Sarah awoke to the warmth of the morning sun on her dozing face, bright enough for her to know it was daylight. This was one of those mornings Sarah especially liked. There was nothing she needed to do and no appointment she had to keep. She could rest in bed for just as long as she liked.

Or not just rest. She could hear Lee breathing beside her, soft and steady as he slept on his back, face upward. Sarah smiled. It would take so little for her to arouse Lee’s attention and for the two of them to enjoy each other’s bodies. To rub her sweaty torso against Lee’s. To feel his teeth nibble her clitoris. To be bathed by his tongue.

For the moment, Sarah lay still, letting her erotic thoughts tingle through the nerves of her body, down her legs and around her crotch. She slept naked as always, the better to luxuriate in the sheets over her body, but also to enjoy the proximity of Lee’s body beside her, even if he was normally so motionless and rigid. Particularly from the waist down.

But the tingle of erotic excitement wasn’t all she was aware of. Her bladder was straining from the need for a piss. That bottle of wine Sarah and Lee had shared last night while listening to the radio play, the two of them wrapped around each other on the sofa, Lee stretched out, his legs stiff and straight, and Sarah entwined around him, burying her nose into the folds of his shirt. And while they were together, enjoying the pleasure of intimate companionship, Petra, her dog, was close at hand, steadfast and reliable, looking out for both of them.

Sarah raised an arm, pulled the duvet off her bosom, relishing the relative chill of the air after the fetid heat under the down-filled cotton, and nonchalantly swung her legs around, so her feet could touch the ground. And then she paused on the edge of the mattress, her arms supporting her weight, the soles of her feet savouring the pile of the rug, the wool tangling in her toes. And then, silently, hoping to disturb neither Lee nor Petra, who was probably dozing in his basket in the hallway, his muzzle buried between his legs and groin, she pushed herself up to her full height and stood upright by the side of the bed. A trail of sheet and duvet slid down behind her onto the mattress.

Then, carefully, guiding herself with outstretched arms, and remembering exactly where the edge of the rug met the cool pine floorboards, she slowly made her way across the bedroom, each step counted, until she knew she was at the en suite bathroom. And then, feeling the even cooler linoleum under her bare feet, she measured her steps towards the lavatory. She raised the toilet seat, turned about and plumped her bare buttocks onto the plastic rim.

Although the rush of urine and the relaxation of having successfully relieved herself was all that was needed, Sarah liked to sit on the loo just a little longer, rather relishing the comfort of sitting there and letting her body decide whether she also needed a crap. And as she sat there, her thoughts wandered back to Lee. It wasn’t as easy for him to go to the toilet as it was for her.

Lee and Sarah had been married just over a year now. Sarah relished the memory of the wedding, although there had been the inevitable awkward moments. Particularly as the best man had to push Lee’s wheelchair and Sarah’s father had to walk so very slowly to guide his daughter step by step along the aisle. And there was some difficulty in engineering the meeting of lips when Lee was told he could kiss the bride, assisted by the best man who bent Sarah down into the right position. But it was an occasion Sarah would always remember fondly. As she did now, while soaking up the dampness on her crotch with toilet paper.

It was a love they said could never last. Well, no one was cruel enough to actually say it to either Lee or Sarah. But it was one of those fairy-tale romances that many people just didn’t believe could happen. It had been a tale of impossible romance from the first moment she bumped into Lee.

In fact, it was in a very literal sense that she bumped into him. His wheelchair was a most unexpected obstacle in the clinic where she had gone for one of her regular check-ups. Petra had not given unambiguous enough directions.

Sarah fell on top of Lee, her head landing on his and her steadying hand on his shoulder.

“Are you all right?” he asked kindly.

