Even then, he maintains the pretence by putting on a condom, even though we only use them for other partners now. For a split second, I panic that this is just someone who is very, very like Lloyd but not him. What if that’s the case? What if Lloyd is watching me now, watching me mistake another man for him?
In my confusion, I try to close up my vaginal muscles, but when I feel the tip of his cock and his firm grip of my hips, the momentary anxiety is dispelled. This is Lloyd’s cock. Even in its rubber sheath, I know its precise curve, weight, girth.
He knows I know.
He penetrates with exquisite slowness, as if making sure there is no room for error or doubt. If this doesn’t give it away, he seems to be saying, nothing will. How many times have I felt this hard length stretch me until it is deep inside?
Not enough times. It could never be enough.
Now I can tell him. Now I must tell him.
Once I’ve clamped my muscles around him so tightly he can’t escape, I whisper his name.
I hear his delighted intake of breath. ‘You knew?’
‘I knew. But you aren’t going to stop now, are you?’
‘You don’t want me to pull out?’ He makes a mock tug backwards and I moan.
‘Nooo. Do me. Now, you bastard.’
He pulls almost all of the way back.
There is a second of unbearable tension.
Then he reaches for my hair and pulls it hard, slamming himself all the way back in simultaneously. My endorphins all whoosh together and race around my body, scalp to toes, filling me with wildness.
Halfway through the fuck, a skilled combination of hard and fast and slow and steamy, I realise that I am laughing. I am so stupidly delighted to be here, with Lloyd, in this grim stockroom in Soho, getting banged into the ground that it feels like my life’s high point.
I know it’s just my brain being strange, but I go along with it, let the joy surge and the rhythm guide me, all the way to an orgasm that starts small and builds, up and up and up, until it’s too big for me and it spills out.
I am joyously impaled, happily immobile.
He comes almost immediately – my orgasm seems to have this effect on him a lot of the time – and lets go of my hair, putting his hands on my shoulders then clasping them around my neck. I feel his head drop on to the nape of my neck, resting there. His heartbeat pounds into my back, even through his shirt.
For a blissful moment, only our heavy breathing can be heard.
Then a spell is broken, and Jerome speaks. ‘Well, that’s three out of three,’ he says. ‘I guess you got your prize. Guys, shall we …?’
I’d completely forgotten they were there. They troop out and shut the door on us, leaving us to our recovery.
‘What the fuck’s that aftershave?’
‘Cheap stuff on special offer in Superdrug.’
‘You’re not keeping it.’
‘No.’
We yawn back into trembly pleasurable silence.
‘When did you know it was me?’ he asks just before I nod off in my restraints.
‘When you breathed.’
‘When I breathed? I was under the impression I did that fairly continuously.’
‘No, you dolt. I didn’t hear a thing for ages, then you took this breath, just – the way you do. And I knew.’