- Helen
- Mandy
- The Third
Chapter 20: The Lawyer Who Left (University Third Year)
https://freeimage.host/i/FbE32YQ
(AI-generated image of Elle)
Disclaimer: All names, characters, and events in this chapter are fictional, although inspired by the lived experiences and memories of the protagonist. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Settings and timelines have been adapted for narrative purposes.
Elle was unlike anyone I’d ever met.
Not just older, but also sharper. Beautiful in a way that didn’t try to please.
She was Eurasian, and you could tell at once: skin like golden almond cream, high cheekbones, and full lips that seemed perpetually on the edge of a smirk. Her eyes, a clear grey-green, almost feline, held the kind of gaze that made you feel as if she had already filed you away in a drawer labeled “
temporary
.”
Her voice was precise, each word clipped like courtroom evidence, softened only by a hint of posh London polish. It wasn’t the kind of accent you pick up from Channel 5; it was from childhood piano lessons, summers in Cornwall, a British stepfather who once served in colonial Hong Kong.
We met at a debate society mixer at Ice Cold Beer on Emerald Hill. I’d shown up late, in jeans and a wrinkled tee, while the law kids floated around in ironed linen and cologne that cost more than my monthly allowance.
“You don’t look like you belong here,” she said, her eyes scanning me like a hostile witness.
“I probably don’t.”
“That’s a shame,” she said, swirling her gin. “You’re interesting to look at.”
She led. I followed.
The first time I saw her apartment, an airy second-floor walk-up near Holland Grove, it smelled of bergamot and old teak. Her apartment felt like a curated reflection of her interior world: elegant, curated, severe. Between dense legal tomes and volumes of
The Economist
, I spotted well-worn copies of
Delta of Venus
and
A Spy in the House of Love
. “Anaïs Nin,” she said, noticing my gaze. “For when the law fails to explain desire.” She spoke the name like a knowing password, then stepped closer and touched my chest lightly, as if preparing to rewrite something there.
She then poured me wine without asking what I liked.
Next she kissed me, unannounced, unhurried. Her lips tasted like tobacco and dark grapes. She pressed herself against me in silence, her hands slipping under my shirt to trace the ridges of my ribs, then my waistband. Her touch was slow, deliberate, like she was exploring a language she already knew fluently.
We didn’t undress. She did.
She stepped out of her skirt with practiced grace, revealing smooth, tawny legs and black silk panties. She pulled off her top in one motion, revealing small, firm breasts and faint tan lines, evidence of Bali, perhaps, or Phuket. Her body was lithe, dancer-like, with a thin scar along her left hip that I’d later learn was from a childhood surgery she refused to talk about.
When she pulled me to the bed, it wasn’t with urgency; it was with authority.
She straddled me like a verdict being passed. Moved with rhythm and restraint, teasing each motion like an argument being built. Her hips rotated with near-mechanical precision, controlling the pace, watching my reactions. Every shift of her weight, every contraction of her thighs, seemed calculated, not to seduce, but to dominate.
Her breathing remained quiet, measured, a slight gasp here, a hiss between teeth there, but never uncontrolled. I felt like I was being studied, dissected, consumed.
She whispered instructions, not crude, but clinical.
“Slower. Now harder. Good. No talking.”
And when I climaxed, she didn’t flinch; she just exhaled and lay back, draping one arm over her forehead like a verdict had been delivered.
Later, she lit a slim cigarette, lying naked on a rattan daybed, the ceiling fan turning above us like an indifferent witness. She began discussing constitutional law cases, punctuating each reference with long drags and ash flicked onto a vintage glass tray.
That was our rhythm.
For several nights I came over, it was like being summoned. There was no affection, no cuddling. Just intensity: raw and intellectual.
We made love in the way lawyers argue: layered, passionate, but always under control.
She liked being on top
always
and when she let me lead, it was on probation. The moment I lost rhythm or focus, she took back control without a word. Sometimes she tied my wrists with her silk sash and rode me until my legs shook. Sometimes she asked me to describe how she looked, in exacting detail, before she allowed me to touch her.
It never felt performative. It felt deliberate.
Like she was imprinting herself onto me… a brand that would linger long after the heat faded.
But there were glimpses.
Once, after I brushed her hair aside during a quiet moment, she let her head rest on my shoulder. She fell asleep that way, breathing softly. In that moment, I dared to hope.
The next morning, I asked the question.
“What are we?”
She was in the middle of buttoning up her blouse, white with navy piping, the kind you’d expect from Raffles Place on a Monday.
She didn’t turn.
“We’re a moment.”
I tried to smile. “And when the moment ends?”
She turned then, briefly. Lit a cigarette.
“Then we thank it for being beautiful… and let it
die
.”
A week later, she was gone.
No call. No note. Not even a forwarding email.
A classmate from law said she’d flown off early, to a prestigious clerkship in Europe.
I said nothing. Just nodded and left.
Years later, I saw her in a magazine feature. Elle, now a rising star in international law, standing at a podium somewhere in Europe, elegant in a navy pantsuit and pearl earrings. The caption called her a “force of nature.”
She hadn’t changed. Still breathtaking. Still unreadable.
Elle never promised forever.
But she carved herself into me with such precision, it took years to stop bleeding.
And for the first time, I understood what it meant to be loved not tenderly, but expertly.
