"If I Fucked You, You'd Have To Be Tied Up."

In one regard, I have absolutely no idea why I said that. I had never had sex with somebody who was tied up. There had been one occasion when I briefly tried to implicitly raise the issue by holding a fellow student’s wrists to the bedposts and binding them there with some kind of tie, but she said, “What are you doing?” and I had to stop. Neither did we actually have sex; I think I just put the tie down and pretended I was really drunk. It seemed preferable to actually explaining myself.

But in another, more important sense (that of being horny and drunk), yes, I know exactly why I said it. Because Suzanne and I were standing in the middle of a crowded East London house party at around 3 in the morning, both of us thoroughly off our respective lady- and man- tits. 

My tits were only off on alcohol, while hers were off on an impressive amount of cocaine snorted in a stairwell, bought at a price that probably only seemed like a good idea because she was, you know, already off her tits on alcohol. I'd dropped a bottle of wine. People were dropping tablets of something suspicious. There were early-December mince pies. It was already a fun night.

It had been a funny couple of months. I had written reams of terrible advertising copy - as we all had. To help maintain my sanity, I had developed a game; every time I was simply too exhausted or apathetic to come up with writing relevant to the product, I’d write unrelated nonsense about cavemen and see if anybody noticed.

By this time, I had written a great deal about cavemen.

(My favourite game at previous offices had involved jerking myself off in the bathrooms and laughing about the fact that I was doing it on company time. It says a great deal for my sexual outlook by this stage that I could no longer muster the creative energy.)

Suzanne and I had also got incredibly drunk one evening, during which she had told me that our mutual boss, an enthusiastically dull and happily married man by the name of Quentin, followed her into fast food outlets after work and tried to proposition her, because he kind of liked her. At which point I had admitted that I also kind of liked her, and she had confessed that, actually, she kind of liked me too, but obviously, her boyfriend, etc…

Then we’d indulged in a drawn-out but undoubtedly sloppy series of 3am kisses, before watching two stockbrokers strip to their waists and start an equally drawn-out and sloppy fistfight in front of a Tesco Metro just moments later. It hadn't been romantic, but it had perhaps been a little sweet.

It had not been mentioned a great deal since. And now here we were.

“If I fucked you, you’d have to be tied up.”

I was too drunk to remember why I said it, though I think I may have been trying ineffectually to explain exactly why relationships weren’t working out for me right now. I don't know why I chose that moment to admit something I'd never admitted to anybody before, except that I felt like I trusted her and she probably wouldn't judge me for it.

I was also too drunk to notice her reaction.

But she told me later - her eyes widened.