Head job in the stairs.

I gave him a head job in the stairwell when I shouldn't have.

He had a partner. The first few times we made love there was no mention of a partner. She emerged from his silences slyly like a magic trick, suddenly the velvet of his real world was swept aside and she was there all the time. He had already been unfaithful with me and therefore he said we should continue, even with the work lights turned all the way up and all the mechanisms behind his sleight-of-hand exposed.

I could see his point, but I didn't like him well enough to follow through with it. She seemed like a nice enough girl, smart and passionate, an environmental activist. She wore organic hemp clothing and went on all the marches. I wished her well. I wished he would stop cornering me in the hallway or outside the house asking for just once more, a final goodbye. I didn't see myself as the kind of girl who would sleep with someone else's boyfriend without permission. I thought I would be particularly bad at keeping those kinds of secrets.

I gave him a head job in the stairs because I was a little drunk and more than a little lonely. It was a turn for the worst. I hadn't had sex in weeks. I go a little mad when I haven't had sex for a week or so. I was ready to tear the clothes off anyone and he was there in the hallway, following me in my search for the loo. The mechanics of the thing would be impossible, a cramped stairwell, me in an evening gown with ripped hems, mended with gaffer tape, him in a suit. It was a gallery opening. We could have fallen onto the stairs and clung to the rail for support, but I wasn't sure it would be all that comfortable.

The head job just stirred things up again. I smelt the pungent damp crotch odour, tasted the salty pre-come and the frustration of it all reared up in my chest. Surely there was someone to have sex with. Surely, in this throng of art-loving bohemians I could find somebody to drag outside to the park up the hill to take the pressure out of me, that hissing-kettle fury of a girl half-crazed by desperation. I pulled away from him and he groaned.

"Come on. Just a bit more."

"You have a girlfriend."

"You've started now, just a minute more, just a little bit, it will make no difference."

I pushed past him and I stumbled down the stairs. Someone else pushed through the door at the bottom, someone who knew me vaguely and who would have seen me on my knees at his feet. Spared from that at least.

I stepped out into the champagne and all the cliche's about form and style and colour that were ricocheting off the canvasses. I didn't care about the subtext or the delicate subtlety of texture. I wanted a root. I wanted it right then and there. I looked around at all that water, an ocean of gaudy pretentious flesh and realised there was not a single one of them who would offer me a drink.