To be desired not as a person, but as a memory waiting to be shelved.
[End of Chapter 20]
Mirror Site:
Chapter 21: Hollow Interludes (Just Before Leaving for London)
Disclaimer: All names, characters, and events in this chapter are fictional, although inspired by the lived experiences and memories of the protagonist. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Settings and timelines have been adapted for narrative purposes.
⸻
Elle left a silence.
Not the kind that echoes, but the kind that settles, like the heaviness before a thunderstorm.
It lived in my chest. Pressed against my ribs. Stole my appetite.
I didn’t want love. I didn’t even want company.
I just wanted touch, bodies without souls, hands without meaning.
Skin, heat, breath… anything to remind myself I still existed.
⸻
https://freeimage.host/i/FbEfg94
(AI-generated image of Helen)
Helen was a freshman from FASS, with a bubbly laugh and oversized glasses that fogged up every time she stepped out of aircon. We met during an arts bash at Zouk when it was still new and full of older regulars who smoked inside without shame.
She was sweet, naïve, a little starstruck. She told me she liked my “sad poet” vibe and said I looked like someone from a Leslie Cheung film.
Her room at Temasek Hall was tiny but tidy, Hello Kitty bedsheets, a lava lamp, a cassette deck playing Jacky Cheung softly in the background. The air smelled of fabric softener and watermelon shampoo.
We kissed gently at first, her lips soft and uncertain, as if she was learning the steps of a dance she’d only ever watched from the sidelines. She giggled between kisses, her fingers brushing my cheeks, her laughter unfiltered, like someone startled by her own daring. I was only her second partner.
Her hands trembled when they reached for my belt. I caught them lightly, then guided them down, easing the moment into something slower, steadier. She looked at me, wide-eyed, as if asking for permission she didn’t know how to phrase.
Her clothes came off piece by piece: a pink tank top, denim shorts, a white bra with a tiny ribbon in the center. When she finally lay back, knees drawn nervously together, I paused.
“You okay?” I asked.
She nodded quickly, forcing a smile. “I want to learn.”
Her body was petite, still soft in the ways youth hadn’t yet sculpted away. Her breasts fit perfectly into my palms, her stomach rose and fell with every uncertain breath. I kissed her collarbone, then the slope of her chest. She shivered, not from cold, but anticipation she wasn’t quite ready to name.
She moved like someone trying to remember instructions. Her hips jerked uncertainly, chasing rhythm, then breaking it. She whispered “Is this okay?” more than once. I nodded each time, trying to ease the pressure she’d placed on herself.
At one point, she crawled down and began sucking gently on my toes, her brow furrowed in concentration.
I blinked, startled. “Uh… you alright?”
She looked up, hopeful. “I read somewhere this is a turn-on for guys.”
I smiled gently. “Maybe not all guys.”
She giggled again, embarrassed, and returned to kissing my chest instead.
When we finally joined, she gasped at the sensation, clinging tightly to my shoulders, her legs wrapped awkwardly around me. She was warm and wet, but tense, her body unsure whether to embrace the moment or brace against it.
I kept the rhythm slow, careful not to overwhelm her, though each movement felt increasingly disconnected from emotion. I wasn’t there, not really. I was in the motion, the act, but my mind hovered somewhere far above the ceiling, detached, watching two people try to find meaning where there was only need.
I came too quickly, not from desire, but guilt. Guilt that I was giving her something that looked like intimacy, but carried none of its weight.
Afterward, she curled against me, head resting on my chest, fingers drawing lazy shapes on my abdomen.
“Did I do okay?” she asked, voice small, almost childlike.
“You were lovely,” I lied.
She smiled and closed her eyes. I stared at the ceiling, feeling like a thief, not of innocence, but of expectation. She wanted sweetness to mean something. I only wanted to feel something, anything, that could drown out the echo of someone who had already left.
⸻
https://freeimage.host/i/FbECfuR
(AI-generated image of Mandy)
Mandy was a third-year accountancy student: bold, curvy, and unbothered. She worked part-time at a beauty salon in Jurong and carried herself like she already knew how the world worked and where men fit into it.
We met at Sparks, the new club at Orchard Hotel, where the air was thick with CK One, sweat, and laser lights bouncing off mirrored walls. I was at the bar, brooding into a gin tonic, when she leaned over and said, “You look like you need a good massage.”
I raised an eyebrow. “That obvious?”
She smirked. “Come. You look too tense to dance.”
Her rental flat in Bukit Ho Swee was dim and narrow, with no aircon, just a squeaky standing fan rotating like it was watching us. There was a thin mattress on the floor, textbooks scattered beside bottles of massage oil and a half-used tube of deep heat. The air smelled like lemongrass, liniment, and ambition.
Mandy wasted no time.
She stripped out of her black tank top and denim cutoffs, revealing smooth, bronzed skin, firm breasts, and a small tattoo of a purple phoenix just above her hipbone. There was no coyness, no small talk. She unhooked her bra, stepped out of her panties, and beckoned me to lie down.
I obeyed.
She oiled her hands with practiced ease and began kneading my shoulders, her fingers firm, expert, relentless. Every press felt like it was meant to erase something: tension, memory, maybe even conscience. I groaned once, and she chuckled.
“See? Told you. You needed this.”
Then she straddled me.
