Monique was a faded beauty. Her long, rather straggly black hair betrayed her age with its grey roots and her skin was dry and pale but her eyes were those of the 20-year-old she had once been, cheeky and vivacious, cool and seductive.

She had been married to the same man for 40 years and had seemingly led a nice life. He was a sculptor of international repute and they had traveled the world, he working and speaking and lecturing, she taking care of the administration. She could probably have had a career of her own as an actress, but had decided early on that Jean-Luc was better in his field than she was in hers, so she had followed him around, dedicated to making his life easier so he could concentrate on his work.

Now they were in their 60s and had the dilapidated look of aging bohemians. They spent most of their time in their small apartment in Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe, rarely going out and only dining in restaurants when clients and admirers invited them. Monique gave the impression of feeling she had once been a woman but wasn’t sure anymore.

When I approached them by email – I’m a freelance writer – it was Monique who replied from the address bearing his name. She invited me to their apartment one afternoon and it was just another assignment for me. Their second-floor apartment was behind a locked door at street level and I was told to phone when I got there.

In fact I found Monique sitting on a step, waiting for me. She was medium height, neither thin nor fat but with a bit of a belly and not much chest left. I had noticed before how breasts seemed to deflate in older women, sleeping in their brassiere, their day long gone.

Her hair was coiled in a bun at the back and she had an oriental look about her, like a Vietnamese peasant whose wonderfulness had been hidden from the world as she toiled her life away out in the fields. She was wearing black trousers and a loose t-shirt with a wide neck. It was a stuffy summer day in this noisy, unattractive part of the city and I was sweating as I crossed the road. She seemed to know it was me.

“Veec?” she said. I’m Vic.

“Monique,” I replied.

“I wait for you,” she said.

I’m English and although there is this belief that the French insist you speak their language, I found that as soon as they heard my attempts (I thought I had quite a passable accent, actually), people would switch to English to save themselves the pain of hearing my incompetence. Or maybe they were just being kind. Monique certainly radiated kindness.

Up in the apartment she fetched me a glass of water and Jean-Luc shuffled in with a crinkly-eyed smile as I turned on the recorder on my phone.

While he talked and I prompted, Monique flitted around the place, bending low over the table to top up my water and displaying her small, braless breasts and then sitting opposite me with her legs wide apart. I tried not to look at her crotch except when Jean-Luc was looking away, into space, as he often did. When his gaze was averted I was drawn irresistibly to this display. The breast show was unmistakable: you only ever see a woman’s breasts if she wants you to. As for the splayed legs, maybe in her mind the trousers provided cover and she wasn’t doing anything provocative. Maybe it was the French way, or the Guadeloupe way, a mix of French sophistication and Caribbean brazenness.

Whatever it was, by the time the half-hour interview was over I knew the tip of my half-erect cock was covered in precum. The fact that Jean-Luc had done and said nothing about his wife’s quiet performance made me wonder if they had some sort of alternative lifestyle. Maybe they were swingers. Maybe he allowed her to have sex with other men. Maybe he liked to watch.

As I got up to leave I was prepared to respond to any invitation, but I detected none, so I headed back to my house in a small town by the sea and immediately had a wank while Monique’s energy was still in my loins.

The interview was for a monthly local touristy magazine, so I wrote the piece up - it flowed pretty well - I sent it in and got on with my life.

Then came the day when it was published and I immediately got an email from Monique. They were very pleased with it and wanted to thank me. Would I like to go round for a drink? I accepted eagerly and we agreed on that Saturday afternoon.

Jean-Luc worked all day every day and produced an astonishing amount of work, for which he had collectors waiting. I had been doing a series on artists and I’d never met one with the work ethic and almost production line speed.

He had agreed to take a break from two till three to have a drink with me. All I could think of in the intervening days was Monique’s desire to show me her body and my equally strong desire to look at it, touch it, feel it, eat it, penetrate it.

She met me downstairs again and phoned Lean-Luc to tell him we were on our way up.

“So ‘e can put on ‘is trousers,” she confided in a way that suggested she thought I would not be surprised. She was wearing an old, very thin pale green dress that the wind in the corridor blew into her crack, showing me the outline of her buttocks.

I had a reckless feeling about her, as if I could grab her arse and she wouldn’t mind at all. But I decided to play it careful and see if she was in the same mood this time.

Up in the ramshackle little apartment with its rustic/artistic carved woods and a parrot whistling in a spare room, I sat in the same chair and Jean-Luc occupied the same one he had the last time.

Monique appeared with a bottle of Muscadet and three small, water-stained glasses. I waited breathlessly for her to lean forward and pour the wine, and she did, the dress’s neckline falling obligingly to display her little milky white tits.

She wants me to suck them, I thought to myself. Maybe she will engineer a little situation so I can do that.

We talked about films and music, because this time I wasn’t there on business and we had to talk about something. Monique sat opposite me and this time she had something to play with: the hem of her dress, which she swept from side to side, pulled up a little, let fall. It was like the dance of the seven veils and the performance was so quick and minimalist that I thought I saw a flash of beige undies but I couldn’t be sure.

Again, Jean-Luc appeared not to notice, as I struggled to look at him rather than his fluttering wife.

We got onto the subject of streaming movies as an alternative to Netflix and Monique decided to show me a list of links on her laptop. She sat at the desk and Jean-Luc leaned on it from the other side. I stood next to her with my left hand on the desk and my right on the cushion just behind her. My naughty, lustful right hand a mere inch or two from her bottom, I leaned casually and adjusted my position to see something on the screen and my wrist touched her lower back/upper buttocks. She didn’t flinch.

I did it again and she stood (or rather sat) her ground.

