Smell

Many things that are true of smell are also true of Taste.

I smoked for thirty years, and gave up just a few years ago. I loved everything about smoking - the rituals of buying, unwrapping, opening; tapping the top of the pack to encourage the first cigarette to offer itself up; the spark of the flint; the petrol flare of the Zippo; the grey-blue skeins of smoke from the burning end of the cigarette; the grey-brown fog exhaled from deep in the lungs; the smells of a smoky room, a brimming ashtray. I was sceptical of stories about the delights in store for me once my sense of smell recovered from the assault of twenty a day, and that scepticism has been largely borne out - things smell much the way they always did. Bad things smell no worse; good things smell no better. But I pay more attention to smell during sex than I used to, and perhaps this has something to do with not smoking.

One of the things that is frustrating about the friendly, functional, efficient five- or ten-minute fucks with C is that there is no time to build up any real smell of sex. Someone walking into the room thirty seconds after we were done would probably not notice anything. It takes time to work up a sweat, to pump the molecules out of her cunt and into the air, to dampen the sheets. C, who is post-menopausal, insists on applying Astroglide beforehand too, and I think this has a neutralizing effect on the smell of her cunt. Afterwards, there is no slow leaking, no smearing of the residue of cunt-juice and come on our bodies; for it is time to be up and wiping off and getting on with the day and its business.

It is not just a matter of time, of course. Five minutes with Q is probably enough to perfume a large room, what with the pace of fucking, her lavish ejaculations, the fact that we both delight in our own and each other's smells. F is acutely aware of smell too, and routinely interrupts fucking to point our how great the smell of our sex is. Like Q, F is an enemy of deodorant, and I have largely given up on the stuff because of the pleasure that it prevents. D is perhaps a bit less enthusiastic about my ripe armpits, but does her best to avoid deodorant in the run up to seeing me, and that together with the fact that she has not shaved since the end of the summer makes her armpits unbelievably erotic.

Smell persists. Typically, I have to shower after extra-marital sex and so do not get to carry the smell of sex away with me. But I like, if I can, to dip a finger before departing, to take at least a little along. On the subway, I can then lift my finger to my nose and catch the scent of cunt. When I was a smoker, this smell overlaid that of tobacco, and I liked the blend. When I visited MRR for long weekends in my twenties, I would carry her cunt on my fingers all through the long cross-country train journey home, sniffing until I could no longer tell whether any of her scent remained, or whether it was just the tobacco. And that, in turn, eroticized the smell, so that for many years I associated the tobacco smell on my fingers with M and her cunt.

In fabric, smells persist for longer. Before I became a liar, cheat, and adulterer, I subsisted sexually on intra-marital sex plus liberal amounts of masturbation, and this I would often fuel by sniffing C's underwear (all of it black). At times, it almost seemed that sniffing alone could practically bring me to orgasm. I don't recall having access to any other woman's underwear in those years, so I am not sure if the effect was C-specific: certainly I thought about her when I jerked off and came. Opportunities to sniff other women's underwear since I became an LCA have been irregular, but if I could be sure they were safe from discovery, I would love to have a collection of underwear, suitably scented and stained. I am not confident that I could tell which belonged to whom by smell alone.