Her thighs pressed tightly against my hips as she leaned forward, her breasts brushing my chest, her breath hot against my ear. She bit my earlobe, then dragged her nails slowly down my ribs, leaving thin red trails that stung just enough to remind me I was alive.
She didn’t ask. She simply reached between us, positioned me against her, and slid down with a low, satisfied hum.
Her pace was unrelenting, fast, hard, and focused. Her hips moved like she was in control of gravity itself, using the rise and fall of her weight to draw every sound she wanted from me. She watched my face the whole time, not with tenderness, but curiosity, like a scientist testing her hypothesis.
I tried to kiss her.
She turned her head.
“This isn’t that kind of night.”
Her words landed like a slap, not painful, but cold. A reminder of the rules I hadn’t been told but was now expected to follow.
We changed positions only when she felt like it, gripping my wrists above my head, hovering just out of reach, her body firm, commanding. She moved with athletic confidence, her sweat slick against mine, her voice low and steady as she rode wave after wave of her own pleasure.
When I finished, she didn’t collapse into me. She climbed off calmly, reached for a towel, and wiped herself down with a few swift swipes. Then she sat cross-legged on the mattress.
“You should try bringing ice cubes next time,” she said. “More fun.”
I tried to laugh. It came out hollow.
We lay there for a few minutes, the fan squeaking in the corner. She didn’t ask for my pager number. I didn’t offer mine.
There was no next time.
⸻
https://freeimage.host/i/FbEnCRj
(AI-generated image of The Third)
I don’t remember her name.
She had thick bangs, too much powder on her face, and a silver butterfly clip in her hair. I think she was in Year Two, maybe Communications, maybe Business. We met at an Inter-Faculty party at a West Coast condominium function room, the kind with plastic chairs, lukewarm catering trays, and a lone stereo playing Emil Chau on repeat.
She danced with a kind of loose, distracted energy, swaying rather than moving, beer in one hand, occasionally laughing at nothing. I didn’t approach her. She approached me.
“You look bored,” she said, eyes half-lidded.
“I am.”
“Come on. Let’s go somewhere quieter.”
The guest room was dim and smelled of talcum powder and stale air. There was a sagging mattress on the floor, mismatched bedsheets, and an oscillating fan clicking faintly as it turned left to right.
She kissed me lazily, not with hunger, but with habit. Her lipstick had a faint cherry taste, and her breath smelled faintly of Red Bull and rum. We undressed without urgency. Her top slipped over her head, bra unclasped with one hand. I fumbled with the hooks. She didn’t help.
Her breasts were soft, her skin warm but perfumed like she’d stepped through someone else’s routine: overly powdered, deodorized, and masked. She lay back without speaking, one arm behind her head, the other resting on her belly.
Foreplay was brief, almost procedural. Her hands barely moved. My kisses landed without response.
When I entered her, her legs parted instinctively. She didn’t guide me, didn’t resist. Her body moved, yes, but just enough to let it happen. Her eyes stayed open at first, watching the ceiling, then slowly turned away toward the wall.
There was no moaning. No breathlessness. Just quiet breaths, the occasional shift of her hips, and the squeak of the mattress underneath us.
I tried to imagine gorgeous Elle, her voice, her scent, her words in the dark. But the memory refused to rise. All I could feel was the present: this anonymous body, this nameless encounter, this numb weight of motion without emotion.
I finished quickly, quietly.
She didn’t speak. Just turned on her side and adjusted the pillow under her head.
I lay there beside her, staring at the ceiling fan turning above us like a slow metronome ticking out the measure of another night I’d soon forget.
In the morning, she offered me instant coffee from a Tiger flask, her eyeliner slightly smudged, hair now tied into a loose ponytail. She sipped from her own cup and asked:
“You got a girlfriend?”
“Not really,” I said, eyes on the window.
Outside, the sky was grey. HDB blocks stretched across the horizon, laundry fluttering listlessly on bamboo poles.
She didn’t ask for my name.
I didn’t ask for hers.
We just finished our coffee in silence, then went our separate ways.
⸻
I was leaving for London in a few weeks.
My room back home was half-packed. Passport tucked into a manila folder. Visa letters folded neatly beside the edge of my desk. I moved through campus like a ghost, though library, down lecture halls, past kopitiams, everything too familiar, too small, like a world I had already begun to leave.
I wasn’t looking for love. I wasn’t even sure I believed in it anymore.
What I wanted was simpler, sadder, just to be touched, just to be wanted, just to feel something other than the quiet ache Elle had left behind.
So I chased warmth wherever I could find it.
One bed at a time.
Each girl left something behind.
Helen’s nervous sweetness, so eager to please it hurt.
Mandy’s unflinching strength, a mirror I wasn’t ready to look into.
The third’s silence, her presence like a blank page I projected all my loneliness onto.
None of them reached the place Elle had scorched clean.
But they weren’t to blame.
They had their own hopes, their own pain, their own reasons for letting me in.
I didn’t learn much during those nights. Not about love. Not about myself.
But I began to understand something quieter: that loneliness isn’t cured by proximity. That not every touch heals.
And that using others to fill your emptiness only deepens it in the morning.
I told myself London would be a reset.
A clean slate. New air. New lovers.
New chances to remember who I was before I mistook being needed for being whole.
Before Michelle.
Before Elle.
Before I started calling absence a kind of love.
