Tag Archives: flash fiction

Charlie joins in with #Lippie: Plum Dandy

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At lunch yesterday, I mentioned #Lippie to a couple of trusted colleagues. ‘I might choose a lipstick for myself over the weekend,’ I said.

‘No,’ they insisted. ‘We’ll randomise one for you!’ And that’s how I got Plum Dandy.

Plum Dandy

The therapist gestures in the air. ‘This…’ she says, mimicking a spiky series of peaks and troughs, ‘…is happiness. Everyone aspires to happiness.’

She makes it sound like a bad thing.

‘And this…’ the line she draws with her hand is flatter now, like a bad dance move, ‘…is contentment.’

In my head, the first pattern is red, passionate, interesting. The second is flatlining, blue, cold, dead. That’s not what I want to be.

She can’t tell me he’s bad news, obviously. She can only parrot back the things I say, until I can say he’s bad news.

‘Contentment is peaceful,’ she says. ‘Imagine how good it would feel to be calm, to be able to sleep, to not worry about where he is, or who he’s with.’

While I can still imagine him, I can’t imagine peaceful.

‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’

Erm … no. 

I mean, yes, obviously, on some level it would be nice. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t miss sleeping well, or regular meals, or not feeling angry the whole damn time. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t already know this was unhealthy.

I like lots of unhealthy things.

I’m meeting him in the pub. He knows where I’ve been this evening, but he won’t ask for the details. He respects that I have a life separate from him. I resent that he has one separate from me.

We’re good, in public, at pretending we live by the flat line of contentment. We drink a bottle of Merlot, and he tries to wipe away the blue tint it leaves on my lips with something that looks a lot like tenderness. When that doesn’t work, he kisses it away instead, sinking his teeth into my bottom lip until the blood flows in and my mouth flushes pink again.

The wine is finished and the candle is soft and misshapen, spilling wax across the table.

‘Take me home and fuck me.’

‘I have to be up early for work.’

The therapist was wrong. The red line doesn’t just spike upwards. It forms stalactites too, lows that leave me breathless with the fear of losing him.

I like that I care that much. It’s who I am; what I value.

‘Please,’

‘Fine, but it’ll need to be quick.’

It’s lucky I get off on humiliation.

He holds me down as he pounds into me, my arms high above my head, his fingers imprinting him into my skin as he drives his cock deep. These are the moments that I live for, these twenty minute snapshots of violent passion. I struggle, pretending to want to get away. Not only because the idea of having to fight him turns me on, but also because the greater the struggle, the better the bruises.

‘Bite me,’

‘This isn’t about you.’

Oh, it is, my love, it is.

His sharp little teeth sink in just above my nipple. Bite marks are the best marks, somewhere between purple and scarlet, a million miles from the sickly, greenish-yellow bruises he leaves with his fingers. Both are good, but everybody has a favourite colour.

If I stay with him, I’ll never achieve blue calm, except in moments like this, snuggled in his arms after red hot sex, briefly able to forget that I’ll be on a night bus by twelve. And on that bus, I’ll slide my fingers under the neckline of my dress and press down on the flesh that is quietly turning violet. I’ll revel in those marks, and every time I catch sight of them I will feel plum dandy.

The Owl and the Lark

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She submits the essay at 6, and by half past she’s prowling the corridors. These are the dead hours: the clubs chucked out hours ago and even the scientists aren’t up yet. She’s strung out on a combination of coffee and ProPlus and the weird euphoria that comes from not having slept at all. She takes a kind of pride in her ability to stay up all night – when other people talk about all-nighters, they mean the nights they turn in at 3am, but, like everything, she likes to do it properly.

There’s a peace, a focus, that comes from working last minute, when everyone else is sleeping, and it appeals to her introverted side, too. Just music, a pile of books and the words accumulating: two weeks of study coming together on three sides of A4. But by morning she craves company. Company, and, well, cock.

He wakes early, usually, but not quite *this* early. She should let him sleep. But by 7 she’s practically scratching at his door and mewling like a lost kitten. And sure enough, as she checks her watch for the thousandth time, the door swings open and he’s standing there in his boxers, sleep-mussed and tired-eyed. He crawls back into his narrow single bed, holding the duvet so she can climb in next to him. For a moment, sleep is more of a temptation than sex, but as they spoon and his cock begins to swell in the small of her back she finds an untapped reserve of energy.

In the tangle of bedlinen, she kicks off her clothes. He reaches into her bra to grope her tits, sniggering into the warmth of her neck when he finds toast crumbs in her cleavage. He loves her like this, mascara smeared from all the yawning, clothes creased and her mind still whirring at a hundred miles an hour.

