Forbidden Heat: Singapore Diaries

*Forbidden Heat: Lessons in Desire* is part of the Singapore series, told this time from the other side of the desk. Diana Richardson. Fifty-one. Married. Former Head of English. Considerably less innocent than her Instagram suggests.

---

Jamie Bennett. Six years out of my classroom and walking through Changi Airport like he owned the place and simultaneously like the place might arrest him.

My first thought was: he's filled out.

My second thought was: Diana, you're fifty-one years old.

My third thought arrived before I could stop it, which was that his school reports had always said *James has considerable potential if he can learn to apply himself*, and standing there watching him navigate the Duty Free with that slightly hunted expression, I found myself wondering if Singapore had taught him that particular lesson.

I could have let him walk past. The terminal was busy. He hadn't seen me. Nigel was still forensically inspecting chocolate.

I said his name anyway.

The look on his face when he registered who I was. There it was - that specific combination of surprise and something else, the something else being the thing I'd been professionally not-noticing since he was seventeen and sitting in the third row trying to look like he wasn't watching my legs when I wrote on the board. Boys that age think they're invisible when they want something. They're not. They're the opposite of invisible. They're like neon signs in a power cut.

Then I had an idea. Or rather, I had an impulse and dressed it up as an idea.

'My daughter keeps telling me I need to be more social media savvy,' I said, which was true. 'Are you on Instagram?'

His face did something I filed away carefully. 'Er, yeah, sure.'

We exchanged details. His hands were slightly clumsy with his phone, which I found disproportionately satisfying.

'Brilliant,' I said, in the tone I used for students who'd finally produced a decent paragraph after three attempts. 'Perhaps our paths will cross again.'

---

Three months later, I checked his profile and he'd liked eleven of my photographs in a single session, including one from a walking holiday in 2020 that he'd had to scroll back quite some way to find.

I smiled at my phone in the staff room and thought: there you are.

Five months after that, I sent him a message.

*Overnight in Singapore on way to Perth. Drinks?*

Not exactly subtle. But then I was done with subtle. Subtle had served me well for twenty-five years and here I was, fifty-one, married, and following my former student's Instagram feed at 6AM before school. Subtle had had its chance.

---

Singapore was a layover, technically. Perth for a conference, overnight stop at Raffles because I'd used the university's travel budget and wasn't about to waste it on an airport Travelodge. When I saw his location tag - *Singapore, again. Send help or gin* - I sat in the hotel bath for twenty minutes thinking about whether to message him.

I messaged him.

The thing about Nigel is that he's a good man. Genuinely. Kind, reliable, remembered anniversaries before I did, never left a wet towel on the bed. Twenty-five years of that. And somewhere around year eighteen I'd realised that goodness and desire aren't the same thing at all, and that I'd been confusing them, and that this was nobody's fault. We'd had the conversation. We'd made the arrangement. He was perfectly fine about it, which was either very modern or very Nigel, and I'd stopped trying to work out which.

So I wasn't doing anything wrong, exactly. I was just messaging a former student to suggest drinks. Completely reasonable. Happened all the time.

I arrived at the Raffles bar fifteen minutes early because I was nervous and standing outside felt worse. I ordered a Singapore Sling and told myself I was just being friendly.

He was late, which was characteristic. He walked in looking like he'd been assembled specifically to irritate me - taller than I remembered, that particular ease that young men develop when they've had a bit of money and a bit of success and haven't yet started worrying about either. He saw me and something flickered across his face. Not surprise. Something else.

'Ms Richardson,' he said.

'Diana,' I said, because if I was going to do this I was going to do it properly.

---

Three Singapore Slings in, I'd remembered why I'd always liked him as a student. He was quick. Genuinely quick, underneath all the sixth-form posturing - he'd just been allergic to showing it in case someone mistook effort for earnestness. I'd read that in his essays for two years, that careful camouflage of intelligence behind the wisecracking. Sitting across from him now, watching him try to be casual about staring at my legs, I felt a specific kind of warmth that had nothing to do with the gin.

