9 Secrets We Can't Keep

Here are some excerpts from our collection My Secret Life: What Only I Know.

'First and Last' Megan Hart

‘You taste like chocolate,’ she murmurs into his mouth.

Then his fingers shift, and the words are gone. He slides beneath the lace. Finds her clit, the pressure sweet and perfect, just right. She doesn’t mean to bite him, but her teeth catch his lip. She mutters an apology but gets out only one syllable before he’s kissing her so hard she can’t be sure if the blood she tastes is his or her own.

She doesn’t care.

His hand is on the back of her head. His mouth on hers. His fingers slide against her, then oh fuck, inside. All the way, thumb still pressing her clit, and she has to grip his shoulder, bury her face in his neck. She bites him again. This time, she means to.

If this had been something sweet and slow, both of them taking their time, something with blowing white curtains and scented candles, music playing in the background, she wouldn’t have been surprised. But there’s nothing slow about this, and the only music is the sound of his belt unbuckling, the snicker-snack of the zipper going down. The only smells are her perfume and his skin.

Somehow, his shirt is pulled off over his head and tossed aside. His pants go too, kicked off and forgotten as a couple of steps take them to the bed. She’s on her back. Mouths fused, he’s on top of her for too short a moment until he pushes up onto his knees to undo the tie at her side. He opens her dress, and she watches his face.

He does like what she’s wearing. He also likes when her back arches, just a little, at the pass of his fingers across the slopes of her breasts exposed by the demi-cup bra. His palms caress her ribs. Her mouth opens. Eyes close.

She wants to touch him. But later. Now, she can think of only being touched. 

'Women’s Studies' Kim Dean

 Now that he'd been given the chance to fight for his funding, he seemed more at ease. 'I'm sure you'll be happy with your decision. Is there anything in particular that you like? Is there an erogenous zone I should pay special attention to?'

Tressa squirmed. She'd die before she'd tell this analytical geek what got her off. 'Where do we start?'

"You can take off your clothes.' Walton glanced about the room and drummed his fingers against his chin. 'I need to get things ready. I wasn't prepared to run a test case today.'

With that, he left her. Tressa didn't know whether to laugh or be grateful when the studious man practically forgot her. He began puttering around the desk, and she hesitantly reached for her clothes. 

The insanity of it all made her numb.

What was she doing? She was the VP for a Fortune 500 company. Had she seriously just volunteered to be a test subject for sex research?

'Modesty is unnecessary.' The professor glanced her way, but then went back to unloading books off a medical table she hadn't noticed before. 'I want you to feel secure and open to new experiences.'

With a deep breath, Tressa took off her suit jacket. The top that she'd thought too low-cut went next, but her hands were sweaty as she reached for the clasp of her bra. The need to hide her nakedness became too strong to ignore. She turned her back on the professor and felt her face heat with embarrassment.

Just get it over with, she told herself. It was too late to back out now.

'Mr Wrong' Justine Elyot

He's a dangerous person. He's bad for me. Everybody hates him. He's arrogant and faithless, self-absorbed and cruel.

When he dumped me, three years ago, by publicly feeling up another woman at my twenty-fifth birthday party, all my friends practically haemorrhaged with relief.

'I didn't like to say anything at the time but ...' 'I know you were really loved-up but ...' 'I was dreading the wedding invitation because ...' Followed by the chorus: 'I’ve never liked him.' I couldn't possibly blame them. I don't like him either, for all the reasons outlined above. So why am I meeting him, in secret, every chance I get?

My dictionary defines addiction as: 'the condition of being enslaved to a habit or practice

to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma'. It's as good an explanation as any. I'm not sure I experienced severe trauma when we split, but there were a lot of wet pillows on my bed for months afterwards. 

And even when the pillows were dry again, the bed felt so empty, so bleak. I couldn't envisage a replacement for him there, even if I did go to the pictures or eat out with the occasional nice guy. The occasional nice guy never made it up the stairs. He just seemed to have the wrong pheromones. He wasn't Luke.

He didn't size me up and strip me with his eyes within a second of looking at me. He didn't do that slow burn over the table linen that had me gagging for it by the time the dessert menu arrived. There wasn't that constant low-level possibility of being thrown up against a wall, whenever and wherever, and taken.

'In the Middle of Nowhere' Gwen Masters

Keith and I had been together just long enough to read each other's moods. We understood one another in the ways that only a couple who has been completely open and honest can. That's why he didn't hesitate to tell me about his fantasies.

'I have always wanted to see my woman with another man,' Keith announced one night as he lay in bed beside me. He was still trying to catch his breath.

The thought of two men was always a fantasy of mine, too. My body instantly responded again, even though I had just been satisfied over and over. 'Why?' I asked.

'I want to see a woman of mine take all the pleasure she can possibly stand,' he said. 'I guess it helps that I don't have a jealous streak. As long as you're doing it in front of me, it's not cheating, and I don't mind whatever you might want to do. I like being able to let you fulfil all your fantasies, and not have to worry about you going elsewhere to do that.' That was not what I expected to hear. I sat up and looked at him in the near-darkness. I knew Keith was always very laid-back when we were around his friends or mine, even the male friends who liked to flirt from time to time. But I always chalked that up to him simply trusting me, not to his very nature.