‘Fuck me,’

He does, though she’s on top, bouncing like a Duracell bunny. He slaps her arse whenever her rhythm slows and it makes her giggle, the joyful sound of it setting his mood for the whole day ahead. He rests his knuckles against her clit and she comes hard, words pouring out of her that couldn’t be more different from the ones she wrote overnight.

‘Slut.’

‘You love it.’

‘I do.’  And his orgasm merges with the wake of hers.

*

She needs to stay awake. She has a tutorial at 9. A shower will help, she knows, but she wants nothing more than to stay here with him, his come sliding down her thighs and his leg entwined with hers.

‘Don’t you have an essay to finish?’ she asks, as he flings an arm around her waist and snuggles in for the long haul.

‘Nah,’ he mutters. ‘I finished it days ago.’

She envies him this discipline as much as she teases him for it. ‘Swot,’ she replies, and takes his hand, guiding it back to her wet folds. ‘Luckily, some things can be finished more than once.’

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King for the Day

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I figured I’ve written enough big stuff in recent weeks, so using ‘Epiphany’ to write about more big or sudden realisations didn’t really appeal. Instead, I took the religious meaning of the word and wrote this deeply unseasonal piece about sex, and, er, cake.

*

By the time it comes round, she’s ready for cake again. In the past few years she’s reconciled herself with the fact that she hates New Year’s Eve, and she lies low, not detoxing exactly, but, well, detoxing. Socially, as well as nutritionally.

He doesn’t even need prompting. He stops at the bakery on his way home and collects what he reserved days earlier. A square flat box, tied with narrow pink ribbon. Sometimes she lets the kids invite friends, but otherwise it’s family only.

She doesn’t believe in giving things up in January. It’s cold, dark. She wants to say it’s a comedown, but that would be untrue. She loves Christmas, but she loves this too – the putting away of gifts in their rightful places, replacing the tree with bright, hothoused tulips, the end of parties and people everywhere – finding him again, in the lazy mornings between Christmas and New Year, sneaking the odd mouthful of leftover brandy cream from the fridge, post late night fuck. Roaring fires, winter walks.

This is the climax of those moments: the golden, frangipane-filled disc already staining the accompanying crown with its buttery grease. It’s sickly as hell, and she’s never sure if she actually likes the taste that much. What she likes is her family round the table – her kids, the man she loves. The man who can still make her crazily horny with just a glance.

He cuts the cake into four. The rules say that none can be left – that’s how you ensure that someone gets the little ceramic figure buried in the almond paste, that someone has to wear the cardboard crown. As he serves his own slice, there’s the clink of china on china and he makes a lunge for the headgear that is rightfully his.

‘Not fair!’ the kids protest, and she realises that this is the first year they haven’t rigged it to make sure one of the children is king. Maybe she should feel guilty, but she doesn’t. She has plans, especially when she sees him wearing the too-small crown atop his dark curls. She has the plans, but she wants him to have the control.

Of course, because they’re parents, he doesn’t actually get to be king for the day. He still helps with the washing up and makes his own cup of tea when the youngest won’t settle and she’s upstairs for hours reading stories. By the time she makes it back downstairs, he’s raising his hands to take the damn thing off.

‘No!’ she cries, rushing over. ‘Not yet!’

He smiles, and kisses her, her hands still clamping the flimsy cardboard to his head. There are all kinds of games this could lend itself to: she could play the scared princess, the slutty maid, the evil queen, even, if she wanted.

But role-play is not their thing.

She sinks to her knees on the carpet, and unbuckles his belt in the glow of the fairy lights. Distantly, she remembers that she meant to take the tree down today. It can wait. Until after his cock in her mouth, his hands in her hair, his words in her ears and his come on her face.

She doesn’t care that she didn’t get the bit with the figure in. She doesn’t care that she wasn’t king. She doesn’t care because she’d rather have what she has right now: the king in her.

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Postcard Flash #03: Tender is the Night

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I finally stopped letting Fitzgerald intimidate me…

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She finds a copy of ‘Tender is the Night’ in a second-hand bookstore a few weeks after they end it for good. It makes her cry all over again. It was his favourite, and even though she has bad school memories of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ she’d read it anyway. More than the book itself, she likes the trivia around it – the way it was rewritten after Fitzgerald’s death to make it more acceptable, more palatable. She sympathises with that – the inability to tell the exact truth about something because nobody else quite *gets* it. From the very start the best bits were a series of occasional moments that she revisited time and time again in her head – sucking his cock in a dark alleyway after their first date; the flowers he bought her two weeks in; the butt plug he gave her after six.

You couldn’t share those moments with other people – they always wanted the chronology, the forward momentum (not to mention that the words ‘butt plug’ made them wince.) They wanted a proposal, marriage, babies – something they could relate to their own experience. Theirs wasn’t a story you could sell, and almost everyone was glad when he left her. But months later she still revisited those memories – dipping in at will. Treating them more like poetry than a novel.

