Category: IST

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I didn’t sleep. At seven I bought the biggest bunch of flowers the petrol station had, two coffees and a croissant, and drove to the university.

It was enormous. I hadn’t thought about that. Eleven buildings, three car parks and about four thousand students, all of whom seemed to be carrying lanyards. I didn’t know her course code. I didn’t know which exam. I knew her name was Bryony and she had freckles.

I stood outside the medical building for an hour and a half holding carnations. The coffee went cold. A security guard asked me, twice, who I was waiting for.

“Bryony,” I said. “She’s sitting an exam. Nursing. Red hair.”

“Surname?”

I didn’t have one.

He walked me back to my car, very politely, the way you’d escort a pigeon out of a supermarket.

On Friday I went to the Velvet Room. Scarlett was on the stage. When she came over she was smiling, but there was a crease between her eyebrows.

“Security emailed the whole nursing year,” she said. “Warning about a man with flowers hanging round the exam halls. Description sounded familiar.”

“I just wanted to wish you luck.”

“I know.” She sighed and squeezed my hand. “It’s sweet. It’s also a lot, Owen. Twenty quid a song. Let’s keep it in here for now.”

She danced for me. She was lovely. And at the end of the song she went back to work, and I drove home with a bunch of wilting carnations on the passenger seat.

Ending 11 of 25: Flowers for Nobody. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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I came back on Friday. Paid my twenty quid cover, sat at the edge of the stage and waited.

Scarlett saw me from across the room and her face lit up. She walked straight over, ignoring a man who was waving a fifty at her.

“You came.”

“You said pay like everybody else. Here I am. Everybody else.”

“I passed,” she said, before I could ask. “The exam. Distinction.” She took my hand. “VIP. Now. My treat.”

In the booth she pulled the curtain, sat me down and climbed into my lap, and the first thing she did was put my hands on her hips herself.

“Dez is on his break,” she whispered.

She was wearing green lace this time. She danced for exactly one song. Then she was kissing me, and I was pulling the lace aside, and she was unzipping me with that same practised hand, and the dance turned into something no menu covered. She rolled a condom on me, sank down slowly, biting her lip to keep quiet, and rode me with her hand over my mouth while the bass thumped through the wall. When she came she buried her face in my neck and shook. I came holding her hips tight, both of us trying not to laugh.

“That’s definitely against the rules,” I said.

“I’m nearly a nurse,” Bryony said, straightening her lace. “I prescribed it.” She kissed me. “Pick me up at two. You’re staying at mine. Four years of this and three of studying, and I want a boyfriend with a sad kettle story.”

I picked her up at two.

Ending 10 of 25: Exam Results. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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“Thank you,” I said, buttoning my jacket. “Both of you. That was… I don’t have words.”

“You don’t have money either,” Jade said, not unkindly.

“No.”

Scarlett kissed my cheek. Jade patted my head like a dog who’d done a good trick. Then they were gone through the curtain together, and I walked out across the main floor with a damp patch in my jeans and my jacket held strategically low.

It was only on the pavement that I checked my pockets.

My wallet was empty. I knew that. What I hadn’t thought about were my car keys, which were on the floor of the VIP booth, where they’d fallen out during the four most exciting minutes of my life.

Dez wouldn’t let me back in. “Club rules, mate. Once you’re out, you’re out.” He said he’d hand them in at the bar. The bar was shut.

So I walked to the bus stop. The night bus wanted two pounds fifty. I had a pound coin and some fluff. The driver looked at the coin, then at my jeans, and waved me on with an expression of deep, weary pity.

I sat at the back. The bus smelled of chips. A woman in a hen-party sash fell asleep on my shoulder.

I got home at four. I picked the car up on Monday, on the way to the job centre, and Dez handed me the keys with a perfectly straight face.

“They said you lasted four minutes,” he said.

Ending 8 of 25: Bus Fare. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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“What are you two doing after close?” I asked.

Jade and Scarlett looked at each other. A whole conversation happened in that look.

“Usually?” Jade said. “Chips and a cab.”

“He’s skint, Jade,” Scarlett said. “He just gave us his last three hundred.”

“I know.” Jade grinned. “So he’s not a customer anymore, is he?”

That was how I ended up at half two in the morning in Jade’s flat above a launderette, on a sofa with a grumpy grey cat glaring at me, while two of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen kissed each other in the middle of the rug.

This time there were no rules.