'You don't get jealous?' I asked. 'At all?' 'Never have, no.' 'Even if your woman was with someone else, it wouldn't bother you?' 'It would bother me if you did it with someone else and I wasn't included. I think that would be cheating. But if you can do it right in front of me, that's not cheating, right?'

'Falling' Charlotte Stein

His thirty-eight seems very far from my eighteen, suddenly, and I find myself thinking of all the things he must have done in his long life. All the strange things with women far more worldly than me, that all appear behind my eyes as a succession of contorted limbs and sliding, slippery bodies. Everything is golden in these imaginings and yet somehow still nightmarish, and when we get to the room and he slips out of his jacket, I'm suddenly afraid.

Of course I understand the practicalities of the thing. He's going to take off all my clothes, and then all of his clothes, and then he's going to climb on top of me and push his great thing into my body. And it is a great thing, too, because I saw it once when he was changing, through those modern underthings of his and with the suspenders clipped to his socks down below – so funny, somehow.

Though it's not really so funny now. I go to the bathroom and stand in there for ages, unsure as to whether I should take my dress off or not. He hasn't said anything but then again he so rarely does. He's not a big talker, Harrow. The most I can remember him saying to me when we met in the gallery was 'Well, what are you doing here?' As though he could hardly comprehend a single girl, alone, looking at the paintings.

I decide to go back out again in my dress. If he wants me to take it off he can say so, though when I do actually find myself in the bedroom with him something seems not quite right. The room is lovely – of course it is – with a set of double doors that go out onto a balcony, you know, and he's opened one of them so the night air can come in a bit.

It's almost ... I don't know. Romantic, I suppose. Though it seems like a silly word. Especially as he's laid in bed just waiting for me, in his pyjamas of all things. He's not even reading the paper or looking over some work thing, either, as I had expected. He's just gazing at me and I feel awkward, suddenly, though not in the way I had thought I would.

It's a warm awkwardness. Like lying in the sun by a riverbank, on a summer's day – though I can't say what's awkward about that.

'Something Twisted This Way Comes' Kyoko Church

 'Wait a second.' He looked up. 'Turn to me a little,' she said. 'That's right, now lift your knee up onto the couch.' He did so and jumped as she placed her other foot gently but firmly against his crotch. 'Keep rubbing,' she commanded, gesturing at the foot in his hand. 'I just want to make sure you're not getting excited.' Fire exploded in his face. He looked away from her, at her foot, then looked away from that.

She laughed. 'It's OK,' she cooed. 'I know you like my feet. And I do need a foot rub right now. So you rub them.' He hesitated. 'Do it,' she said, not laughing now. 'But I just need to make sure you're not being a disgusting pervert and getting all excited about my pretty feet. This foot rub is supposed to be for me.'

He rubbed, obediently trying to clear his mind, trying to think of anything but her slim foot in his hands. But there was also the pressure of her other foot against him. And then she started making little noises. Little whimpers, groans of pleasure. 'Mmm, that's right,' she purred. 'Ooo, right there, that feels so good.' He was helpless. He sat helplessly rubbing, while his cock grew with a mind of its own.

'Oh my God, what is going on?' She looked at him. 'I can feel you, you know,' she said, wiggling her toes against his stiffness, only worsening matters. 'God, what horny little thoughts are going through your head right now? Was it the noises I was making?' she chided. 'I was only enjoying the foot rub! You weren't thinking that's what I sound like when I fuck, were you?' He stared into his lap, unable to respond. 'Well, if you are going to act like a horny little dog, then that's how I'm going to have to treat you.'

This was how it was that he found himself, a grown man, a professional, an architect, on all fours on the floor in front of this goddess, humping her foot like some kind of human lapdog.

'The Carrot and the Stick' Chrissie Bentley

I opened the binder and, quite honestly, I had no idea what I was looking at. Beyond what was obviously there, of course. I passed over the ones Ray had just detailed, to the page after page of supposed fakes. 'OK ...' I began. 'So what makes these any different?'

 Ray leaned over me, close enough that I could feel his body heat through our clothing. Although I doubted whether the photographs had anywhere near the effect on him that they were having on me. After all, if you spend forty hours a week surrounded by every sexual act and position you could imagine, you had to develop some kind of immunity.

'This one. The costuming is spot on, the furniture's more or less right for the period. But you tell me. Did late-Victorian servants really wear studs through their tongues?' I looked closely and, sure enough, denting the glans of a cock in mid-lick, a honking great piece of hardware. He pointed at another. Again, the clothes looked correct, the furniture seemed old. 'And that's the point. The furniture does look old today. But in nineteen-oh-whenever, it probably wouldn't have been brand new, but it wouldn't look like it had just come out of an antique mall, either.'