It was probably his voice she first fell in love with. Quietly spoken. Reserved. Kind and considerate. And this conversation led to their first date. That was an achievement in itself. Neither she nor Lee could go on a date without the assistance of other people. But Sarah’s sister agreed to accompany her to the town-centre pub chosen more for its wheelchair access than for the quality of its beer or the pleasantness of its ambience, where Lee was waiting with a friend who insisted on smoking and was rather unsubtle in his pursuit of Sarah’s already married sister.

Sarah eased herself off the toilet seat, taking full advantage of the strength of the metal bar placed there more for Lee’s benefit than her own, and followed the trail of the wall tiles to the sink where she washed her hands, face and bosom with the warm, soapy water.

Lee hadn’t been the first man in Sarah’s life. That distinction was held by Tom, the young guy from the kennels who brought Petra round when it was necessary to put faithful old Shep to pasture. He was a thin lad and very nervous. Petra was still very much in thrall of him, still taking every opportunity to burrow his muzzle into the crotch of his jeans. Of course, nowadays it was Sarah’s crotch that mostly had that honour, something that gave her a guilty twinge of pleasure she didn’t really like to think about too deeply. But dogs do that. Perhaps because it’s quite warm there.

And not just warm as Sarah established as she put her hand on Petra’s muzzle and felt the unmistakable contours of Tom’s groin. Curious, she rested her palm flat on the length of it, surprised by the thickness of the fleshy member under the tight denim. And she was sure the warmth it emanated wasn’t just that left by Petra’s muzzle.

“What are you doing?” gasped Tom, as Sarah’s hand squeezed and stroked his hidden penis.

“Sshh!” remarked Sarah, her face upward and her broad smile directed in the approximate direction of his voice.

“What? Bloody hell! Those are my flies! What are you doing? I’ve got a girlfriend, you know. It’s not right!”

“This says it is,” Sarah said softly, as she eased out a penis that was growing ever larger and thicker. It slumped out of his unzipped jeans and the slit of his cotton boxer shorts.

Sarah had no idea what she should do with an erect penis now she had one in her hands. She loved the feel of it: throbbing, warm, twitching, and, above all, veiny. She’d never imagined that the veins on a penis would stand out in such absolute relief. This was a feature that none of those Braille or audio books had mentioned in very much detail. However, she knew that a girl was supposed to do something with a penis, and she was curious to know what semen might feel or even taste like. She’d always imagined it would be a bit like the juices she’d sometimes loosened up in her vagina, but already she could tell that a man’s genitals smelt distinctly different to those of a woman.

After all these years, Sarah could still remember all the licks of her tongue and her tentative attempts to get some of that strangely hooded and wholly unveined glans into her mouth, over her tongue and perhaps, as she’d once read, toward the back of her mouth. In later encounters with Tom, Sarah was much less clumsy, prolonging the time of his erection beyond the less than a minute it remained stiff on this first occasion before splattering onto her chin and cheek, a surprisingly warm and oozingly erotic sensation, quite unlike whatever she’d expected. Particularly since she had no informed idea of when it would happen.

Of course Sarah got to know Tom much better after this, although perhaps not as often as she’d like. Although Tom said with some sadness that he enjoyed sex more frequently, more reliably, and, even, more satisfactorily than he did with his girlfriend, Mandy, he also said he wasn’t going to abandon her for a girl with whom he knew it just wasn’t going to work. As he stated, the extent of his skills in community care only went as far as dogs, which he was properly qualified to handle and train. His qualifications didn’t extend to the owners of the dogs. And anyway he’d already proposed to Mandy.

Sarah sometimes wondered what Mandy might have thought to see her fiancé fucking her so vigorously and punctually, usually within only five or ten minutes of her opening the door to the flat where she lived at the time and the two hurriedly dispensing with the business that provided the excuse for his visit. But as she lay beside Tom’s heaving body, his chest rising and falling after his exertions, his salty sweat streaming off his limbs and soaking into the sheets, mingling with the puddles of warm perspiration she had also shed, Sarah knew that this was a relationship doomed.

