Category: Recollections (Page 1 of 10)

ILB recalls moments from his past, vaguely related to love, sex, or whatever else

This is (not) a drill

October 15, 2026 / Innocent Loverboy / 0 Comments

I didn’t know her name. Maybe I did at one point. She was in the year above us, and that was always a sign that we weren’t meant to be communicating. (We had a better relationship with the people in the year below. The following year, when they joined us, was much more convivial, even if Becci did insist upon pelting Harry with wine gums.) Still, I recognised drill girl, and although I don’t think we ever exchanged any words, I felt no affection nor animosity towards her. She was just another face in the crowd.

To this day I still have no idea how Lightsinthesky felt about her.

Maybe he didn’t like her. She was one of the many in our school who wore pink and jeans. He wasn’t fond of pink and jeans. He’d tell anyone who’d listen that. I’d have done so, just to spite him, had I owned a pair of jeans. I don’t think I’ve worn jeans since I was about six.

He also did something (which I’m assuming was, I have no idea) grotesque when she walked by. Invariably he would put his hands to his chest, extend one finger of each as if they were an extension of his nipples, and make a noise like a drill.

Drrrrrrrrrrrrr. Dzzzzzzzzhhhhh.

He never explained this. I assume we were meant to know what that meant. The logical part of my brain tells me that this was some sort of misogynistic commentary on her breasts, but since her breasts were average size, well-proportioned and worked beneficially on her slight frame, maybe he was seeing something I wasn’t. I mean, I wasn’t looking too closely at her breasts.

Eventually he’d grow tired of the frowny face I threw him every time he did this, because after a while he would nod sagely and answer the question that nobody had asked him:

“Yes, she is intensely shaggable.”

Which also wasn’t something I’d considered. Lightsinthesky saw pretty much every girl in the school as somewhat shaggable. This is the guy who would take up the bass guitar because that’s how you get all the ladies. I may have had the occasional crush, but I wasn’t as desperate to shag anyone as he was. My assumption is that he would have sex with drill girl if he could, but he couldn’t because he didn’t know she was, and neither did I, so he just consoled himself with making the drill noises, pausing, and then declaring her intensely shaggable.

Am I the only one who’s confused by this?

Drill girl passed us in the lunch hall once and Lightsinthesky waited for a few seconds before the hands came out and he made a noise like a cross between a pneumatic drill and a machine gun.

“That’s all I have to say,” he nodded, with some finality to it.
“I don’t understand and I never have,” I interjected, “but… do you like her or not?I mean, you keep saying she’s intensely shaggable.”
“She is intensely shaggable.”
“If you say so,” I sighed, realising I wasn’t going to get much else out of him. “You just keep making that drill noise when you see her and I’ve no idea what that means either.”
“Oh, you know.”
“…”
“You know.”

It was a statement, not a question. Clearly I was supposed to know what this meant. I also wanted to work out why he found drill girl so intensely shaggable.

“My God, that woman’s got a huge arse,” he said, snapping me out of my rêverie.
“You know, you’re not meant to say stuff like that,” I responded. “It’s not appropriate.”
“But it’s true,” he explained. “And I’m always clear about what I say.” (He didn’t hear my snort at this as he ploughed on regardless. “Plus, it’s one of my catchphrases.”

I didn’t even know he had catchphrases.

“Five seconds, here we go,” I said in the style of Roy Walker.

I’m still annoyed he didn’t get it.

/msg Kaf Quiet!

October 3, 2026 / Innocent Loverboy / 0 Comments

The first time I ever used IRC was via the official Worms 2 server. Granted, I didn’t know what IRC was at the time, but I owned Worms 2 and a dial-up Internet connection, and was curious. I was also friends with Kaf, who would be very keen for me to show off the chat function, even if I did insist upon ~~losing at~~ playing a few games of Worms 2 first.

Kaf was, to be frank, a lot bolder than me. He was strong, athletic, attractive and went to an all-boys’ school, which sounded fairly terrifying. I’m not sure if I believed all the stories he told me about throwing other students through walls and the like, but they were entertaining, and so was he, and a very loyal friend, to boot. He was more interested in WormNET than the actual game, because – as it turned out, although I’d had my suspicions – it was a way to talk to girls.

