#101: BONUS: It Stuck With Me – No. 09
A vignette titled ‘The Houseshare’ – autobiographical piece capturing the moments from my life that remain etched in my memory
[Image description: Text ‘It Stuck With Me No. 09’ on a lilac background]
Almaz note:
Season 4 of She Dares To Say is technically over, but there’s a vignette I wrote while back that a few people in my network have read and loved, so I’m sharing it with my wider audience here on Substack.
Many people on this mailing list will recognise the setting, because the raucous fun we got up to in this particular houseshare I describe, spilled into so many facets of my IRL social life. Friends, acquaintances, party pals, fellow musicians, lovers et al. from my riotous pre-Covid, North London era, this piece both for – and inspired by – all of you lot ❤️
(The piece is actually called ‘Slut House’, but I couldn’t put that in the subject line of this email, it would have just been siphoned off into your spam folders…)
Slut House
During a four-year stretch at the end of my twenties, and just tipping into my thirties, I lived in a houseshare in North London. On the outside, it was just an ordinary Victorian terraced house, but it was so much more than just bricks and mortar. It was more like a living, breathing, organism with four hearts, and four sets of limbs with a rotating cast of characters.
And it was far from perfect. We fought over mouldy veg at the back of the fridge, and who still owed for last month’s electricity bill, and who left the front door wide open last night, WTF??!! We tried to implement a chores rota, but it usually went ignored, dishes piling up like a precarious Jenga tower. And someone was always finishing the milk and never replacing it with a fresh pint, gah!!
We spent our evenings and weekends cavorting about the city, soaking up art exhibitions we sometimes had to just pretend we understood, or dancing energetically to tech-house bangers in clubs that stayed open til 6am. Or hanging out with friends loudly discussing the merits of collectivism at the occasional warehouse rave.
It always ended the same way… prosecco fizz on our tongues, fried food on the way home, and eyes shining with glee. We’d collect strangers and admirers like treasures. We seemed to have our own gravitational pull, and sensibility didn’t stand a chance. We’d split cabs with strangers who we’d thought were charming and clever, but they’d really just been doing lines and lines of coke. We’d wear nipple tassels to bottomless brunches and flash unsuspecting clientele.
And so, we’d often come crashing through the front door with the most recent hanger-on in tow… someone we barely knew, and who’d likely be gone by the following lunchtime.
We racked up many, many notches on our bedposts. Inevitably, we called our place the ‘Slut House’. With pride. With open mouths full of it. ‘Slut’. ‘House’. Those two syllables vibrating low in our throats. It didn’t feel reductive; it felt triumphant.
We watched all the zeitgeist TV shows together, ‘Catastrophe’, ‘Fleabag’, and ‘Archer’, cosied up on the sofas, wine glasses in hands, openly ranking the cast by who we’d most like to fuck and why. There was no judgement when one of us (me) admitted to the exact scenarios I liked to imagine involving Sterling Archer and Lana Kane (two of the hottest characters ever to feature in a 2D-animated TV show), only a ripple of interest, murmurs of agreement and the inevitable follow-ups. Would you get involved? Or just watch? Before long, the conversation would slide from hypotheticals into well-worn fantasy, each confession setting off screeches of laughter.
My room was south-facing, and I spent plentiful mornings lazily shagging in the sun-drenched part of my bed. After I’d shut the front door behind a lover, I’d head back to bed and press my face into the sheets, inhaling all that we had been and couldn’t imagine life possibly being any better.
Sometimes, the best part wasn’t even the sex, it was the retelling. Flinging myself into the living room, my dressing gown dragging open and one boob halfway out, finding a housemate or two sprawled on the sofa, clutching a mug of tea. The way their faces lit up when I’d start my confession. “So”, I’d begin, breathless, “you won’t believe what we just tried...” And then the room would erupt in gasps, giggles, questions. How? For how long? Did you like it? Would you do it again?
There was no shame, only fascination. We were endlessly hungry, insatiable not just for touch, but for the details. The sensation of sweat pooling in the curve of a back, the texture of someone’s voice when they moaned into a pillow, the way you felt your hips opening when they push your thighs apart. And when the people we’d met and hooked up with us sent us nudes to our phones, we’d squeal and describe the scenario it depicted in all its sordid glory to the others with salacious delight.
I mean, we would sometimes try to be sensible, pledging a full week of early nights with no wine allowed, OK pals. But by the time the weekend came round again, we’d egg each other on to pull another set of people. And yet more the following weekend. And the next.
This was certainly a chapter of my life I was revelling in. Surely, this was my golden era. All those comings and goings (literal and otherwise!) meant I was constantly recounting my own experiences to others with a delivery that ensured rapt attention and total immersion. It was no coincidence that my ‘Kayleigh Daniels Dated’ project came into being while I was living at the Slut House address.
I mean, an illustrated erotica and sexual-health content brand that mixed titillation with practical advice didn’t exactly arrive out of nowhere… it emerged from my imagination, under circumstances where sex was both a ‘hobby’ and regular conversational fodder. Since we were having so much sex, turning elements of our lifestyle into a creative project, simply felt like the next logical step.
To read the remainder of this essay beyond the paywall further down this post, you’ll need a paid subscription.
Previous posts in the ‘It Stuck With Me’ series:
All pieces in the series can be found here:
[Image description: Text ‘POSTSCRIPT’]
The ‘POSTSCRIPT’ segment for paid subscribers will drop on Wednesday 8 July and will feature an extended piece of writing where I interview a couple of my old ‘Slut House’ pals and together we unpack what it means to be attractive.
To receive this extra mailout you’ll need to upgrade to a paid subscription, which is either billed monthly at £5.99 or annually at £60.
[Image description: Text ‘PRODUCED BY’]
I’m Almaz Ohene, a Creative Copywriter, Freelance Journalist and Accidental Sexpert.
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