Jean-Luc’s view was obscured by Monique’s shoulder and mine, so all we had to do was not move too overtly. I managed to look down into her eyes and gauge her feelings without it turning into a gaze. To achieve this she had to put the bare minimum of encouragement into her own look, and she did it perfectly. It was all there, smaller than microdots. ‘I know you are touching me deliberately and I don’t mind -in fact I like it, so let’s continue carefully.’

Without changing my stance I touched her with my fingers. I felt the warmth of her body and the little thickness of her dress and knickers. I stroked her gently and she didn’t move, neither toward me nor away. She was allowing herself to be touched in a way that was subtly sexual but which you could imagine a skilled lawyer putting a different spin on. “My client was simply balancing himself and through no fault of his own was in close proximity to the lady’s back.”

I glanced at Jean-Luc to check his status – suspicious or otherwise – and he betrayed nothing. I felt like saying, “I’m sorry, mate, but she started it and all I’m doing is giving her a tiny bit of stimulation somewhere perfectly innocent.”

Then I returned to Gulliver’s travels – the sporadic journey of my fingers on Monique’s dress. I upgraded the accidental bumping to a definite stroking action, and when that was well received I moved my fingers across to the very top of the slide that led from back to arsehole. I felt the cleft and ran my fingers down it until I reached the chair cushion. Any more and I would have had to slide underneath her and the situation would have escalated.

When it was time for me to leave, Monique found an excuse to go downstairs with me: putting the garbage bag out. Jean-Luc watched us to the end of the corridor and we descended the stairs a little nervously. I touched her hand and she squeezed mine.

“I call you,” she whispered, quickly strutting down the street in the opposite direction from my car.

I heard nothing for a couple of days and was beginning to think it wasn’t going to happen. Maybe she had thought better of it. Maybe Jean-Luc had quizzed her about it, she had admitted what he suspected and he had let it drop on the condition it never happened again.

Then came a text. There was on old fort on a hill near my place and I was to wait for her there the next afternoon from two onwards.

It was the kind of place the authorities had tried to turn into a tourist attraction, but it really wasn’t that interesting and both times I had been there it had been deserted.

I sat on the solitary bench at the top, baking in the sun but with a good view of the path from the village. Just after 2:30 she appeared, a yellow floppy hat protecting her from the sun and the same old dress on. As she got near she gestured to a small derelict building which had perhaps once been the magazine, where kegs of gunpowder were kept. I followed her to it and we stood inside in the dank atmosphere with the smell of urine and torn condom sachets strewn around. I didn’t want to kiss her in such squalor but she looked up at me and smiled nervously before burying her face in my chest.

I wrapped my arms around her and she kissed my chest between the buttons of my shirt. I put my hand through the big armhole of her dress and found a breast, which I stroked and squeezed. And then as one we were taking the straps down and folding the dress down to her waist. I bent down and sucked her nipples and she quivered.

“Old woman,” she said ruefully.

“Beautiful woman,” I replied. “Tue es tres belle, Monique.”

“Maybe since forty years,” she said. “Now no.”

I lifted her chin and kissed her tenderly and she kissed back gratefully and then passionately.

“You are very kind,” she said as my hand slipped down her chest and stomach and into the skirt. She pulled herself free and wriggled back into the straps before lifting the skirt and nodding down at it.

I ran my hands over her knickers and felt her shape, that curious, firm, peachy split that turned into marshland. I slipped a finger inside her hot, steamy pussy and she responded by grabbing my balls through my jeans.

“I want to lick you,” I said urgently.

“Non,” she said, shaking her head. “Pas aujourd’hui. Pas ici.”

It was a squalid situation, an ugly, unpleasant venue for what should have been a beautiful encounter. And the circumstances made it even worse: the deceit, the disloyalty, the abuse of friendship.

And yet such animal desire as we both felt has a habit of getting its own way. This was no perfumed boudoir, we had no soft bed and silky sheets. This was not lovemaking. This was going to be fucking.

Monique slid down and crouched on her haunches, avoiding kneeling on who-knows-what, unzipped me and sucked my cock like a veteran. no frills, no twisting and turning like you see in porn, just loving having a cock in her mouth.

Then she stood up, turned around, away from me, and leaned against the wall with her rump sticking out. I pulled her knickers down to her knees and positioned my cock in the crevice below her arse. I felt the untended pubic area, hairs getting in the way of a clean insertion. I pulled them away with my finger and my cock head rested at her entrance.

“Oui,” said Monique. “Comme ça.”

I slid into her and we started fucking like primitives. She was muttering quietly in French. It was as if she had temporarily cast herself as a girl from the streets, an old-time Parisian whore allowing a man to do what came naturally in his beastly way.

As for me, I banged her harder than I would have normally. If we were going to have brutal, unsophisticated sex I would have to fuck her selfishly until I came and she would have to forget this was the modern era of shared orgasms and consideration. She was being fucked and there was a lot to be said for that.

We could do this again in the future somewhere nice, somewhere genteel.

But for now it was wham bam thank you Ma’am, and I banged her like a sailor just back from a year at sea. I fucked this ripe, aging woman, this still-alive piece of womanhood, and in no time I was shooting my spunk into her and she was grinding her hindquarters against me and accepting my semen, happy to have a man who desired her enough to fuck ugly like this.

As soon as I pulled out, a plug of semen slipped out and hit the floor with a theatrical splat.

Monique turned around and we embraced and giggled, kissed and caressed.

“Merci monsieur,” she said with a bashful smile.

“Merci madame,” I replied with a slight bow. “Tomorrow, I will book a hotel. Can you come?”

“Oui. One hour only.”