I wasn’t that interested in “girls”. I knew girls. Lots of my friends were girls. I’m still friends with most of those girls. Still, I liked making new friends and Kaf was good talker, and I’d let him use my keyboard for informal chat, although I did object to the use of “FUCK OFF YOU FUCKING WANKER” (a phrase used a lot on WormNET), which he shrugged off with, “you’ve got to have some fun in life.”

But it was my computer, my internet time and my copy of Worms 2, so I tugged the keyboard back off him like he was Jared in the e-mail scene of Dear Evan Hansen.

“But I haven’t told my joke,” he wheedled as I hastily tried to apologise to everyone. “Let me tell my joke.”
“Do you really want to tell one?” I said quietly, scrolling through the window. “Lots of people are telling jokes, but they all appear to be racist.”
“You shouldn’t have answered that guy who asked if you were German in German.”
“But I’m doing German GCSE, it was a chance to practice!”
“Fine,” he said, wrenching the keyboard from my hands, “I’ll tell my joke, and then you can chat afterwards.”

Before I could answer, he started writing.

okay so i know a great joke and this is how it goes so there are three women in a lift and it gets stuck and a genie appeared and granted them three wishes so the first woman goes i wish i was a hundred times smarter and she got out of the lift and the second woman goes i wish i was a thousand times smarter and she got out of the lift and then the third woman goes i wish i was a million times smarter and she turned into a man :))))))))))
Kaf

“But that’s not very funny,” I said meekly once he’d hit return and handed me back the keyboard.
“You don’t understand the joke,” he replied earnestly. “You see, it means men are a million times sma…”
“I know what it means, it’s just not funny.”
“People are laughing.”
“Nobody’s laughing.”
“Isn’t that what FOAD means?”
“Not as far as I’m aware.”

Kaf sighed.

“Like I said, you’ve got to have some fun in life.”
“You do,” I agreed. “But not like this. Not through swearing and telling sexist jokes.”
“What sort of joke would you tell, then?”
“Oh, something simple. Something like

Did you hear about the very think Saxon who scored? It was a goal from the narrowest of Angles.
an objectively better joke

or in the same vein.”
“But I don’t even understand that one.”
“It’s my favourite joke.”
“Mine was funnier.”
“Yours was sexist! If you’re going to be sexist on WormNET, you shouldn’t be doing it on my account!”
“Fine,” he huffed. “You fix it. I’m going to get some crisps.”

While he went to get some of my crisps, I tried – quite well, I thought, at least – initially to everyone for what my mate had said.

And that’s the first time I got called “GAY” on the Internet by someone I didn’t know. What a time to be alive.

Did you cheat on me?

September 4, 2026 / Innocent Loverboy / 2 Comments

The question rattles around in my head until it becomes untenable. I try to squash it down; it becomes an ache in my chest, a pit in my stomach. Don’t be silly, say my rational parts. It didn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. You never even considered it at the time, they say.

But what if? says the rest of me. My body begins to dully thud, the doubt now upon me like a leaden blanket. I think about it all the time. You certainly could have. It would have been so easy for you and I wouldn’t have ever known. I would just be… there. Solidly, dependably present, waiting for you to come back from your rendezvous, innocently disguised as something else.

I’d know, of course. Somehow I’d know. I’d lie on your bed, staring at the ceiling with rivers of tears staining my cheeks. Every cry of ecstasy he elicited from you another dagger of ice piercing my very soul within. I wouldn’t even ask myself why. I knew the answer. I wasn’t good enough. I knew that all the time. Not good enough. Not enough. Not enough. Not enough.

I wouldn’t need to ask who, either. I knew who and so did you. He was never really gone. From the rapturous tone of your initial mentions of him to the tiny hints of infatuation towards the end, he was always there. Not present in the real sense, but there nonetheless, like the faint, uneasy smudge of a mistake. If you cheated on me, when you cheated on me, it would be him. It was always going to be him. He’d be so easy to blame for any betrayal, and I’d believe you.

You’d probably tell me, although you’d never know what that would do to my heart. Broken is not the word. It would be worse too than shattered. My heart would be atomised, reduced to nothing more than a pile of fallen sand. The cries I’d give would outnumber the ways to describe the pain I’d be feeling. Holding you close would be the only way I’d stop the rot from setting in.

But, of course, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I wasn’t good enough to hold you. Not worthy. Never worthy. Never had been, never would be. Never. Never. Never.

