- Romance
- Winter Flowers
- Page 5
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How Florian could hold it in for so long, no one knows. Call it determination. Whatever it was, he kept pumping into Irina until her howling began to defy the sound isolation of the room and he felt her hot liquids on his lap. Only then did he finally allow himself to ejaculate. They both collapsed on the bed exhausted but with a satisfied smile on both of their faces.
Irina crawled in Florian's arm pit where they both lay blissfully sighing over what had just passed between them. No words needed to be exchanged. They both knew it could not get much better than this.
Irina felt the urge to kiss Florian all over. She had to remind herself that this was not her man, but her client. Once the night was over, the odds were that she would never see him again. It was all too bittersweet.
She told herself to get a grip. This was normal. Wasn't this the way she always felt after a great fuck? Surely it was. It had only been so long since this had happened last. Just the usual post-sex sentimentality. That was all.
"I can't believe I had been missing out on this for so long," Florian said tiredly.
Irina almost answered that she could not believe she had been missing out on this for so long. She thought the better of it. She was not quite thinking straight; better not say anything that she might regret later on.
The night was by no means over. Irina was determined to show Florian her gratitude by showing Florian all manner of sex that was now available for him. If he was going to fuck her like that, she sure as well would fuck him right back. First, she pulled out one of those flavoured condoms and showed him the pleasures of oral sex. Then she rode him, both traditionally and in reverse. Irina squirted each and every time. It made her think that Florian must have broken her body by now. By the end of it all Florian was too exhausted to even get excited when Irina suggested that they might do anal next. When he put down that offer, Irina was sad to realize that there was simply no energy left in Florian to keep on going. She did not want the night to end. But on the other hand, she too was too exhausted to keep going. Before she knew it, she was cuddled against Florian's naked body, falling into the realm of dreams.
A couple of hours later she awakened in that very same place. Florian was still snoozing next to her, perfectly at peace. Irina could not help but feel fondness for the face next to her. She gave a light kiss on its lips, cautious not to wake him up. Then she slipped out of the bed and began to dress.
She could not stay until morning. Staying until morning meant waking up next to him and having to become Therese again. Thank him for doing business with her, a casual smile on her face? Irina could not do that. She didn't want that awkward interaction to ruin the memory of the night. And it wasn't just for Florian's sake. She too wanted to keep it and cherish it: the night she had spent with this wonderful boy, not as Therese but as Irina. Maybe someday, with some luck, their paths might cross again. Maybe that day Therese would be history and they could just be Florian and Irina. Maybe then the two of them might actually have a chance.
Irina grabbed her things and exited through the door. At the desk she asked the concierge to give him a wake-up call half an hour before check-out. She tightened the coat around her and vanished into the darkness of the muted city.
- - -
It was a sunny Tuesday morning. The temperatures were for once just above zero, making the dirty piles of snow on the roadsides slowly melt away. Robins were singing on the branches of the bare trees that decorated the opposite side of the street. There was a promise of spring in the air, and it wasn't even the new year yet.
Florian was trying to make sense of the way the houses were numbered on that street. On one side, a house was marked as 42-3, on the other side on the house was numbered 31. Which way was 35? There was no one around to ask for advice.
It had been a couple of weeks since his night with Irina. Christmas had come and gone. Florian had tried calling her number but there was never an answer or even the option to leave a voice mail. He guessed, or rather hoped, that the radio silence had to do with envelope he had later found from his coat pocket. A thousand questions ran through Florian's mind regarding that envelope, all of which could have been summed up with a simple "why?" Every answer that Florian could think of only resulted in further questions regarding Irina's disappearance. Florian had his fears and his doubts, but among them was just the tiniest glimmer of hope.
It had taken a lot of asking around, weeks of work, but finally Florian was holding in hands an address that might lead him straight to Irina. It had been the girlfriend of a friend of a friend who had remembered she had met a girl named Irina, a law student of a matching description, at a house party some weeks back. This piece of information wasn't useful per se if it hadn' t been for the fact that she knew where the girl lived, as this Irina had been introduced to her as the upstairs neighbour of the party hostess.
It was a long shot, but Florian had nothing to lose.
Florian had thought of buying flowers but had decided against it. He knew what it might look like, appearing at the door of the girl he had tried to pay money to sleep with him. What he was doing was already in and of itself pretty creepy: he didn't need to up the ante by making himself look like a lovesick dunce.
In the end all he could really ask for was some form of an explanation. People don't just vanish like that. It made him feel worried. Even more so when she wouldn't answer his calls. This surely wasn't normal behaviour and finding out what had become of her was the very least he could, no, should do. Or so he kept telling himself.
