I share my house with a gay man. Flamboyant, camp and unreasonably stable, he's the perfect roomie.

I'd been sharing the rest of my time with a tall, handsome man. A stock-broker. A successful, charming guy with a penchant for Mexican food. He also had a pathological need to lie, and a complete inability to practice monogamy for more than a few weeks.

It's not like I didn't know. My friends warned me. His friends warned me. But like I said, he was charming. He got into my head, my panties, and my bed. He was most welcome in all of those places. Inevitably he also found his way into my heart, and that protected him for a while. I believed what he said, and I just didn't see what he did.

Long story short, I eventually came to my senses. I kicked him out of my bed, told him he could keep the panties, and to please take his lies with his sorry ass, and never come back.

I tried to move on. I attempted to grieve. I got drunk and let a stranger fuck me, and then woke up beside him the next morning, and let him do it again sober. I'm not saying it was without merit, but it didn't work.

So for a while I just kept moving. Spent my day at the office, and then the evenings at home. I watched a lot of TV, and ate a lot of ice cream.

It took two months before Rick confronted me, and told me I needed to find a way to put this thing away. He stood in front of me after I stumbled out from the shower, unprepared, and unable to defend myself. What can you do when all you have is a lime green towel?

Rick insisted that we needed to talk. He took me by the hand, and convinced me to lie on the sofa so he could berate me. At least that's the way it seemed. In fact, he was ready to help in the only way he knew how.

I lay on my back with my head on the padded arm of the sofa, the towel wrapped around my breasts and barely covering my thighs. I didn't care. I was depressed for a start, and Rick was decidedly uninterested in my body in any case.

He sat then, on a stool at the end of the couch. He had a hairbrush, and as he talked, more quietly than he normally would, he gently brushed my wet hair. He'd done this once before, for no more reason than the fact he was curious, but this time was different.

His brushing gave me the focus I needed to hear what he was saying, and as I lay there more or less motionless, he told me all about what was wrong with my stockbroker, how none of it was my fault, and how if I hadn't been such a nice girl in the first place, it might never have happened.

He understood my love for him, he said. He understood how I was broken and dysfunctional. He understood my getting drunk and fucking a stranger. But it wasn't healthy, Rick warned me, as the brush slid through my long hair, to continue to dwell on it. The thing was over, the man was gone, and it was time to move on.

I listened, and tried to accept what Rick said. I nodded now and then, and mumbled a response or two.

I wept. For the first time since all of this finished, I cried. Openly and without trying to stop, I bawled my eyes out, and somehow the hurt flowed with the tears. Not all of it. It's not as though it could just be washed away, but perhaps enough.

I lay in silence after that, listening without actually listening to Rick, liking the feel of the brush in my hair, and the timbre of his voice, and the silence of the house.

I stayed still, with my eyes closed and my mind wandering, and perhaps I slept for a minute or two.

Somehow, in any case, an idea slid quickly through my mind. A sex dream perhaps, whether I was actually asleep or not. One of those vaguely disturbing and unreasonably arousing scenarios that don't make sense, but still leave you dripping with need.

I was more deliberately still then, hearing Rick's voice still, and feeling his hands on my hair. My thighs though, were moving. I could feel the heat rising in me, and the need. I knew I was damp, and even though I couldn't quite recall why, I knew it was something naughty, and sexy, and delicious.

I also knew that this was the last step. To move on, I had to take back control of myself. It's not like I hadn't masturbated. Wanking with a stockbroker was great fun, and he liked to have me do it in the car.

He could drive while I sat beside him, my short skirt flicked up around my waist, slinky panties a wisp of pink about my ankles. I would spread my knees and take care of my other pinkness for him, the fingers of one hand deep inside myself while the other was busy strumming my desperate clit. Desperate for release, desperate to please him, desperate to not be afraid when someone saw us, as they inevitably did.

I masturbated alone too, talking to him on the phone. He was, he told me, at a conference, or some out of town meeting. I found out that he was seldom alone on these occasions. He liked to have an audience to listen to me while he fucked them from behind.

And when he wasn't available, legitimately busy or occupied with someone who would make too much noise for me to continue to pretend, he encouraged me to pleasure myself, as he said he would if he were with me.

If he was with me, and we weren't in public, masturbation was seldom on the menu. He wanted something a little more direct, a little more involved. He'd take me from beneath sometimes, allowing me the illusion of control, as he thrust and lifted, burying his sizable cock in me, whether I was ready or not. I couldn't say I didn't like it. I'd have preferred something a little less aggressive, I think.