I’d been cheated on before, of course. That was heartbreak of the sort I thought I’d never experience. The love we shared convinced me that I was in so way worthy of love. This one who felt unlovable finally told otherwise.

If you cheated on me, it would be my final shreds of hope you set on fire. The rest of my life wouldn’t be worth a thing. My existence reduced to nothing but constant pain.

Pain.

Forever.

I lie on my side letting the question scream its way through every part of my existence. Did you cheat on me?

I know you didn’t… but what if?

Like Like (aka: Good in Bed, Like)

July 28, 2026 / Innocent Loverboy / 0 Comments

Shield-eaters and world leaders have many likes alike.
Ancient Hylian Proverb

“Here,” she said.

I turned around to look at her. She had a semi-quizzical, semi-dirty look on her face. I hadn’t known her for that long, at that point… but I knew that look. Whatever she was about to say wouldn’t be a pleasant thing. I’d stake my reputation (as a hopeless social misfit) on it. In that moment, I could solemnly swear that she was up to no good.

“Yes?” I tried tentatively.
“I know someone who likes you…” she started. “Like, she really likes you.”
“No she doesn’t,” I said automatically.

Of course she was lying. Nobody liked me – that was impossible. Plus, at that age it wasn’t proper for anyone to like me. I certainly didn’t like anyone (although maybe I did… I just wouldn’t admit it…), at least not enough to entertain any particular fantasies. 12 was too young to be a romantic person, someone who went on dates or had girlfriends. I was going to wait until 13 until I started to ritualistically get my heart broken.

“You don’t even know who I’m talking about!” she exclaimed. I’m talking about…”

Here she gave a name. I didn’t recognise it. I didn’t know many of the girls in my year anyway, although everyone knew who I was. I knew the Floof. I knew the Manics fan and would end up wanting to have sex with her. I knew Dani who pinched my bum. This name I didn’t recognise, although I didn’t go to the same primary school as the majority of my year either, so I was none the wiser.

“Oh,” was my eloquent reply. “Well, I don’t know who that is, and I can’t like someone who I don’t know. And if I don’t know her, she won’t know me, and I’m not sure how she could like me if she doesn’t.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“You don’t?”
“No. I think you don’t like her because you don’t think she’d be good in bed.”

Good in bed. I’d never heard that phrase before. I didn’t need to work out what it meant, though. It was fairly self-explanatory. But then at the age of twelve I wasn’t exactly beginning to rank people I knew by whether or not they’d be good in bed. Considering the year I’d been having, I was beginning to know people by how hard they hit.

“…no,” I managed after I’d recovered from this curve ball. “I’d never… I mean, I don’t know who this is and I…”
“So you don’t think she’d be good in bed?”

This girl wasn’t a bully – she was a bit of a tease. But I knew I was in dangerous territory. Any answer I gave would be weaponised against me in some way. Whatever I said would have found its way through to the rowdy boys at some point. Throughout the year I’d been gay (because I wasn’t interested), a pervert (because I said someone was pretty), radical (because I gave a speech in favour of sex before marriage), and then gay again (because a friend of mine accidentally sat on my hand and apparently that was me groping him. My bully kept saying things like “I don’t feel safe around [ILB], he keeps looking at me in a homosexual way”.) The last thing I wanted to now be was someone who didn’t think someone I didn’t know existed wasn’t good in bed.

What was I supposed to say?

“I don’t know what it’s like in bed,” I said theatrically, making my excuse to go to the bathroom and end the conversation there and then. I got stuck in one of the stalls and my Geography teacher had to kick the door in.

By the time I got back to class my bully had heard that I didn’t know what a bed was like and was telling everyone that I actually slept on the floor under a second-hand flea-infested rug in the hovel that I lived in, and that’s why I was so stupid and dirty.

But at least I didn’t have to have sex. Gross!

Moment o’ Memento

June 22, 2026 / Innocent Loverboy / 0 Comments

Sitting in my Uber, with the heat beating down on the main road and no sign of ameliorating, my driver had all four windows open. At forty miles per hour this created a pleasant, if artificial, refreshing breeze which whipped and twirled around my head. Hair flying back and forth. Eyes closed. Mouth open (slightly). And thoughts, twirly whirly swirly thoughts, to match.

Because sometimes all it takes is a moment.

