think of england

He was too tired to rouse himself, and the pair of them looked pityingly down at his limp dick as still as a corpse through the split in his pyjama bottoms. Gingerly she poked a single finger into it, felt its slight weight, watched it slump back lifeless into its former stasis. It really was over. He shrugged as though this were normal, a trivial or commonplace matter that warranted no further comment, but such composure was undermined by the panic in his eyes. He felt as detached from the organ as if it were a cut of meat - which in essence it then was - and nothing greater. She squeezed his arm in some instinctive gesture of comfort and he flinched; it was pity, not comfort, embarrassment even. She was embarrassed for him, embarrassed to be involved. He shook the dick in his hands like skin, tried to laugh it off, as though to shake the dick in his hands like skin until such time as it attained erection was a regular and expected component of his sexual routine, a suggestion that they both knew to be false. He clenched until it stung, expecting to feel something, some hardening, some movement of blood, whatnot, but there was nothing. If anything the dick retreated, deeply unimpressed, swallowed into hair and scrotum. She slid to the edge of the bed and put her brassiere back on, took a sip of what must have been cold tea from the chipped Cath Kidston mug she had left on his bedside table. Her face betrayed little but a slight impatience, perhaps frustration, not the customary self-doubt or insecurity people on occasion discuss in such standoffs; she had no doubt whatsoever about her own considerable attractiveness. He cupped himself in one damp palm and closed his eyes and thrust himself slightly and tried to lose himself in a web of mental erotica but all he could think of was an England felled.

“Please,” she said. “You’re degrading yourself.”

“This has never happened to me before,” he said. “Once or twice at most. Mostly never. A handful of times. It’s not regular, but happens sometimes. Weekly. Meet me in the middle?”

She settled the dick away into his pyjama trousers and pulled the two sides across to cover it, like dog mess under leaves on a picnic, like a curtain closing at the end of a theatrical performance. The end being of some pertinence. She gazed upon both it and he with the detachment of a medic and he was struck by a great shame. He reached out a hand toward her thigh which he gripped lightly, and moved his hand up, and looked at her intently as he pushed his index finger into the heat of her cunt which was remarkably wet in further biological remonstrance of his own shortcomings. It stung a small wound at his nail base. She looked ahead as he did this and not to his eyes, but shifted herself slightly to accommodate his efforts.

“It’s no good,” he said. “I just...”

“Be quiet,” she said, but with no cruelty.

She dressed hastily but precisely and looked at her watch. She would easily make last orders. He pulled the waistband of his pyjamas up and peered in at the dick, still defiantly soft, by then almost invisible against the flesh of his mons and the weight of its foreskin, and he felt utter contempt for his body. He shrugged again but felt how meaningless it was, even while it was happening.

“Tell me this happens to everybody,” he said.

“Goodnight,” she said.

She closed the front door behind her, while he sucked hungrily on his finger and relished her memory.