[...] Half-heartedly, I picked up The Firm again, skipped forward two hundred pages, skipped back fifty; by chance I happened on a sex scene. The plot had developed a fair bit: Tom Cruise was now in the Cayman Islands, in the process of setting up some kind of money-laundering scheme, or in the process of unmasking it, it wasn't too clear. Whatever the deal was, he was getting to know a stunning mixed-race girl, and the girl wasn't exactly backward in coming forward. 'She unsnapped something and removed her skirt, leaving nothing but a string around her waist and a string running between her legs'. I unzipped my trousers. This was followed by a weird passage that was difficult to grasp psychologically: 'Something said run. Throw the beer bottle into the ocean. Throw the skirt on to the sand. And run like hell. Run to the condo. Lock the door. Lock the windows. Run. Run. Run.' Thankfully, Eilene didn't see things quite that way: 'In slow motion, she reached behind her neck. She unhooked her bikini top, and it fell off, very slowly. Her breasts, much larger now, lay on his left forearm. She handed the top to him. "Hold this for me." It was soft and white and weighed less than a millionth of an ounce.' I was jerking off in earnest now, trying to visualise mixed-race girls wearing tiny swimsuits in the dark. I ejaculated between two pages with a groan of satisfaction. They were going to stick together; didn't matter, it wasn't the kind of book you read twice.