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By Root 746 0

‘Fumblers’ might be better. They hadn’t known what they were doing or how to get her to do what they wanted. Not the kind of lovers who see you naked in broad daylight. And not many of them, to be honest. She’d done all her real learning with Simon. She hadn’t even liked sex much until him. Romance had always done it for her before. She might never have admitted it but sex was always the squelchy bit that came at the end of the romance and before the cuddling. Of course, Simon had shown her that she felt like that about it because the others hadn’t been doing it properly. He said doctors made great lovers because they understood the human body better than other people. Natalie thought it might be more to do with all the practice he’d had: Simon had lost his virginity to his teenage babysitter when he was fifteen. His parents, who were naïve, kept paying her to come around long after Simon needed to be cared for because she’d got an A in English O level, and Simon struggled a little with that subject. His mother never really understood why he ended up with a C, but if she’d ever returned early from an evening out she would have discovered that what the babysitter was teaching him was not on the syllabus. After she’d gone off to university he’d moved on – and on, and on – and each girl had taught him a little something, so that by the time he had started with Natalie he was an expert. With him she had seldom required a huge amount of romance beforehand, and quite often, afterwards was more interested in doing it again than in being cuddled.

But someone else? After all those years with Simon? Maybe the best thing to do was get drunk and just do it. With anyone. So why not Tom? She knew where he’d been, pretty much. She knew he’d be kind. Why not with Tom? Alcohol was the key, maybe.

He laughed, delighted. ‘You’re bluffing, Nat.’

‘Just you wait and see. I’ve an attaché case full of my best M&S lacies and a twelve-pack of Durex. I’m not afraid to use them. How about you?’

Tom hadn’t had sex with anyone except himself since the previous summer. He’d never been much of a shagger, as Rob called them. He was one of those men who couldn’t see the point of sex for the sake of it. He’d never been much interested in the porn videos that various friends and housemates had held in such high regard. The girls looked much the same after a while, with their implausible, un moving boobs and their perfect round bums, and the act itself became dull and mechanical to watch. One particularly unsavoury friend of a friend at university had ridiculed him for this lack of ‘normal’ interest. Called him a poof. Which couldn’t have been further from the truth. Tom loved women, and he loved sex, when it was the right kind. The sexiest part of a girl, for Tom, was her face when he was making love to her, or the secret bits that pushed her buttons, which only he knew about – like being kissed on the top curl of an ear, or stroked behind the knees.

He’d had a lot of girlfriends, and he’d slept with a fair few, but he hadn’t lied, years ago, when he’d told Natalie that he hadn’t been in love: there were many complex layers of caring. He hadn’t fallen in love until he was twenty-five, and only once more since.

He hadn’t been in love with the woman last summer, but he’d thought she was pretty amazing. He’d been scuba-diving in the Red Sea, working towards his open-water PADI certificate, and she’d been on his course. She was Dutch, but her English was fluent, with a rolling accent he found instantly appealing. What had done it for him was her zest and enthusiasm. She was older than he, in her early forties; she had come to diving relatively late in life and loved it. She rattled off the bookwork, in a language that was not her native tongue, and was itching, every day, to get into the water. Back on the boat after a dive, she was always still for a while, as though readjusting to the air, then effusive about what she had seen and how it had felt. It was infectious, and rare among the hardened show-offs, dive log bores, and macho single men on the course.