He'd been doing it all evening. Glancing down, looking away, pretending to examine the menu. At one point he actually dropped his napkin and bent to retrieve it, and I had to press my lips together to keep from smiling. Jamie Bennett, at twenty-three, was still exactly as obvious as he'd been at sixteen. Some things didn't change.

I'd worn the hold-ups deliberately. I want to be honest about that.

I'd known about his thing since Upper Sixth. Not because he'd done anything inappropriate - he hadn't, he'd been perfectly well-behaved, more or less - but because thirty-odd years of teaching boys that age teaches you to read the room. You learn to notice what they're trying not to look at. I'd caught him often enough that it had become a small, private joke I kept entirely to myself. Now, sitting in the Singapore heat watching him try to be subtle about it, I found I wasn't inclined to be subtle either.

'After years of marriage, you figure out what works,' I said. 'What doesn't. What you need that the other person can't give you.'

His expression did something complicated. He was trying to work out if I was saying what I was saying. I gave him a moment.

'Want to see my room? The view from the third floor is stunning.'

He actually said *for the view?* I nearly went home.

---

Outside the door, I told him there were still a few things I could teach him, which was perhaps the most shameless thing I'd said to anyone in years. I meant it, though. That was the disconcerting part.

He'd assumed, I think, that I'd be nervous. Or tentative. Or that the whole thing would be awkward and apologetic in the way that first times often are. He didn't account for the fact that I'd been considering this, in one form or another, since Heathrow.

I poured gin and tonics I didn't particularly want and talked about Cambridge, buying time because I suddenly felt the weight of what I was doing and needed a moment to decide whether that weight was warning or wanting.

It was wanting. I kissed him.

When we broke apart he said he'd thought about this more than he should probably admit, in a voice that went slightly odd at the end, and it was so completely Jamie - the honesty arriving a beat after he'd tried to be cool about it - that something in my chest did a small, stupid thing.

'So have I,' I told him. 'Though my thoughts were considerably more recent than yours.'

His face. Worth the whole trip for his face.

---

'On your knees, Mr Bennett.'

He went down like the floor had tilted. I'd imagined this, if I'm honest. Not in any detailed or premeditated way, just the occasional idle thought over six years that I'd filed under *not your business, Diana* and left alone. And now here he was, twenty-three years old and actually trembling, his hands around my ankle with this look on his face like I'd handed him something he'd been waiting so long to hold that he'd stopped believing it existed.

I let him look. That's the thing nobody tells you about desire - sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is simply not stop it.

When he pressed his mouth to my instep I felt it in places that had no business being involved. He kissed the nylon slowly, lips moving up toward my arch, and I heard myself make a sound that had no business coming out of a fifty-one year old English teacher from Cambridge. His tongue traced the ball of my foot through the sheer material, wet warmth through silk, and I stopped thinking about Cambridge entirely.

'Good boy,' I said, and meant it in ways I wasn't going to examine.

He looked up at me then. Completely unguarded, all that sixth-form performance stripped away. I'd waited six years to see that face and it was considerably more affecting than I'd prepared for.

I pressed my foot gently against his mouth and watched him close his eyes.

---

He got a cramp in his calf.

He stopped mid-shag and hopped around the room clutching his leg like a wounded pigeon while I laughed until my eyes watered. It was the funniest thing I'd seen in months and also, unexpectedly, the moment I realised I actually liked him. Not just wanted him. *Liked* him. That was an inconvenient development at half eleven on a Wednesday in Singapore, but there it was.

'Come here,' I said, when he'd stopped hopping.

Good sex usually has some comedy in it. The films never show that part.

I pulled him onto his back and got on top because I wanted to be in charge of this, and because watching his face when I controlled the pace was doing something serious to my concentration. He was younger and stronger and twice he tried to speed things up, and both times I pressed down harder until he got the message.

'Patience,' I told him.

'You're actually enjoying this,' he said.

'Tremendously,' I agreed, and rolled my hips in a way that stopped the conversation.

'You made me rewrite the entire Othello essay,' he said at some point, which is not something I expected to be saying during sex, but there it was.

'The revision was significantly better.'

'You're actually marking me right now, aren't you.'