[End of Chapter 21]
Mirror Site:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/68...ters/177601556
Note from Casanova:
Some women leave you wanting; others leave you wondering why you ever wanted at all. Michelle taught me that conquest without care leaves a mess no one wants to clean up. Elle showed me what it’s like to be burned by brilliance, not by love, but by someone who knew exactly how far to let you in before closing the door. And the girls after? They weren’t mistakes… just mirrors held up to a version of myself I was trying to escape, one night at a time. I thought I was collecting moments; truth is, I was just losing pieces of myself during this period.
Chapter 22: Katya from Saint Petersburg (London Exchange Year)
https://freeimage.host/i/FbEz5g9
(AI-generated image of Katya)
Disclaimer: All names, characters, and events in this chapter are fictional, although inspired by the lived experiences and memories of the protagonist. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Settings and timelines have been adapted for narrative purposes.
⸻
London.
Grey skies, diesel fog, newsagents selling
The Sun
for 30p, and pubs that smelled of vinegar crisps and spilled ale. I arrived in the winter, sometime in the early nineties, suitcase scuffed, ears cold, mind spinning from the sudden quiet of distance.
My university was all Georgian façades and ivy-covered gates, where the students wore long overcoats, talked loudly about Derrida in basement bars, and smoked roll-ups on stone steps with studied melancholy.
For the first time in years, I was unlabelled.
No one knew my past. Not the women I had touched, not the ones who’d left me colder than they found me. In Singapore, I had built a reputation. In London, I had none.
And that freedom,
terrifying at first
, quickly became addictive.
I could be anyone here.
That’s where I met
her
.
Katya.
She was sitting in the university café, framed by condensation on the window. She wore a thick grey wool coat, her platinum-blonde hair twisted into a loose bun. One leg draped over the other with the kind of lazy elegance that made people stop mid-sentence.
She was sketching something on a napkin… a face, a cathedral, I couldn’t tell.
She looked up.
Held my gaze.
Didn’t smile.
“You want to sit, or just keep staring like British pervert?” she asked in a thick Russian accent.
I sat.
We talked. She was 22, from Saint Petersburg, doing a term in comparative literature. She quoted Pushkin, rolled her cigarettes with lavender paper, and called British men “soft like pudding.”
She was luminous, but hard. Polished, but sharp.
Later that week, she told me over a pint in Soho:
“I model sometimes. And sometimes, men pay me to have dinner. Or more. It pays rent. I’m not ashamed.”
“An escort?” I asked carefully.
She didn’t flinch. “You call it that. I call it survival.”
I didn’t care.
Or maybe I did, but not enough to walk away.
⸻
Her flat was on Euston Road, tucked above a discount Polish grocery. Cold, cramped, and scented with incense and citrus peel. Books stacked by the bed, Nabokov, Orwell,
The Master and Margarita
, and a scratched Soviet-era record player in the corner.
She poured us tea laced with brandy.
No music. No preamble.
She kissed me.
Her lips were dry but warm, and her fingers gripped the back of my neck like she owned the room and everything in it. When she pulled me to her mattress, her coat slipped off in one elegant motion. Beneath, she wore only a loose white shirt, unbuttoned at the top, bare thighs gleaming against the dull light from the window.
I was trembling. I had not made love with a Caucasian woman before.
I fumbled with the condom. Dropped it. Picked it up. Put it on.
Touched her too roughly, too quickly.
She pulled back slightly, smiled.
“Gentle, comrade,” she whispered. “You’re not climbing mountain.”
Her body was lean, supple, hips smooth, breasts small and tipped with pale rose. She had a faint scar across her abdomen, and a tiny Hello Kitty tattoo below her hipbone that looked absurd and erotic all at once.
She took control.
Straddled me slowly. Lowered herself with a sharp exhale, eyes fixed on mine.
Her walls clenched around me as she moved… a slow, grinding rhythm that grew faster only when I began to match her. She held my wrists above my head and whispered filthy things in Russian I didn’t understand.
It was raw.
Not romantic, but intimate.
We made love again, later, under a blanket of coats. This time slower.
She pressed her forehead to mine. Told me to breathe with her.
“Everyone’s same,” she whispered. “When lights go off. Just skin.”
⸻
Afterwards, she smoked by the window, wrapped in a wool shawl. Her silhouette ghosted in the frost on the glass.
“Russia is changing,” she said. “There’s no Soviet Union now.
My city… we used to be Leningrad. Now we are Saint Petersburg again. Everyone is free. And scared.”
I watched her exhale a long plume of smoke.
“I go back in two weeks. Maybe help my cousin run hostel. Maybe become teacher. Or rich gangster’s girlfriend.” She shrugged. “World is strange now.”
I said nothing. Just lay there. Watching her like a painting I would never see again.
When she left, it was sudden. A knock on my door. A kiss. A shrug.
“Don’t become boring, Asian boy,” she said. “Stay curious.”
⸻
Katya taught me that desire doesn’t ask for permission.
That history and race and shame melt under the heat of two people who want.
She didn’t rescue me from my insecurities; she dissolved them. Not with affection, but with indifference.
And somehow, that was
enough
.
She was a woman who didn’t care who I’d been, where I came from, or how many wrong moves I made in bed. She made me feel like I belonged in the world, even if only for an hour at a time.