Back in Nottingham, my days were punctuated more often than not by Rodge and Shell having sex. They were a couple, or at least they were for a while. They continued to have a lot of sex even after they’d broken up. What with my friend Blaine the human sloth being loved-up with his girlfriend, and our French housemate having an apparently real (but possibly invisible) boyfriend, I remained – despite hot drunk girls walking randomly into my bedroom and holding urban parties just around the corner – the only single one in the house.

A memory danced into my head along with the windspren in the Uber. Rodge, who usually ate about six or seven slices of cheese on toast after his morning shags, had someone who was pretty, loud, fairly uninhibited and clearly highly sexual, judging by the noises they made (whether or not she was a girlfriend or just a regular lay). Blaine, despite sleeping 16 to 20 hours a day like a male lion, clearly had something going on with Sarah. The French girl was French.

I had no such arrangement back then, and I do not now.

In my 20s I lived with my parents and had girlfriends who I did not live with. I spent a lot of time with them – specifically with my second girlfriend, who lived in Oxford and that’s less than an hour away by train – but our visits were more an attempt at moving towards cohabitation than regular drop-in shags (no matter how much sex we actually had). I may have had a couple of run-ins with others – like Alicia, or Lilly, or even snowdrop – but that was always me visiting them.

Someone pretty visiting me for sex was an idea that beguiled me back then. The desire I had for it, from a fleeting memory on flying winds, buffeted its way back into my brain. Twenty years on and here I was still thinking about it. Living independently in a London flat with a wife who doesn’t have sex and a job to which I actually go (not to mention a disability which may make it difficult to actually have sex).

The idea of someone coming over for a little morning delight still manages to entrance.

Why? I asked the wind. Why, when I am married, busy, lazy, disabled and less than conventionally attractive, does the back of my mind even entertain the possibility? Soft porn and erotica have the trope. But they’re fiction, of course. I read blogs which have some of the same stories… but they don’t happen to me. They never have, the wind told me. And they never will.

I’ve never had my incel moment and I don’t intend to start. I don’t consider myself to be owed anything. I certainly don’t expect to have more or a right to sex than is to be reasonably expected. Hell, I don’t expect it any more. I don’t mind not having sex, I really don’t…

…but the back of my brain lets the wind tell me differently…

…because sometimes all it takes is a moment.

Death to the aristos!

April 25, 2026 / Innocent Loverboy / 0 Comments

When I was at university I had a friend (on whom I had a crush, briefly) who was a “The Honourable”. She would be getting a signet ring for her twenty-first birthday, lived in a large pile in the middle of the country somewhere and had a father who was made a lord within the time I knew her. She also didn’t like giving blowjobs, could make her lips look three times their size with the use of her tongue, knew how to disable a drunk man by twisting his nipples and spent most of a seminar passing notes to me wondering if having four stomachs (like a cow does) would cure my IBS.

I have the coolest friends.

Travelling up to her place for her birthday party was a bit of an adventure, mostly on account of the fact that only one of our group had a car, I was navigating using directions I got off Google, nobody knew exactly where this house was and there were lots of country roads (but we found it – we got lost on the way back, though). The event itself was a curious mix of posh and youth-friendly; I was on a table with people I didn’t know. I ended up telling the story of how I’d been cheated on and dumped the previous year and I got responses like “shit, that’s fucking weak, isn’t it?” in aristocratic voices like the airmen in Armstrong & Miller.

Hired servants brought the food, which was largely uninspired; there was a disco in which they played Space Cowboy (which I’d spent that morning getting dressed to). I was enjoying myself – getting hyped up on free Coca-Cola and thrashing about on the dancefloor like Tim Booth if Tim Booth couldn’t dance. I may not have been an aristocrat myself, but with my fancy suit, naturally BBC voice and lack of concern for what people thought of my dancing, I was having great fun pretending.

The girl with the curly brown hair ended up asking me how old I was.

“I’m 19,” I said. “I’m guessing you are around the same? Although I’m not supposed to ask a lady her age.”
“I’m 30,” she purred. “You’re 19? That’s cute. You’re 19. I’m 30. And we’re dancing.”

Is she drunk? She’s just saying things that seem obvious.

“We are. I’m quite enjoying the funky music.”
“Wheeeee!” was her restrained reply, at which point she radiated away and vanished into the milieu of wasted rich people congregating at the other end of the marquee.
“That was weird,” I said to nobody in particular, and then set about wondering how I was going to get to sleep that night since I’d forgotten my sleeping bag (nota bene: I ended up sharing with Meg, the girl at my university who had driven me there. A drunk aristo spent most of the night trying it on with her and I had to stuff my fist into my mouth to stop myself laughing too much.) while throwing shapes for a bit longer.