And so on. I soon spotted a nineteenth-century nurse being fucked by a 'patient' whose cell phone still lay on the bed alongside her; a milkmaid blowing a stable boy beneath a sky that was streaked by a jet aircraft's con-trail; and, my favourite, a scene that even Ray admitted was perfect in every detail bar one. A door had opened behind the couple, and you could just catch the reflection of a flickering TV screen through the gap.

He continued his impromptu lecture. 'Sometimes it's the language that gives a picture away. There'll be a word in the caption that wasn't in use at the time the picture was meant to have been taken. It's surprising how many words for cocks and quims we've come up with in the last fifty years or so. The problem is, I'm trained to look for things like that, and we have the necessary equipment to scrutinise every picture that comes in. A lot of people, though, it never dawns on them, just as it never occurred to you, that such things can be faked. So they start their collections, they spend a small fortune and then one day they need to have it appraised.' His voice trailed off. 'It's got to the point where my firm doesn't even offer to value collections any more, unless we're actually being offered it for sale. That way, if we think there's anything amiss, we can just decline to buy and not have to give a reason. You know how they say a fool and his money are easily parted? Well, a fool and his temper come in a close second.'

'Hidden Inside' Ashley Hind

Sometimes when I see you I can't even breathe. I feel the air sticking in my throat and it never quite manages to escape before my chest flutters and sucks it back down. As the joy and adrenalin rush to build, the flutter becomes a kind of spasm, which perpetuates as I fail to draw another breath. I am left wondering if my self-preservation mechanism will ever kick in and force my lungs back into action. Fortunately, it always has, which is just as well as it would be a pitiful way to die: goggle-eyed and choking on an empty goldfish-gulp for oxygen, my big tits jiggling up and down and me looking for all the world like I have a cattle-prod stuck up my backside. The whole office would get to witness my graceless descent into a besotted heap at your feet, all watching me struggle for one last longing look at you before my lights finally went out ...

You probably wouldn't even bat an eyelid. You would be thinking: What is this very plain and slightly chubby (if sweetly perfumed) heap of nonsense doing wheezing and turning blue? Why is she spluttering saliva all over my very sexy Italian shoes? Too bad: I will die and never get to tell you that you are the most beautiful man that I have ever seen. You will never learn that, despite my relative plainness alongside others that you favour, I am quietly gifted in ways that would literally blow your socks off. I am, as it happens, the very best cock-sucker in ... well, if not the whole world then at least in this office. And that, my lovely man-who- apparently-loves-to-be-fellated, is no idle boast but a fact.

If I was Hannah then you would have found out about my talent by now, that's for sure. But I am not her. All I am is a face that you recognise though hardly register. I know so much about you and yet nothing of me dents your conscious thoughts. To you I am merely a barely acknowledged shape that used to accompany Hannah to the staff canteen or to the pub, a splodge in your periphery as you filled your vision with her. I was the one who sat there silently while you two giggled at each other's suggestive remarks and nudged each other, shoulder to shoulder, in the only contact you would allow yourself in public. In private it is a different matter I'm sure. Despite Hannah's claim that there is nothing between you but friendship, there is no way you would keep your hands off her if you got her alone. She is simply too gorgeous and irresistible and I would eat her up myself given half the chance. You remember that night you went to the cinema with her? You remember the other person, the one you steadfastly ignored in the bar afterwards, the one who had to sit with your best friend and not blurt out that he had a haircut like a fuzzy dog's arse and a terrible line in <em>Steven Seagal: Lawman</em> anecdotes? That was me! And I saw your face as you gazed upon her and I know it spoke of more than mere friendship.

'Grizz' Heather Towne

I was still brand new to the whole 'gay scene', not 'open' at all; unlike that grizzly bear playpen. But I'd quickly discovered that hair was where my care laired. Big, beefy men covered in rich, thick whorls, wearing their fur like cloaks of honour, unashamed of their bushy forearms and legs, the pelts on their chests and backs, the tufts that burst out of collars and cuffs, hairlines that plunged into deeper, denser parts unshown.

'Uh, can I borrow your binoculars for a second, Myron?'

'See for yourself,' he responded with a grin, handing me the field glasses. Then he directed the twin telescopes strapped to his face back down at my crotch again. 'Just be careful with that meat there – there're animals around, you know.' He laughed, coughed, choked. Zipped over to a water fountain.

I raised the binoculars to my bright-blue eyes and zeroed in on the bear on the range. The nametag on a pumped-up pec read GERALD, and, up close, I could count the brown follicles on his huge arms and legs, if I had a month or so. He looked to be around my young age, despite his far superior growth. My long, skinny white body and feeble red faux-hawk paled in comparison to his overall tan, build and hair. His eyes were amber, teeth white and even and sharp.

I watched the erotic nature show from close range for about a minute or so. Until Myron banged into the back of my legs with his arthritic knees, propelled by his chair and erratic sense of direction. 'I need the spyglasses back, kid,' he wheezed. 'There's some interesting wildlife about to bust loose over by the birdcages.'