And when she was gone, the room felt colder.
Not because she took something with her.
But because, I’d wanted her to stay.
[End of Chapter 22]
Mirror Site:
Chapter 23: The Girl With the Doraemon Tattoo (London Exchange Year)
https://freeimage.host/i/FbEujd7
(AI-generated image of Mira)
Disclaimer: All names, characters, and events in this chapter are fictional, although inspired by the lived experiences and memories of the protagonist. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Settings and timelines have been adapted for narrative purposes.
⸻
You don’t always fall for a body.
Sometimes, it’s the way she burns incense at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday because “the light feels spiritual.” Or how she sings off-key to Kate Bush while threading homemade beads into your wrist and calls it a “blessing.”
I met Mira on a cold Sunday at the Camden Lock market.
The air smelled of roasted chestnuts and diesel. I was nursing a hangover with a greasy falafel wrap. She was hunched behind a folding stall, selling handmade bracelets and self-published booklets of poetry wrapped in twine.
She wore a thick wool jumper two sizes too big, yoga pants fraying at the cuffs, and an orange beanie with a felt flower safety-pinned to it. Her short black curls peeked out like wild ivy. Her cheeks were flushed, her fingers stained with chalk pastel.
I paused at a canvas of a blue woman meditating under a pink moon.
“That’s me,” she said, in a lilting accent I later learned was Bulgarian.
“Painted it after my divorce. It brings luck if you put it by your window.”
“You were
married
?” I asked, incredulous. She couldn’t be more than 22.
“Briefly. He liked vodka and shouting at plants.”
That made me laugh. She laughed too, loud and unselfconscious, the kind that made strangers look over and smile. She told me I had tired eyes. Offered me tea from a thermos. Said she taught yoga in a studio above a fishmonger’s in Chalk Farm.
I showed up the next week.
She taught barefoot, to cassette tapes of Bulgarian folk music. The poses were more emotional than technical. “Lift your hips like a sunflower! Exhale like you’re flirting with a mountain!”
I stayed for the chaos. For her.
⸻
Mira wasn’t like Elle, who demanded perfection, or Katya, who wielded seduction like a weapon.
Mira
flowed
.
She invited me to her flat one evening, two rooms above a Turkish bakery, all mismatched cushions and flickering candles. Her daughter, Ilka, four years old and full of questions, offered me a carrot and called me “Mister Cloud.”
Mira served me pasta with rose petals and said it “helps your third eye digest.”
She showed me her Doraemon tattoo, peeking just above her left thigh, blue and slightly faded.
“I got him at 16 when I was obsessed with Japanese cartoons,” she said. “He’s round. Wise. Brings gadgets. I trust him more than most humans.”
We listened to a dusty Portishead cassette on her player, the sound warped but still sultry. She lit sandalwood, curled up next to me, and after a long silence said:
“You look like someone who hasn’t been touched kindly in a while.”
Ilka was already asleep, curled in a pile of blankets in the corner of the room. I remember glancing over, seeing her small hand sticking out, holding her Doraemon plushie. Mira said she liked to fall asleep near warmth, “
She’s a little moon. Always orbiting.
”
I smiled then, not knowing how strange memory can become, how time blurs the edges of things until one day, you mistake the echo of a past life for something new. But that came later.
She kissed me softly, once, then again, longer.
She undressed in front of me like it was the most natural thing in the world, her top pulled over her head in a lazy arch. She was small, warm, lightly freckled across her shoulders and chest. Her body was unshaved, unpolished, but radiated something earthy: raw comfort.
“Touch me like you’re learning a song,” she whispered.
I did.
She guided my hands, my breath. Slowed me when I rushed. Made me laugh when I fumbled. When I entered her, she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and whispered affirmations in Bulgarian, the meaning unknown but the rhythm soothing.
It wasn’t acrobatic. It wasn’t perfect.
But it was the first time in months that I felt safe inside someone.
We moved slowly.
Her hips rose to meet mine, steady and sure. She smiled through it, not out of amusement, but reverence. Her fingers laced with mine. Her body responded like it was welcoming an old friend home.
Afterwards, she lay with her face pressed to my chest, humming.
“You’re holding sadness in your lungs,” she murmured. “But it’s okay. I have space.”
⸻
We weren’t a couple. She wasn’t interested in labels. I wasn’t ready for commitments.
But for a few weeks, her home became sanctuary. Doraemon grinned from a magnet on her fridge. Ilka danced around in tulle skirts. We made love whenever the mood struck, once even on the yoga mats, once under a table while candles flickered above.
Each time was different. Sometimes silly, sometimes tender, sometimes intense.
But always human. Always real.
Then one day, she told me she was leaving.
“I’m going with a man,” she said. “He’s older. Very rich. From Bahrain. He wants a second wife.”
I blinked. “You’re serious?”
She nodded. “He says Ilka can have ponies. I don’t care for ponies. But she does.”
I laughed. She smiled. “He also said I can keep doing yoga. And that he likes my laugh.”
We made love one last time, slow, unhurried, like a goodbye that didn’t want to admit it was one. After, she held me tightly.
“You’re kind,” she said. “But you’re a cloud, Mr Cloud. I can’t live in clouds.”
⸻
A year later, I searched for her.
No trace. No address. No more postcards.
