She frowned, not pleased with me until I continued the kiss, and held her ass two-handed again, tighter in case she needed comfort. Then I shuffled my hands up  through fabrics, past woolly jumpers, a silk shirt and a cotton vest, to get at her bare skin. Svitlana sighed, happy to be touched directly though she sucked in her tummy when I passed her hips.

She forgot those vanities when I reached, held and squeezed her breasts. They were firm, and high, and I could not fit either in one hand. Not entirely. 

I said, “My god,” with my hands filled, stroking, squeezing, and giving special attention to her rubbery nipples, large and apparently very sensitive. Svitlana closed her eyes, taking the praise and the attention as her due. We stood there for a long time, paying attention to Svitlana’s breasts in our different ways, sharing our breath. Eventually I dropped my hands, reluctantly. “Bed. Come to bed.” 

“Oh yes. Yes please.” I took Svitlana’s hand, and led the way past the kitchen to the bedroom. She followed until I opened the door. Then she stopped.

She didn’t seem unhappy. She had the same expression she’d had when she’d said I was a silly man.

I said, “What? Problem? What?” 

“Make me.” 

“What?” 

Svitlana made a happy, throaty sound, comfortable again, her ass in good and appreciative hands. She pressed her full length against me so I was completely aware of her breasts even through all her many jerseys and other things I hoped to remove soon. My erection got harder to conceal. I stopped trying.

Then she pulled my shirt out and put her hands directly against my skin. She stroked my back and then bit my face. It hurt, but the important thing was that it meant we weren’t worrying any further about consents or liberties. We were now officially in the early stages of fucking.

But I said, “Teeth. I’m sure you’re not supposed to bite me.”

“But you’re biteable. Of course I’m going to – ” And she bit me again. This time the important thing was that it hurt.

I said, “Hang on.” I shifted one hand up from her ass to stroke her hair back from her forehead. Then I held her hair, tilted her head back with no force, and kissed her. She liked that, and melted into it.

She purred, “mmmmmmmmmmm.” Then, with the other hand, the one still holding her bum I smacked her. Not a pat. Definitely a smack. She opened her eyes wide. “Heyyy.”

“You’ve got a gorgeous arse. And you bit me. And your arse really is gorgeous. What can I do?”

Svitlana looked at the spoon for a second. In her country men didn’t greet women at the door, offering to spoon ice cream into them. They didn’t in mine, either. I’d guessed that the nerdiness wouldn’t hurt my case, and the enthusiasm I was displaying would help it. Svitlana frowned. She might have been making similar calculations.

I know … The’ ice cream = come’ thing is one of the oldest porn tropes. I simply forgot that. I had ice cream in my fridge, that’s all.

But after a couple of seconds she opened her mouth, expectant, like a child about to be fed. She tried to look solemn, so we were playing a game. She allowed me to put the spoon into her mouth and rest it on her tongue.

She licked the ice cream off and swallowed, and I realised that I’d chosen a more explicitly sexual gesture than I’d intended.

She saw me frown while I watched her but she misunderstood what I was worried about. 

She nodded approval. “Pistachio,” she said. “That’s absolutely correct.”

I offered another spoonful. She giggled again, a shorter version this time. “You’re silly! You’re a ridiculous man!” This was a good thing to be. She spoke with high-pitched excitement, like someone recognising their hangman as a fellow Freemason.

Then she put her hand on my shirt and pushed me back into the room. She followed and closed the door behind her. As though she was being followed. She said, “Sorry – ” she hunted for my name – “Jaime?” I nodded. “I don’t want Mayne and Barbs to know I’ve come here. They think I’ve gone home.”

“And they don’t know you’re this sort of girl.” I wasn’t sure what sort of girl was meant since Mayne and Barbs, the friends she’d come with, were capable of disapproving of Svitlana being here for multiple reasons. If we had sex it would be frivolous sex, furthering no cause, it would be sex with a man, and – worse – it would be sex with an anarchist, as I then was. There were other problems, including that my status as a dom wasn’t a terribly well guarded secret, and they could speak for hours, using paragraphs and footnotes, of their disapproval of bdsm.

