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By (user no longer on site) OP
over a year ago
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An article in today's Times:
Sex, by Anna Blundy
A long time ago now, I got up on a sunny morning and put on my blue silk kimono dressing gown. I padded quietly into the sitting room so as not to wake him and I put my cafetiere on the stove. I sat down on the edge of the table and looked out on to the High Street, where hundreds of army horses were trotting up the hill through the morning mist, the sound of their hooves clattering round the walls of my flat, amplified by the early emptiness. The khaki riders looked healthy, fit, rosy-cheeked and ready for a charge headlong at the enemy should the need arise. A van delivering crates of freshly baked croissants pulled up outside the deli and a girl in a white apron brought them out steaming.
Of course, this stuff actually happened every morning outside my window, but that day I had been having sex all night and the world looked beautiful. Or, more accurately, I looked beautiful. Or, more accurately still, I felt beautiful and adored and touched and starving hungry. I put my coat on over my dressing gown and went down in my slippers for croissants, smiling at the deli staff with what may have bordered on smugness. Envy me! He thinks I am beautiful and he whispers it in my ears.
What started out as a champagne-saturated chat had got closer and closer and turned into a silent conversation that neither of us would ever be able to tell anyone about. I would try because I always do, but talking about sex, let alone trying to describe what was good about it, is always gross. He and I talked and smiled and looked and the sex seemed like a seamless part of the talking, just another way of saying what we were saying anyway, which was: “I like you. You are beautiful, funny and perfect and I would like to lean against you and shut my eyes for ever.”
That night I was not in control. I was doing everything I felt like doing. I was reaching out for everything I felt like reaching out for and getting it. I said, “Love me.” He said, “Yes.”
I like buying expensive underwear, imagining someone pushing a soft kiss into my breast on the edge of the lace. I like being looked at wearing it. I like being someone else’s fantasy and feeling his need. Narcissistic? Sure. But mostly I like feeling absorbed into someone else and absorbing them.
But almost the best thing about sex is the point when it’s over, and you walk around with a secret feeling deliciously special to someone. I love the day afterwards, glowing with the knowledge of being adored, feeling the warmth of a hand in the small of my back and all the private things whispered in the dark even if they aren’t true in the morning. Sex makes me feel exquisite, young, beautiful, a worthy recipient of love, an active participant in life. Sometimes at the theatre or the cinema or just reading a book in the evening, I shut my eyes and let my thoughts swim through the swirling dark to that night before the horses and the croissants and I have to stop myself doing my (actually very good) Meg Ryan impression. Sex, and even the memory of sex, make me... mmm…ooooh… yes… yeees… right there… Yes! Yes!! Yes! Yesssss!!!
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