Svitlana and I didn’t talk about our relationship, nor its end. I just passed, by degrees, from being her lover and dom to being her life coach. There’s always some overlap between those roles, so that came easily enough.

In the next step I became her lesbian dating counsellor: “Call her! Of course she wants to hear from you!” She didn’t fuck her lesbian dating counsellor, because she was getting limited amounts of sex from the new girl, and was starting to fall in love.

In all good remainder shops!

I turned out to be reasonably good at giving lesbian dating advice. Women tell other women a lot of things that they don’t tell men. But they also tell men some things that they don’t tell to women. Mostly men aren’t listening, so this doesn’t influence the world as much as it should.

But it means that men, if they listen at least sometimes, know some things about women that other women mostly don’t know. Or acknowledge.

There’s probably a book in that. “Straight Men’s Sex and Dating Tips for Lesbians.” A short book, with tiny sales, but never mind.

Anyway, Svitlana got the girl, with a bit of help from me, and as a consequence I lost Svitlana. I wasn’t being noble. I’d always known that though Svitlana was absolutely a blessing in my life, she was going to be a temporary one. What I lost was never mine.

One evening, though, we were having what turned out to be our second-to-last one-to-one conversation. Svitlana knew that it was going to be one of our last meetings. I didn’t, of course. She said, “Have you ever been in touch with that girl you used to know? Tiana?” 

Svitlana and I couldn’t last. She wasn’t willing to be seen in public with me. That was mostly because some of the local dykes wouldn’t like it, and they could make life difficult in a small circle that Svitlana didn’t actually want to leave.

But it was also because of her own reservations: I was fine, but I was only a holiday. It was too easy to get classified as heterosexual if you get seen dating someone from the opposite sex. Svitlana wanted to get back to the local dyke community. It wasn’t really the kindest social circle I’d ever known, and she knew that. But it was hers, and it was where she was going to find her next serious love. 

After a while she started seeing more of another new girl in the local scene. Svitlana and I still met, but I spent my time listening to angst about whether the other girl really liked her, and giving encouragement and advice. She stopped staying the night.

Eventually she moved in with the other girl and her visits stopped entirely. I think I was a bad secret now, a shameful one.

I didn’t mind being cast out. I liked Svitlana, and she had to be who she wanted to be, and the odds were against her. She had to write me out of her history. Later I’d sometimes meet the two of them at parties. I was friendly, an old friend, but I was discreet. I don’t think Svitlana ever talked about me. Eventually, even with mutual affection and respect, we really did become the strangers we pretended to be. 

But before that had happened, she had one more surprise for me.  

So Svitlana and I were a couple. Of sorts. For a while. 

One of the sorts of couple we were was “secret”. Svitlana generally turned up after midnight, but only if I’d assured her there was no-one with me and no-one expected. 

Some of our time together was like the night I’ve just described. Svitlana would turn up, slightly anxious until she was safely in the door, and not really relaxed until she was bed, being admired.

Other times … I’m going to try to tell a story quickly. 

Svitlana and I were out for dinner. We didn’t go out often, but I’d won a contract so I was in a spacious mood. She talked me down to something less grand, a cheap Thai restaurant that fed a lot of students. So I sat her down and ordered wine. We laughed, ate and talked, exactly as if we were a couple on a date. 

Svitlana’s chair faced the entrance, which I thought nothing of at the time. But it wasn’t an accident. Suddenly she said, “oh shit.” She got up and disappeared to the toilets. I had another prawn and a glass of wine, because I guessed that dinner was over. And, without looking around too obviously, I saw that Kerry had arrived, with friends.

Kerry was the woman who’d warned Svitlana against various male friends of Barbs, for various political and personal shortcomings. Jaime the dom pervert had, as I’ve mentioned, taken a prominent role in that list of male scum. Kerry had encountered so much bigotry for her own sexual choices that it could never occur to her that she too was a bigot. She was the reason Svitlana was hiding in the toilets.   

Kerry’s friends filed over to a reserved table, which fortunately was on the other side of the restaurant. I got a text from Svitlana asking me to wait for ten minutes and meet her in the car park outside. A moment later she made a break for the exit, her hair tucked under a sort of mob cap, her collar up and her head down. So I pretended not to know her, and ate as much of my meal as I could manage in five minutes. Then I paid and sauntered out, taking the wine bottle with me. 

Svitlana was by my car, freezing since she hadn’t asked me for my keys. I pushed her down over the hood and spanked her, since our relationship had progressed to the point where I could do that sort of thing without asking. I’d have liked to have fucked her, but she was obviously too nervous about discovery for that to be any fun. So I gave her the wine. And bought her a burger on the way home.

So we were always a secret couple. Spies on the porch of love.  

I said I had more. I hadn’t, though. I had enough energy left to roll over and fondle Svitlana’s mango-wet cunt. I thought about having an erection, and her skin was firm under my hand, but my mind kept slipping away. I could see the ghost of the tree in front of my window, shimmering out of the night, and there was a bird woken up and piping on a single note, answered by another bird with a call like a handful of pebbles tossed into a tin helmet. 

In ten minutes I was mostly asleep. I was vaguely aware of Svitlana wrapping herself round me, one leg over mine, and that mango pressed against my thigh.

She was a quiet sleeper, and companionable. I woke up later and flipped the light out.