Florian was now standing in front of a duplex with the number 35 hanging on the wall. There were two doors, two doorbells. Florian took a deep breath, mouthed a prayer and pressed the one on the left.
It was probably not even her address, he thought. No reason to be nervous. There was probably nobody even ho--
He could hear movement inside. Somebody running down the stairs. A silhouette appeared on the other side of the frosted glass: the figure of a young blonde woman.
The heavy door opened with a squeak.
"H-hi," was all he managed to say.
Stunned, Irina stood looking at the apparition in front of her. She was wearing some grey lounge wear, the university branded t-shirt and a pair of sweatpants. Her hair was loose and straight past her shoulders. Her face was completely without make up, not that Florian noticed. To him she was as pretty as the day he had met her.
She gasped. "Florian!" But then something about her relaxed. A confused smile spread on her face. To Florian's great relief she exhibited no signs of fear or disgust. "What are you doing here?"
"I tried to find you," he said, stating the obvious. "You didn't answer my calls. I had to know if everything was alright with you. Especially since you were just suddenly gone without a trace."
She shifted uneasily.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. Her voice was pathetically apologetic.
Florian nodded in approval. "Good. You should be sorry."
"I was afraid you'd make me take the money." The way she said this was as if money was one of the greatest inconveniences in her life, useless and to be gotten away with. Florian found this incredibly amusing.
"I would have at the very least demanded to know why you didn't take it," he muttered. "If it was because you were upset with me and would accept no money from the likes of me, it would have been hurtful, but I think could have lived with it."
Irina looked at him in horror. Her eyes were wonderfully expressive.
"But," Florian added hopefully, "if it was because I was just that good..."
There was that pretty, amused smile again. She barely resisted the urge to laugh at Florian's bold suggestion. It made Florian chuckle.
"Then I suppose I could maybe have let it slide," he said.
"And you came all this way just to tell me that it's okay for me to refuse your money as long as it's due to your mad sex skills?" she asked him with an eyebrow raised and arms crossed.
"Y-yes, that, and that you are the most amazing girl I have ever met and I'm already knee-deep in love with you," he blurted out.
Florian had expected her to laugh at this confession. Not out of malice, but simply because of its absurdity: the words would have made a wonderful joke. But Irina didn't laugh.
For a moment Florian thought he saw pity in her eyes. She looked as if she was about to cry. It made him feel terribly embarrassed. Yes, he may have fallen for a prostitute but surely it wasn't that big of a deal. A rejection might be painful, but he would get over it eventually. There was nothing to be sorry about.
But before Florian could say any of this, Irina jumped around his neck with such force that he almost stumbled down the steps behind him. She pressed his face closer to hers and kissed him so sweetly and lovingly that Florian was too dumbfounded to respond. Her face was wet. Was she crying? Yes. But she was also smiling.
Florian held the sentimental whirlwind in shape of a girl tightly in his arms. How anyone could be so joyful and tearful simultaneously, he could not understand. He could only laugh with her and kiss her. Irina pulled him inside the house with her, drowning him in kisses.
Neither of them had a plan. They were too happy to need one.
- COMMENTS
Auden Jamesabout 2 years agoI am not really sure what to make of the almost unequivocal praise the present story has received by other commentators. Is it just I, or does no one else see the many slight to grave inconsistencies in both main characters? But let us not get ahead of ourselves, instead let us first take a little inventory of the characters whose love story we are supposed to believe in here.
There is Irina, alias “Therese,” a law student and former model, who is now working in the “industry” as an escort and cannot “imagine doing anything else.” She has a penchant for charity, which is why she deals out her services to one of her clients for free or “pro bono” for a single night every Christmas season; this season the lucky one is Florian.
Meet Florian, a nineteen years old fellow student, who has just come back from a student exchange in Vietnam and who upon his surprise early return caught his (now ex) girlfriend in the act with another guy. He is a self-proclaimed “virgin” who nonetheless seems to have mastered every single sexual act there is apart from P/V intercourse, which is why he finally wants to catch up on the latter with the help of Irina, our heroine.
