‘I like this game,’ I tell him, handing over the artery-cloggers. ‘What’s my next challenge?’
He opens the bag, takes out a doughnut and bites into it.
‘Hey, you can’t –’
He points to the bar code label and shrugs.
What he does next is infinitely more disturbing. He finds the jammy part and shoves it up to my mouth.
‘Lick it,’ he says. ‘Go on. Lap it up.’
‘I can’t!’
‘You can. I know you can.’
He is wicked, and he makes me want to be wicked. Tentatively at first I extend my tongue and take the tiniest dot of the sweet red filling.
‘Mmm, is that nice?’ he purrs. ‘Get stuck in, go on.’
I push my tongue into the hole and scoop out the jam until it is all gone and my face is sticky with sugar crystals.
‘Let me help you.’ He puts the half-eaten doughnut back in the bag. He hustles me into an alcove between the sliced white and the speciality loaves, takes my chin in his long fingers and, oh my God, what is this?
He licks each grain of sugar off my skin with his warm wet tongue while I gasp and grab the pillar for support.
‘There,’ he says. ‘Your face tastes really nice. What are your lips like?’
But I’m beyond speech. This seems to have gone wildly out of control very quickly. Should I be scared? My body seems to have replaced the fight-or-flight response with the fuck-or-fuck response.
‘Do you mind if I try them?’
All I can do is shake my head.
He presses his lips to mine and they feel every bit as good, as full, as hungry as I imagined they would. I’m getting snogged in a supermarket. The realisation floods my knickers. I grind myself against his crotch, finding bruising hardness there. His tongue unfurls inside my mouth and his hand reaches for my hip and slides around behind, covering my arse and taking a squeeze.
The sound of ostentatious throat-clearing prevents us from going any further. A thunder-faced bakery assistant shoos us away.
‘Man cannot live on bread alone anyway,’ says my supermarket suitor airily. ‘I think you need meat.’
I take my trolley and he stands behind me, his hands on mine, and pushes it along from my rear to the meat aisle. I wonder if the refrigerated air might dampen his ardour, but his erection crushes itself against my bottom with persistent force despite the chill.
‘You’re going to make some obvious joke about sausages, aren’t you?’ I say.
‘Me? I wouldn’t dream of making lewd pork product-based puns. I can’t think of anything wurst.’
I kick his ankle. ‘Enough of that. What’s your name anyway?’
‘Serge.’
‘Serge? Are you French?’
‘No, my mum just had a thing about Serge Gainsbourg. How about you? Are you named after a parental heartthrob too? Brigitte? Agnetha? Princess Leia?’
‘Emma.’
‘Emma Peel? That figures.’
‘No, just Emma. Jeez. I’m glad we skipped the chatting up stage and just got on with business. You’re quite annoying, you know.’