#96: It Stuck With Me – No. 08 (full piece: no paywall)
A vignette titled ‘Press Trip’ – autobiographical piece capturing the moments from my life that remain etched in my memory
[Image description: Text ‘It Stuck With Me No. 08’ on a lilac background]
Almaz note:
This is the final piece in the current ‘It Stuck With Me’ series. I’m 21 in this one, and I’ve suddenly found myself appealing to several men while away in Sicily on a press trip (!).
I’m publishing the full piece – without a paywall – for this mailout, so that you guys can follow my (s)escapades to the end.
Please do let me know what you think of this piece in the comments section at the bottom of this post. And feel free to tip me if you enjoyed it. Creating pieces like this takes huge amounts of thinking, writing, editing (and emotional processing 😬) time.
Press Trip
‘We can order room service Champagne, if you’d like, gorgeous.’ He begins fiddling with the top button of his shirt, which is a fabulous shade of fuchsia. He takes a step towards me.
‘I like your shirt,’ I say.
To my surprise, my voice sounds cool and confident. The voice of someone who knows what’s supposed to come next. I cock my head and raise my eyebrow, ‘I can help you out of that.’
Some seconds pass, where I watch his eyes rove across my body. Some more seconds pass. He hasn’t said anything. The silence between us stretches. I begin to regret my somewhat brazen offer and I think of leaving.
But then, he takes half a step towards me. I stay glued to my spot. He takes another step toward me, now unbuttoning his shirt in earnest. This silence between us stretches further still.
I take a breath, close my eyes and reach for his neck. I trail the tips of my fingers downwards across his clavicle and feel him exhale. He takes my other hand and wraps it around his waist.
My fingers untuck his shirt, finding the waistband of his boxer shorts. They’ve been digging into him just slightly, leaving a faint red indent. He holds me close and I feel the muscles of his torso contract and relax in time with his breath.
He holds my head in both of his hands and strokes his lips across mine. I kiss him back, my tongue snaking its way into his mouth. My fingers squeeze his buttocks and I feel him rise against my stomach.
‘Come join me in the bathtub,’ he whispers into my ear, sending the hairs on my arms upwards.
‘Yes please.’
He peels himself out of our clinch, slides out of his trousers and boxer shorts, then backs into the bathroom. I watch his erection, absurd yet commanding, bounce at me, so I follow him in.
In the bathroom, steam clouds the mirror, softening the edges of everything. We leave our clothes in a pile on the floor. I clock that all of his have designer labels, and I hope that he doesn’t notice that mine are just cheap Highstreet brands.
We slowly lower ourselves into the huge bathtub. At first, we’re wincing and bracing against the hot, hot water. But soon, we relax into it, admiring each other, my toes stroking his golden chest hair.
The tray with two glasses and a bottle of Moët arrives, but it sits forgotten on the tiled bathroom floor. I realise that, actually, I would like a drink. He sees me glancing over and steps out of the bath. The beads of water drip down his torso making delicate patterns on his body hair. He fills the two glasses and we sip the bubbles in expectant silence.
Some minutes pass, where I watch his eyes rove across my naked, wet body. He tops up our glasses. Some more minutes pass. I turn the hot tap back on, filling the bathtub with more scalding water. Steam swirls around us.
He beckons me over to his end of the bathtub. I slide towards him, our limbs entangling. He cups my chin with one hand, while raising his glass to his mouth with the other.
‘Let’s try something.’
‘’kay.’
He takes a large gulp of his drink and places his mouth on mine. He prises my lips open, letting the Champagne trickle from his full mouth into my empty one. I swallow it down, coughing a little.
‘Mmm, tasty.’
He chuckles and then kisses me long and slow, his tongue exploring my mouth. We pause for air. He reaches for the shower head. ‘Shall we use this on you?’ he asks, pulling it out of its bracket. He turns it on and points it straight between my legs. I gasp as my vulva responds to the pressurised jets of water. He grins. I grin back. By the time we’ve finished, our water is tepid.
Finally, I tip-toe back to my own hotel room next door. Giddy from both the Champagne and the excitement of what has just gone on, I leap into bed and will myself to fall asleep. My dreams are full of attractive strangers gently kissing the length of my body.
My alarm goes off, so I dress and head down to breakfast. I’m feeling exceptionally pleased with myself.
