THE SEX DIARIES: My orgasm was so intense I had to turn my face away so he wouldn’t see…

It was good to have a life after a painful divorce, my therapist said. If a parent’s life came to a standstill, they were not a good role model for the children.

Only it didn’t feel right when six-year-old Emi, dressed like a sad clown in a ruffled skirt, striped socks and sequins, cried in my arms on a sidewalk shined by the rain.

‘What can I do?’ she shouted. “I can’t hug the babysitter!”

‘Why not?’ I said.

“Because she’s not you!”

After living together for more than eight months after our divorce, my ex-husband Simon had moved out of the parental home and into a rental flat. He didn’t see the children much. And now I, the only huggable one, left my kids to have sex with my hot young boyfriend.

Earlier in the evening, knowing this assignment was coming, I rushed Emi, Hector, 14, and Maude, 12, through their dinner while they talked about Minecraft and didn’t eat their vegetables.

“Is it bad that we annoy you?” said Emi. “Because we can stop.”

“Honey, no, you’re not!” I said, guilt bubbling in my throat. But they were so slow that I was late to meet Eliot. I had been waiting all week to meet him, but now Emi was swinging against the radiator and not brushing her teeth.

“Come on!” I said.

I had already drunk a large glass of wine. In the mirror my face was feverish. I wasn’t the mother I wanted her to remember. Furious, impatient, amazed that it had come to this: I did all the baths, all the hair washes, all the dinners while Simon could spend the evenings in the pub.

The doorbell rang, the babysitter was there. I told Emi I had to leave and she started crying.

‘Wake me up when you get home. Pinch me awake. Promise you’ll do it!’ I promised, I felt terrible. How could I leave such a sad girl behind? And why wasn’t her father here to comfort her? But my desire to see Eliot exceeded everything. On the street the babysitter had to tear her away.

As I boarded the train, I could still feel the imprint of Emi’s hands on my thighs. But I deserved to have a beautiful young boyfriend after the horrors of my divorce – to have the best sex of my life!

The train was when I went from being a mother of three to a beautiful older woman. I peered at myself through the window as the dark tunnel flashed by; applied my new red lipstick into my phone’s camera. My situation seemed written all over my face. Maude told me yesterday that women in their late forties never acted in anything, but here I was, the center of my own melodrama.

When I arrived at Eliot’s flat in North London, I was still self-conscious, running after my old life and trying too hard. I stood on my toes to kiss him, leaned too far forward. I tilted my chin and narrowed my eyes. He smelled like Sauvage, so he had made an effort, even though he was only wearing shorts and a plain white T-shirt.

I had dressed carefully in jeans and a French linen shirt, with some uncomfortably sexy underwear underneath.

But I wasn’t complaining: beneath his T-shirt, Eliot’s abs were firm. His chest grew bigger every day from all the weights he lifted. After we kissed, the transformation was easier: it made me dizzy with desire.

We ate the dinner he had prepared – curry from scratch – together at his table, hoping his housemates wouldn’t come home early. I looked at his big, beautiful hands, with their bitten nails, as he ate. I thought about them on my body. Finally he held out his hand. “Let’s go to bed.”

In the bedroom, Eliot stripped my clothes down to my matching red underwear (found triumphantly in the junk of my bottom drawer) and touched me. I looked into his green eyes. He once told me that men had told him that if they weren’t straight, the color of his eyes would make them fall in love.

“I long for you,” he said. He bent his head towards my breasts. I felt his shoulders, his strong neck. We fell on the bed. When he pressed his weight on me, inside me, it felt like maybe I didn’t exist.

My orgasm was so intense that I had to turn my face away so he wouldn’t see it. I said, ‘I’m glad it’s dark. I feel scattered to the four corners and now I have to think about myself.’

He said, “What does it look like when you put yourself back together?”

I thought: self-consciousness is creeping into the cracks again and here I am again thinking about the dishes waiting for me and Emi crying herself to sleep. But I replied: ‘A ship, a sail, put together.’

We said goodnight at the bus stop and kissed as only people in love do. I wrapped my arms around him and tried to lose myself in him, which I managed for five minutes before the bus came.

And then I drove away crying in anger because I was in his enormous grasp and had to return to my life.

Annabel Bond is a pseudonym. Names have been changed.