Free Red Grow the Roses by Janine Ashbless

There’s a public garden where, if it’s a quiet day at work, I take my packed lunch to eat; there are often students there sketching the statues and the plants because there’s an art college on the boundary road, and for some reason a lot of them seem to be Italian or Spanish. I find myself eyeing them up, fantasising about having three or four of those cool, aloof girls on their knees before me, their sleek hair swept behind their shoulders as they take it in turns to suck my cock, squabbling delightfully when one gets too greedy and holds centre-stage too long.
    Christ. I’m turning into a real horn-dog.
    Maybe the more sex you get, the more you want.
    * * *
    I come out of the rather fancy town house and stand on the top step with the computer printout in my hand, feeling sick. When I look down at the paper the figures blur and dance, meaningless. It’s a good thing the doctor explained the results to me.
    A good thing … Oh, God.
    I went to a private clinic for the semen analysis, keeping it quiet, not telling Penny. I just wanted to be sure it wasn’t me that was holding us back. Well, now I know. Low sperm count, and those that are there have something wrong with them. Stunted tails, I gather from the doctor’s sympathetic words, that cause them to swim in fitful spirals instead of straight ahead.
    Fuck fuck fuck. What’s going to happen when Penny finds out? Because she will: eventually she’ll have us both down our local GP, demanding medical check-ups and assistance. It only counts as infertility if you’ve been trying for two years, but she’s going to lose patience sooner rather than later.
    How’s she going to react when she finds out it’s me, that I’m the one letting her down?
    I stumble to the car and drive all the way home without the slightest awareness of my surroundings. It’s only when I’m in the big basement car park under Mavin Wood Towers, reversing into my parking space, that I register anything outside my own head, and then I nearly accelerate into the bloody wall because the mirror-girl is back, sitting behind me, bisecting the rear window and visible in my rear-view mirror. ‘Ah God
fuck
!’ I shriek, slamming the horn by mistake. The cacophony in the concrete undercroft is horrible. I’m out of the car in a flat second, staring in at the back seat – but no one’s visible, of course. She was only there in the reflection.
    I feel sort of foolish then, and ashamed of my cowardice, and pissed off. I look round to see if anyone’s witnessed my panic, but the parking area is deserted.
    I make myself take the elevator up to the twelfth floor, not the stairs. The interior of that little box is lined with smoked mirror-glass, but I grit my teeth and step inside. I refuse to be afraid of her. What has she done, after all, but crawl out of my dreams and bestow her cool kiss? Does she even exist outside my head? Should I be afraid of that? Resolutely I turn my back on the mirrored wall and stare at the numbers over the door.
    Halfway up, between the sixth and seventh floors, the lift slows to a halt and the lights dim. I shut my eyes. I’m sweating: I can feel the cold trickle inching down my spine toward the cleft of my ass. My shoulder blades bump lightly against the glass and under my suit jacket I feel my skin crawl.
    Something brushes my thigh and the front of my trousers. I look down to see a slim, naked arm draped about my hips, the pale hand stroking my crotch and searching for my fly. Her nails are long and just a little too pointed.
    Oh, hell.
    My eyes flick upwards. There’s a camera in one of the corners, of course. It won’t get the best angle, but if it’s still working – and I’ve no way of telling that – it’ll see enough. The thought of being filmed on CCTV while an unseen woman opens my flies and pulls out my cock is too uncomfortable. I turn my back to the lens and