There was an unusual crowd at the airport. This was Guernsey, a British island of 60,000 people, forty-five minutes from London by plane. Quiet, respectable, a low tax area, which meant it was full of banks and trust companies, and therefore rich people as well as the local population. And because it was isolated, people had taken to international online dating sites to increase the chance of meeting partners. I had lived there most of my life and although it would not be true to say I knew all the women in my age group, I certainly knew a lot of them and had been fortunate enough to have encounters with more than my share.

So here I was at the airport. Five o'clock Sunday afternoon, early autumn. In the departure lounge, uncommitted temporary couples waited for flights back to the UK, or the mainland, as we called it. A pale, exhausted middle-aged woman in a loose Laura Ashley dress sat next to a dreaming, smiling black man several years younger than herself. A young woman in tight jeans and a Robbie Williams t-shirt held hands shyly with a smooth, self-satisfied man with silver hair and a gym-hardened body.

Conversations had run their course and everyone was waiting for the inevitable, the flight announcement that would signal the end of their weekend of expensive meals and bracing beach walks, the outward manifestations of hastily-arranged hookups that involved a quick getting-to-know-you phase followed by some rampant humping and the realisation that it was only make-believe, almost. They had got along together well enough online, so they had made it happen and now it was over until the next time or possibly forever.

My partner and I were one such couple. Barbs lived near Gatwick and we had been chatting for a couple of weeks before I had issued the invitation and she had plucked up the courage to accept. It doesn't take much doing to get someone to visit you in a nice part of the world, but Barbs was a nice, well-brought-up woman in her forties and she didn't leap into bed with just anybody, let alone spend several hundred pounds to go somewhere and meet someone she didn't really know, just to have sex with them. I admired her for that. I respected her. And I liked her. We had had a great time together, enjoying hanging out, with a significant amount of trust involved. We had made the decision to spend forty-eight hours or so like an established couple, eating and sleeping together, passing the time with walks around town and on the cliffs.

The sex was not exactly irrelevant, but it wasn't the be-all and end-all of the arrangement. We had explored each other and when we had finished one foray we had engaged in a bit of something called life to fill the gap before the next one. It was very civilised, in a strange way.

Barbs had a body that some would call "ample" and women on their profiles call curvy. It means plump. It means big, ripe breasts and rolling hills all the way down to the waist, possibly with a big bottom and sturdy legs. I like it.

I had devoured Barbs like a big Sunday dinner. She was roast beef and Yorkshire pudding with a delicious gravy. I had kissed her and licked her in all the usual places plus a few less popular ones before coming to rest at her buttocks as she lay face down, daring me to make that last heavenly detour.

"Do you like having your bum licked?" I had asked, and she had replied with a shy, playful, "Maaay-be,", and I had left it at that. Then a few minutes later I said, "So would you like me to lick your bum?"

"Maaay-be."

And both of us had stayed there, peering over the edge of the beautiful precipice and not quite having the guts to do it.

Unfinished business. There is no regret more infuriating than the one that could have been so wonderful and you know you could have achieved it if only you'd had the bottle to do it.

Now, as we sat and waited for the departure announcement, facing each other over cups of hot chocolate at a little aluminium table, I don't know what she was thinking but my mind was in her knickers, round the back.

Then the voice came over the PA system. Her flight was delayed by an hour.

The departure lounge fell silent as the short-term lovers, plus the clean people who were not part of our tribe, wondered how they would fill the extra time.

"Let's go for a little drive," I suggested quickly. In seconds we were in the car, heading down a steep hill to one of my favourite beaches, an old smuggler's cove type of place. Before the car park at the bottom, there was a little track off to the left, leading to a derelict cottage. The night was falling as I parked in the undergrowth.

"What are we..." she began.

"Back seat," I said urgently, and we both scrambled through.

"One more time," I began as we kissed frantically. "Would you like me to..."

"Yes," she said.

"What?"

"I would like you to lick my arse," she finished nervously, in case she had misunderstood. Her jeans and knickers now around her shins, she got comfortable, her head on her arms on the back of the seat. I was vaguely aware of another car pulling into the track and rolling up next to us. I plunged my face into Barbs's beautiful warm cave and licked the woman's anus. It was strangely fulfilling, as if my whole life had been leading up to this moment. She grunted and groaned and arched her back to draw me in further. In our fabulous Sunday roast, I was now enjoying the last of the golden potatoes and the thick, rich gravy, oily with the rendered fat of her body.

I licked that woman's arse as if our lives depended on it and she quickly came to a squirming, squealing, ecstatic orgasm.

When she had composed herself for a few seconds, she turned round and sat next to me, her hands on the crotch of my jeans.

"One more thing," she said, silently begging me to anticipate what she wanted.

"Yes," I said. "Oh fuck. I want to."

"Cum in my mouth?"

"Yes."

"Yes. Cum in my mouth," she said. She descended to my hastily-lowered jeans and took my cock in her mouth.

"I'm going to wank you off," this lovely woman said. "Into my mouth." And with her skilful hands and tongue, her hot, eager mouth, and my desperate urge, she made it happen and I pumped my semen into her cheeks and down her throat.

As we reentered the earth's atmosphere I saw that we did indeed have company.

The two guilty couples from the airport were there, the tired pale woman bent over the bonnet of a car while her ebony-skinned beau humped her from behind, while the silver-haired smooth guy leaned back against a tree as his younger lover knelt before him. He groaned loudly as he came in her mouth.

And suddenly, just for a second, the world made sense.