It was the first week of October in 2010. I was 21 and had just started my final year at university. But I wasn’t in a beige lecture hall that smelled like Redbull and Lynx Africa with the rest of my classmates in the English port city of Southampton. Instead, I was on the island of Sicily, Italy, gallivanting with a load of fully-fledged journalists – ones who had stacks of real business cards – who’d been sent there on a press trip to review a new five-star golf and spa resort.
I was studying English, so my degree was contact-hours-light, which meant I’d been able to pursue writing commissions outside of my studies. Before long, I somehow found myself one of the staff (of course, unpaid, as was the way at that time) at a now long-defunct lifestyle magazine, where the editor would often assign London-based high-profile fashion events and the occasional luxury hotel review to me (!).
I could not believe my luck. For this latest assignment, all I had to do was make my way to Heathrow and join the group of journalists and PR managers, and file a 1,000-word hotel review after the trip.
When we arrived at the resort, we found ourselves in the midst of many other groups of travel journalists from all over Europe. It was a brand new five-star golf and spa resort. It wasn’t yet open to the public and we were its first guests. Plenty of us have seen the television drama The White Lotus. Well, this resort was the 2010 version of that. It was absurdly luxurious; all weighty cutlery buffed to a mirrored shine, luscious green lawns manicured to perfection and staff trained to smile on cue.
The wine flowed so freely on our first evening there that it felt reckless. Our glasses were refilled automatically, long before they were empty, so it became difficult to gauge how much we’d had. By morning, at breakfast, there were whispers. Two of our party, it was said, had been seen leaving the same hotel room. Hearing such salacious gossip triggered something lying in wait inside me.
Up until then, I hadn’t done much sleeping around. I’d been sexual with a couple of handfuls (10) of people. And the majority of those experiences were with people I’d met when I was abroad in Brazil and Germany the previous year. My number was lower than that of many of my peers at university.
I was completely new to the ‘art of seduction’, and I hadn’t ever been in such close proximity to hedonistic professionals. And although I’d been sent to report on fashion events in London by the online magazine, I’d never been self-assured enough to try anything with anyone there. It wasn’t that I had body image issues; it just had never occurred to me that unapologetically pursuing sex was a valid choice for ordinary young women like me. I’d sensibly carried condoms in my purse the way some people carried safety pins, y’know, just in case, but mostly out of habit. I mean, I’d rarely spontaneously used them.
But on the trip, buoyed by the repeated compliments on my good looks, stylish clothes and enthusiastic attitude, I began to consider myself differently. Suddenly, my twenty-one-year-old reflection in the hotel mirror seemed sharper, more defined. I saw someone who might be an interesting and enticing sexual prospect for these older, professional men. Could I do sex goddess?! Like, make these kinds of men want to share pleasure with me?
After dinner that evening, as I walked the corridor towards my room, a door opened. The handsome blonde from the Finnish press contingent stepped out.
‘Hello, beautiful next-door neighbour,’ he said.
Our rooms were adjacent and we’d already spent some time checking each other out through the translucent walls of our balconies. He invited me in. His bath was already running, the steam making the room feel humid and intimate. My body responded before my brain could catch up.
And then, somehow, it was happening. His skin was hot and damp, his breath quick and shallow. It was the most exciting sexual experience I’d ever encountered.
Until the following day, that is, when I noticed a man, who looked a lot like a young version of fashion designer Marc Jacobs, checking me out. He’d been striding around the hotel grounds more purposefully than most of the press guests.
After dinner, he sought me out, telling me that he was the hotel owner’s son, and flirtatiously asked if I wanted to take a stroll with him. I replied that I very much would like to accompany him.
He took me to an out-of-bounds bar, where he picked up the phone on the wall and called for a bartender. We holed up in a booth and consumed a seemingly never-ending supply of gin and tonics.
We’d been gradually inching closer and closer as we chatted. Mid-sentence, I felt his fingertips brush against my bare leg. He deliberately let them linger a few inches above my knee, and then watched intently as my body quivered a little in response to his touch.
I took his hand and slid it further up my thigh. We made out so enthusiastically that the bartender made himself scarce. When it got really late, he walked me to my room and invited himself in. His presence, just metres away from my bed, was so, so thrilling.
We ripped each other’s clothes off. I breathily congratulated him on the depth of his tan (‘This bit here… where your tan meets the white of your bum… is sexy as fuck’) and he traced the outlines of my various birthmarks with his index finger (‘This one… on your knee… looks like Scotland. Oh, and this one… on your boob… could be Crete’). Obviously, this led to sex. We were unrestrained, and, y’know, noisy.