Well, let us start right away with the story’s fatal flaw: the “virgin” Florian. Seldom have I read something equally (let alone more) ridiculous in erotica as the tribulations of this supposed virgin who turns out to be a bona fide sex god all but in name! That he has already the looks (tall, dark, and beautiful) of one is almost trivial since that is a given in the romance genre, but then to read of his agony because he “waited this long” before having P/V intercourse (reminder: he is just nineteen!), which, after all this time, for reasons not given now somehow seems to equal pure madness, and next to read of him being so nervous that his legs are literally “shaking” just sitting next to Irina in a public tram only to then become a little while later “best lover she had ever had,” making her squirt constantly in unending orgasmic bliss by simply “play[ing] on her clit” and “hammer[ing] his cock into her,” which, I suppose, are practically speaking exactly the same acts her other clients would have done when in bed with her: all of this taken together is patently absurd, teetering in its inconsistency on the brink of supposedly romantic, but ultimately just laughable hooey.
(Side note: How come that at nineteen our sex god virgin Florian has already done a one year student exchange? I mean, it is rather unusual to start one’s university studies with one or two terms abroad, so is he also some kind of scholastic wunderkind who started his studies at what, fifteen or sixteen?)
But apart from the ridiculousness of the male love interest, there are also remarkable inconsistencies in our heroine, Irina. One, for example, reveals itself in her adoration of Florian’s “anecdotes” about his travels, for the narrator informs us then that “she had never been outside Europe” and “[e]ven of Europe had seen very little.” Since she had formerly been working as a model, it seems rather implausible that she would not have been traveling around for her modeling jobs, if only around Europe where nonetheless many international fashion weeks take place, e.g., Frankfurt, Milan, Paris, London, etc. (Although, admittedly, the narrator does not explicitly state that she was working as a fashion model; still, if she instead was working as some kind of fetish model, or something similarly niche, it would then have been an even graver oversight by the narrator to not inform the reader about the specific modeling our heroine had been doing in the past.)
Furthermore she comes off as an oblivious hypocrite when she cannot “help but empathise with her client’s [Florian’s] heart ache” after he confesses to have been cheated on by his ex-girlfriend, all the while she is the working girl with whom many of her clients would be cheating on their spouses or partners regularly! Hence Irina is a phony, or, as O.J. Berman from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” might observe, a “r e a l phony,” at best, insofar as “[s]he believes all this crap she believes” (Capote 32). But that is precisely begging the question of whether our heroine’s feelings—as conveyed by the narrator—are to be believed at all? How could we believe such an inconsistent character in the first place?
While the characterizations of our heroine and her love interest may arguably be the greatest and gravest flaws of the present story, there are still some finer points too that I want to cover in this in-depth critique.
First of all, I noticed several uncalled-for point of view (PoV) changes where the narrator suddenly starts to hop from the heroine’s to her love interest’s head in the same scene or even sentence, for example: “That his strange behaviour had not ruined the night for her, and that she was willing to forgive and forget was something that he [Florian] knew to appreciate.” Reading this sentence, we might at first intuit that the narrator is conveying, albeit a little obliquely perhaps, the heroine’s thoughts only to then discover and realize at the end that we were inside her love interest’s head right from the start, which the more sensitive reader may find rather jarring. Another example, this time of a perhaps even more ambiguous PoV change, provide the following two sentences: “Florian was studying her face. He was expecting some kind of a reaction.” Is the narrator here telling us really what Florian is expecting, or is he rather telling as what Irina concludes of his “studying her face,” viz., that he must be “expecting some kind of a reaction” from her? The first sentence is unsuitable to decide this question since it can either be construed as a marker of PoV change (Florian becoming the grammatical subject) or as a neutral description by the narrator of what Florian was doing and Irina merely seeing him doing!
Generally speaking, changes of PoV within one scene, paragraph, or even sentence should be avoided since they are almost always unnecessary because nothing of substance in the narrative framework tends to change within these loci, thereby making changes in PoV in disregard of this appear unnatural, superfluous, a/o confusing. (Examples of substantial shifts in the narrative framework would be a scene break, a mood change, or, to suggest something a little outré perhaps, a character with a dissociative identity disorder who might even justify changes of PoV within single sentences.)
From a moral perspective, which given the subject matter is indispensable, I find the glorification of prostitution—and escorting is just that—expressed in paragraphs like the following rather questionable, if not distasteful or even dishonest:
“And how she loved her secret side job! It allowed her to freely explore her sexuality and discover an entire world that had previously been completely hidden from her. Unlike guys her age, these men knew what they liked, and they were eager to share the joys of their kinks with her. No judgement, no attachments: sex that was more than just premature ejaculations and penetration. She was essentially being paid to have a sex life that most people her age could not even dream of.”