They undressed me together, laughing, and pulled me down onto the rug with them. Jade rolled a condom onto me, pushed me onto my back and sank onto my cock, wet and tight, rolling her hips slowly while Scarlett straddled my face. I licked her while she leaned forward to kiss Jade over my chest, the two of them moaning into each other’s mouths. Scarlett came first, thighs clamped round my head. Then they swapped, Scarlett riding me hard while Jade’s fingers worked her clit until she shook.

I lasted a lot longer than four minutes this time. When I finally came, buried in Scarlett with Jade’s mouth on my neck, all three of us were sweaty and giggling.

“Twenty-seven, twenty-nine and thirty-four,” Scarlett said, sprawled across both of us. “Ninety years of experience.”

“He’s done for,” said Jade, and the cat seemed to agree.

Ending 7 of 25: After Hours for Three. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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I drove home with the window down, partly for the fresh air and partly for reasons I’d rather not explain.

At home I stripped in the kitchen, stuffed my jeans and boxers into the washing machine and stood there naked in the light of the fridge, eating cold beans out of the tin and feeling, honestly, not bad. Two hundred quid and twenty more. One song. Totally worth it.

The machine started its spin. Something clattered round the drum.

I stopped it, fished around in the wet denim and pulled out a small folded square of card, pulped at the edges. The Velvet Room’s logo was on one side. On the other, in what had once been neat eyeliner handwriting, was a name and a phone number.

Most of it had dissolved.

I could make out a capital B. A y, maybe. The first four digits of a mobile number and then a grey smear where the rest had been. She must have slipped it into my pocket when she climbed off me. When she kissed my cheek. While I was busy being a man who’d just come in his jeans.

I laid it on the radiator to dry, as if that might bring the ink back. It didn’t.

I went back the next Friday. Scarlett wasn’t working. Nor the Friday after. The girl on the bar said she’d finished her nursing degree and quit, and no, she couldn’t give out numbers, obviously.

I kept the card. It’s still on my fridge, under a magnet: a capital B and four digits. A reminder to check my pockets.

Ending 4 of 25: Laundry Day. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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I sat in my car with the heater on, a box of tissues from the glovebox and absolutely no plan. I just knew I wasn’t leaving.

At ten past two the fire door banged open and Scarlett came out in a long coat and trainers, bag over her shoulder. She spotted my car straight away.

She knocked on the window. I wound it down.

“You’ve been out here two hours,” she said.

“I never asked your name.”

She stared at me. Then she laughed so hard she had to lean on the roof. “That’s why? Oh my God.” She opened the back door and climbed in. “Get in here.”

I got in the back with her. She pulled the door shut and shrugged the coat off her shoulders, and she was still in the black lace underneath.

“Bryony,” she said, climbing onto my lap. “And you owe me a proper one. No jeans this time.”

She unzipped me, and I was hard again in seconds. She tugged her knickers aside, rolled a condom down me from her bag and lowered herself onto my cock, slow, gasping, her head bumping the roof lining. The windows steamed up in about a minute.

She rode me hard, the little car rocking on its springs, my hands finally, finally on her hips, her bare tits bouncing in my face. She came biting my shoulder. I came holding her down on me, swearing into her hair.

“Better than the booth?” she panted.

“Everything is better than the booth.”

She wrote her number in eyeliner on my wrist and kissed me goodnight.

Ending 3 of 25: The Back Seat. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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“I’ll text you,” I said, trying to sound like a man who had options. “Maybe breakfast another time.”

Bryony’s eyebrows went up a fraction. Then she smiled, and it was a nice smile, but it was a smaller one.

“Sure,” she said. “Another time.”

She didn’t give me her number. I realised that about four seconds after she’d stepped into the corridor to get dressed, which was about four seconds too late. I stood in the empty booth pulling my shirt on, still buzzing, still smelling of her, telling myself it was fine. She knew where I’d be. I knew where she’d be. Friday.

Dez let me out through the front. He looked at me the way you look at a man who has just stepped on a rake.

“She doesn’t ask twice, mate,” he said.

“She asked me to breakfast.”

“I know. I heard.” He held the door. “Nobody gets asked to breakfast.”

I went back the next Friday with a clean shirt and a speech prepared. Scarlett was on the stage. She saw me, smiled warmly, waved, and then spent the whole night working a table of accountants. When I finally got a song with her on the floor she was lovely, funny, all professional sparkle, and she called me babe like she called everybody babe.