At breakfast the next day, he pretended to read the paper, while not-so-obviously watching me chat with my press group. One of our journos clocked him. ‘Well, Almaz has an admirer.’ I smiled back coyly.
On the final night, that same journo from our British group propositioned me. I said yes without thinking. At this point, saying yes felt so easy.
At the end of the trip, I returned to my student house in Southampton, still sun-warmed, and holding onto the memories of new foods, new experiences and three new sexual conquests to add to my tally (!!!). The house was cold (it was still too early on in the season to spend money on putting the heating on), and damp in the way most student housing was. I stood in the kitchen, the tatty lino curling up at the edges, and told my housemates everything. They listened with wide eyes, their faces a mix of disbelief and envy. None of us had done anything quite so outrageous.
The body I had, with its sturdy thighs, full hips and brown skin, hadn’t been framed by the mainstream as something young men could openly want. So I learned not to expect to be looked at with desire, although I had always wondered what it was like to be lusted after by many… to have people watch me from across a room and have their eyes settle on my face, or body, and then linger there for just a beat longer than was strictly necessary.
The only time that seemed to shift was on a dancefloor. There, in motion, my body could be read differently, noticed, responded to, and briefly desired. But outside of that context, in everyday life, I often felt as though I receded again, becoming less visible, or at least less legible in that particular way.
So, I assumed that plenty of lustful attention was reserved for other young women. Young women with smaller frames, straighter hair, lighter skin. Young women who already knew what it was like to be wanted.
In the weeks following the trip, I carried a strange energy around with me, as though something in my body had been switched on and hadn’t yet worked out how to switch itself off again. I moved through university with an altered awareness, half-participant, half-observer, watching myself as though through the speculative, appraising gaze of others. Something had shifted.
Or, more accurately, I had adjusted the lens. I had learned how to see myself being seen. I found I was no longer only inside my experience, but also looking at it. Desire seemed less like a random impulse and more like something that emerged from context, shaped by what it encountered. What had felt expansive in Sicily now looked, back in the UK, a little… impractical. Much, much harder to sustain when you’re scurrying between lecture halls and subsisting primarily on beans on toast.
Still, I was energised by what I’d discovered. Not because I had suddenly become some radically different person, but because I had, in some sense, encountered a version of myself I hadn’t fully recognised before. I’d discovered a capacity for letting desire exist without immediately trying to explain or contain it. And for the first time, that didn’t feel like something to rein in. It felt like something to follow. And I felt excited rather than cautious about where that might lead me.
In the Summer of 2011, at 22, I graduated from university and moved to London.
– [ENDS] –
Please do let me know what you think of this piece in the comment section at the bottom of this post. And feel free to tip me if you enjoyed it! Creating pieces like this takes huge amounts of thinking, writing, editing (and emotional processing 😬) time.
[Image description: Text ‘POSTSCRIPT’]
The ‘POSTSCRIPT’ segment for paid subscribers will drop on Wednesday 6 May and will feature the original piece that I wrote after returning from the trip. Although the outlet (it was called ‘AGENT2 Magazine’) no longer exists, I had the foresight to copy and paste the published piece from the internet onto MS Word, so I still have it in my archives. Of course, it was just a functional hotel review feature that didn’t reveal anything about the exploits we’d all got up to.
Back in 2010, at the time of the trip, I was part of the student newspaper editorial team, which meant I had access to a range of resources and equipment. I remember realising I could borrow a professional SLR camera for the trip (even though it had nothing to do with what I was doing at university), so I took plenty of photos along the way. I’m including some of these pics for you in the ‘POSTSCRIPT’ segment 😃.
To receive this extra mailout you’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription, which is currently billed monthly at £3.79 monthly, or annually at £34.99.
[Image description: Text ‘PRODUCED BY’]
I’m Almaz Ohene, a Creative Copywriter, Freelance Journalist and Accidental Sexpert.
Visit my Work With Almaz page 😃.
Follow me on Instagram | Visit my website
Please do ‘like’ this post via the heart icon (❤️) that appears at the very top and bottom of this post, as it’s the best way to help others find my work.
If this project is something that you value, and want it to continue, readers are encouraged to upgrade to paid. With a paid subscription you’ll gain access to the content beyond the paywall and unrestricted access to the full archive of this newsletter.
Paid subscriptions are either billed monthly at £3.79 (less than a coffee ☕️) or annually at £34.99.
If you would prefer to make a one-off donation, feel free to send a tip via PayPal.
You can also show your enjoyment without spending £££, by liking, commenting, restacking via Notes, or just generally sharing 😃