We've discussed books before with foreign settings (foreign to us, at least) and the lure of sex someplace where we're only visitors. The language thing is part of that, and so are different customs, but sometimes it's just the freedom feeling outside of your ordinary life. Someone mentioned Liz Coldwell's story "Smoke" a while ago, and I got her to elaborate along these lines.
Smoke is one of those stories which was inspired by a real situation. The Amsterdam bar that’s the setting for the action really exists, and is one of my favourites, even though I’m not a beer drinker or a smoker (which is ironic, given the subject matter of the story). My partner and I were sitting in there one hot June afternoon, when a woman at the bar got up to go outside for a cigarette. I watched her chatting away to a couple of lads who must have been about twenty years younger than her, and at first I was just thinking about how the bans on smoking in public places which have started to be enforced over the last few years have led to people who smoke socialising in a different way, striking up conversations with strangers over a cigarette. Or even “smirting”, as some people have termed the cross between smoking and flirting.
From there, though, I began to wonder what would happen if their interaction went further than just a simple, flirtatious conversation. And when you’re writing a story where the overriding theme is lust, then all bets are off and you can have your characters doing something they probably wouldn’t consider if they weren’t being driven by their lustful impulses. In real life, there are all kinds of consequences that might arise from an unexpected threesome, but fiction gives you licence to ignore those. So Barbara, the narrator of the story, gets to act out her fantasy of having sex with two hot men at the same time.
Mind you, there is a twist in this tale, but I’ll let people discover that for themselves…