'I'm always marking you, Jamie.'

He groaned, and I wasn't entirely sure whether it was frustration or something else, but either way I took it as a compliment.

---

Singapore spread out below us, all that relentless light. I had my palms flat against the glass and he was behind me and the city carried on entirely indifferent, which somehow made it better.

Near the end I stopped being Diana Richardson, which doesn't happen often. I felt him deep and I heard myself say *don't stop, don't you dare stop, I want to feel you come inside me* in a voice I barely recognised, pressing back against him, one hand squeaking down the glass. He made a sound against my neck and gripped my hips harder and I said *yes, like that, exactly like that* and I was not, in that moment, a Head of English. I was just a woman with her knickers round her ankles in a Singapore hotel window and I was absolutely fine with that.

He came hard. The groan he made was undignified and very satisfying.

I followed him about thirty seconds later with my forehead against the glass and the city lights blurring, saying something I won't be writing down.

---

Afterwards we lay on the thoroughly ruined sheets and I ran my fingers through his hair and felt something I wasn't going to examine too closely because it was nearly 3AM and I had a flight to Perth in nine hours.

He asked about Nigel.

'Does it bother you?' I asked. 'Thinking about him?'

He said no, then yes, then not enough to stop. Honest to the end, that was the thing about Jamie.

---

He'd been staring at them for ten minutes. On the floor where I'd stepped out of them, one folded slightly over the other. I watched him look at them and look away and look back, working himself up to it, and the whole performance was so completely Jamie that I had to study the ceiling for a moment.

'Go on then,' I said.

'Sorry?'

'Whatever you're trying to ask me. Go on.'

He went the colour of a postbox. 'I was just - could I - the stockings. Could I keep them.'

He said it all in one breath like he was ripping off a plaster.

I picked them up off the floor. They were still warm. I thought about what he'd do with them when he got back to that penthouse - and I did think about it, quite specifically, because I'm fifty-one not dead - and I felt a little pull of something that was half power and half something more complicated.

I folded them carefully, the way I fold everything, and pressed them into his hand.

'The knickers I'm keeping,' I said. 'They're my favourite pair. And frankly one souvenir is quite sufficient given what you'll do with it.'

His mouth opened.

'Don't,' I said pleasantly. 'We both know. Teachers always know what boys get up to when they're alone. We just never say anything.'

He sat there holding my stockings with the expression of a man who has got exactly what he wanted and isn't sure he deserves it, which was, if I'm honest, the most attractive he'd looked all evening.

I kissed him on the cheek and went to make coffee.

---

I slept well, which surprised me. Woke before him, made coffee, watched him sleep for a moment in the way you're not supposed to and then thought: Diana, you're fifty-one years old, not a teenager. I went and stood by the window instead.

He looked younger asleep. That was the thing I kept coming back to on the flight to Perth, and during the conference, and in the hotel room in Fremantle where I sat with a glass of Semillon and thought about what exactly I was going to do next.

Three days later I messaged him.

---

The video call had been an experiment. That's what I told myself. He answered shirtless - trying too hard, the tan was genuine though - and I could see he'd shoved things out of shot in a hurry, a Tiger can half-visible under the sofa.

He had the stockings. Of course he did.

I was halfway through the sentence when the maid walked in.

Walked in, assessed the situation in approximately two seconds, knelt between his legs. The whole thing was so brazen and so completely Singapore that I burst out laughing.

'Well, well,' I said. 'Is that your father's maid, Jamie?'

He was attempting to hold a conversation while this woman did entirely competent things to him on camera, which was not an easy task and he managed it with less dignity than he'd have liked. The maid - Maria - looked up at the phone and said *hello, Miss* with absolutely unimpeachable politeness, as if she wasn't in the middle of a hand job.

I liked her enormously.

'Next time,' I said, 'I want both of you.'

I ended the call, put my wine glass down, and thought about Nigel at home in Cambridge, probably watching Gardeners' World and wondering why I'd sent him three postcards from Perth when email was free.

Twenty-five years. He was a good man.

I was a complicated woman.

It seemed, on balance, to be working out rather well for everyone.