Romance Language : Wank Wednesday

In the beginning was the Word, and the word was #word.  That's right, today's Wank Wednesday prompt word is, in fact, #word. It comes from Ruby Kiddell at The Erotic Notebook. Go there to find out more about this writing challenge and to find links to other participant's stories.

Romance Language : Wank Wednesday

You may know her as Celeste Harrington, author of Rodeo Romeo, Infidelity in Istanbul and Passion in Paraguay. I know that her real name is Ida Scraggs and she's lived all of her forty-two years in Melbourne. She's my ex-wife.

We lived together for twelve years. We were good together too, but when she caught me with another woman it ended. I didn't blame her. Everyone has to chose what they want in life, and what she wanted was no longer me.

I moved to the U.S. and started up a men's magazine. That was ten years ago. It wasn't the right time for it. The internet had already eaten up most of the wank mag business. So I went bust. Ended up scraping a meagre existence writing porn paperbacks for Viscount Press. They'd been around since the fifties. Now they were releasing their range in ebooks as well as print so they were managing to stay afloat. There wasn't much money in it, but it paid for my burgers and beer.

Then my dad died and left me $5,000. I was homesick for Melbourne, so I decided to use the money to return there and look for a place to live. I could write smut anywhere. It might as well be somewhere I could get a decent beer.

At first I was hesitant about contacting Celeste. But she wasn't one to hold a grudge. It wasn't anything personal anymore. I'm sure she had someone new and my misdeeds of the past would be the least of her concerns. And she was the only person I could think of who might put me up while I looked for a flat.

I emailed her. She was happy to catch up. I was right and wrong about her having someone new. She'd had plenty of guys, but at the moment she was on her own.

She met me at the airport. To me it didn't seem like she had changed at all. She was wearing a light floral summer dress. Her brown hair was kind of a mess, pulled back behind her head but with strands hanging down the sides. I suppose there was a tinge of grey to it now, and maybe deeper laugh lines around her eyes, but I still wouldn't have kicked her out of bed for farting even after all these years.

"God," she said. "You look terrible. You obviously haven't been eating properly."

"You wouldn't know a real man if you tripped over him," I replied. "You live in romance land, populated by blokes in whose ripped muscular bodies beat hearts as soft as poofters."

"I don't know how a lady of my refinement ever ended up marrying such a Neanderthal," she scowled.

"I bet you haven't had a decent root since I left," I smiled.

"I never found out what a decent one was until I dumped you," she responded.

"So seriously, how is the old romance lark?" I asked her once we had got to her house and stowed my luggage in the guest bedroom.

"I'm doing well enough," she told me. "It's hard work though. No matter how good the writing is, you really need the quantity to make a living at it. What about you? What are you up to these days?"

"Thinking about getting into a new line of work," I admitted. "I've been writing porno novels. There's very little money in it. And hardly anyone is buying the stuff I write. The readers are just so jaded and only the kinkiest and sickest books sell. Nobody wants good clean wholesome smut anymore. I mean look at some of the other titles that Viscount are publishing," I said, calling up a list on the computer. "Tamed by the Torturer, Incest and Peppermints, Loving Lassie..."

"'Loving Lassie'?" she queried. "That sounds like a Scottish period romance."

I showed her the cover.

"Oh..." she said, looking a little pale.

"There must be something else I can write," I sighed.

One thing I'd always loved about Celeste was her cooking. That evening she made lasagne.

As she was preparing the ingredients, with an red and white checkered apron over her dress, I came up behind her and began fondling her buttocks. They were incredibly soft, but still shapely.

"Why don't I sleep in your bed tonight," I suggested. "We could both do with a bit of a clean out of the old pipes."

"You've really lost none of your debonair charm, have you?" she laughed, pushing my hands away.

I wasn't able to persuade her, so that night I slept in the guest bedroom.

"Why don't you try writing romance?" she asked the next morning at breakfast. She was sitting there drinking her coffee in a baggy pink tracksuit which had seen better days.

"You really think I could write that kind of stuff?" I queried.

"Well, it ends up with sex scenes," she pointed out. "You just have to be more subtle and long-winded about how you get there. More time describing the sea and the sky and less time describing the body parts."

"I've never thought of myself as a romantic," I pointed out.

"It's not up to you to supply the romance," she explained. "That's for the reader. You only have to learn to provide a framework for them to hang their dreams on."

So I decided to give it a go. Celeste agreed that I could stay on for a bit while she attempted to show me the ropes.

