Up Close and Personal by Leonie Fox

But she was frighteningly clever and when, after a few drinks on the last night, she’d asked him to pleasure her anally, he thought it rude to refuse. His second conquest was a blonde, waifish thing, who served him cappuccino every morning at the coffee shop next door to the surgery. For several weeks they’d flirted outrageously, and then one day Connor had impulsively scrawled his mobile number on a paper napkin and passed it across the counter to her. ‘Call me,’ he said, ‘if you ever fancy hooking up.’ Half an hour later they were fucking like mink in the coffee-shop staff toilet. It was a scenario that was destined to be repeated many times and in various locations over the next few months, until the waitress found herself a proper boyfriend.
    Connor’s third and final lover was Zoe Tripp. They’d met five months ago, not long after Tilly’s birth. Zoe had just moved to Loxwood with her husband, a high-flying city lawyer who worked long hours. One day, she’d come to the Willows complaining of watery eyes and an itchy rash. Connor had diagnosed an animal-hair allergy and sent her away with a prescription for anti-histamines. The following week she was back again, apparently concerned about a small mole beneath her left breast. As Connor examined the blemish – which turned out to be perfectlynormal – Zoe had propositioned him. Ordinarily, patients were strictly off-limits for Connor. Such a liaison would be awkward, not to mention highly unethical. But Zoe was very insistent – and stunningly beautiful to boot. In the end, Connor had been powerless to resist, and he hadn’t regretted it for a minute. Zoe was quite the most exciting lover he’d ever had, regularly eschewing vanilla sex in favour of intricate role play and light bondage. Sexually speaking, she liked to be in charge and, much to his surprise, Connor discovered he liked being dominated. So much of his daily life involved being strong and assertive that it was nice being told what to do for a change. His new lover was very imaginative and he never knew who she was going to be from one session to the next – sometimes she played the part of a sexy schoolteacher in angora sweater and horn rims, administering discipline to her recalcitrant pupil; other times she was a smart-suited executive and he her hopeless subordinate.
    It wasn’t long before Connor became hopelessly addicted. The more sex he had with Zoe, the more he wanted. In stark contrast, his marital relations had dwindled to practically nothing – though this was only partly due to the affair. A large part of Connor’s lack of sexual interest in his wife stemmed from her new status as mother. Since Tilly’s birth, Nicole had swapped the figure-hugging jeans and G-strings she knew he loved for rather less attractive drawstring trousers and granny knickers. To make his home life even more unappealing, Connor found his new domestic responsibilities unspeakably tedious. Not that he didn’t love his daughter; far from it. It was just that he found the practical aspects of parenthood – the bathing, the night-time feeds,the endless nappy changing – boring in the extreme. His wife, by contrast, seemed to revel in the most mundane of tasks. Only that morning, she phoned him on his mobile, triumphant because she’d found a new hypo-allergenic brand of baby wipe that didn’t irritate Tilly’s sensitive skin. Fatherhood made Connor feel boring, predictable. He craved excitement in a way he had never done before – and excitement was precisely what he got from Zoe.
    Now, as he lay on his examination couch with her, their limbs damply intertwined after a particularly frenzied bout of lovemaking, his thoughts turned once again to his responsibilities. ‘I’d better nip out and grab a sandwich,’ he said, glancing at the funky retro wall clock he’d had imported from Italy. ‘Afternoon surgery starts in half an hour.’ He reached for his trousers. ‘We must do this again soon,