach departure lounge, her ticket in her hand, while I waited impatiently in my queue.
When I finally had done the deal, I walked into the lounge and there she was. I marched straight up to her and started talking – just about the queue, the airport, the cold.
Her name was Brenda and she was originally from Zimbabwe but now lived in Nottingham and was on her way back there. I was going to Taunton, the other direction. But we got along so naturally that she gave me her number and somehow I felt that we would meet again.
Back in the south west with a UK mobile number I sent her little texts and enjoyed her replies. She was fun in my kind of way – you know other people’s idea of fun is not necessarily yours, but we suited each other. Gradually I concluded that she was a decent person, respectable and trustworthy, and I wanted to make this count.
I was only going to be in Taunton three days. I told her when I would be back at the airport to return to the sun, and she said she would meet me there. We arranged it for the day before my flight and I fantasised about a night with this beautiful, smiling, slightly fleshy dark woman.
Our arrangement kept a smile on my face throughout my stay at home, to the extent that people noticed and asked me what I was up to. I shrugged noncommittally and left it to their imagination.
Soon the day came and I was on that coach the second it arrived. I wasn’t entirely convinced that Brenda would show up, because after all, if I was slightly apprehensive about our arrangement, how must she be feeling?
But as I swept into the arrivals, there she was. Same fur coat, same shiny hair and same faint air of amusement with the world.
As I walked towards her I wondered how we were going to greet each other, because if we seemed stiff and uncomfortable it would look odd. I decide to give her a hug, and she had obviously had the same thought, because we kissed cheeks and it must have looked like we were old friends.
I noticed some makeup on her collar and wondered why she was wearing so much. Anyway, I would soon find out. I was going to fuck her the minute we got in the hotel room, then again at bedtime and in the morning. We hadn’t discussed anything, but it was an unspoken certainty. She wanted our little relationship as much as I did.
At the hotel she sat down discreetly while I checked in, putting her down as my wife. It was one of those sterile, very functional hotels with no personality and a dead sound in the corridor.
As soon as the door closed behind us we were in each other’s arms and I was slipping her coat off and unzipping her knee-length cream polyester dress. As it slid to the floor she put it in the wardrobe while I got undressed down to my underpants. So far, so married-life. It felt perfectly natural, as if we had done it many times before, but of course that was going to change in a moment when we made love for the first time.
We held each other close and I unhooked her bra. She kissed my chest and as my hand slid into her knickers she took a handful of my balls and then slipped inside to grasp my erection.