As I jammed the creamed bun down my throat and wiped sugar from my cheeks, Aunty Betty said, "You really need to learn to practice some self-restraint, Missy." She had no idea just how much, in fact, I did.

It was a family wake, many years ago, when Aunty Betty said that. No one in the world could have known that my favourite method of masturbation was to tie myself into Dad's worn old armchair and wriggle free. I'd sit in the great chair, strap a rope around myself, tighten it, sling it around again, tighten it some more, and around and around until I'd twined the rope under itself and then pushed my hands beneath the restraints and proceeded to wriggle myself free.

The struggle was enormously titillating – for not only was I feverishly working to free myself from the compromising position before any family members should arrive home, but also because the rope mauled my sensitive body, presented hard resistance against my jerking hips, and flicked my clitoris up and down as I fought to liberate it from the bonds. Those days were mighty self-satisfying – although they did fall by the wayside when I discovered the opposite sex.

I hadn't thought of those days for years, until one night at my place when I found myself in the company of three other people discussing masturbation. It had been a great night – a cocktail party thrown for my choicest friends. We'd had a magnificent feast with great wine; had discussed world events, a bit of work, the Seven Wonders of the World – and then, near two A.M., the topic of conversation turned to masturbation. Three friends and I were actually talking about masturbation… well, confessing it really.

I don't recall who initiated the topic, but I sobered a little when I realized that Lestrade was seriously disclosing what turned him on alone in his flat, just hours before he'd turn up at work and hand me reports on the Melissa MacBeth murder case.

"I lean against the wall," he said, and paused as if testing whether the waters were safe. It seemed they were – no one objected to his honesty – or at least no one said a word.

"I put one hand up and I lean into it. I'm facing the wall and I pull, gently at first, always. My man likes it gentle for starters."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I sat up a little. Should I stop this stuff? What were the others thinking?

"I imagine I'm standing over a woman. She's scared of me because I'm a man, I'm stronger, bigger, I've got it over her."

Yeah, sounds like a man's fantasy, I laughed to myself.

"And as I get it going, she starts to feel it too and she's backing for it. She wants to say it's disgusting but she likes it. Her nipples are reaching out for me; her breasts are surging toward me. I pull harder, lean more into the wall. My dick almost touches the wall, which is her, but it doesn't – except for momentary little garbs of sensation and – shit. You know. I… oh, man – someone else's turn. Man. Oh, man."

Leah is quick to jump in. She's hot to go. She liked it. She tells something about a beer bottle between her thighs, face down on the floor. The neck of the bottle barely touches her clitoris as she humps herself on it. She grinds up and down, the tip of the bottle only touching, only touching. It makes me hot.

"Look mum, no hands!" she giggles, and we all crack up laughing.

Then Anderson goes, and after that they all look at me. "Oh," I say. "Oh, I –" I can't say I don't masturbate. It's a part of my daily life. It's a part of everyone's life.

"Come on," Leah coaxes. "It won't get past these walls."

So I look at them all, determine they're all so boozed they'll forget by tomorrow, and I tell. I tell about wriggling out of Dad's old armchair, about the time my sister almost caught me in the act, how she gave me a weird look, a sussing look, as if I was something strange and wicked – and how that turned me on. It was such a secret, such a delicious pleasure, and it was all my own.

My story seemed to take longer than the others. I tend to go off into my own world; to elaborate, describe in detail, relive; to tell all. By the time I was finished, my audience was speechless.

"Well," said Anderson, finally. "I think we should all go home. It's late, don't you think. And after all, if they ask us at work what we did on the weekend, we don't really want to tell, now do we? So let's put tonight to rest."

We all looked at each other like dumb cats in a blind alley. I stood up. "Thanks for coming," I said, immediately regretting my choice of words. "We'll have to do this again sometime."

People took the cue; before I knew it, my home was my own again. I sat on the couch hardly believing what had just gone down. I was knocking back the last drop of wine in my glass when the doorbell rang.

Uncertainly, I rose and answered the door and discovered Anderson in the stairwell. "Forgot my mobile," he said. I let him in.

I watched Anderson make for the couch, take a cursory look over it, then turn around to face me. As we stood face-to-face he put his hand insider his jacket, withdrew his mobile phone and dialled a number. My phone rang. I looked at him, incredulously. Then I answered the phone.

"Hello?"