Just one faded memory: a photograph I stumbled upon in an old photo album mailed from London: Mira in a sun-drenched desert, veiled but smiling. Ilka holding her hand. An Arab man in white robes standing beside them.
Mira taught me that joy doesn’t need order. That chaos, if honest, can heal.
She never tried to fix me. Just held me, long enough to remember how it felt to be whole.
And when I miss peace, I remember her laugh.
Wild. Off-key.
Like wind rushing through a beaded curtain in a room where love once lived.
[End of Chapter 23]
Mirror Site:
Chapter 24: Diana with the Butterfly Tattoo (London Exchange Year)
https://freeimage.host/i/FbEcVjt
(AI-generated image of Diana)
Disclaimer: All names, characters, and events in this chapter are fictional, although inspired by the lived experiences and memories of the protagonist. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Settings and timelines have been adapted for narrative purposes.
⸻
By the middle of my London exchange, I was,
at last
, content.
The grey skies no longer felt foreign. I had a rhythm: lectures at Russell Square, jogs through Regent’s Park, Tesco meal deals for lunch, and kebabs after nights out. I’d filled out my frame a little, gymming at the university rec centre, drinking less Coke, eating more eggs. My confidence was quiet now, no longer performative.
After Katya’s intensity and Mira’s chaos, I found myself craving something simple. Grounded. Familiar in an unfamiliar city.
And then came
Diana
.
I first noticed her in the library’s South Reading Room, bundled in an oversized jumper, legs tucked under her like a cat, pen tapping against the spine of
The Economist
.
She caught me glancing. Not shy. Not flirtatious. Just direct.
“They’re not going anywhere,” she said dryly, eyes flicking to the magazines. “But I suppose neither are we.”
Her voice was the kind of British you didn’t hear on TV, soft North London, ironed clean of pretense but grounded in middle-class vowels. She read footnotes aloud to herself, sipped instant coffee from a chipped Shakespeare and Co. mug, and annotated margins with furious elegance.
She was 25. Doing her master’s in international relations. She had opinions on Angola, Palestine, Thatcher, and how
The Guardian
was “getting a bit smug lately.”
We started talking. Then studying. Then loitering outside the library after hours, waiting for the 134 night bus together, trading jokes about the Cold War and canned beans.
Over dinner one night at a cramped Indian restaurant near Goodge Street, she casually mentioned she’d visited 27 countries.
“Wait,
27
?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I used to work summers as a courier. We carried other people’s business documents. And got cheap standby flights.”
“And Singapore?”
“Twice. Once with a friend. Once alone. I stayed in a crumbling hostel in Geylang and ate stingray at midnight. It was the best sleep I’ve ever had.”
She wasn’t showing off. Just stating facts. Back then in the nineties, global travel wasn’t a badge on social media. It required grit, maps that folded into origami, and trust in strangers.
⸻
It happened after a lecture on realism in international politics. It started to rain, thin, grey English rain, more wet air than water. We ran under awnings, laughing at soaked shoes. She walked me to my flat, stood at the doorstep.
“Invite me up or I’ll take it personally,” she declared.
I did.
⸻
Her lovemaking was as British as she was: restrained at first, then startlingly intimate. She peeled off her jumper with deliberate slowness, revealing pale skin freckled across her shoulders, and breasts that moved naturally with every breath.
I reached out, traced the butterfly tattoo on her wrist, cobalt blue, the wings slightly faded.
“I got it in Cairo,” she said, removing her bra with one hand. “I thought I was becoming something new. But I was mostly becoming broke, then.”
We undressed like it was a ceremony: no rush, no theatrics.
Her panties came off last, navy cotton with a lace trim. She kissed me with a soft urgency, guiding my fingers between her thighs. She was wet already, warm and plush, her breath hitching as I slid two fingers into her, curling slowly.
“Just like that,” she whispered, legs parting wider as she leaned into me.
She pulled me onto the bed, no music, no mirrors, just the low thrum of London traffic outside. When I entered her, she moaned softly, biting her lip. We moved together in sync, hips grinding, mouths exploring, hands locking into place like we’d rehearsed this in a dream.
She scratched my back gently when I went deeper, her legs wrapping around my waist, pulling me in with quiet greed.
Later, we lay tangled in the sheets.
Her hand on my chest. My thumb brushing her jawline.
“You’re a good lover,” she said, eyes closed. “I didn’t expect that.”
“Why not?”
She smiled. “You seemed too polite to be good.”
We made love again at dawn, this time slower, even quieter.
She rode me with deliberate grace, never breaking eye contact, her butterfly tattoo catching the golden edge of morning light through the blinds.
⸻
We saw each other now and then after that.
Long walks. Debate nights. Long kisses in the back of the 91 bus, away from the prying eyes of onlookers curious to see a Chinese dude kiss an elegant London girl.
But life was moving. She was applying to Reuters. I was preparing for exams and a reluctant return to Singapore.
One evening, she pulled away after a kiss and said, “Let’s not make promises. I don’t like promises.”
I nodded. Neither did I.
⸻
Years later, I found one of her articles while reading
The Independent
. A dispatch from the Balkans. Her byline intact.
She looked older. Sharper. The butterfly tattoo still visible under the rolled sleeves of her field jacket.
I heard she has a family now. I hope she found the peace she never needed to search for in me.
Diana wasn’t a storm or a spark.
