Read Part 1 here.

Part 2 here.

Chapter 7

Dust and olive groves. Window watching. Maybe I should have been a boy.

It would have made more sense. Chasing a little prick across the world.

I have no excuse. Phrasing little desires out of flesh, out of nothingness. Empty womb, barren place, no need to fill it up.

Truth is I’ve been waking up for months now feeling tired. Something in me refusing to rest. It craves.

Beautiful fucking woman on the other side of the alley. Husband asleep against the window, drooling. Baby suckling at her breast.

My eyes and hers lock, she smiles weakly, but it’s genuine.

Shit, she looks exhausted. Bags under her eyes, hair tangled and badly brushed, falling over her shoulders down to her elbows. Baggy clothes, dark, soft cotton over a baggy figure, soft, flabby, well concealed.

Still, she’s gorgeous, and can’t be more than 33.

For fuck’s sake, Livia.

These villages are lovely. Nothing like this back home in Blighty. Real people growing real things, old men with cigarettes and coffee, ave marias, little vegetable patches.

I want to smell her hair.

Focus on the road.

I could have been born here.

But then I would have run away to London, seeking desperate faggotry.

Hopeless.

On the radio, an Italian talkshow is yapping, volume too low to hear properly.

Why do people do this? Filling space with buzz?

I’ve never understood, I want silence.

I could ask him to put some music on.

I won’t, I’m too British.

I start daydreaming about Onlyfans. Maybe I should have an account.

Lush boudoir, Andrew Tate studios. Heading to the toilet, top rolled up in the mirror, pretty round tits, camera snap snap.

Pinching pink harder, snapping in the mirror.

Edit, upload, crop face, back to my bed.

Waiting for the comments.

Here they come.

“Love your tits”.

“Pretty nips”.

“I think you’re such an intelligent girl”.

Laughing.

Fingers in my panties.

Snapping new angles.

Jeans off.

Panties to one side.

Pink flower glistening.

Prickly dark hairs, fuck off I haven’t shaved.

Snap snap sent.

Straight to the bathroom again.

Strip naked.

Hot water down my neck.

Hot water along my spine.

Hot water between my thighs.

Fingers on hips.

Lips flushed.

Sighing.

Rubbing.

Dripping down my thighs.

Warm and lost.

Throw myself against the wall.

Clamping my throat.

Fingers push inside.

Forcing myself to cum.

Sinking to the floor.

Moaning.

Tears and laughter.

Pussy pulses.

Drippy fuck cream.

Pushing more fingers in.

Pushing the knuckles.

Gasping.

Shudders.

Curled up in a ball.

No, forget Onlyfans.

Too many men with their cocks out.

I don’t much fancy being plastered all over Russian honeypot websites either.

I say that, I have accounts on all of them.

Should have been a boy.

**

“La Dulmiziana” driver announces.

Shit, that’s my stop. Must have dozed off.

Grab my shit, smile and a wink to the Italian beauty with the baby. Thanks for a lovely journey.

Out and I’m in a little town plaza.

Not much has happened here for 200 years. Imagining little post-Napoleonic whores taking travellers into their rooms for the night.

I would have been good at that.

A man sees me, waves. Introduces himself, leads me to a car. Tells me we need to drive to the boat. Check my phone, Gina says get in the car, he’ll take you to the boat. Not got a better idea.

Boat turns out to be a little powerboat. We drive off shore, him telling me Gina’s island is about 45 minutes along the coast.

Gina’s Island.

Chapter 8

She greets me, standing up on a rock like a marble fucking statue, white drapes billowing in the wind.

Light reflecting on the water is half blinding me.

Shouldn’t have worn jeans. It gets hot in fucking Italy. I’m sweating like a lezzo pig.

The boat pulls towards the jetty.

She steps down to meet us.

Botox cheekbones marbled firm, corners of her sculpted lips turned upwards like rosy scalpels.

Legs flayed stepping forwards to meet her, knees ready to collapse.

She towers over me and the boatman like some shade out of Acheron.

There’s my elbow, pulls me in, kisses my cheek. Reek of perfume and tobacco floods my brain, woozy from heat.

“Thank you Lorenzo” she says to the boatman, who nods and disappears.

“And welcome, dear Olivia” in my ear, cheek cold.

****

So this is my room. White walls, white sheets, white marble.

Bathroom decked with polished obsidian sink. I want to press my face onto it, feel it cold, like hers.

I envision her pinning me to the wall, shoving her fingers inside of me.

“I’ll leave you to get settled in”, she says, botox lips waxing lyrica.

Last time I felt this way in front of a woman was when I was sent to Ms Blunchett’s office at school.

Not her fault Olivia left her diary on the bus and some African church nutter read it.

Don’t read other people’s fucking diaries.

****

Dreams of a colossal Indian goddess, blue skinned and dancing on the rings of Saturn. Every turn of her hips is an aeon in the lives of men, every toss of her hair millions of skulls joining her necklace, clattering.

She breathes fire, screeching across space. Immeasurable arms reaching to every corner of the cosmos. Weapons of war, tributes to peace, and burning skulls, always skulls, with eyes of glowing night.

****

I was always sensitive, believe it or not. Sensitive to the feeling of dread. The sense that something has been torn, warped, punctured. A corpse, a naked body, significant physical trauma.

The disclosure of immanence, the flesh mortal and living. Dread exposes all, stripped bare.

Ovid fixated on it, painting the warp of flesh across myth and man. After a career of love honing in on beast-men and gods becoming nature.

The grand illusion is that we are separate, spawned for a higher plane.

So much drags us back, to the warp of war, decay, pleasure and madness.

I encountered it on the beach, aged 7, watching my mother’s friends tanning their leathery breasts and smoking cigarettes, my eyes transfixed on “smoking kills” and the apparently forbidden regions of a woman’s body.

Cancer and exposure, all on holiday, all scorching heat.

“Come play in the pool, Livia”, croons one of the deathbats.

“I don’t want to”.

Pretending to read my book, watching through sunshades at bodies, naked, forbidden, released, inhaling tar and cancer.

Looking down at my own prepubescent body, flat, smooth, like a boy with a slit in my pants.

I was scared for my mother and her friends.

Dread seeping in. Choking them and they weren’t realizing. Cackling, warbling, carrying on. Dread coming for me too, breath on my spine, fingers down my throat, noone to scream to.

I cried that night, told mother I was scared she would die.

She promised me she would be fine.

Lying bitch.