A note from Christine.
Whilst it is not essential, I strongly recommend that you read Part 1 first. It sort of puts everything into context.
Still whatever, enjoy and let me know what you think
C x
*****
There was Tom an Art Director at one of the agencies where I worked freelance. I had known him for some time, not that well and certainly not intimately, but on terms that were close enough for us to chat easily.
There was Stuart, a lawyer I met at a dinner party and there was Gordon a fifty year old Mancunian, self-made multi-millionaire I met while on a golfing holiday with seven other women in Spain.
Tom and I sat next to each other at an awards lunch and ended up in his bed that evening. Peter and I went on several dates before gradually getting round to it and Gordon had his hand up my skirt and my tits out on a lounger round the hotel pool at two o'clock in the morning. Quite a varied lot really.
The awards ceremony was at the Savoy. All rather grand and all crushingly boring, but as I had written some copy for an Tom had designed and we were nominated we had to be there. Fortunately, the client couldn't make it so we were able to overindulge in the free booze and by the time the room was darkened and the presentations started, we were both a bit tipsy. He pulled his chair closer to mine as many of the others on the round table turned theirs towards the stage. We laughed a lot taking the piss out of some of the ads and I felt his arm go round the back of my chair and his fingers rest on my shoulder.
"And what, Mr Mason, do you think you're doing?" I asked.
"Actually Ms Hunt trying to get into your knickers."
"Well as you know better men than you at your agency have tried and better men have failed," I replied jokingly. Such banter was not that unusual between the male and female staff in the ad industry where PC still doesn't seem to have arrived.
"Yes, but they haven't been close up to you when you're tipsy and just gagging for it have they?" he quipped back.
"Who says I'm tipsy?"
"Well OK pissed then," he retorted.
As the ceremony droned on so I felt his hand softly rubbing my shoulder. As we got nearer to our section so his leg pressed against mine. As we both drank more wine so his foot ran up and down my calf and as we realised we hadn't won so I felt his hand on my leg.
"Oh well that's that then," he muttered leaning over so that his mouth was close to my ear. "We might as well go and have a quick fuck then hadn't we?"
In my slightly, well fairly to be truthful, pissed state and with me now trying to be the sophisticated sexual creature it seemed sort of cool really to say.
"Yeah I guess we should I suppose."
So we did. Twice actually later that afternoon in his flat in Fitzrovia. And it was good. Neither of us was in that fit a state for sexual acrobatics so both times were leisurely and probably not that expert, but they were fun.
Until Tom, I'd never really looked on sex as being fun. But with him it always was. He didn't take anything that seriously, so why should he with sex was his belief? So for a two or three month period, when he introduced me to smoking marijuana again after what must have been a fifteen or sixteen year absence, we had fun as we had sex. We smoked, drank and laughed our way through a series of premature ejaculations, a number of 'oh fuck it I can't get it ups' and some absolutely monumentally mind blowing sessions.
At the same time, Stuart was pulling me. Slowly and methodically as his legal training prompted him, he did everything absolutely properly.
The first date all friendly and diplomatic and a peck on the cheek as we said goodbye. The second, dinner, at a posh Italian restaurant in Chingford was a little more romantic and talk of a more intimate nature followed by a lips on lips kiss in the cab on the way to my home. No thought on either part though of coming in for coffee, no not on a second date that would not be right. It was on the third, though, as was a full on kiss and tongues in the other's mouth. Up top only on the third date as he enquiringly at first touched my breasts. Finding only the appropriate level of resistance he persevered as we sat in his flat that was just round the corner from the Italian restaurant. Over what must have been an hour he undid a couple of buttons on my blouse. It took probably another twenty minutes for him to get his fingers inside my bra and another ten or so before he eased each boob out from its restraining cup.
Being the demure and modest lady I felt he wanted me to be, after he'd played with them for a while not, of course going so far as to suck my nipples even though that was exactly what I wanted him to do, I put my toys away and went home an intact and well behaved lady.
As I had got back into dating I'd worked out that the fourth or fifth date is the watershed. It's the one where you've both got to know each other quite well, where inhibitions have gone a bit and both parties are quite comfortable with each other.
So when he also suggested the new man thing of, 'come round and I'll cook you dinner' for our fourth date I assumed that this would be where the heat would be turned up.