Angie Thompson was utterly amazing in bed. It was all about technique and I reckoned she had studied it and perfected it. I mean, when I got home the day after the night we'd eaten at Le Main Gauche, I was still floating about six inches off the ground.
It was Rant Room day so I had to get my mind into gear. I read everything I could lay my hands on about Lucy Wilson. She was a loud voice for ex-prisoners who needed help to leave a life of crime, and spent a huge amount of effort persuading employers to give the poor devils a chance. I introduced her and sat back, waiting for her to rant.
Since she didn't start, I decided to prompt her. "Lucy, I was hoping to hear your rant."
"It's a bit awkward, Catherine."
"How's that then?"
"Well, what I want to rant about is, well, ranting." She had the most wonderful, impish smile.
"You're teasing me, right?"
She spoke very quietly and I saw my producer's fingers in the control room, adjusting the sound level. "I spend a lot of time trying to persuade business people to give ex-cons a chance. A lot of them, the majority I'd say listen with great sympathy and respect and then tell me that either they will look into it or well, they are unconvinced and fear that the effort might be greater than the reward. Then I ask them how they measure reward in these cases and it's usually about staff turnover and re-offending and, basically, it's all about them.
"So then I ask them if one of the ex-cons goes straight and gets a new start and takes advantage of it, isn't that a reward? And of course they agree that it is but they still decide the risk is too great. Well, that's fair enough."
She took a deep breath and slowly let it out. There was a curious tension in the studio, as if we were waiting for something. Radio abhors silence but I knew it would be wrong to fill it.
"But," she said eventually, "but there are some who sort of explode." And suddenly she started to speak in a fast and loud, angry voice. "I wouldn't employ an ex-con if you paid me they are all no-good they never go straight tigers never change their spots." I was going to point out that leopards are the spotty ones but she was off and running. "They are all thieving bastards and deserve all they get there are plenty of straight people who want a job and nobody should fail to get a job because some scummy thief has got one."
Lucy was just fantastic. She not only ranted but demonstrated that ranting is usually about speaking so much that no counter-argument has time or opportunity to intervene. It only ended when I broke down into a corpse of laughter and she joined me. We were laughing and hugging and I think I was crying a bit because it was so funny and so poignant. The producer never gave me a chance to say goodnight to our audience, she just faded out the two laughing idiots.
But I imagine you're wondering what made Angie so good in bed. It was simply that she seemed to know what I wanted without asking and was quick to adapt to the ebb and flow of sex with me. She topped, led, encouraged, directed as if she had taken me to bed a hundred times. No toys, just all the art of lesbian sex with hands and fingers, tongues and thighs. She undressed me slowly, licking or kissing as each new part of me was exposed. She guided me to satisfy her, firmly but without violence. She did something very special to my clitoris when she knew I was right on the brink and it just blew me away. She took my little pearl between her lips and blew a sort of vibration, her tongue tip vibrating against it. Fuck, that was a mind-bender.
Rosie was still away and we had exchanged texts and a FaceTime during which she had watched me masturbate to her instructions and, just as I was about to cum, she told me to "stop and wait until you get a message saying you can cum." She gave me a wicked smile and signed off and I groaned with frustration and was sorely tempted to disobey and finish myself off. But, and readers like me will understand this, the point is about obedience even when, or maybe particularly when, you don't want to be. The message came through as I was about to go to sleep and the moment had passed so I just rolled over and went to sleep.
In addition to my work for the paper, I also did a bit of freelancing; a couple of publications and an airline magazine. Airline magazines are fine as long as you don't expect anyone to read them. My editor knew and was fine with it. I had done two articles about Ellie Porter. One for my paper, a brief bio of a local success story, the other for the airline, longer and more detailed but similar. We'd got along. She was an engineer who had started her own business making, at first, parts for engines but had recently created an engine that could run on liquid hydrogen and had decided to build a car around it. The car was a huge success and Ellie became incredibly rich and famous. She was, however, in my estimation, modest, and thoughtful. My estimation may have been slightly biased since she was gay, tall, beautiful and a little androgynous which you may remember I rather like.
So you may imagine how I felt when I got a call from her PA asking me to drop round to her office for a chat. You may also imagine that I made a bit of effort when i dressed for the occasion. It takes skill to look as though you've made no effort when in fact you have thought of little else for two days!
So I turned up at the time arranged and was shown immediately into her office. She was behind a modest desk and stood as I approached. She was wearing a jump suit, dark blue and it did nothing to conceal how good she looked. Her short, dark brown hair seemed to highlight her bright brown eyes.
Greetings over, coffee organised and now sitting facing each other across a low coffee table (my knee length skirt smoothed under my arse as I sat - give her the femme razzle dazzle!) and she explained why she had wanted me to come.