"How's this?" I asked later that day, showing her what I had written :

The sheikh swept her up in his arms beneath the desert moon. He made her his own with a passionate kiss on the lips, much as he might brand one of his camels with a hot iron. Her tender heart twitched liked a newborn rabbit, as he bore her to his tent. As the wind whipped the sand into eddies around their fragile shelter, he lay her down upon a pile of silken cushions and, with great relish, unwrapped the sweet delights of her soft form. Then he proudly threw off his robes, grasped his jizz-filled fuck stick in his hand and shoved it up her twat. 


"It's starts well," Celeste conceded. "But, you see, it's all a matter of the words you use. What's happening is just the same. It's all about fucking, but you have to make it sound like it is something different from what you see the animals doing at the zoo."

Half an hour later I showed her something new :

There in the woods, with the glittering gowns and whirling waltzes of the Grand Ball still swirling in our heads, we embraced with a heated passion that burned like the furnaces in the dark satanic mills. We transported each other to a rare etherial realm where fairy folk serenaded us on the pan pipes as we lost our raiments and our inhibitions. Our love was like a mighty wave that reached a foaming crescendo as my body melded to hers. And, then, when our ecstasy could reach no higher peak I bathed her visage in the excess of my adoration.

"What does that last bit even fucking mean?" asked Celeste.

"I came in her face," I said.

"Maybe I'm wrong," she sighed, shaking her head. "Maybe you really don't have it in you."

"Don't you ever want the real thing?" I asked.

"What do you mean?" she wanted to know.

"Well, you write about people making passionate love in glamorous places, but here you sit in a suburban home in Melbourne in a pair of trackie dacks that would give Casanova a soft-on," I explained.

"Sure, I'd love to sip champagne in Paris in a Yves St. Laurent dress while an Archduke kisses my hand," she admitted. "But it just isn't going to happen."

"But that isn't what romance is really all about," I told her. "It isn't about places or clothes or even good looks. It's about how you can make a person feel. Smile in the right way, open your heart to the one in your arms, show them that you treasure them for all that they are, and you can make them feel like a million dollars. You used to be able to do that to me. The last few years I've felt like a piece of shit, because that is all anyone took me for. But when I saw you there at the airport, I remembered that with you it was different."

"But I wasn't enough for you, was I?" she asked.

"No, you weren't," I admitted. "And I'm sure I wasn't enough for you. But romance is not about sufficiency, it's about electricity. And you can't keep lightning in a bottle."

"If you're a genius at anything," she said, "it's making excuses. But you're right. Having you around has put a spark back in my life too. I can laugh with you. And I can be myself. That counts for a lot, and I don't intend to take it for granted."

"He enveloped her in his manly arms," I began, fitting actions to words. "And pressed the hardness of his lips against the softness of hers."

Her mouth opened and I felt her tongue slide into my own.

"You're tracksuit may be of the finest silk, milady," I told her, "but it is no match for the silkiness of your pure white skin."

I unzipped her tracksuit top and pulled it off of her shoulders. Then I crouched in front of her and yanked  down the bottoms. She was wearing a sensible support bra and white cottontails.

"I, also, will divest myself of my vestments," I declared. "If we are bound for paradise then let us be clad as Adam and Eve before us."

I tore my t-shirt over my head, pulled off my shoes and socks, unzipped my jeans and pulled them down. I stood in just my underpants.

"My love for sweet Celeste grows inside my codpiece like a mighty oak," I soliloquized.

"You might be overselling it a bit there," she told me.

"Romantic hyperbole, my dear," I assured her. "Nothing more."

Then I slid off my last garment and twisted my hips so that my stiff cock swung proudly before her.

"I must feast my eyes upon my fair lady's bosom," I declared, "and upon the juicy cunt that soaketh through her panties."

"It's not exactly 'You had me at hello'," she laughed. "But I'll give you points for trying."

I unclipped her bra and set her soft pale boobs free to swing above her belly. Then I pulled down her panties and slapped her playfully on the bum.

"Let us away to the fuck chamber!" I cried, picking her up in my arms and carrying her to her bed.

I pulled her tight in my arms, her legs wrapped around my waist and my cock slid happily home into her warm wet pussy.

"You're my home, you know that, don't you?" I told her. "In your arms, and in your pussy, is the only place in this whole crazy fucked-up world where anything makes any sense."

"I know," she said, "I can tell. And I'd rather be here with you than with some hunky cowboy in Texas or some oil sheik in Bahrain."

And so, as the sun sank slowly over the western suburbs of Melbourne, glinting off of the chrome bumpers of half-dismantelled Holden cars in many a back yard, and as the blow-flys floated over the piles of canine excrement set like jewels in the green cloak of the kikuyu grass, Celeste and I drifted off into an erotic wonderland of pussy-twitching and jism-spurting exultation, and all was right with the world.

The End