She was a steady flame: warm, thoughtful, clean.
And sometimes, when I think about London in the 90s, I remember her body against mine, her voice in the dark, and the way her fingers traced me like I might one day be a memory worth holding onto.
[End of Chapter 24]
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Quote:
Originally Posted by
TheBeginner
Geezus Krist. The multitude of characters you have met…
Buckle up my friend, you ain’t seen anything yet. The story still has a long way to go.
Chapter 25: The Girl Behind the Bar (London Exchange Year)
https://freeimage.host/i/FbEGp4e
(AI-generated image of Sasha)
Disclaimer: All names, characters, and events in this chapter are fictional, although inspired by the lived experiences and memories of the protagonist. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Settings and timelines have been adapted for narrative purposes.
⸻
Some girls lean into you like a question.
Sasha leaned like a punchline, already knowing you were going to laugh, and a little worried you might cry instead.
I met her behind a sticky counter at
The Dive
, a Camden basement bar that reeked of stale lager and restless bodies. It was spring, early 1990s. London was post-Thatcher, pre-Cool Britannia. The walls were lined with Joy Division posters and handwritten drink specials. The stereo played
The Cure
on loop.
She was pouring whisky when our eyes met.
“You want another?” she asked, her voice thick with smoke and somewhere-between accents, part East End, part something Slavic.
“Neat,” I said.
She smirked. “Ah. One of those. Sad-eyed foreign student with a colonial hangover.”
“Possibly.”
“Let me guess. Engineering, psychology, or literature?”
I replied.
She poured. “So none of the above. But close enough.”
⸻
Her name was Sasha.
Not short for Alexandra. Just Sasha. “No frills. No metaphors. Just me,” she said.
She wore black… always. Tank tops, jeans, boots with thick soles. Her lipstick was the same blood-dark red every night. Her eyeliner was sharper than most people’s opinions.
She was half Russian, half Ukrainian-Jewish, and all bite.
“My tits are the Ukrainian part,” she once told me while lighting a cigarette. “They’re resilient and probably cursed. My cynicism? That’s all Moscow. We don’t do optimism. Just damage control.”
She had a minimalist tattoo of a sleeping cat on her forearm.
“That was Tula,” she said. “She lasted longer than most of my relationships.”
At twenty-three, she had seen more of life than most forty-year-olds. She told me about blackouts in Kyiv during the Soviet collapse. Her grandmother selling tinned fish under a train bridge. A border guard who once asked for her bra as payment.
“London’s easy,” she said. “They just want your accent and your ass. Not necessarily in that order.”
⸻
One night, after she’d closed the bar, we walked the empty stretch toward Camden Town station. The streets were slick from earlier rain. She smoked as we walked, flicking ash into puddles.
At her flat, she opened the door and said, “You can come in if you’re not here to save me.”
The heater was broken. The window fogged from the warmth of our breath. We kissed against the fridge. Then stumbled to the bed.
She pushed me down. Climbed onto me. Undressed slowly, shirt first, then bra, then jeans unbuttoned one-handed while biting her lip. Her body was lean, pale, taut from years of dancing in clubs and surviving on cigarettes and sour yoghurt.
She pressed her hand against my chest and said, “Don’t perform. Just feel.”
I obeyed.
She climbed over me and sank down, letting out a sharp gasp, her nails pressing into my shoulders. Her hips rolled, slow, forceful, deliberate. She guided me in and out of her with unbroken eye contact. Her breath grew louder, her fingers tighter. When I touched her clit, she whispered, “Harder, yes, don’t stop talking.”
So I talked.
Told her how beautiful she looked. How soft she felt. How alive she made me.
She came first, clenched and gasping. Then me, groaning into her shoulder as her body buckled forward, pressing her lips to my ear, murmuring, “That’s it, boy. Burn it all out.”
⸻
We lay tangled, naked and steaming under a wool blanket.
A dim bulb buzzed overhead. Her face softened.
She told me about her father, who left when she was seven.
About her mother, who still lived in Odessa and hadn’t written in three years.
About the time she took a train across Poland alone with only a jar of pickled beets and a knife hidden in her sock.
“Life is war,” she said. “But sex is a truce.”
⸻
I saw her again, twice, that week.
Each time was like reliving a dream you can’t quite grasp.
Rough kisses. Quick undressing. A cigarette after, shared in silence.
One night, I asked her what she really wanted out of life.
“To disappear in peace,” she said. “Somewhere with trees. And no men asking questions.”
Then she kissed me hard. Bit my lip. Pulled me onto the bed and whispered, “One more for the road.”
⸻
Then she vanished a week later.
New bartenders. No forwarding address. No goodbye.
I didn’t try to find her.
⸻
Sasha taught me that not all broken things need to be fixed.
That some people are mosaic: cracked, sharp, beautiful not despite but
because
of what they’ve survived.
Her dark humour wasn’t armor. It was memory made wearable.
She didn’t want rescue.
She wanted recognition.
And for one cold, smoky week in Camden, I gave her that.
[End of Chapter 25]
Mirror Site:
Chapter 26: The Ivy Around Her Waist (London Exchange Year)
https://freeimage.host/i/FbEwOKB
(AI-generated image of Aigerim)
Disclaimer: All names, characters, and events in this chapter are fictional, although inspired by the lived experiences and memories of the protagonist. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. Settings and timelines have been adapted for narrative purposes.