Flash fiction: Testa rossa

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Disclaimer: I know nothing about cars. When I saw the Wicked Wednesday prompt this week, I was tempted to skip this one. But I like a challenge, so I scoured Wikipedia until I found a single detail I could hang a story on. Probably though, the Ferrari Testarossa looks nothing like the car in Back to the Future. I’m bad at film, too.

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The Ferrari stopped and the tinted window opened to reveal a man. Just not the one she wanted. He reached out, folded the wing mirror in, and the tinted glass slid back into place.

She came here to escape. There was, she’d discovered, little difference between being at the end of a relationship and right at its heart. Everywhere she went, everything she saw, it all reminded her of him. In the supermarket, she noticed the guys who used the same brand of toothpaste. In their favourite bar, the ones who ordered the wine he preferred. Suddenly, an abnormal proportion of the men she encountered wore his aftershave.

Thank god he wasn’t a coffee drinker.

Every Saturday she wiled hours away in coffee shops. They hadn’t even been together that long and she’d forgotten what to do with weekends spent alone. She read the paper, or tried to. She emptied sugar packets onto the table and drew patterns in the snowy grains. She tried, really tried, not to think about him.

The car door opened. The man stepped out. He was good looking, without a doubt. He was wearing beige tailored shorts and a pale blue shirt. Good legs, great arse. And he had a nice car. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she feel anything?

She’d noticed the car for the wrong reason when he’d pulled up to the kerb. Some women, she knew, would be drawn in just by the sight of a 1980s style Ferrari that looked like something out of Back to the Future. Most would never even have spotted the branding above the brake light.

Testarossa.

She watched the man as he queued for his coffee. How would his thick leather belt look hanging open? How would his fingers feel inside her? Would he taste like the espresso the waitress was pushing across the counter towards him?

She willed herself to imagine his cock, to think about the way the head of it would feel spreading her open, to picture the veins running like tributaries under the skin. And amazingly, the willpower worked. She was wet; thinking of somebody new.

He downed his coffee and walked back to his car. If he noticed her sat there, by the door, he didn’t show it.

For six months, the only man she’d thought of, the only one she’d wanted, was the man who was now her ex: fiery, passionate, red-headed. Her very own testa rossa. It was those words on the back of the car that drew her to it, another sign, another reminder of her loss.

But as its driver fired the engine and pulled off into traffic, she knew something inside her had shifted.

She would fuck other men. Men who drank different wine, used different toothpaste, wore all kinds of aftershave. Her testa rossa would become one of many, loved and lost, but fondly remembered. She would be ok, more than ok, in fact. One day, not too far from now, she’d remember how it felt to be happy.

For more Wicked Wednesday, click the image below…

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Postcard Flash #02: Music at night

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Too late for Masturbation Monday this time, but here’s another piece of postcard flash.IMG_5242IMG_5243

She agreed that it was rude of the neighbours to hold a party on a stifling Wednesday night in summer when everyone was sleeping with their windows open. It made her giggle, though, the way the bass from the disco drowned out her cries when he fucked her leaning against the windowsill, her hands splayed on the tired paintwork and her skin revelling in the cool breeze from outside. 

He spun her round eventually and pushed her to her knees, not letting her suck his cock until he’d teased her with it, wiping her juices and his precome across her lips and cheeks. When he did let her swallow his length, it pushed it deep immediately, so the smeared juice on her chin mixed with her free flowing saliva. Tangled in her hair, his fingers grazed her sweat-slicked scalp. She was, quite literally, a hot mess. 

His breathing quickened and she knew he was close. Suddenly, he pulled his cock free and came *everywhere* – she was covered from her fringe to her tits. The music went on – louder, it seemed, now the two of them were sated. He got up, threw her dress at her and muttered ‘Back in a sec.’

When he returned, he was grinning. ‘We’re welcome to join the party.’

‘But I’m covered in…’

‘Dare you.’

And sticky and contented, they danced till dawn.

Postcard Flash #01: New Biology

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I’m blogging more than I have in recent weeks, because I think writing breeds writing, and I miss it. I have a box of postcards depicting vintage Penguin book covers and I had no idea what to do with them – I’m not a big sender of old school mail. And then I remembered F Dot Leonora’s Sticky Note fiction, and wondered if I could do something similar. Pick a postcard at random and then write a piece of erotic flash inspired by the title on the card. By linking it to Kayla Lord’s great meme Masturbation Monday, I hope i’ll be inspired to do it on a fairly regular basis. This is my first attempt. I hope you enjoy.

