I had been on a sex dating site for a few weeks and suspected the whole thing was bogus – women 'responded' to me when we were totally unsuited and half of them mysteriously turned out to have just cancelled their membership.
And of course they were all hundreds of miles away, while the women who were supposedly needing sex in my part of the world remained silent. I was also dubious about how serious women were in putting themselves on such sites: maybe they just signed on when they were feeling particularly horny but changed their minds the next day.
Then a younger girl started replying to me. She was 20, I was 50. She was very overweight and not fantastically pretty, but there was something about her sad expression that made me want to shag her to boost her self-esteem (I'm partially joking). We exchanged mobile numbers and she would text me late at night, presumably when she had been drinking, and want me to go and pick her up and bring her back to my place. And fuck her.
She asked me how old I was and when I told her she sent back 'Fuck in hell, mate.' Then she wanted a picture of my cock, then my face.
'Hope it doesn't put you off,' I said.
'You fine, babe,' she replied.
'I want you to fuck me for an hour,' she texted once. I told her I didn't want these late night summonses, I wanted a date, and she said she was about to move into a new place and she would let me know. Two days later her text said 'Come round at 8.30' and gave the address of an old hotel now converted into a lodging house. She said they weren't supposed to have visitors so I would have to be quiet.
I found the front door and walked in as casually as possible, scanning the walls for directions to room 20. I tiptoed up the stairs and knocked on her door. She opened it wearing a scruffy old dressing gown and with her phone to her ear. She signalled to me to be quiet and she lay back on the bed. I sat in a chair and, as she showed no sign of finishing her conversation, I went to the toilet, grateful to be able to piss before I developed a hard-on. When I came out again she was still on the phone. Her hair was darker than in her photo and styled differently. I couldn't decide whether she was unintelligent or just uneducated, but thought probably the latter. More than that, though, she wasn't like most people I knew, and there was something about her that made me think she had had a difficult family life, not the nurturing that most of us take for granted.
There were none of the usual niceties – no 'sorry, sit down and have a drink, I won't be a minute.'