For the next few hours the thirty-year-old with the curly brown hair kept drifting in my direction, almost saying something and then removing herself.

You are in the main room of a social gathering for rich people. There are exits to the north and west with a twisty little passage opening to the south.

There is a grinning little thirty-year-old in the room with you!

I had no idea. What exactly was her angle? She seemed a bit put out to find that I was 19. She didn’t want to talk, as she kept stopping herself, and she didn’t want to dance, as she was already doing that. She couldn’t have realistically wanted anything else, as this was a party, and she couldn’t have wanted to sleep with me, as nobody ever wants to do that. So what exactly was it she wanted?

It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

I went into the adjoining marquee, lay on the ground until Meg turned up and the night came to a quiet conclusion. Quite a nice ending, all told.

The following morning I asked my friend who the thirty-year-old with the curly brown hair was.

“I’ve no idea,” she admitted. “He’s one of my brother’s friends. My brother has very weird friends. I mean, you heard two of them doing his character assassination – she’s a sister or a friend of a friend or an ex or something. Why? Are you interested?”

Well, are you?

“No. No, I’m not. I’m just curious. We started talking last night and never really got to finish our conversation.”
“Don’t worry about it. Hey, just a question – is Meg driving you back to Nottingham today? If you’re staying, you could meet her again.”
“No, it’s okay. I’m going with Meg. Why, do you want a lift?”
“I’m staying here for a bit, but it won’t be too long. I’ll be back for the new term, though.”
“What, are you getting a private helicopter to fly you or something?”
“Oh, do fuck off,” she grinned.

Sext

February 20, 2026 / Innocent Loverboy / 0 Comments

Ding ding. Ding ding.

I picked up my Nokia 3310 and opened the Messages menu to see the name of the pretty blonde I used to talk to. Her messages were usually teasing without going to the point of being ribald – having only physically met her once, I had no idea exactly how far she would go in the flesh. From the impression I got, it was pretty far.

I’m sure we all went that far in the end. But she was an early bloomer.

is it true that
when you’re
horny about me
your phone locks

That was all it said. I pressed the button to scroll down to check if there was any more to the message. Of course the screen didn’t move one iota. Maybe it would move up. Nope, no movement there either.

I went into an immediate and very brief blind panic. My ‘phone may have broken. There was no way I would be able to afford a new one – the things were expensive. I’d inherited this one from my sister. What would I do without it? I’d never be able to text people. Not that I texted many people, but I had pretty blonde friends who sent me things like this. It was almost like my ‘phone was locked.

…oh.

…oh!

…OH!

The last horse crossed the finish line before I texted her back.

Got me! That’s hilarious!

It was, at least, better than the ASCII art of blowjobs that another, slightly grosser female friend used to send me.

just sending something funny to my friends. but good to see ur horny about me 😉

I mean, I hadn’t been horny about her… up until that point. But I’d made up my mind to keep that text – it was a clever trick, however it worked. I would send it to Esque at one point, who would be similarly amused.

But I was particularly restless for the remainder of the night.

Hotel Story #2

October 22, 2025 / Innocent Loverboy / 0 Comments

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.

かわいい

September 21, 2025 / Innocent Loverboy / 0 Comments

[Do I need to update my PHP? Probably. I'll just add that to the list of things I'll never do. I've still got an account on Ello and haven't gotten around to shutting that down yet.]

I’m standing outside a Buddhist temple in Kyoto with sweat rolling down my forehead. It’s subtropical in southern Honshu in August and I hadn’t quite factored this in. My mother made me pack a coat; I’m not sure why she did either.

Heat or no heat, I’ve been enjoying myself. We spent a whole week in Tokyo buying retro games and drinking the VERY MANLY pink peach froth they do in Japanese Starbucks. The occasional diversion to maid cafés, a stripshow and possibly-the-biggest-sex-shop-in-the-world aside, our first week had mostly consisted of going to various places to shop.

And I was completely fine with that. I can’t pretend that I wasn’t there for that, too.

