The first time I stayed in a hotel with a girlfriend, I was 18. We had plans to spend an entire Easter holiday period together – that’s two weeks, to my non-UK readers – one week with her family; one with mine. We decided to bridge the gap with a night in a hotel.

The universe didn’t make it easy. Whatever search engine we were using before everyone switched to Google threw up a few answers and we sort of picked the first one which wasn’t too expensive, part of a chain, near an airport or with a resident distraction. I ‘phoned the one-star hotel near King’s Cross and reserved a double room. Not needing to do so, I didn’t give any details apart from my name… a fake name.

I had gone into this with limited cash and the idea that we had to be more or less anonymous. At the age of about 14 or 15 I had had a fantasy about being one half of a pair of young lovers who had a lot of sex even though the police were trying to stop them. Their orgasmic moans were a clue to their location – usually down a dark alley or on a rooftop or something – but they were never caught. Now that I was actually in that situation (even though we were publicly a couple and everyone knew we were having sex), getting a hotel room without anyone knowing so was about as close as we were ever going to get to becoming The Sexing Twosome™ (yes, there was a name, just in case I ever pitched it to TV. Now that I consider it, Netflix may jump on that idea…).

We took a train down to London and felt each other up for the majority of the journey. By the time we found our one star hotel, we had decided we probably ought to have sex before going out to find food.

The concierge told us that they didn’t actually have the room I had reserved, but there was a twin room available, so would we like that?
“What the fuck?” I didn’t say. “We’ve specifically booked this room so we can go at it like jackhammers, even though we’d be doing that anyway but we got carried away with this harebrained idea and now we want or sex room!”
After not saying any of this and leaving, my dreams of finally becoming The Sexing Twosome™ started to seem impractical. After all, the suave, debonaire male partner was a dynamic young go-getter with problem-solving skills, and I was an awkward, gawky idiot who had just been put in his place by an aging concierge in a hotel which didn’t even seem to contain lights.

“So what do we do now?” she asked, clearly expecting this awkward, gawky idiot to pull some magic solution out of the air like I’d done the first time we had sex.
“Abuh,” said this attractive genius. “Let’s… uh… I don’t know.”
At which point I noticed the rest of the street we were standing on.

The two star hotel next door had nicer Romanesque columns bookending the entrance, but it had the same vibes inside – dim lighting leading the way down gloomy corridors; uniform grey carpet tiles everywhere, a slightly neglected air, clean though it may have been. (London is full of these. The first part of this story has one particularly memorable one.) After being assured that they were never going to be full, I paid some cash and was handed a huge piece of vinyl with a key attached to it.

I remember walking down the corridor holding hands. It was quiet. Nobody else was around. Everything was calm, but sad. A place of sorrow without torment.

Our room, as it turns out, was actually quite nice. Spacious, airy, bright and with a sizeable double bed… which, as we suddenly realised, was the reason for our presence in this dreary corner of London. We put our bags down; I went to make a cup of tea…

My penis was inside her within five minutes. Half an hour later, with a plastered grin and full of cum, she felt ready to walk again.

We went in the wrong direction, got completely lost, and almost didn’t find somewhere to eat. I think we ended up in McDonald’s, which – as I noted multiple times that night – was also the name of the one star hotel who had abandoned our room.

In the end, we had to walk a little to get back to our temporary place of lusty residence. As we mutually admitted, we were tired, we’d had food, and we’d already had sex. We went back to our room intending to go straight to sleep.

And then we had sex three more times that night.

The police never found us.