Suzanne Portnoy

I walked into the back garden, towel in hand, still sweating from the steam room. Six naked bodies were dotted around the small space, each lying on a towel covering a Reebok gym mat. I picked up a gym mat from the stack in the corner of the garden and did the same for myself. That’s when I saw him, sitting in the back of the garden, a towel draped around his waist, taking a drag off his cigarette. I put down the towel and walked over to him.

‘Hey, you,’ I said and bent down to kiss his lips, tenderly.

He put his arms around me, lowered his head, sucking one of my nipples gently into his mouth. I felt myself get wet instantly. Then he released his lips, moved across to the other breast and did the same. I smiled.

‘Haven’t seen you here in a while,’ he said.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’ve been busy. Lots of work. I haven’t been hanging out much. How’s the Slovakian chick?’

‘Gone,’ he said.

‘So, what’s happening in your love life?’ I said innocently, hoping he was available. In all the years I had been going to Rios he was the only man I ever wanted to see outside the place. The last time we’d hooked up was a year or two ago and I still recalled the intensity of that meeting. I’d always regretted that we had never swapped numbers.

It wasn’t just the sex although we had a natural chemistry. He had made me laugh and I found him incredibly attractive. Tall and slim, almost 40, with an Irish accent, cheeky smile and short salt and pepper hair, he was my usual type.

Now, here he was and I couldn’t help thinking that fate had played a part. Rios was never a place I went to with intention.

‘Nothing much,’ he said.

‘So,’ I said. ‘You gonna play with me later on?’

I walked away, not giving him time to answer and lay face down on the mat, my head facing away from him and my pussy in his direct line of vision. Then I waited.

First things first. My new podcast is up and this week I’m joined by the absolutely fabulicious Angelika Jinx of Naive London Girl fame. We talk about sex blogging, dating and lots of other girly stuff. We may even talk about shoes…

As is my want, every four months or so I upload my profile on some dating website to see if any new fish have entered the very small pond I normally swim in. As is my want, the day after I upload my profile I pull it down again, when the thought of going through 50+ responses becomes too much to bear. I look at my kids’ free weekends, realise that I don’t have any until the end of the summer and wonder why I bothered with any of it.

The other day, a little bored, I went onto GirlsGoFree.com because someone told me it was a freebie site for chicks and, well, being Jewish, I hate paying for something I can get for nothing. I posted up my profile, mentioned that I had some swinging experience, very little free time, a penchant for threesomes, the usual nonsense in other words. The site had a blogging section and so I posted a few times on that too, mentioning my holiday to France, having sex three days in a row, eating pussy for the first time in a long while. More nonsense. And, as usual, lots of guys started writing to me, none of whom I was particularly that keen to meet although a couple looked like they might be quite fun. Sometimes it’s just nice to feel wanted and I suppose that was why I posted in the first place - just for some validation.

It was good to know that despite not having any free time and being a single, workaholic mum, that there were a whole group of guys who wanted to get to know me. Not that I don’t get that from writing here but it was nice to get it from guys who didn’t know anything more about me other than what they saw on the site and not from what they summised from reading about me in a book or on this blog.

I checked onto the site for a couple of days until yesterday when, without warning, I suddenly disappeared. I logged in a few times just to check I had the right password, even got the site to resend my password again but it appeared that I had been bumped off the site. When I wrote to them to ask why I received no response. It was the not first time I had been barred from a dating site. Once I was invited to join a site called gorgeous people or simply gorgeous or something like that. They bumped me off after I wrote ‘I like big cocks’ in the WHAT I LIKE section and ‘I don’t like small cocks’ in the WHAT I DON’T LIKE section. They said sexual talk wasn’t allowed on the site and I wondered why as I thought that’s why most people went on dating sites… to get laid.

This morning I met up with a girlfriend for lunch and explained that I had been barred from GirlsGoFree.com.

‘Has this happened to you before?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Once before.’

‘Maybe you should go around all the dating sites and see how many will kick you out,’ she said.

‘That would be too easy,’ I said.

Nevertheless the experience made me realise that when it comes to dating dos and don’ts I am so out of practise that even if you pointed to the floodlit landing strip, guided me down from the tower and had a co-pilot by my side, I stll couldn’t find it. I don’t need a roadmap to negotiate the rules of dating so much as a specially tuned GPS. Realising this, I did what any girl would do and went straight back to one of my tried-and-tested swinging sites where noone bats an eyelid at the fact I have a preference for anal over oral, threesomes over 1-on-1 and blindfolds over nipple clamps. Within five minutes I had ten responses, most of them from quite intelligent sounding guys who have similar preferences to my own. No doubt tomorrow I’ll pull the ad down again but at least it will be me pressing the delete button and not some prudish webmaster. Like everyone else, I hate rejection, even dating site rejection.