"It's me, Anderson."

"You jerk! Why are you ringing? What are you doing?"

"Please invite me to watch you."

"What?"

"Please. What you said, the way you said it, I've known nothing like that before. Please do it tonight. Let me watch you. I won't say a thing."

It had reached that time in the night when boundaries, self-limitations and self-reproach for harmless pursuits of pleasure all seem to disintegrate into insignificance. I stood holding the phone, looking at Anderson, reading absolute desire all over his face. As a single woman, as a lover of life, as someone who won't persecute herself for anything that comes naturally, and who longed to see Anderson raw, I decided it would be OK.

I put the phone down, walked to my hallway cabinet, withdrew surplus rope I'd stored there in case the towrope in my car was mislaid, and took it to the longue chair. I dropped the rope, went to the CD player, figured Eminem for music, and returned to the chair. By then, Anderson had made himself comfortable on my couch.

This was weird, this was weird – but oh, it felt good.

I pretended Anderson didn't exist and hoisted myself into the chair. I placed the rope around my waist, swung it around the back of the armchair and tightened it. Then I swung it around again and tightened it further. I did this a few times until there was no rope left and there was nothing to do but loop it under itself and wriggle my hands and arms under its folds. As I did, I noticed how short my skirt sat upon my thighs. It seemed to feign modesty for my essentials but really aroused the most immodest desires. I desired myself. My arousal was heightened.

Needing no cue but the sudden sense of vulnerability I felt, faced by the fact of my bondage, I began to struggle free. The rope was tight across my chest and as I attempted to jerk leverage, it pressed down into my flesh until it got stuck at my nipples. Then it flattened them as I wriggled and jiggled, until it passed the hurdles and my red hot nipples sprung free. They tingled at their sudden freedom and the rope roughed itself down the rest of my breasts. Over my flesh the rope rubbed, down and further down as I struggled to free myself.

Now threatening to hold my hips and pussy prisoner, the rope burned into my bones as I jerked and writhed. Four or five folds of rope lay over my clitoris as I wriggled, sweating and breathless now, Anderson watching intently. I was only half aware of him as I lapsed into myself, feeling acutely the arousal of my clitoris from being rubbed by the ropes. I sighed and closed my eyes. The pleasure was tremendous.

I became momentarily alarmed when Anderson dropped from the couch to his knees, his penis in hand. He had unzipped himself, unbuttoned his shirt, and, like a man-sacrifice, knelt before me. He began to stroke his piece, and I'm not sure whether it was shock or a sudden surge for freedom, but something caused my feet to push against the floor, while simultaneously throwing myself and the lounge chair backward until I was on my back, on the floor. I was mostly loose by then and I wriggled my clitoris, then my mound, free of the rope.

As I did this, Anderson was stroking feverishly. He was delivering sounds of a tortured soul edged with cries of freedom, and my excitement heightened as I heard him nearing orgasm. He cried with excruciating anguish as he stroked madly, his penis over my face.

I was suddenly thirstier than ever before in my life and I wanted only to drink Anderson's gush, but it was only almost there; my need for it became unbearably intense. I was able to free up some rope and was just feeling it pass over my knees when Anderson jerked forward and cried out as if it were his last utterance upon this earth. He screamed and gurgled all in one as hot come streamed from his penis in a great gush of release. Still on my back, I lifted my pelvis to greet his shooting cock – crying for joy, the come wet on my thighs and pussy. I immediately thrust three fingers into myself in a frantic need for unity. I fingered myself with crazed rhythm, quick and urgent, needy. I did this for only seconds while Anderson panted over me, before I too came and released from all bonds of this earthly existence. The orgasm was transcendental.

It was somewhere near four A.M. and we were panting over each other, a mess on my longue room floor. I close my eyes; Anderson carried me to bed, and we slept.

We both missed work the next day, which in itself was caused for rumour, but when Cindy came up the day after that and asked me pointedly what I'd done over the weekend I was so mellow I simply had no defences left. "I meditated," I told her absently.

"Oh, really?" Cindy replied, catching her reflection in the glossy surface on the wall behind me. "I heard you and Anderson took an interest in each other." She was aching for gossip.

"Really!" I scolded, much as Aunty Betty would have done were she there. "Well, I meditated, thank you very much – and touched upon realms you've only read about." And I went back to writing the report on the Melissa MacBeth murder investigation.