She had come up to switch off the lights. We silently walked into each other's arms and kissed. When we disentangled, I was already hard. She started for my zipper, and I stopped her.

    "Are you wet?"

    "Of course."

    "Then we can skip it. Hurry up."

    As she pushed herself up onto the desk, I saw that she wasn't wearing any panties.

    "Oh..."

    Maintaining a smug look on her face, she leaned forward, unzipped me and took it out. She stroked it several times and held it in place for me to push it in. I looked down and felt a deep sense of gratitude, seeing how everything is in its right place: the thick, luxuriant crop of wiry pubic hair, her confident pink and dark flesh.

    I drove it home and it was a true quickie. She came (biting into my shoulder to soundproof her orgasm) but I didn't.

    "Do you want me to finish you off?"

    "It's ok."

    "I'll see you in a few days then."

    "Don't forget your panties."

    A quick peck followed by a pat on the ass and off she went.

    I often feel bad and downright guilty. I mean, the world's in such a horrid state and all I'm doing is thinking about sex twenty four seven. Would you laugh if I told you that lately, I've been more than a tad concerned about the environment? And what's gotten me more worried in the past two days is the fact that the weather has been so goddamned gorgeous, all white fluffy clouds and blue skies. Yet, the heat feels different somehow. Thinking about it now, it's a lot like me. Calm in appearance, but agitated inside, like how they say in Chinese, a knife concealed in a smile (xiao li chang dao). And so, I haven't been feeling a lot like writing, and feeling shitty about this as well. You know what they say, damned if you do and damned if you don't, so here's how the story goes.

    There's this coffeeshop that I visit on a regular basis, one of those that's planted smack in a more upscale neighbourhood. By no means it's the perfect place to hang out. While the tables are not filthy, they're sticky enough to attract the occasional fly, which is real fucking annoying when I'm trying to eat, drink, read, write and listen to music all at the same time. But it's a convenient port in a storm.

    The fella who runs the joint is this thuggish-looking guy who's two years my junior. The first impression that I had of him was this: an immature streak, prone to aggression. He's no Adonis, but I'm sure that many Chinese girls of parochial stock found his boyish charm an immense turn-on. I get the feeling that his wife (who's the cream of this sandwich little post) was one of these girls, and that their first-born was conceived out of wedlock. I have no way of verifying this of course, but sometimes the gut feeling is all that matters until proven wrong. Come to think of it, it's a lot like the scientific method.

    Life imitates Friendster, and after a few weeks, we found out that the three of us have a mutual acquaintance who, the last I knew, was working as medical sales rep. Apparently we used to hang out in the same bar a couple of years back. I stopped going there after finding out that a little fame can be a real bitch. But apparently I leave a pretty strong impression on people, but not vice versa.

    Friendliness is such an effective tool of seduction, and I'm the perfect sucker for it. She would always make it a point to go the extra mile for me, or instance, making sure that she's the one who gets my orders even when she's busy, constantly making eye-contact and making a big show of being curious about the things that I scribble and sketch in my spiral notebook. There was once when two loose sheets of A4 paper (with my smut written all over it, sketches and all) scudded to the mosaic floor just as she was sauntering towards my table with a cup of tea in a saucer, held precariously in her left hand between two fingers. Upon seeing the paper on the floor, she uttered, "Aiya, you dropped something..." and crouched down at once to pick them up, all trembling fingers and clicking clacking cup and saucer. I practically jumped from the chair to pick them up myself.

    "How much?"

    "Tree-door-la," she sang, with a frivolous air bordering on schoolgirl vacuity, flippant and fickle right down to her slight overbite and her perfectly white teeth. As she walked away I took in her flawless Chinese complexion and the raunchy gait of her backside, and with a cigarette tightly clenched between my teeth, soon found myself laughing like an idiot to myself.

    And so it turned out that she was a pervert of sorts. What she loved most wasn't fucking, but watching me jerk off to the homemade porn that she and her husband shot. She had a real dirty-looking cunt, and every time I look at it the flaps remind me of a charred pitcher plant. Perhaps due to having seen too many bukkake videos when she was young, she had an eerie appetite for come. One of the other things that she enjoyed was having me ejaculate all over her clothes.

    "Aren't you worried about the stains?"

    "No, why?"

    "He might see it."

    "Well I'm the one who does the laundry."

    "What if he sees it when you're wearing it?"

    "Oh. Well in our line of work, it's natural to get splattered by all kinds of stuff."

    "Including your customers' come?"

    She found this last statement so funny that she started pulling off her shorts. The reward that she offered was a chance to watch her frig herself, wherein the added bonus was seeing her cunt for the first time because up till then, I had only seen it through her homemade porn. The entire scenario and this particular juxtaposition of limbs always evoke in me a deep sense of regret. There was once when Elise (a Singaporean ex) and I were fooling around in a locked room in exactly this position. I was masturbating while she was furiously fingerfucking herself, and the regret was that I came all over her thighs and not in her mouth the way I had really wanted to.

    "Can I come in your mouth?"

    "Yes, hurry up. I come really quickly when I finger myself."

    The ejaculation wasn't spectacular, given that I had come barely fifteen minutes ago. There was a moderately thick globule, but the rest was just watery semen. She played around with it in her mouth as she shuddered and came. Her thick distended labia hung down thick and heavy like renegade meat from a generous sandwich, a slight trickle of mayo leaking from the crack. All of a sudden I was keenly aware of how much she looked and smelled like an aunt, even though she was only about 28. It radiated from the pungent bouquet emanating from the wispy hair on her armpits and extended to her sweaty, hair-plastered neck, her golden earrings and necklace down to her exceedingly hairy, worn-out cunt.

    In a story like this, you'd imagine that there'd be lots of fucking. But we never fucked even once when we were together. One day her husband sat down at my table and I soon found out that she had run off with someone else. He gained uncontested custody of their two children and apparently she hadn't even bothered fighting for them. As he spilled his guts to me, I had this peculiar feeling that he was casting me a suspicious eye, as if to imply that I was in cahoots with the property developer that she had run off with.

    "Bitches," he said, grimacing through gritted teeth and a plume of smoke.

    I took another sip of that plasticky almond tea and nodded.

fifty floors down lay his smashed-up and mangled body, the memory of their last kiss and last fuck splattered all over the pavement, getting cold like the rest of that half-digested meal of wine and foie gras.

just what is it that happens when a body dies?

do we wake up from yet another dream, another life?