“Breakfast?” I tried, at the end.

“I’m on placement mornings now, babe.” She kissed my cheek. “Shame. Bacon was on me.”

I went home and lay on the bed, thinking about the best sex of my life and the breakfast I’d turned down, and laughed until it hurt.

Ending 2 of 25: Playing It Cool. Go back and try a different choice for the full happy ending.

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“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely yes to breakfast.”

“It’s half two in the morning,” she pointed out. “Breakfast is technically hours away.”

“I can wait.”

“I can’t.” She drove us to her flat in a battered little Fiesta, one hand on my knee the whole way. It was a tiny place above a bakery, textbooks stacked on every surface, a skeleton poster on the bathroom door. We fell into her bed in a tangle and slept like we’d been knocked out.

I woke at nine to the smell of fresh bread drifting up through the floorboards and Bryony curled against my back, naked and warm, her hand already wrapped round my cock.

“Breakfast,” she murmured into my shoulder.

She kissed her way down my chest, freckled shoulders bare in the sunlight, and took me in her mouth, slow and lazy, until I was gripping the sheets. Then she climbed up, rolled a condom on and sank down onto me with a long, happy sigh.

No buzzer. No Dez. No camera. Just her, rocking slowly on top of me in the daylight, my hands everywhere I wanted them, her nipples hard against my palms. I rolled her under me and fucked her deep and steady while she wrapped her legs round my back and begged me not to stop. She came with her nails in my shoulders, and I followed her, groaning her name. Her real name.

Afterwards she fetched croissants from downstairs in nothing but my shirt.

“Worst week of your life,” she said, feeding me a bite. “How’s it ending?”

“Best Saturday I’ve ever had.”

“Good.” She kissed the crumbs off my lip. “Stay for lunch.”

Ending 1 of 25: Breakfast in Bed. You found the full happy ending.

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“Let me sort this,” I said, and picked up the phone on the desk before she could argue.

Reception answered on the ninth ring. The same flustered girl. The system had crashed at nine, she explained, and they’d been checking people in by hand ever since. Somebody had written 714 twice. She was very, very sorry. They were completely full because of the conference, but she might be able to find me something. Could I give her twenty minutes?

I put the phone down. Priya was watching me from the bathroom doorway, the towel still clutched at her chest.

“Twenty minutes,” I said. “Maybe.”

“Maybe.” She sighed. “I’m Priya, by the way. Twenty-seven. I’m here with my friend Rosie, who’s in 716 next door and is currently, I’d guess, three cocktails deep in the bar downstairs.”

“Liam. Thirty-eight. Here for a conference about firewalls, which is exactly as exciting as it sounds.”

That got a smile out of her. She had a good smile, a little crooked, the kind that made you want to earn another one.

“Well, Liam who likes firewalls,” she said, “I’m not putting clothes on for twenty minutes. So you can either wait here and keep your eyes on the telly, or go downstairs and shout at someone in person.”

She sat on the end of the bed, crossed her legs, and the towel parted along one smooth brown thigh. She didn’t fix it.

→ I wait in her room for reception to call back

→ I go down to the lobby to sort it out myself

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It was nearly midnight. Reception was a mess. And she was laughing, which felt like a good sign.

“Look,” I said. “I’m not going to make you get dressed and go downstairs to fight about this. I’ll ring them in a bit. In the meantime, I’m happy to take the chair, or the floor, or the bath. Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

She studied me for a long moment, still dripping on the carpet. “You’re offering to share.”

“I’m offering not to be a nuisance.”

“I’m Priya,” she said finally. “Twenty-seven. Here for a weekend away with my friend Rosie, who is next door in 716 and will absolutely kill you if you turn out to be a creep.” She nodded at the connecting door between the rooms. “That’s not locked, by the way. Just so you know.”

“Liam. Thirty-eight. Network engineer. Extremely boring.”

“Boring I can work with.” She tucked the towel tighter and padded over to the minibar, bending to open it in a way that made the towel ride up the backs of her thighs. I looked at the curtains with enormous concentration.

“I was going to have one of these anyway,” she said, holding up two tiny bottles of whisky. “Seems rude to drink alone when there’s a strange man in my room.”

Then she glanced at me, rumpled and sweaty in my conference shirt. “Or you could use the shower first. You look like you’ve been on a train all day.”

→ I accept the minibar whisky and sit down with her

→ I take her up on the shower first