She wears sensible black pumps and the nametag spells out her rather ordinary name in a standard serif script. I notice that she wears clear nail varnish as she absentmindedly runs the long fingers of her left hand down the front of her white working-girl shirt. Gesturing vaguely at the nearby furniture, I choose as best I can the words to breathe life into my lie.

"A colonial feel to it… reference books everywhere. The scent of well-worn leather from the existing pieces, perhaps a hint of jasmine from the open window if the breeze changes. On the walls, pencil horses. An astrolabe, a rug from Afghanistan, anatomical charts of the beasts. And the cylindrical holder with the interesting fretwork at the door holds riding crops collected over many, many years. Masculine lines, you see. Functional furniture, but comfortable".

It was about the chair I had come. I wished for something uncomfortable, I explain to her. The kind of chair that suggested to the person in it that their discomfort as they sat right on the very end of its thin black lumpy leather cushion could best be lessened by leaving the room. Immediately. I am a very private sort of individual, you see. I have no friends, there are no women in my life, and I especially detest visitors.

Horses are my life. Fat ones, thin nags with dapples, short haired stud horses or lanky cart-horses; it didn’t matter as long as the leg count of the body I was stroking exceeded my own. I even felt uncharitable towards jockeys, stable hands and all the rest. But in the presence of a marvellously maned mare, aaah….

"I know exactly what you need," she says. "Come".

I watch her slate grey skirt, the precise colour of her eyes, outline the back of her middle-aged thighs, first one, then the other, as she briskly walks away. The fruity scent of her lip gloss upon her breath as she speaks these few words is so unexpected, so contrary to her blandness, that I falter before trotting hurriedly after her.

She half-sits against a rather large desk at the far end of a rather dusty side room, supporting herself with backward-stretching arms. A chair dominates the centre of the room. With her steady grey eyes meeting mine, holding mine, she asks me to sit. I do. She speaks softly of the whinnying of the young fouls in the paddock outside as they exercise their young muscles. Of their animal scent mingling with that of the muddied hay they tread underfoot as they jostle each other with their soft snouts.

"Can you hear how they snort,”"she asks, tying back her long black hair in pony tails. First one, then the other, then softly tossing her head as a young mare would its mane. Taking the tiniest step closer, she whinnies.

The chair is hard and unyielding, and I shift my weight uncomfortably from one cramped buttock to the other. She snorts and whinnies repeatedly, and with an underlying urgency, watching my reaction from beneath the long lashes of those flat grey eyes. Then, she raises one sensible black shoe to knee height, displaying a flash of the whitest thigh before bringing it down in the dust with a soft ‘clop.’ The other is then raised; a prancing barnyard display, then brought down: ‘clop.’

Clop, clop, clop, her feet rise and drop.

How long she leans backwards against that desk, raising her shiny hooves until her skirt is rucked high up on her pale thighs can only be measured in the soft animal sounds she makes, the flat tattoo of her hooves, her hooves, her hooves. A thin line of moisture appears on her upper lip, and abruptly she stops, turns her back, and allows me a moment to forget that I was ever wearing clothes.

"The riding crop should be used sparingly, against the buttocks," she says.

The material of her skirt is bunched very tightly indeed at the tops of her thighs. If she should bend just a little forward… aaah! Perhaps more; lay her hands flat on the floor.

She leans forward, thumbs under the hem, and slowly exposes herself to the air, to the empty room, empty of all but her tight white flesh, my uncomfortable chair and her everyday face, upside down now, watching me watching her with a coquettes stare: boldly bare the beautiful background of her buttocks, and, quite smooth and hairless, the cleft of her surprisingly bright pink vagina nestled there. Allowing me the briefest glimpse of this moist fissure, already darkening as it becomes distended with her obvious lust, she pushes herself up. The lubricious slit is snatched from my view in a pastel blur, only to reappear reversed as she stands to attention and offers it with pale fingers splayed against her pale thighs, pulling the engorged labia slightly apart. She still wears her sensible shoes. I wonder if her lip gloss is sticky or smooth.

The softest sounds: the susurration of unbuttoned cloth, sloughed. She knows to do it slowly. A freckle, two, come into view. She doesn’t look down. Shrugs, uncovers a curve, slips off a strap, casually unsnapped. Offers her left nipple in profile, extruding from a pale cream tit, turgid at the tip, which stiffens still more, as does the other pink tipped twin as out it slips from within her fingers’ fumbling grip. She cups both, thrusting their warm weight forward while flickering fingertips pluck at the suckable tips, slightly moistened by discreet slips of a darting tongue.

The harness apparatus cuts across her nudity, her straining flesh barely contained by the hand-stitched leather. Breast and buckle, nipple & bit define in their contrast something unconstrained, tamed. My hand takes the reins.

I lead her widdershins around the room. Impatient, she flicks her mane at imagined flies, dreaming the unbridled bareback ride into this narrow space, where beginning becomes end far too soon. Clop, the syncopation of her horsy strut, around and around: the mare’s in a rut. Thin ankles feel the hang of the heavy shoes, buttocks jut and sway, sliding ever so slightly apart to flash her slit in pastel pink. She chafes impatiently at the bit, spittle drips from her lower lip as her neck arches for the release the reins deny her; for the monotony to cease. Still the snorting sounds punctuate the short, sharp rushes of breath whistling from her parted lips, rising to a higher pitch as I whip, whip, whip.

The swish of the crop, the echo of the leather’s sudden stop against her jiggling butt, and the sudden report, an indignant snort and suddenly she is in full flight: her naked canter the russet rush of nipples, the liquiflow ripples of her breasts in a mad galloping flap. Then the reins snap.

The chair is hard. She is breathless. I am too. I drop the crop. She straddles the chair, climbs up to squat at eye level with a wide-thighed smile. Suspended there, she slowly succumbs to gravity’s irresistible charm, but even as she begins her inevitable descent she attempts to assert her control by sliding slightly backward & forwards, the slippery skin of her well-lubricated peritoneum offering first the bliss of her sphincter starfish, then her shaven slit, for penetration. The hairless lips of her sex smear the droplet of pre-ejaculatory semen forming on the tumescent tip of my want, and her incessant to-and-fro dips lower and lower as her quivering legs begin the collapse. I barely understand the question when she asks me if I have decided.

"Do you find this uncomfortable enough?"

How can I answer? I am balanced, as is she, in an exquisite moment of indecision. Erect, my stiffened cock pulses out the answer in time with my heartbeat: yes! Yes! YES! And her grey eyes close once, and for the first time flicker briefly over the length of my tumescence, and grow wide with startled comprehension. She snorts. Turns. Touches finger and thumb to the top button of her unruffled white blouse as if to reassure herself. Walks the short distance to two other women dressed in the same bland uniform as herself, and with a furtive glance which measures the precise distance between herself and the stain disseminating the secret of my shame, begins to speak in a low urgent voice.

I strain to hear the delicious syllables slip from her lips, wanting to sustain the pretence. Wanting her wet-lipped words to somehow stain them with my presence. But she seems to lack the imagination, the words, for they shake their heads sadly and walk away in separate directions.

Bored, I turn away. Survey the Sales Desk for assistance. I think I may need something for one of the 10 000 other rooms of my imagination…

Image by Ossawa