The third of four. Nine women, nine worlds, and nothing shared between them but the moment. A client who can buy anything except the thing she wants. A singer and a stranger who will not applaud. Moving day. An officer candidate in 1943 with a birthday she has told nobody about. A hard sell meeting a hard no. An astronomer alone on a Hebridean island. A tradeswoman and the client who tells her she has undercharged. A summer with a date on it. An air traffic controller on the tenth day of being kept.

Slow burn to high heat
Power exchange and sapphic D/s
Orgasm denial and edging
Rope and light bondage
Praise kink
Forbidden and forced-proximity desire
Professional boundaries crossed
Age gap
Established couples and long marriages
Sapphic threesome
Wartime and historical settings
Holiday and summer romance
Remote island and Scottish settings
Class difference
Enemies to lovers
Character-driven literary erotica

Margaret Atkins
Inspired by Marisa Buccieri

They have kept me waiting for the better part of twenty minutes, which is longer than anyone has dared make me wait in this millennium.
The reception of Collins Byzante occupies the second floor of a converted bank on Cornhill, and whoever specified the furniture understood what the last three firms did not: a client kept waiting has nothing to do but value the room, and she will. The chairs are upholstered in wool so dark it reads as black until the light finds the green in it. Nobody chooses that fabric by accident. I admire that.
The second point of interest is that I am still sitting in the aforementioned chair.
The receptionist offered me coffee once and water twice, and I declined all three attempts to placate me because accepting refreshment in a waiting room is the first stage of forgiving the wait, and I have no intention of forgiving it. I dismissed Hargreaves & Vane after their senior partner kept me waiting briefly and then apologised at twice the length of the offence, which compounded it into something unforgivable. I dismissed the firm before that one for reasons too trivial to remember, though the relief on their faces as I turned to leave was the one thing that stayed with me.
The wait lengthens. Considerably. We are now past twenty. Somewhere behind the partition a printer starts and stops and starts again.
I could stand now. The girl at the desk keeps glancing at me as you’d glance at a wild animal that has strayed indoors, wary of sudden movement, and standing would be a mercy to her. I have my gloves in my lap, kid leather gone warm and slack from being held. I have a car outside. I have, at last count, forty-one million reasons distributed across four tax jurisdictions why the best counsel in London should come to me, and yet here I sit on wool that has taken the shape of nobody, beneath a rather good Hepworth print while Philippa Collins conducts whatever business she has deemed to rank above mine.
I stay in the chair.
I am honest with myself, always, as it saves time, and so I note the truth, which is that I am staying because nobody has done this to me in decades and I want to see the woman who has the nerve.
When the inner door finally opens, I hear it before I see it: a soft drag of brush strip on carpet, and I am still in the chair.
The photographs on the firm’s website show a handsome, yet unremarkably bland reflection of a corporate professional. The photographs, as it turns out, are a crime in the face of reality. Philippa Collins is tall, dark-haired, with a distinct Mallen streak. But it isn’t only her look which is striking: she crosses the foyer without hurrying, and her hips make a meal of it. She is a woman who neither hurries nor is ever late for anything that matters. That much is obvious. She is forty-five, perhaps. Her heels make no sound at all, because whoever chose the carpet had an obvious aversion to the sound of a woman owning her power. A navy suit cut close enough that the tailoring silently screams bespoke, and no jewellery except a watch with a face turned slightly inward.
“Ms Atkins,” she says, no hand extended. “You’ve been waiting.”
“Twenty minutes.”
“Nearer twenty-five.” No apology, and the correction is louder. “The call ran on because the client was in difficulty and I don’t abandon a client when they need me to be punctual for a stranger. If that doesn’t suit you, the lift is behind you. I wouldn’t wish either of us a wasted afternoon.”
The girl at the desk has stopped breathing, eyes wide and averted. The printer behind the partition has the decency to stop mid-page, awaiting further instruction.
I rise, and I take my time about it, and look for a long moment at Philippa Collins.
“Twenty-five,” I agree. “Shall we?”


O: Volume Three is the third of four illustrated sapphic anthologies. Nine erotic short stories, each narrated by the woman whose ink portrait opens it, each held to a single unbroken scene.

A client who has dismissed three law firms discovers the one thing she cannot buy. A singer loses an argument she started with a stranger who will not applaud. Two women move into a house that still smells of the last people in it. An officer candidate at Fort Des Moines in 1943 has told nobody it is her birthday. A sales director prepared for a negotiation is given a procedure instead. An astronomer on Coll has to say out loud what she wants, because the woman who sailed back for her has done enough already. A restorer delivers a chaise longue and does not leave. A borrowed house in Spain runs down to its last thirty-one days. An air traffic controller reaches the tenth day of being kept.

Nine women in the unguarded moment they stop managing their desire, and find themselves gloriously alive.