To cite O.J. Berman again, that might be the “crap” a real phony believes (see above), but, alas, the story is missing any indication, even if expressed only by an easily dismissed goof character, that prostitution might not be all our heroine is making it out to be. Instead we get even more phony pontificating from her re the shady side of prostitution:
“Irina understood perfectly. Sex work has a bad rep. Sometimes Irina would see a side of the industry existed outside of law. Irina was resolved to keep her business clean. Therefore, she appreciated it when her clients expressed concern over the ethics of participating in the industry as consumers.”
Hence it is only a question of a prostitute’s “resolve[] to keep her business clean,” and then everything is A-OK? Rings true? Well, I think that this sounds a little flippant rather, to say the least, and does not suggest an entirely adequate or proper understanding of the possible—if not, in fact, probable—pitfalls and perils of prostitution!
However, up until now I have not yet touched on the erotic aspect of the present story. Concerning this matter, there is a rather interesting anonymous comment, dated 30th March this year, which says:
“Nice romantic disposition and not pages long descriptions of sex, all the same and borring [sic]. Sex is nice in nature, but describing is useless.”
I firmly disagree with this sentiment, especially the latter notion that describing sex is “useless.” Far from it! In the present context of erotic writing, this notion even strikes me as rather bizarre. Or would you think it logical to state that filming sex is “useless” in porn? I think that it is neither useless to film sex in porn, nor to describe it in erotic writing; rather it is one of the conventional main attractions in either medium. That is not to say that sex must be described in erotic writing as it is not essential to it—you can write an erotic story without a single sex scene in it—but if sex is described, it ought to be done right (as everything else too).
Now, after these preliminaries, I think that the sex described in the present story could have been done better—much better indeed. One of its main weaknesses is due to the absurd characterization of our heroine’s love interest who is basically a sex god virgin doing everything just exactly right: “He knew perfectly well where to touch, rub and kiss, when and how long. He didn't rush but took his precious time. There was a wonderful choreography to it all. . . .” Since he knows and does everything “perfectly well” and is “taking the lead as a man should” (which our heroine follows only all too naturally), there is absolutely zero tension to the sex: no nervousness, no hesitation, no exploration, no nothing. The dominant voice Florian suddenly takes (e.g., “Then show me how much you like it. Cum for me.”) rings all the more hollow for the same reasons: it is not the voice of an inexperienced virgin, but of a stunt cock playing his agreed-upon role as a dom. In consequence, as our heroine is going along and enjoying everything he does to the nth degree—though what he is doing is essentially the same as every other client of hers would be doing when having sex with her—the sex becomes predictable, unbelievable, and boring. (See, anonym quoted above: even though the present story does not offer “pages long description of sex,” the sex is still boring!) In short: it is all just a crafty, fake, and phony love affair. Ironically, not unlike the real thing: a real date with an escort!
That at the story’s end our heroine really seems to make herself believe that she is in love with her sex god ex-virgin just underlines O.J. Berman’s saying quoted above one final time: she is indeed a “r e a l phony.”
(Final side note: There is another anonymous comment, dated 27th November last year, which aptly observes that the present story does not even try to resolve the central conflict of pairing off a prostitute with a former client of hers and asks the question of how on that basis their relationship could “grow?” Well, I would argue that this question only concerns real people, but since the characters in the present story are, at best, only real phonies [or, at worst, failed attempts at characterization], there is no basis for a genuine—let alone growing—relationship anyway!)
To end on a positive note, I may point out that the Christmas atmosphere of the fictitious town was captured quite well and that the numerous descriptions of the different places that our couple went while wandering through the streets were also quite evocative (though, to be honest, I think they also distracted a little from what, narratively speaking, should have been the main objective: the main characters’ love affair). Their banter was also quite witty in places, which made for some amusing diversions from the rather dragging development of their romance (a problem that could be easily rectified with tighter editing.) And, all in all, the narrative will, so to speak, was evident from the start all the way through to the end: a quality that by no means all—and perhaps not even the majority of—stories on here can match!
—AJ
WORKS CITED
Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Penguin Classics, 2000.
Anonymousabout 2 years agoAbsolutelly stuning. I tried to double mark five stars, but does not work. Nice romantic disposition and not pages long descriptions of sex, all the same and borring. Sex is nice in nature, but describing is useless.
Anonymousover 2 years agoWonderful! I take it, she was a whore no more. Hopefully, her pill will fail, the condom break and Irina has a new name, not Therese, but MOMMY. Her last name will be the same as Florian... Please write another chapter!
Anonymousover 2 years agoYes, great read love Europe (dam covid no travel) reading your area at Christmas dam beautiful!! All the to ya in 2022 ! We all need a happy new year !! And yes to part 2 of winter flower but it’s your story