"I want you to write my biography." To say I was stunned was a slight understatement. "We got on really well, you write, I have a publisher and I want you to do it."
"But, I have never written a biography."
"How hard could it be?"
"Well, it's not like writing for a paper. The book has to tell a story, be readable, it's a marathon, not the sprint I'm used to."
"If I am prepared to give you a chance, would you try for me?" How could I refuse. She gave a big smile when I agreed and said, "Bugger coffee, let's have champagne!" My kind of woman, definitely.
I discovered that, anticipating my agreement she'd already spoken to my editor to get him to agree to a furlough. I was a bit miffed that he hadn't said I was indispensable but I got over it when Ellie told me how much she was going to pay me.
Her publisher, a small, local firm would supply an editor to guide me where necessary and the deal was done. I said I wanted to start by doing a lot of research, gathering information about her, opinions and other useful material. I worked solidly for best part of a month before I felt I had gathered, collated and absorbed as much as I could. I'd been keeping her up to date and when I said I was satisfied, she invited me to her apartment to discuss where we go from there. Her flat stands on one of the best sites in the City. It commands a wide view over the rooftops of the City, the famous bridge and the harbour. I arrived about 7pm and once I had spoken to the concierge I was directed to a lift that had no apparent means of controlling it, but which closed and whispered me up to the penthouse, opening inside her entrance hall. Flash!
Ellie greeted me with a chaste kiss and a glass of champagne. I could, I thought, get used to this lifestyle. I went through some of my research work with her and she seemed pleased with what I'd done. I said the next stage would be to interview her. How long would I need? No idea but, I thought, maybe we start with a few days and see how it goes.
"We'll go to my home in France. We can work all afternoon together and I can do other work in the mornings and you can do the writing up?" France? Well, if it has to be France I guess I'll get over it.
Ellie Porter was full of surprises. First she pulls the stroke with my editor and then, after the evening of our chat she arrives outside my flat in a sleek sports car and wearing another jump suit, purple. The car was white, the roof was down and she sat within as I dropped my suitcase into the luggage compartment. I sat beside her and she drove, confident and competent, and the wind blew my hair.
"You look good," she said. "Windblown suits you. Makes you very attractive." Her hand slipped from the gear lever and touched my thigh, dragging my pale yellow skirt a little higher. I turned to face her.
"You have nice hands." She smiled and we both knew the attraction was mutual and, likely, would be consummated at some point.
The next surprise came in the premises of her car factory, or, more accurately, in the grounds of her factory. There were a number of light aircraft dotted about the place and, in one corner, a large building. She drove straight into it and we got out of the car. A plane wth two engines sat in the middle of the hangar and we went to it. She told me not to worry about my bag, someone would see to that. She had a conversation with a man in overalls and, apparently satisfied, showed me how to climb up into the cockpit. A few moments later she joined me and helped me don headphones and then did the same herself.
"It gets noisy so we speak through this intercom," she said pointing to the microphone by her mouth and then the one by my mouth. She 'accidentally' let her finger stroke my lip. "Don't speak if I am talking to anyone on the radio."
There was a roar and the two engines started up and we sat for a few minutes. "The engines have to reach operating temperature." Obviously. With a sort of gentle shudder the plane began to move out of the hangar and onto the grass field outside. She spoke to a control tower or something and was given permission to take off and, the next moment it seemed we were free of the ground and coming up into the blue, summer sky. If I had been excited when Rosie took me on her motorbike, this was another thing altogether.
I was, predictably, in a state of childlike awe. I'd never been in a light aircraft before and had certainly never been flown to France by a woman who might, very possibly, become a lover. As if she read my thoughts, her hand came once more to my thigh and this time stroked even higher. She looked at me and laughed and I laughed with her, a promise made and accepted.
We were aloft for maybe three hours. Three hours during which we talked and, just occasionally, touched each other in a manner that, innocent enough of itself, spoke volumes to me and those volumes were not remotely innocent. The conditions were perfect and at a few thousand feet the Earth looked like a miniature version of itself. Ships, as we crossed the Channel, looked like bath time toys; railways looked like models as did houses and, as we started to descend over a small village somewhere in Normandy, buildings grew large again until we touched down on a long green field and taxied up to a sort of mound from which a large country house seemed to be almost in touching distance. It was about 7pm and the day was one of those soft summer evenings.
The silence when the engines were turned off was surprising. "My French home, Manoir LeClerc. My Grandmother was French and this was her family home." I remembered having read that, and had been aware of her family's French wealth. We clambered out of the plane and walked hand in hand to the Manoir. "Our bags will be in our rooms, don't worry." A small truck with two men in it approached the plane and hooked it up and as we walk, they towed it to another, smaller, hangar.