But whatever sort of girl Svitlana was, she was the girl I wanted in my bed that night. I put the ice cream down and my hands on the back of her hips and drew her in. So Svitlana was inside my front room and hidden from all sight but mine, and she was being held by someone with no breasts and his hips held awkwardly to conceal a developing erection, and whose face was rough with late-night stubble.

But we held the kiss and turned it around, inspecting it from various sides, and when I felt her body relax against mine, I let my hands slide from her hips to her arse, which was cool, firm and irresistibly woman-shaped. She frowned at me, not sure to object that I was taking liberties. I said, “Ahhhh, that’s better,” to show that while I was indeed interested in her ass, I wasn’t trying to be remotely smooth about it. 

But eventually the dinner broke up. I’d hoped Svitlana would stay on, but when people were filing out she left with the dyke couple. I’d expected a phone number, or at least a meaningful glance, but I got neither. Maybe I’d been mistaken. There was a guy who usually stayed on and drank my whiskey and talked, if I was alone, but he had people to see.

So I was alone by half-past eleven, I put on the cello sonata again to see if I could hear any Slavic soul. Till then I’d just thought of it as music, rather than Russian music, and rather dry music at that. But now Svitlana had mentioned it, there was a kind of accent there: Eastern cadences, and a kind of sadness in the harmonies even when the melody line seemed to be cheerful, or academically unemotional.

A little after midnight there was a knock on the door. I hadn’t expected Svitlana back, but it was unlikely to be anyone else. I let her wait, because I wanted to fuck her and I had an idea about what might seal the deal. Whether or not Svitlana was supposed to be a dyke.

I grabbed a small plate and stacked it with ice cream from the freezer. It wasn’t that food would make her decide to fuck me; it would be that I’d started with a completely ridiculous gesture. So I opened the door with the ice cream plate and a heaped spoonful pointed at whoever happened to be there.  

Of course it was Svitlana, looking cold and nervous, since she was a woman approaching a man after midnight and risking rejection or other kinds of hurt and harm. But she giggled uproariously when she saw the ice cream. When she recovered she looked at me with utter disbelief. So I scowled at her, raised the spoon to her mouth and said, “Open”.

I should tell a story about that girl I mentioned, who’d come to bed with me after a couple of years of only bedding other girls. I introduced her into Ana’s story to quote her on doms: that we – figuratively – kept our clothes on during sex, that we got other people off for the pleasure of taking away their self-control, but we never let anyone see us out of control. 

As I said, I thought this was mostly unfair but that there was some truth in it. But it seems rude to introduce her in the middle of someone else’s story, use one of her ideas, and talk about nothing about her except the way she had sex. Actually, her name was Svitlana, and she was a Ukrainian woman studying feminist architecture at the local university. I met her because I was holding a dinner for some political activists working on homelessness. A couple of dyke friends brought her along, since she didn’t know many people in town, and she’d just broken up with a friend of theirs.

About halfway through the dinner I put on a Shostakovich cello sonata as background music, but about four minutes into the slow movement Svitlana had burst into tears. When I asked what was wrong she insisted that she was very happy, and the music reminded her of home, in Odesa. Shostakovich was Russian, not Ukrainian, but he had Slavic soul, she reckoned.

“Oh,” I said, “so he had.” And I brought her a box of tissues and topped up her glass. 

Both my parents are Irish, which would give me an excuse to get maudlin on St Patrick’s Day and curse the English if I wanted to, but I just can’t give a fuck about that kind of thing. People sing rebel songs and I’m unmoved except by angry contempt for anyone who romanticises the IRA or the Orangemen. And Oscar Wilde might be a contender for greatest Irish writer but he wouldn’t get in the Top 100 English writers. Fuck the Oirish soul. Fuck the Slavic soul. Fuck all nationalist mysticism with a live, angry hedgehog, wielding a chainsaw.

So I listen to Shostakovich without fussing about his Slavic soul. After the sonata was over I put on John Fahey, and Svitlana dried her eyes.  

But we’d noticed each other. She had flaming red hair and skin as white as milk, but brightly freckled. She ate with enthusiasm that explained the voluptuousness of what I could see of her body, under layers of jumpers and scarves. It was a cold night in my town, that night, even by Odesa standards.

All her jumpers had vee necks, and she pointed her cleavage at me and leaned forward quite often in the rest of the evening. She could eat all the desserts she liked, as far as I was concerned.