And soon, of course, it petered out. Tom’s visits became fewer and fewer. And then he ceased to visit at all.

At first, Sarah felt bitter. Masturbation was really no substitute, although she had managed to acquire some vibrators through a friend that did at least alleviate the itch that Tom had awoken in her. She missed the hot sweaty passion. She missed the thrill of a man’s stiff penis slide into her always creamy and welcoming vagina. And most of all, she just missed having the pleasure of nestling her ears and cheeks on a man’s naked body.

Sarah soaped up the long tangled hairs of her crotch that spread so high up toward her navel. She was slim and had been told many times how beautiful she was. But of course she had no way of knowing what people meant by this. What she found attractive in people were very often the very curves, contours, folds and features she was told made a person ugly. Smoothness for her often equated to blandness. Though Sarah didn’t really like the sensation of rough warts or psoriasis.

She made her way out of the bathroom and toward Lee’s side of the bed. She had no way of knowing whether he was awake or not, apart from listening to the steady rhythm of his breath, but Lee, knowing this, was the one who addressed her.

“Sarah! You’re so beautiful!” he gasped. “I would hate if you ever wore pyjamas or a nightgown. Why hide your beauty?”

Sarah smiled. She crouched by the bedside and kissed Lee’s proffered face, placing her lips on what she judged to be his forehead. Then following the line of his nose and cheek, she steered her tongue and lips toward his mouth. And next, without a word, the two grappled their tongues and mouths together in the same passion that gripped the two of them on their first parting kiss, on that first date, while Lee’s friend was spending rather too long in trying to persuade Sarah’s sister that this evening signified the start of a relationship between the two of them.

However, it was Sarah and Lee who were to stick together. Sarah’s sister insisted only on accompanying Sarah if Lee’s friend didn’t come, which, as Lee couldn’t very well go to a pub unaccompanied, meant that the couple were obliged to meet at Lee’s family home that he shared with his mother and teenage sister.

Sarah crawled onto the bed, her lips still on Lee’s, and then swivelled about, reluctantly disengaging her lips, bringing her knees up beside Lee’s ears, her arms outstretched to support her weight on the wall ahead of her and her hairy pudenda above his face.

“Sarah! I’ve only just woken up!” Lee protested.

“Oh! Come on!” Sarah laughed. “I scrubbed it clean specially!”

“Oh okay! If you made all that effort!”

“You know how much I love your tongue!”

Lee didn’t answer, but Sarah knew from the moist, sticky, slobbering, energetic caressing below just why he was not at this moment able to say anything. Well, anything other than muffled grunts or groans. And these grunts and groans were soon to be echoed and amplified by Sarah’s own. She was sure that no one, nowhere, had raised the art of cunnilingus to such a high level as darling Lee. So what if he couldn’t walk! So what if it took about half an hour every morning for him to get out of bed! And nearly as long at night to get back in again. So what, as long as he had a tongue that could lick up and down, teeth that nibbled her clitoris and inner lips, a tongue that vigorously slobbered inside the very walls of her vagina, mixing her own juices with gobbets of his saliva! So what!

Tom’s tongue had never been as good as this. In fact, he’d never once tried. For all the many times Sarah had taken his penis into her mouth, sometimes quite a long way back into her throat, and for all the times he had accidentally released his semen on her face or breasts rather than inside her, he never once reciprocated by putting his tongue to her vagina.

Malcolm was different in that regard. Although nowhere near as capable or imaginative as Lee. But Malcolm almost worshipped Sarah too much, although like Tom he insisted that this wasn’t a relationship that should last. This wasn’t because, as in Tom’s case, there was a fiancée involved, but rather because he was old.

“I’m old enough to be your grandfather!” he once stated.

“Nonsense!” replied Sarah, squeezing his flaccid penis.