⸻
By the time she appeared, I’d long stopped predicting the kind of woman who might change the course of a night.
London in the 1990s had a way of surprising me, never with what I expected, only with what I hadn’t yet imagined.
She stood out immediately.
Tall. Lush. Languid. Every movement deliberate, like she’d rehearsed it in front of an invisible camera.
Auburn curls framed her face, somehow untouched by London’s humidity. Her lips were full, her perfume strong and sweet, and her breasts, surgically enhanced, were shown off with unapologetic pride beneath a deep neckline.
We met at a Central Asian film screening in South Kensington. A Polish coursemate had dragged me along. I remember the warm smell of spiced tea and the half-hearted buzz of academic conversation.
She was at the snack table, reaching for the last
koshachiy pirozhki
.
“Go ahead,” I said.
She turned with a smirk. “Not many men give up pastries so easily.”
“Not many women win them that fast.”
She laughed, low, textured, amused. “China?”
I blinked. “Close, but no. Singapore.”
She frowned. “Singapore? That’s… what, near Hong Kong?”
“South of it. Island country. We’ve got better English and worse beaches.”
She grinned. “Ah. One of those small places that punches above its weight. I like that.”
Her name was Aigerim.
From Kazakhstan, in the west, near Atyrau.
“Close enough to Russia to inherit the language. Far enough to never want to go back.”
I tried a line of Russian.
“Привет. Меня зовут…”
She raised her brows. “Look at you! A proper little Asian Casanova.”
I smirked. “I picked up a bit of Russian from a girl I dated. She made sure I remembered what mattered.”
“Let me guess…
da, nyet, more vodka,
and
faster
?”
“Roughly in that order.”
She laughed, amused and approving. “Dangerous combination.”
We sat side by side during the film, but I couldn’t remember enough to tell you what it was about.
⸻
Later that night, we ended up at her flat in Islington.
Dimly lit. Velvet cushions. Gold-draped windows. A faint scent of jasmine, wax, and vodka-soaked memory.
She poured drinks without asking.
“This vodka is awful,” she said, “but it’s nostalgic. Reminds me of weddings where someone always collapses during the toast.”
A green tattoo curled along her left arm,
Poison Ivy
, creeping seductively toward her elbow.
“You like her?” she asked, catching me staring.
“Very much.”
“She’s misunderstood. Strong women usually are.”
She came and sat close. I could feel her warmth through the cushion. Her perfume wrapped around me like a spell.
Then she kissed me, no hesitation, no preamble. Her lips warm and sure, her tongue teasing the edge of mine, her fingers moving with practiced confidence to my buttons and belt.
“Don’t pretend to be shy,” she whispered. “You’ve been undressing me with your eyes since the first toast.”
⸻
We made love on a velvet throw beneath the open window.
She undressed with slow precision, blouse slipping from her shoulders, bra unhooked in a single motion, breasts high and sculpted under the soft light. Her skirt dropped next, revealing long, toned legs and silk underwear that barely stayed on as she crawled onto my lap.
A floral wreath tattoo circled her hips: intricate, delicate, and vanishing into shadows I was aching to explore.
She slid down onto me in one slow, confident movement, gasping sharply as I filled her.
“Good,” she murmured. “Stay in rhythm. No rushing.”
She moved with deliberate control, rolling her hips, tightening around me with each thrust. Her hands roamed my chest, her nails leaving red trails I welcomed. Her breath quickened as I brushed her clit, and she clenched hard as she came, swearing softly in Russian.
I followed, groaning into the curve of her neck, pulsing deep inside her as her hands gripped the back of my hair and pulled me closer.
⸻
Afterwards, we shared a cigarette. She lay half-naked under a wool blanket, her voice softer now.
She told me about Moscow.
“Dreary. Pretentious. The Paris of people with no laughter.”
She told me about her village.
“Three cows. One shop. One school. Everyone married or miserable.”
“I don’t do boyfriends,” she added. “Only cities. London’s the current one.”
We saw each other once more. No declarations. Just friction, fire, and release.
On our last night, as I was buttoning my shirt, she stood in the doorway in a silk robe and said, “I’m off to Milan. They’re casting cheekbones again.”
No hug. No promise. Just perfume, a grin, and a glance I’d never forget.
⸻
She taught me something I hadn’t learned from anyone before.
That sex could be
strategy
. That leaving could be a kind of grace.
That not all tattoos are decoration. Some are declarations, worn not for show, but as survival.
Aigerim didn’t want to be understood.
She wanted to be
seen
.
And for one brief, scented summer, I saw her:
brilliant, impossible, unapologetically burning
.
[End of Chapter 26]
Mirror Site:
Quote:
Originally Posted by
xcess
Ufff
you killin’ me man. The stories are memories of souls that touched us and left their mark. I’m 52 and I just went down memory lane of my own experiences. What a flash back.
Keep rockin’ & rollin’ brother. You are slayin’ it!
Thank you, brother. Men like us deserve to share our stories… not for validation, but because there’s meaning in reflecting, in remembering, and in being honest about how we lived and loved.
There are few spaces in Singapore where men can speak openly about desire, regret, and everything in between. I just hope that through these memories, others can find resonance, or even lessons, in our journeys.
Appreciate you walking down memory lane with me. Rock on.