Fireworks where I am tonight, which made me think of this erotica short that I wrote a while back and did nothing with. There’s a lot technically wrong with it, but I still like the way it captures a mood.

***

I always miss the party.

It’s not that I’m one of those geeky girls who thrills at hanging around afterwards discussing the finer points of the presentation of the industrial revolution in the 19^th century novel, but I’m easily lured in by the girl who claims to have written twenty-six sides, reduced to panic despite knowing that she’s probably reproduced the study notes verbatim. I’ll let her take me through what she wrote and the whole time I’m mentally calculating how I need to have done in the other papers to still be guaranteed honours.

By the time I get into town it’s inevitably mid-afternoon, the champagne’s been sprayed and everyone’s moved onto something cheaper. This year I’m in the square by one, but even then the champagne part is over. I guess it doesn’t take long to fire half a bottle of carbonated grape juice at the nearest girl in a white shirt, especially when all the girls are wearing white shirts, but truth be told, I’m not there early for the champagne, I’m there because I can’t bear the anticipation any longer – I need to get fucked.

The bars around the square are packed with students, but I find the boy sitting on the kerb waiting for me, long legs stretched out into the road, surrounded by burnt out party poppers and silly string. He’s still swigging from the half-full bottle – it’s good stuff, he likes his wine. The red carnation pinned to his gown is wilting miserably in the heat.

As he stands and pulls me in for a kiss though, it’s evident that the heat is having very much the opposite effect on him.

‘Your carnation’s wilting,’ I say, flicking it gently.            

He laughs, blue eyes dancing. ‘Golden rule of sex talk,’ he says ‘Never, ever use the word “wilting”.’

Now, of course, he can afford to be light-hearted. Red carnation equals last exam. Last exam means summer, and an end to stress-relief fucking – missionary sex designed to soothe a library-frazzled mind and guarantee a good night’s sleep. I’m longing to take my time with him, to commit his body to memory before we’re driven apart by jobs at opposite ends of the country.

We take turns swigging from the bottle as we meander back to his room and we’re pleasingly giddy by the time he turns the key in the lock. I wonder what the bottle would feel like inside me. Do empty bottles create vacuums?

‘I could fuck you with this,’ he says, holding it aloft and speaking with the confidence of a man whose questions came up this morning.

He rarely reads my mind that way, but jeez, they turn me on, those confident little suggestions of his. Months ago, they started simple: ‘I could fuck you up the arse,’ ‘Why don’t I eat you here, in the library?’ and he’ll wait, holding my gaze, until I’m so horny that my ‘yes’ is barely a whimper. Today, I say nothing at all – I just take off my clothes. Way back in the first week of term he christened me ‘Cautious’ and tonight I’m determined to shed the moniker. Meanwhile, he takes his time, and watching him is like reading the academic dress list in reverse order: mortar board, black shoes, dark socks, white bow tie…

Stark naked, he nips out for a moment (boys’ corridors, who knew?) and returns with a clinking glass. We’ve been drinking warm G&Ts all year, but now exams are over someone’s finally remembered to buy ice.

I lie on the bed and he kneels over me, runs a cube up the inside of my thigh. My cunt pulses around nothing at all. He swirls it round my nipples, too, and then, when I’m all tight above the waist and all loose below it he grows bored and drops the cube back in the glass.

‘Close your eyes’ he says, and I do. ‘Please,’ I whisper, ‘I want it inside me.’

The boy has other ideas though, and he spins the bottle on the sheet beside me, his clever mouth moving to whichever part of my body it deigns to indicate. His mock compass sends him in the direction of my tits, my neck, and, over and over, my cunt, but best of all is when he travels north to my mouth – he kisses like a god.

I’m not expecting it when cold glass brushes my lips and then pushes inside me. My mouth is dry, and not just from all that champagne we drank. He spits onto his fingers and then slides them in a moistened V around my clit. In my head I can picture the emerald vessel sliding in and out of me, faster and faster as I buck my hips up to meet it and it splinters into a million green shards before my eyes as I come, hard.

I keep my eyes closed as he pulls the bottle from my still-grasping flesh (see, no vacuum!). The boy is breathing heavily but I can still hear distant whoops of celebration in the front quad. Then there’s a groan of release and warm, wet droplets explode across my chest.

I open my eyes. My tits are drenched in his come – a cuvée far more precious than anything you could bottle. I rub it in, then he sucks my nipples clean and fucks me all over again.

In the morning he brings me breakfast on a tray in bed. There’s no milk for the cereal and he’s all out of jam, but there is a champagne bottle vase and inside it, two wilting red carnations. And, as I munch on dry toast he hands me a paper bag. Inside is a jade glass dildo, tied with a huge red velvet bow.

He leans down to kiss me, ‘I’ll miss you, Cautious’ he says, and I grin. The nickname’s kind of growing on me.