Fools for Lust by Maxim Jakubowski Page A

shortly after their answers to his one-track enquiries always seemed to reveal their uselessness to him. It was not so much that he didn’t feel capable of convincing them, once lovers or in a bedroom, naked, lustful, to allow him to shave them; no, he wanted them to come to him in a natural state of nudity below from the outset, like Venus arising from the shell, their cunt more naked than naked ready for his kiss, his tongue, the heat of his lips. He had no wish for preliminaries, or hard work. Once together, they must both shed their clothing and witness their bare areas meeting, like waves lapping the shore, like a pagan ritual.
    But somehow all the women he came across socially or attempted to weave into the fabric of his life now guarded the sanctity of their pubic hair like dragons, and bristled at his unkind suggestion they should do away with their heavenly bush.
    So, instead, he masturbated a lot, familiarising himself even better with the new texture and feel of his own cock and balls. Altogether a pitiful state of affairs for a man who had now reached the stage where he was actually turning women away. And the fact he so often would not take advantage of their proffered charms – he would never say exactly why – only spurred them to attack him with more zest. Never had he been more popular with women, and never had he not fucked anyone for such a long period of sexual drought. If only they knew , he thought as he perused a room full of beauty and talent. But then he couldn’t just drop his trousers here and now and expose himself and reveal his secret. Or should he?
    But he was a patient man. One day, she would arrive, he was convinced, and at the very moment that bare cock and bare cunt would meet, as the mushroom tip of his thick purple cock would at last breach her opening and plunge deep into her pinkness, then their sex flesh would finally meet with a vengeance. Smoothness to smoothness, silk against silk, electrons against electrons, blissful innocence against total vulnerability. And everything would explode in an orgy of momentous pleasure, like an atomic bomb exploding. Like the end of the world.
    Until then, he would wait, he reckoned. And stay chaste, and shaven.

Phantom Lover
    I had a history, a bad habit of always wanting what I couldn’t have. This time it was her. You know how it is. You know how it goes, sometimes: the sad ending is already in the sights of your periscope, but you forge ahead regardless. Just in case. Hope against hope and all that.
    It was the summer of 1997. Don’t ask me about the weather, I can’t recall it well, it was neither too hot nor too cold, that’s all I remember of it. Because of the time we spent naked in alien rooms, I suppose. Just once I had seen her shiver and pass over my over-large grey T-shirt as shelter from the momentary chill. I still wear that T-shirt from time to time; brings back memories. Of the colour of her bare flesh. The concealed shape of her drunken body.
    I was on a job. As it is, meeting her was wrong. Very wrong.
    But then the rules of this private eye game are ill-defined. Even more so if you’re British. We can’t carry guns like the ones in America and all the books and movies. Takes some of the glamour away already.
    I do my best, though. I don’t do adultery, debt research or repossessions. My field’s more refined: industrial espionage, corporate shenanigans. Pays well, limited risks. Quiet and unspectacular, just my style, I reckoned.
    That’s how I first came across her.
    A customer called the agency. Labour had come in a few weeks before and were threatening the privatised utilities with the windfall tax. Basically, the agency is me. And a few freelancers. And lots of names in a computer database. People who could be bribed. British Telecom engineers, book-keepers for stockbroking firms, disenchanted clerks with city banks, underpaid and exploited staff in the despatch departments