I’ve am lying on the bed in this hotel. It’s the Sancerre-soaked, fuck-filled-nights one near Southampton. I had a meeting with someone at the university and thought I’d play emotional tourist and stay there, see what memories it provoked.
Although it is now run by a different hotel chain and it’s been refurbished so that the bar and restaurant are unrecognisable – I won’t use either of them – the bedrooms aren’t much different and nor are the bathrooms. They still seem to be cleaning them with the same products they did then and the smell is familiar.
I miss the vertigo inducing patterned carpets in the corridor, all corporate grey stripes now, but smiled at the sound of Phil Collins playing over the speakers. He/Genesis was definitely the soundtrack to those nights. I’ve got Turn it on Again and I Cannot Believe it’s True on loop on my phone and his distinctive voice is filling the room …
“Never meant it to show
It started happening, that’s all you know
… Ooh, I gave it all to you “
I been drinking Sancerre and fingering myself and remembering. Normally, a little bit of fantasising about the scent of you, the taste, the sweat, glisten and slide of our bodies spilling together, the hunt for ways to get and give the best sensations, pleasure, will bring me off quickly and explosively, but my brain is off down a rabbit hole of a phone conversation. You phoned me in the hotel late at night. You had gone off to Geneva for a meeting and I was there on my own to do some system testing the next day. It was the first experience I’d had of phone sex. I can’t quite remember how the phrase ‘creaming your knickers for me’ inserted itself in to the conversation, but I thought then, think now, that while it is in one way vulgar, there is something deliciously erotic about it, the sensation it evokes, that expectancy, your body loosening itself up, the dampening of the crotch, all those thousands of clitoral nerves stimulated and aroused, poised, ready. The creaming, frothing lubrication, the wetness, the opening up. All that achieved with a few words and that voice of yours.
But, lying here, here where a lot of the furious, nothing is off the table, reckless fucking took place, I can’t find the right rhythm or find the right spot to make the pleasure happen and it occurs to me that, actually, it’s sad and ridiculous and time to stop it. When I leave, when I shut the door behind me, it all has to stay here. All the memories, the longing, the wanting to know who you are now, has to end although the picture of us in bed together laughing about something and sharing a fag will take its place on the sideboard of pictures of the past and I will see it sometimes and think.
‘We had some good times.’
Spellbound and Swallowed 