Kyoto is proving different. Walk down the street from our hotel and lots of the suburban houses have a little Shinto hokora sandwiched between them. Eventually you’ll reach the local onsen, which we’ve already been to. I’ve never been naked in front of 47 before. He’s practically my brother and we had to go to Japan to reach that step. He didn’t seem fazed by my UNUSUALLY LARGE PENIS.

Anyway. We’ve just had a rickshaw ride through a forest of bamboo and there’s a large Buddhist ex-monastery now used as a temple of worship and/or tourist trap. We are tourists and have fallen into said trap. 47, who (as it turns out) is a competent photographer, is quite keen on taking pictures. My DM forbids me from taking anything not at a Batman angle. He’s got the ‘phone and he’s taking the snaps.

I stand in front of the path to the temple and strike a pose.

“Kawaii!” says a cute female voice.
I look in its direction and see the cute female attached to said voice. She was walking down the road with a group of other Japanese women holding parasols, but she’s stopped now to call something kawaii. And she’s looking straight at me. She then repeats it again – “so kawaii!!”

This must be a mistake. Or a joke, or a dare. Maybe 47 has paid her to tell me I’m kawaii. Of course, perhaps she genuinely does think I’m kawaii, or at least the pose I’ve chosen to strike is kawaii. Perhaps it’s the T-shirt I’m wearing, or my messy black hair, or how awkward I look. Japanese friends have occasionally spoken of the appeal of an innocent-looking gaijin. (Whether or not I’m actually innocent is, of course, conjecture, but it’s in my screen name, so I’ll take it.)

Of course, maybe I’m not kawaii. Maybe she was saying kawaikunai – かわいくない – and I’m not cute.

She must have picked up on my sudden self-doubt because she switches to English.
“Cutie!” she clarifies, with a smile brighter than the surface of Venus. “You’re a cutiecutie!”

OK, that’s new. I’ve never been called a cutiecutie before. My mum called me handsome once. A girl at a gig said I was very pretty. A staff member at Rebecca’s college once said I was “a bit of a honey” and one of Soldiergirl’s friends said I “looked like an angel”. But being a cutiecutie was new. Being declared one immediately after being told I was kawaii twice was definitely new. And being told so by a pretty Japanese girl is basically the sort of thing I’ve had dreams about.

After this, you know, take me away. I’m done. It’s not going to get any better than this.

She gets a grin and an arigatoo in response and bounces away riding her own smile. 47 takes his snap and we start to make our slow, sweaty way down the path.

“I’m kawaii, apparently,” I say under my breath.
“You are!” says 47, with some finality to it.

I don’t stop smiling for about a day and a half.

Inhale

August 14, 2025 / Innocent Loverboy / 0 Comments

“It’s too cold to open a window,” she said, “and our room reeks of sex.”
“I quite like the scent of sex,” I demurred.
“Oh, don’t get me wrong!” she protested. “I love it and I always have! In our case it’s a mark of a job well done!”
“High five!” I didn’t say. To this day I’m still not sure whether I should have.

I wasn’t entirely sure about the distinct scent of sex when I first encountered it. It reminded me a little of pee, but then again, the first time I had sex I’d never really had an orgasm awake before, so I didn’t quite equate that to the bouquet of cock. Once I’d tasted vulva, of course, I got that in the mix as well. My wife offers up the term “musty,” which I guess is as good as any.

I’ve always found it to be quite heavy. Sex permeates the air around it and occasionally the whole house. While not unpleasant, not exactly, its distinctive aroma manages to carry both stigma and pride in the same breath. Not bad for a few olfactory particles.

“We could open a window,” I said suddenly. “We don’t need to get cold. Hey, we don’t need to lie on the bed. We could get into the bed. The duvet’s warm enough.”
“But it’s the middle of the day,” pointed out the Seamstress. “Why would we be in bed in the middle of the…? I mean, unless we’re doing what caused this in the first place…?”
“…for the third time today,” I supplied helpfully. “But we don’t need to have sex. We could just be in bed to get warm.”

There was a long, hazy pause.

“No.”
“No?”
“I disagree.”
“You do? You don’t want to open a window or you don’t want to get into bed?”
“No, I want to do both of those things,” she clarified while beginning to take her dress off. “But I don’t agree that we don’t need to have sex.”

[Incidentally, this is my last post for a while. For the next two weeks I’ll be virtually incommunicado while I’m enjoying geeking myself silly in Japan. Catch you on the flip side, bloggiverse.]