Semen was to High School what strangers were to Primary: *the* thing to be afraid of. After all, you could get pregnant even if he didn’t come inside you. So at first she made the mistake of thinking she craved his come because it was transgressive, the same way she craved unknown sex in dark alleyways. The sex was good, even with condoms – he knew how to tilt her hips just so, and she came more easily than she ever had with anyone else. But her own wetness coating her skin afterwards wasn’t enough – she wanted to know what it would feel like mixed with his. ‘How long?’ she wondered. How long did you have to have been fucking before you could talk STD testing and alternative methods? He seemed to know what she wanted, asked if she’d like him to come in her mouth, on her tits, her face. And it was close to what she’d hoped, but not quite there. So she got tested, without telling him, went on the pill. When she told him, he had a surprise for her too: his own clean results. In the weeks that followed they fucked bareback time and again, and with the trace of him inside her, she learnt something new. Semen was indeed the source of new life – it made *her* feel alive.

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More Masturbation Monday here…

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Giving It Up Competition: The Entries

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To encourage you all to get your act together and write something for my Lent-themed Giving It Up competition, between now and the closing date (April 2nd), I’ll be adding links to the list below as and when they come in. I’d love to get a minimum of 10!

Charlie x

1. 05.42 by Innocent Loverboy

2. Giving It Up … Lent Style! by Jane’s Little Secrets

3. Giving You Up by Absolutely Ruby

4. Lent by Strained Voices

5. The Last Night by The Shingle Beach

6. Lent is Rough by Collared Mom

7. Breaking Conditioning by An Older Man

8. Giving up Kink by Euclidean Point

9. Take It All by @Mandapen

L (The Make Up Artist) + **Competition**

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It’s almost the same shade as the lipstick rolling around the bottom of my handbag, but I want it, for the 1920s-style case as much as the name.

She comes over while I’m testing it on the back of my hand. ‘Do you want to see what it looks like on?’

I’m a sucker for other people doing my make up – I’ve never mastered the art of getting that polished look on my own. And she is, without a doubt, polished. Around her neck, a cursive L hangs from a delicate gold chain and her hair is a mass of carefully styled honey waves, but these softnesses are offset by her outfit, which is head to toe black, from her hot pants to her leather apron.

I’m inelegant and clumsy next to her, not helped by having to clamber onto what is essentially a bar stool. She swipes her brush through the colour and leans in close. I twitch, too strung out with life in general to stay as still as she wants me, and she giggles.

She outlines my lips in pencil and maybe it’s that that makes me feel like a blank canvas, like i could reinvent myself here, in Selfridges’ packed Beauty Hall. It’s noisy, hot, and bright, but I’m totally captivated by her. Her lips are ruby red, the kind of colour I dream of being able to pull off as my everyday look. She applies it straight from the stick, she says, and I girl crush a little harder on this rough-and-ready round the edges admission.

It’s strange, having someone focus so hard on your mouth when they’re not kissing you. She fills in between the lines, stepping back occasionally to appraise her handiwork. If I spent this long on my own make up, I’d never get to work.

‘I can’t get the pigment to even out,’ she says, as she continues to sweep colour over my lips. ‘It’s weird.’

Uneven, chaotic – this has been my mental state for months and I want to laugh at the fact that this gorgeous girl can’t make me look calm and sophisticated, no matter how hard she tries. Eventually, the frustration gets the better of her and she drops her brush onto the counter and swipes her finger roughly over my lips.

‘Ah,’ she says, ‘That’s better!’

Even before she hands me the mirror, I know I’m a sure thing. It’s no longer just the packaging and the name. It’s the sense that here, at 11.45 on a Saturday morning, I might have fallen a little bit in love. I pay, and she hands me the bag before turning her attention to the next girl looking for something pretty. Before I walk away, I linger for a moment by the testers and wonder what shade her lipstick was.

Love bite. That’ll be it.

*****

I joked to @Juniper3Glasgow this morning that I’d crushed on so many gorgeous women this week that I was thinking of giving up men for Lent. I think my love of cock will probably win out, but it did get me thinking that Lent is a great prompt for some flash erotica. And what better way to elicit flash erotica than to have a mini competition?

As I said on Twitter, the prize probably won’t be huge. And because at the moment I’m all about pick-and-mix selections of cute stuff, it’ll also be a surprise. And you’ll get the glory of winning, obviously. Plus, because Lent lasts for-bloody-ever, it’s a super generous deadline.

The Rules…

(1) Your story must be a piece of erotica on the theme of Giving Something Up. The more creative, the better.
(2) The post must (obviously) be your own work.
(3) There is no minimum length for posts, but they must be no longer than 1000 words.
(4) You must post the piece on your own blog and link back to this post in order for your entry to be counted.
(5) The competition closes at 23.59 GMT on Thursday, April 2nd. Any entries submitted after this point will not be considered.
(6) You consent to me linking to your post in a list of all the entries once the competition has closed.
(7) Should you win, you are happy to share your mailing address with me for the purpose of sending your prize.

If I’ve missed anything, or you have questions, please let me know…

Charlie xx