***This story is partly inspired by real events. I did indeed arrive in New York, just as Donald Trump announced a ban on flights from Europe. I then spent the next few days watching as the pandemic crisis began to take hold across the city. Unfortunately, I was not accompanied by a nubile teenage girl who was prepared to cater to my depraved sexual needs. That bit is all made up. As always, anyone involved in any sexual activity is at least eighteen years old.***
First night
The shit started hitting the fan pretty much from the first moment we arrived. We touched down at Newark just after seven in the evening. The flight had been mostly empty, so what few passengers there were, could spread out. Both Sadie and I had a row of seats to ourselves. She slept most of the way, while I watched a couple of films.
We got through passport control and customs in no time at all. Then, a quick train ride to Penn Station and soon enough we were checking into our hotel. It was only as we settled down for something to eat at a diner nearby, that we began to discover the gravity of the situation.
"Jesus! Look at this!" Sadie said, as she stared intently at the screen on her phone.
"What?" I said, between spoonfuls of chicken noodle soup.
"The President has barred all flights from Europe!" She replied, offering me her phone.
"He's done what?"
"He's introduced a thirty-day ban on all flights from Europe. The UK and Ireland are exempt, but still..."
"This is because of the Coronavirus?"
"Yeah."
"Shit. They must be taking it pretty seriously."
God, that sounds so idiotic now, so
naive.
Of course they were taking it seriously. It
was
serious.
Very
serious. We just didn't know it yet. We were all so innocent, it was a different world back then.
Everything
was different. Not just the virus,
other
things too, as I was soon to discover.
It was a somewhat unsettling welcome to the United States, but we dismissed it soon enough. Like many people from the UK, we had a kind of default contempt for this particular occupant of the White House. So it was perfectly easy to write this off as a typically hysterical overreaction.
If I'm being honest, I supposed we tended to tar most Americans with a similar brush. They all seemed a bit
crazy,
with their guns and their flags and their peculiarly overt brand of Christianity.
Of
course
they would overreact, that's what Americans did. Not likes us Brits, who were levelheaded and sober in deed and action. We kept calm and carried on.
Well, it turns out we could be a bit
crazy
too. And I'm not just talking about the pandemic. We just didn't know it yet.
So, we carried on with our meal and returned to the hotel, although not before taking a quick stroll round Times Square. This was Sadie's first trip to New York, so I wanted to make sure she saw all the sights and sounds. Arm in arm, we wandered; heading to the Disney Store, then the M&Ms store, stopping to take photos and trying to avoid being hassled by the guys dressed up as Spider-Man or Captain America.
This had all been my ex-wife's idea. She thought it would be good for me and my daughter to spend some
quality
time together.
"You don't see enough of her." She had said, over the phone, when she first suggested the trip.
Well, whose fault is that,
I thought to myself,
you were the one who left me for another guy and moved two-hundred miles away.
"She's heading to university in the autumn." She continued. "Neither of us will see much of her after that."
University was where I had met Lara. She had thrown up all over me in a dingy nightclub called the
Razzmatazz.
It was pretty much love at first sight. Well,
lust
maybe
.
Lara was essentially my idea of a perfect woman. Barely five foot tall, with long red hair, a pretty face and
ginormous
tits. She could never take her booze, and she'd only had a couple of vodkas and Coke before projectile vomiting all over my shirt. She was so apologetic, as I cleaned myself up in the disabled loos.
She was sat on the counter, next to the hand basin, with her legs crossed. I could see her stocking tops and a glimpse of white creamy flesh under her short skirt. She caught me looking, but she didn't seem to mind. She just smiled at me.
By the end of the night, we were back at my halls of residence, and she was wanking me off. The two of us were sat on my bed, my boxers and jeans round my ankles, and she had her hand wrapped tightly round my cock, squeezing and tugging and rubbing. I wasn't a virgin, but I was hardly last of the famous international playboys either. Lara was a
lot
more experienced than me, and I was happy to let her
take me in hand,
both metaphorically and literally.
"Do you want to play with my tits?" She asked, and I responded by groaning and vigorously nodding my head.
With a giggle, she took her top off and soon enough I was fondling her huge, perfect boobs.
"You've been looking at these puppies all night, haven't you, you dirty little sod?" She'd said to me, as I chewed on her nipples, the same way a mongrel tries to devour its favourite toy.
"I didn't see you complaining." I said to her, temporarily pulling my mouth free of her breasts.
"No, I suppose not. It's only fair I make it up to you, after what I did to your shirt."
And
make it up to me
she surely did. I was never that heavy a drinker, not then and not now, so I was pretty much sober that night. Therefore, I remember almost every moment. The way she sank down to her knees in front of me, to give me a blowjob. They way she spread her legs wide apart, revealing a small patch of fiery red pubic hair. The way it felt to slide my
unprotected
cock inside her. The way she gasped, as she came. The tenderness and warmth I felt, as I held her naked body in my arms.
We were young and we were horny; one night stands with people you'd just met was part of the reason you went to university. You broadened the mind, you furthered you're intellectual horizons, but you also became a grownup. Casual sex was something students were allowed to indulge in. I was not the first guy Lara had copped off with, I wouldn't be the last. She liked sex, she liked to shag around. I don't think she envisaged any long term relationship between us. Some time in the early hours of the morning, she slipped away, without saying a word.
That might have been that, but a couple of weeks later, we bumped into each other in a local supermarket. I was with a friend, so was she. We were a little embarrassed to see each other, and the conversation was a tad awkward. We'd slept together, but we hardly knew each other. Slightly to my own surprise, perhaps because I'd run out of things to say, I asked her if she wanted to go for a drink, and she said yes.
"I promise not to be sick on you this time." She said with a shy smile.
Before too long, we were
dating
. Well, we were
shagging
. The number of actual dates, where we went out and did things together, was relatively small. Lara was a dirty little thing, and more often than not we'd find ourselves in a pile of clothes, fucking on the floor.
Truth be told, I was actually rather tiring of the relationship, when she got pregnant. Britain is such a class-bound place, where tiny degrees of societal distinction can make a vast difference. I was basically lower middle class, someone from a
nice
background. My parents were happily married, or they were as far as I was aware, and lived out a comfortable existence in the leafy suburbs.
Lara was very much from what you would patronisingly call, the working classes. She had been brought up on a council estate and her parents had never even tied the knot, let alone got divorced. I'm embarrassed by this now, but I rather looked down on her. She was bright, she had managed to reach university after all, but she was
uncouth.
She was a bit
rough.
The sex was fantastic - eye-opening for a relative
innocent
like me - but a man cannot live on bread alone.