Well, we had liftoff. The elusive male orgasm was achieved. I think I know what precipitated the precipitation, twice.
The first time, we had returned from an evening in Stringfellows, the upmarket lapdancing club. I’d been forced to go along for a piece I’m researching about life post #MeToo, and was damned if I’d go alone. So I asked David. ‘OK, but I’m not that keen,’ he said.
I told him this was total nonsense. That he’d told me he’d once gone to a brothel with a couple of male colleagues. ‘That was the 80s,’ he said. So he came along. He professed not to be aroused, even after a private naked dance* with a French woman called Valerie with breasts as fake as my face. ‘Why didn’t you find it sexy?’ I demanded. ‘What’s wrong with you?’
‘It was very dark. I forgot my glasses.’
Anyway, the dance had the desired effect, later.
The second time was after we had been to a special screening of The English Patient, with full orchestra, at the Albert Hall. As we wandered round, trying to find our seats, I reminded him I’d taken him there to see Siouxsie and the Banshees, on 1 October 1983. And that after the concert, he had concertina’d into my red Mini Cooper, and said he was hungry. ‘Oh, goody,’ I’d thought. ‘He’s going to take me out to dinner, at last!’ Instead, he asked me to pull up outside a shop on Sloane Street, and returned to the car with a meat pie, which he proceeded to eat in the front seat, scattering crumbs.
‘It was a pretty obvious sign I liked you,’ I told him as Ralph Fiennes hove into view. ‘I invited you to a punk concert. That was a really brave thing for a shy, hirsute virgin barely in her 20s to do.’
‘Can you stop living in the past?’ he said. ‘What’s done is done.’
But I’d have loved to have had sex with him back then. I’d built him up in my mind. How it would happen. I was so obsessed, I’d cycle home from my job in Soho, take off all my make-up, and put it back on again. Just in case he knocked on my door and asked to put something in my oven again (his house next door was a work in progress; it resembled the set of The Young Ones, only worse).
Anyway, once back at my flat after the film, my throat sore from sobbing, we achieved liftoff again. Maybe I was more enthusiastic, remembering his lovely face and my unrequited lust from all those years ago. I don’t think I was picturing Naveen Andrews.
He has just texted (David, not Naveen, sadly), to say he has let the cats, my cats, out into his ‘garden’. The text starts well, but ends badly.
‘Hi, I opened the kitchen door this morning, all is well. Everyone has been out, in, out, in, out, in, etc. So all is well. RIP sweet Dream. October is a hard month for you, isn’t it? Hope you’re well. X’
You see, he tries. He is monitoring the number of times the cats go in and out of his ‘garden’, he has remembered I lost Dream a year ago, but he ends it all with, ‘Hope you’re well.’ I put that at the beginning of an email to my editor. David has just had mind-blowing sex with me, twice. I’m more effusive to the Waitrose delivery man if he turns up on time and tells me there have been no substitutions. It reminds me of when I left Michael Hutchence in a room at the Dorchester after a night of semi-passion, and he bade me farewell with a, ‘Thank you for your support.’
But thinking of #MeToo got me wondering whether I’ve gone from being a nervous virgin to someone so strident I’ve just texted him what to wear for a dinner party tomorrow night in Soho: ‘Black Burberry suit and box fresh white T-shirt is fine, no jeans as it’s quite smart, but not shirt and tie smart.’ He replies: ‘Wilco.’
Problem is, you can never be too specific when it comes to men. He turns up as required, except his white T is crumpled, and has a photo of Oliver Reed and Keith Moon on the front. ‘It’s my fault,’ I say, shaking my head sadly. ‘I should have been more specific and typed “ironed white T-shirt with no photos, appliqués or pockets”. I should have known you’d go off-piste.’
‘I hate skiing,’ he says. ‘The cold makes my teeth hurt. I’ve just lost another one, look.’
Oh dear God. It’s like the episode where Ross bleaches his teeth. ‘OK, well, tonight, don’t smile.’
‘It’s not that likely, is it?’ he says, opening the Uber door.
*£30, paid for by me and put on expenses. I can only imagine my managing editor’s face when he unfurls the receipt…