Page 49 of Untether

SIMONE: Did you guys have sex?

ME: Nope.

SIMONE: Did you, you know, reciprocate?

ME: Um, maybe. [Giggles way too coyly for a forty-six-year-old woman]

SIMONE: Look, I’m not here to ask you how you feel about this guy or get into the nitty gritty of what you got down to, but I am interested in how you feel. You just came out of a fifteen-year marriage. By your own admission, you didn’t get around too much before your marriage. You went to a sex club and got on a massage table for a guy you don’t know particularly well, a guy who isveryexperienced in this stuff. And you guys indulged in some mutual pleasure-giving.

I’m so proud of you for doing this that I could burst, but I want to knowhow you feel, twenty-four hours on.

ME: I feel fantastic, and not just because I had an earth-shattering orgasm at the hands of someone else. Although that was definitely the biggest part of it.

I guess I feel liberated, like I’ve come through the other side of something I was super scared to do, and I have zero regrets about doing it. But obviously you get that feeling whenever you face down a fear and realise there’s nothing on the other side but good things.

It’s more specific than that, I think. It’s that I faced down years upon years of self-judgement, and judgement of others, and preconceptions about what sex was, and what was okay, and what was not okay. Right? Sex was thiswhole, huge thingin my head, and sure, I totally bypassed the Tinder generation because I was married.

So I get that I’m late to this party, but I suspect a lot of women my age are. And what yesterday really, viscerallyprovedto me was that sex can exist on its own. Outside of a relationship, outside of judgement, outside of shame.

I had one ofthebest orgasms of my life with a guy I’m not in a relationship with, who has such a different outlook from me, who was super considerate and super hot… and it was a one hundred percent positive experience. And now I’m kicking myself that I haven’t done it more often, because this whole no-strings, hot sex thing?

It’s really, really phenomenal.

31

CAL

‘Iabsolutely reject your premise,’ Aida is telling Richard Dowling, our current Health Secretary, live on TV. ‘Come on. We both know it’s a house of cards. So why don’t you quit trying to sell the public on this strategy of yours once and for all and focus your attention on creating a premise we can actually buy into?’

She glares at him and re-crosses her legs as he haltingly, and foolishly, attempts to bring the conversation back to his plans for more NHS cuts.

I’m not listening to a word he’s saying.

Nope, I’m gazing instead at the woman who, two days ago, was naked and on her knees, sucking my dick, and is now eviscerating a senior member of our cabinet with her trademark aplomb and no mercy whatsoever.

Poor bastard,I think, taking a leisurely swig of IPA. I’ve done a weights session and eaten a chicken salad, and this is my reward.Thisbeing an ice-cold beer and a chance to perv freely at one of Britain’s best imports.

Tonight’s programme,Centre Stage, is a BBC flagship that Aida’s hosted since she left her regular evening news slot afew years ago. It focuses squarely on the most pressing current affairs—the ones that warrant more attention than a five-minute news slot can give them.

The armchair format, which allows Aida to lull her guests into a false sense of security before publicly tearing them to shreds, has the added bonus of giving the viewer a cracking view of her spectacular legs. She’s wearing a fitted black dress with short sleeves and those chunky gold bracelets I recognise from her visit to the club.

It makes my blood boil to think about how many men are perving over Aida’s legs right this second. Obviously, it’s different when I do it, because, come on. She came on my fucking tongue. I don’t think she’d mind me looking at her legs.

The woman on my screen is the real deal. She’s stunningly beautiful, glamorous, educated as fuck, and impeccably prepared for this interview—far better prepared, it seems, than the spineless wanker whose actual job it is to run our National Health Service.

She holds up her prompt cards—which I haven’t seen her glance at once tonight—as she lays into him again. Fuck. No wonder she and Gen have hit it off. They’re both terrifying when they want to be.

To my shame, I’m watching her scarlet lips enunciate, and I’m watching that body of hers twist in her chair, such is her level of moral outrage, but I’m zoning out the actual debate they’re having, because my dick is getting hard and my brain is merging the woman on my huge TV screen with the woman whose epic blowjob is living rent-free in my brain.

I palm my cock lazily through the heavy jersey of my jogging bottoms. Fuck, that feels good. That poor sap, Dowling, is going to crawl out of there a broken man, the latestcasualty of my victorious queen. She’s so sure of herself. So crushingly confident.

But earlier this week she was putty in my hands. Moaning and writhing and begging for my tongue. My fingers. My cock. Seeing her excoriate him, flay him with her words till he’s a ravaged carcass fit only for the papers to finish off tomorrow, is doing magical things to my ego and my cock. Because this woman doesn’t roll over for anyone.

Except me.

When I told her quite literally to roll over and lose her towel, she did.

I’m fully hard now. Need to come. But not while Richard bloody Dowling is jabbering on. I turn the TV off and pull up TikTok on my phone, typing inAida Russell editas I tug the elastic on my jogging bottoms down far enough to free my cock.

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