Sweet Pickings

Carla uses apple-scented washing powder. I know when she's done her laundry: the warm, chemical orchard musk, trailing up the stairs from the the utility room.

Her flat is above mine. Sometimes, late, I can hear her up there, rocking on her bed ' a tiny voice that could be her TV. I wonder what makes her rock so. The thought of me? Maybe.

Or maybe the stories she's read that day in her favourite tabloid ' the ones that encourage a view of the world which, when expressed, as it so often is, always distracts me from the swell of her tits, and the idea of my cock sliding between them to her mouth. Oh, could I hang a necklace at that throat, if only the head was right for it.

But her freshly-laundered knickers and tights comfort me. Sneaking downstairs late at night, I take them, hold them against my face, lick them, imagine the sliced apple of her cunt in them, the juice and pips on my tongue.

I go back to bed and pull them on ' the sour-sweet moisture steaming on my thighs, soaking into my sheets.

And I lie there, listening for her rocking as I come.