"It was another three days before I saw Laura again. She was doorknocking down by the old reform school, now demolished and replaced by a half finished estate of modern detached houses, the ind that are separate but so close together you couldn’t get a football down the gap between them, I planned to just wave and walk on, but her wave in return was more of a gesture, beckoning me.
Five minutes later we were in the beachside cafe, sipping coffee, tucked away in a corner with a crescent of empty tables around us. I was doing my patient routine, waiting for Laura to tell me what was so urgent. She looked as good as she had in my kitchen, and swapping her trousers for a skirt improved the look. Did that count as a sexual interest on my part? Possibly. She had put all of her canvassing stuff, the clipboard, the notepad and the matching pens into a leather bag with a logo I didn’t recognise but which looked like the logo you’d see on a VW if they’d been built by Michael Karlsson. SHe looked as if she was worried about blushing.
‘This is going to sound rude, but I wanted to ask you about what you said about blowjobs.’ I so wanted to make a joke about having her clipboard to hand to take notes, but instead did that gesture with your hand that says ‘go on….’
‘I mean isn’t it just a selfish thing to receive, or maybe just a kind of foreplay?’
‘All of the above, and more besides. Things don’t have to be limited to how most people experience them, or even to how we’ve always experienced them.’
‘Thanks Yoda…’ For the first time there was something girlish, almost playful about her. Then she put her coffee cup down, and carefully centred it on the saucer, the handle neatly aligned to the nine o clock position.
‘I tried asking Matthew if he’s too tired for sex or if he prefers politics to sex. He was offended when I asked, the kind of offended guys have when you catch them checking out someone else’s body on the beach.’ There wasn’t much I could say to that. I tried to change topics.
‘We hardly know each other, but here’s something about me. Last time I was in here was for a social meet with someone I’d been talking to on the web. Fifteen minutes of chat, and it was clear she wanted some extra marital fun with a touch of rough sex, I want to do BDSM the way I learned to do it over three decades with Jo. Her kink is not my kink, so she went back to town, or maybe to her next pre-booked social.’
Laura laughed out loud.
‘Aren’t you supposed to be a billionaire with a tragic back story to do BDSM? At least that;s what ‘that book’ said…’ She even did the air quotes gesture around ‘that book’.’
‘Seriously Goff, what’s that got to do with blowjobs?’
There was still plenty of space around us, plenty of privacy.
‘Anyone can command someone to suck them off. Hell, I’ve done it. To build a place in time where the sub not only wants to obye, but gets turned on by obeying, and finds it easy to make themselves come while they do it, that’s what turns me on.’
She shook her head, and smiled.
‘If that bloke with the terier across the street is from The SUn, we’re both embarassed. Tell me about Jo then.’
So I did. After all it was our point of contact, the gap between her being the wife of a would be MP and hating it, and my being the widower of a woman who could have been an MP but who preferred making a difference. No more talk of blowjobs maybe, but we parted as better acquaintances than we’d been an hour earlier, before two coffees and the conversation.
"
Over the next two weeks in the run up to the election we had two more of those conversations. There would have been more, but Laura was canvasing loyally for her husband, and I was holding my nose and putting principles aside to canvas for our party, Jo’s party. She would have told me it was the right thing to do, and she would have been right, but the people I was canvassing with seemed to lack her kindness and empathy. Maybe it was my fault. Between thinking about Jo, and wondering about Laura, I had little time for other people. I felt as if I was being stalked by Jo’s ghost, urging me to take my chance and make an offer to Laura, that I might be the one to address her need to do more than talk about sex. That was where our conversations had been leading, even before we discussed if we should add each other on Whatsapp, but resolved instead to use a separate messaging app just for the two of us. Did I feel bad about the fact that I was enabling her discontent with her husband, who prized his ambitions above his relationship with a decent and lovely woman? I fretted about it, and in my dreams Jo told me to either get on with it, or stop. We were at that point where theoretical discussions about sex, and why some guys prize it less than others, or are less excited by it, had progressed to me describing in detail how I liked sex, how I liked to be, and how I liked my partners to be. The language had shifted, from ‘I like a woman to wank as she sucks me’ to ‘I want you to wank as you suck me’, and she had mirrored that language. And yet, still, she wanted to protect her husband, to be kind to a man who had promised her so much but had either lost his way or lost whatever it was that she had loved.
On election day we both did early morning leafletting rounds. Imagine the paradox. Same task, different coloured rosettes, and me sitting in a carpark chatting to her via Telegram, telling her that I did not want her to feel pressured, and her wanting to tell me that she had to balance the desire we were both now admitting with her wish that her husband would not be harmed. It felt Twenty four hours later, the language of Game of Thrones had moved entirely into the mainstream, the red wall had, apparently, been breached, and the irritating fool my party and Jo’s had parachuted in to replace a much loved and retiring MP had lost to Laura’s husband. I sent congratulations,and thought no more of it, and expected to hear no more from her. The papers were full of stories about how the new Prime Minister would be coming to our town to celebrate with his new MP, but without details. Isat in front of Jo’s picture in our room, raised a glass of wine as a toast, and told her memory that it would have been different if she’d been candidate.
Saturday saw me doing the things we’d moved to town to be able to do. I took a book back to the library, dropped some paperbacks off at the community centre, then decided to get some shopping in town. There were no messages from Laura, no notifications, and I assumed that moment was past. My mistake. The PM’s big visit was today, and the market place was full of men and women in suits, celebrating and acting as if the vote had changed everything. I came out of the butchers to be confronted by the new MP, with Laura by his side, anxiously waiting for the message that the PM’s team had arrived in town. He was exuberant, and had the look of a man who hadn’t slept, and hadn’t slept off the celebratory drinks. Laura’s tone as she introduced me to her husband was sharp, but not towards me.
‘Oh Matt, darling, this is Goff. He’s the nice person whose wife would have been your opponent but for her untimely death.’
‘I’d have beaten her as well. Some people just belong in the past.’
Something changed in Laura’s eyes, but her face was impassive so far as casual observers would have been concerned.
‘Goff will be part of my future Matt, not just the past. I think he’s a true friend.’ Fair play to Matt, he didn’t seem to detect anything in his wife’s voice that the rest of us would certainly have noticed.
‘I think the verdict of the electorate is clear. They don’t trust him or his party, and neither should we.’ There was something almost gleeful in Laura’s tone, as if she felt relieved to hear her worst fears confirmed.
“As opposed to my having to trust you no matter what Matt? No matter how much you ignore me or treat me as an accessory to dangle on your arm when you need a wife? I’ll message you Goff - I’ll need company while Matt is off playing at parliament.’
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