“What does cock taste like?” I asked her eagerly once.

She shrugged disinterestedly. “Like skin, lah,” she replied.

Admittedly, her simple answer made me a whole lot less afraid of giving a blow job, and when I finally had the chance to fit a cock into my mouth, I went at it with enthusiasm. Let it never be said that I give a sloppy blow job!

Oh no. The very idea of a blow job deeply entices me.

There is so much to a man’s cock besides the taste of skin, lah. There is the thin, silky texture of the shaft as your tongue slides over it, the soft, warm marshmallow of the head that quickly tightens into a hot, quivering ball when your lips close over it. I have longed to give a blow job ever since I read about it in my mother’s copy of Everywoman, to find all the tickly bits with my tongue and suck milk from the tip like an infant on a nipple. To feel the soft flesh grow hot and stiff in my mouth is an instant of the most irrevocable power a woman can have over a man. In short? Cock, basically, tastes pretty damn good.

Another question I asked my matter-of-fact friend: what does semen taste like?

“Salty,” she said.

Another, more descriptive girl said, “At first, it’s thick and goes goosh, goosh, goosh. After that it’s thinner and kind of watery and it just goes spurt. Splut. Sppt.”

I investigated with great interest the taste of semen. This particular batch was, well, salty. With a hint of cigarettes and alcohol. And it was something between the goosh and the splut.

Having been a virgin for twenty-six years, I’d had plenty of time to consider what a cock would feel like, as well as taste like. “It’s a muscle,” Pierre explained to me one day, much later, favouring me also with the various Latinate anatomical names for various regions of the male genitalia.