Of course, Malcolm was right. Although only if both he and his putative child had become parents in their teens. He was always saying that if Sarah could see him, an old man less than ten years from retirement, she would never contemplate having sex with him. In truth, Sarah had no trouble about his age. However, the leatheriness of his skin and those wrinkles on his neck were a great contrast to Tom, who was younger than Sarah.

Malcolm had met Sarah on the staircase to her flat, and helped her up the stairs with her groceries, while Petra trotted obediently behind.

“They shouldn’t have allocated you a flat on the third floor,” he remarked.

“I don’t see why not,” wondered Sarah. “It’s not as if I’m wheelchair-bound!”

Which comment, of course, would now be fairly ironic, as Lee and she now lived in a house with no upstairs. And that was because Lee was wheelchair-bound. But his tongue was certainly not disabled. In fact, the euphemism of ‘differently abled’ made perfect sense with regards to a tongue of such muscularity and flexibility. Malcolm’s tongue, though applied with as much sincerity of purpose and desire as Lee’s, was really no match.

It was Sarah who seduced Malcolm. Well, he was a nice guy. She liked the sound of his voice, softly spoken and polite. He had been a bachelor all his life and Sarah couldn’t understand why. Two or three girlfriends who had never got beyond a few months of dating. Couldn’t they see what a catch he was?

“If you could see me, you’d know why,” said Malcolm sadly. “I’m no film star to look at!”

Sarah had no idea what film stars looked like, or indeed what anyone looked like, but as she ran her fingers over Malcolm’s face, she could feel nothing that would have persuaded her that he was any less physically attractive than any other man whose face she had so explored. And his penis was better than average, assuming that Tom’s had been average (and of course this was the limit to her sample population).

But eventually Malcolm decided that his visits to Sarah’s flat were becoming too much for him. He announced one evening, when the two had slumped apart after what seemed like rather more passionate lovemaking than usual, that he had registered with a computer dating service.

“What about me?” sniffed Sarah petulantly. She’d got to rather look forward to her sex sessions with Malcolm.

“That’s the problem,” Malcolm confessed. “It’s just not right for the two of us! I need to find a lady of my own age. It’s only right. I’m sure a beautiful girl like you should have no difficulty in finding someone else!”

That word again. Beautiful. Like pretty, adorable, sexy and attractive. What use were all these attributes, and she had no doubt they were true having heard them repeated so many times, when she had no way of appreciating them? And what use were such qualities if it was so difficult, sometimes impossible, to do what all the other girls could do, with no complications and without the need of assistance, in meeting, attracting and then making love with men?

But now she had Lee.

The man in her life. A man who gave her the sexual passion that she needed and desired. The man whom she loved so very much.

“Oh Lee!” she gasped, sensing that his tongue was tiring. “I need something more inside me. Something hard and stiff. Something that will properly bring me off.”

“Of course, Sarah,” he agreed with a chuckle. “Assume the position.”

Sarah bent backwards, pushing the sheets off Lee’s naked body, so that they fell to the floor. She lay on top of hot bare skin, hair tangling on the chest and over the useless, slightly atrophied legs, a thick patch around his crotch.

But as Sarah knew, what was meant by something stiff and hard was one of the dildos or vibrators that Lee kept on the bedside cabinet. Not that Sarah cared. She was in love. Nothing else mattered. And the end result was the same.

At first it had been a sore disappointment, the first and almost the most severe fracture in their relationship, when she discovered that Lee was not to be quite the lover she had so long desired and was in one key regard not quite in the same class as either Tom or Malcolm.

She lay on her back, her arse on Lee’s stomach, and her back over the patch of pubic hair, while Lee guided a particularly well-charged vibrator into her eagerly anticipating vagina.

Beneath her was the source of her disappointment, something about which even now she sometimes felt a twinge of bitterness. The accident that had deprived Lee of the use of his legs had also paralysed the one organ she had been most desirous of knowing intimately.

Sarah shrugged. She was too much in love with Lee to let a little thing like that get in the way!