Semaphore

If it’s tucked in your back pocket, or slipped quietly into the overnight bag, I know exactly what’s on your  mind. If you toss a pack quietly into the basket as we walk round the supermarket, my heart beats faster. By the time we get to the freezer section I’m burning up.

You leave a trail for me, through the maze of laundry baskets and obligation and forgetfulness, a series of little silver flags. Square winks. Glittery parcels. Messages in foil envelopes.

I’ll write back in sign language: my three wishes: a hot fuck, a heartfelt kiss, our good health. 

Nikki Magennis

Cleanliness, flash by Craig Sorensen

            My hand rests on the overflowing trashcan.  A warm juicy rubber drapes over another, cold but very wet.

He could have tidied up the place.

His calloused finger starts at my tailbone, teases my pucker and I gasp, traces down into my wetness and paints my clit.  His cock resolves, stabs my hip.

His arm appears like a crane on the Manhattan skyline, dips toward the nightstand and retrieves a shrinking ribbon of foil pouches.  I swallow.

A sweet rip.

Unfurling latex crackles.

“Again?” I whisper.

“Again.”

I spread my legs and jack up my hips.

Cleanliness is overrated.

Craig Sorensen

Practising Safe Sex

What are we practising for? The Fucking Olympics? Maybe Nirvana – perfecting our technique for the virgins we’ll meet in heaven. That harem of beautiful but coy types who’d rather close their eyes, get it over with.

‘You’re cute when you’re blushing, d’you know that? Just relax.’

It’s not always easy to be easy – there are so many facets to a good fuck. Including some things that aren’t easy to practise: a lover’s chemistry. And it may not be safe, no matter how strong our amulets. There’s always the risk of failing, of falling. In love, or out of it.


Nikki Magennis

Do you take plastic?

I took the pill until I broke down. Greasy hair and the world through a glass, darkly. The last thing I wanted was sex. My friend tried the coil – cried with the pain, bled like a miscarriage. Another had hormones implanted under her skin, her periods ceased, she took years to revert to normality.

I tried counting. Guessing the danger zone. That ended in tears.

But a condom. Fits all cocks, takes on all comers. Pocket sized, portable. Suits all sexes, any slot.

If the man I love won’t wear one, he’s not the man I love. Pretty good indicator.




Nikki Magennis

Mind the Gap

When you’re deep down in it, lost in sweat and slick secretions, sliding into a language of flesh and pressed on by a heartbeat and want and want and want, blurring the awareness of whose skin is whose and where it’s slipping and how its driving on and further in what you want is not

-         hold on a minute.

A pause. Cold air. Synapses rearranging to trace the memory of where you left the box–sudden silence when it was all going so well.

I mean, jesus, who’d want to prolong that kind of pleasure, start all over again? 

 

 

Nikki Magennis

Flash by Vida Bailey

I've never understood it, the attitude some have to condoms. To me, they're just part of sex. The 'is it time for a condom?' breathless pause, then the scramble and fumble and the reconnection as it's handed over and I smooth it on, or watch his hands dressing himself. The cool warm slippery latex length against me, and then that first push inside - I love the blunt, wrapped sensation of it. More intimate, somehow, than a naked cock is one that's been prepared for me. Readied. Primed! And then any ensuing mess is mine and mine alone. 


Vida Bailey

Backing

‘Like having a bath with your wellies on,’ Dave said, with the corners of his mouth curling up like day old ham. ‘It’s bareback or nothing, for me,’ he said, shrugging.

So later, when I rode him on the persian carpet, I didn’t use the saddle or the stirrups. I straddled his naked back with my naked legs and dug my heels in. I wriggled until he cried. Kept him on his knees, bore down until he begged.

‘Only with a rubber,’ I said.

‘Course,’ he said, when I held out my palm, two packets lying on it like sugarlumps. 

 

 

Nikki Magennis

From Madeline Moore

Back in what Jack Nicholson calls "The Golden Age of Sex" (post- pill, pre-HIV) we believed in free love. But I believed the pill might be very bad for me. Who could trust the drug companies, hm? So condoms made good sense, as birth control. I wasn't wildly promiscuous or even promiscuous, in my opinion, but a shudder ripples across my shoulders at the thought of some of the babies I might have mothered had I not used proper protection. As it turned out, my two babies were both planned.
Nowadays condoms are used as much (or more?) for protection from STDs as they are for birth control. A quick trip to the drugstore for three or more and a guy is good to go. The sexual partners share in the responsibility for preventing unwanted pregnancies and STDs.
All of that wrapped up in a packet the size of an old fashion photo slide. Condoms are cool. They always have been and I'm guessing they always will be. Amen.

Madeline Moore

Excerpt from 'The Art of Fucking', Nikki Magennis

Stop, stop, wait.' I said, remembering one of Sandy's rules. 'We should use a condom.'

He nodded, beyond speaking now, only leaping up nimbly to find his jeans and check the pockets. He sprinted back to where I lay with a foil square in his hand.

'You brought one to work?' I couldn't quite believe it. Was I the only person in Glasgow who didn't anticipate a casual fuck at lunchtime? My model grinned, biting at the foil to rip it open. He had a wicked smile.

'Boy scout motto. "Always be prepared". You never know who you'll bump into.'

I wasn't in any position to argue, and I just marvelled at the sight of him, cock in hand, unrolling the rubber down his length and checking to see it was on tight. I lay back. 

 

 

Nikki Magennis

A love story written in rubber

So, those French letters, if you laid them all out on a bed – a king-size bed, say, line after line. What would they say?

They might start with how we were cautious, how we cared enough to bear the blush produced when near-strangers discuss the practicalities of sex. They might continue to say silly things – strawberry flavoured jokes that tip you into bed.

That gap there, the little space big enough to make a child. The absence makes me smile. And now?

The letters continue, fewer, maybe, but no less urgent. No less wonderful. And always, always sent with love. 

Nikki Magennis

Mexican Standoff

Rick visits the chemist that afternoon, buys a stock of extra-strong. Smiles at the pharmacist as she slides a paper bag across the counter.

After midnight in the dim-lit nightclub toilets, Danny drops a coin in the machine, rattles the drawer open, pockets the box.

They meet at the bar. Knock back a couple of tequilas. Rick pushes Danny’s hair behind his ear and lets his hand rest on the other man’s neck. He can feel his pulse, hot and steady.

They kiss hard enough to get stubble burn. Both reach for their back pockets. Smile.

No-one loses this draw.


Nikki Magennis

Excerpt from 'Le Petit Dejeuner' by Jeremy Edwards

As we make love, I imagine that we are in Paris. That there is a bidet in our bathroom. That people are speaking French on the sidewalk below. That around the corner is the little pharmacy where I had to resort to an earthy pantomime to indicate that I required a box of condoms. Where the pharmacist, a handsome woman of about 35 with dark, humorous eyes, smiled at me when I paid for them.

“Tell me about the pharmacienne,” Lisa requested our last night in Paris, just as I was penetrating her slick hole with bedtime vigor. “Fuck me and tell me how she looked at you.” Lisa got off on the idea that the druggist had watched me as if she wanted to personally administer the dose of condoms she had provided. She still asks to hear about it some nights, three years later.


From 'Le Petit Dejeuner', Jeremy Edwards