Every woman has a beauty secret.
Alicia’s secret just happens to be 24 years old, 1.78m tall, and completely unaware that he was chosen long before he worked up the courage to ask for her number.
A darkly funny, wickedly honest confession about youth, power, and the things women do that they’ll never admit to.
People tell me i look twenty-six.
Too youthful for my age and the position I hold at work.
That’s the first impression, until I start opening my mouth and the age gradually revealed itself.
I can choose to hide that though,if I want.
I’m blessed with that chio, hot young milf look. Both complexion and figure,but being blessed with those doesn’t men you don’t put in the work to maintain them.
Medically and statistically, i do not look thirty-five. Fuck, talking about my own age makes me cringe.
My skin is tight. My jaw is defined. My body, thanks to Pilates three times a week and a diet that would make a nutritionist weep with joy, is better now than it was at twenty-five. I have the kind of figure that makes women my age hate me at the gym and men of every age do a double-take when i walk past in a pencil skirt.
Yes read that again girls. Your only objective to be at the gym,is to make other girls hate you.
Hate ya, not envy. Envy meant they can work towards what you have.
Hate is different,one look and they instantly know there’s no way they can have what you have,at oh fuck 35.
I’m not bragging. I’m stating facts. The way you’d state your height or your blood type. 1.65m. Type O. Looks twenty-six. These are just measurements.
My name is Alicia. I am thirty-five years old. I am the senior director of brand strategy at a firm that you’ve heard of but i won’t name because i was warned the people on this site will start googling about me. Next thing I know, my information will be plastered all over the internet.
I earn enough to own a freehold condo in CCR, drive a white BMW 3 series that i bought with my own money, no loans. I also have money for blinker fluids for the car’s fucking signals.
And I can eat at restaurants where the menu has no prices.
I have no husband. No boyfriend. No children. No cat. Not even a houseplant that depends on me for survival.
I have breast, i have legs and i have lips that will have you thinking of me on my knees while you moan.
Tell me then, am i not the most situable bachelorette ever?
I have suitors or course, i’m not a lesbian. At any given time, there are between three and five men actively trying to take me to dinner, most of them my age or older. Good eligible bachelors too including the son of a local billionaire.
They have good careers, decent faces, the kind of men your mother would call “stable” and your girlfriends would say “not bad lah” or “quite good leh”.
Investment bankers. Lawyers. Doctors,developers and even an erotica writer.
I turn them all down.
They think i’m picky. They think i have impossibly high standards. They think i’m that woman, the career-obsessed, emotionally unavailable ice queen who chose the corner office over the altar and will die alone with her BMW and her freehold condo and her Pilates-sculpted body that nobody gets to touch.
They’re half right. I am picky.
But not in the way they think.
Here’s my secret.
I don’t date men my age. I don’t date men older than me. I don’t date men who wear tailored suits and talk about their portfolios and pour wine with the confidence of someone who’s been doing it for fifteen years.
I date boys.
Not boys boys lah fuck. Calm down. Not minors or teenagers.
I’m not a predator in the criminal sense.
I date men between twenty-three and twenty-six. Fresh out of university or just starting their careers. Clean, eager, not jaded with life. The ones who still believe in romance, who still get nervous before a date, who still think sex is something magical and not just cardio with emotional complications.
Young men.
Why? You men can lust for 18 and 21 year old while Auntie like me cannot lust for young boys?
And before you ask, no, it’s not a kink. It’s not a fetish either like some of your wife sharing shit or sister in law fantasy. It’s not some desperate cougar fantasy fuelled by too many episodes of whatever drama is trending on Netflix.
It’s maintenance.
You know, some women get facials every month, some women do Botox or fillers or those insane thread lifts that make you look like you’re permanently a 20 year old kpop star. That’s their maintenance.
Mine is different.
I sleep with young men because it keeps me young.
I know how that sounds. Trust me. I know. I’ve heard it in my own head a thousand times and it sounds insane every single time. But i’ve been doing this for six years and the results speak for themselves. I am thirty-five and i look twenty-six and i feel twenty-six and every doctor, dermatologist, and personal trainer who’s examined me has told me that whatever i’m doing is working.
Their energy. That’s what it is. Not in some mystical magic stone, crystal-healing, sage-burning way or placenta from some fucking animals. I’m not burning incense and chanting over their sleeping bodies. It’s simpler than that.
Young men have a hunger that older men have lost.
A rawness. An intensity that borders on something primal.
When a twenty-four-year-old looks at you like you’re the most incredible thing he’s ever seen, when his hands are shaking because he can’t believe someone like you is letting him touch you, when he finishes and looks at you like you’ve just shown him a colour he’s never seen before, that does something to you.
It’a both chemical and biological.
Maybe cellular, like some undiscovered fountain of youth?
It’s like plugging into a charging station. I go in at 40% and i come out at 100%. My skin glows. My eyes are brighter. I walk differently like gravity got the memo to ease up for a few days.
Kristine, my best friend, the only person on this planet who knows my secret, calls it my “fountain of youth” program. She says it with air quotes and an eye roll but she also says i look better every year, so the air quotes don’t really land.
Kristine : Girl…you look younger than my intern. My intern is twenty-four. How is this possible?
Alicia : Clean living.
Kristine : Clean living my ass. You’re draining these boys like a vampire.
She’s not entirely wrong. Well i have rules too.
Without rules, this becomes messy, and messy ages you faster than anything.
Rule one: the age range is twenty-three to twenty-six. No younger, because below twenty-three they’re still basically children and i have standards. No older, because after twenty-six the energy starts to dilute. They become cynical. They start using words like “situationship” and “boundaries” and how much “CPF” one should have, and the sexual hunger dims. I need the hunger.
Rule two: i never pursue them visibly. They must believe they found me. They must believe they approached me, charmed me, won me over like some innocent girl next door. The moment a man thinks a woman chose him, his guard goes up. But when he thinks he chose her? He opens like a flower. Stupid, eager and thrusting, sorry, i mean trusting. My mind works in ways i don’t understand either.
Rule three: i never let it go past the proposal stage. The moment i sense it coming, the hints about the future, the “what are we” conversations, the lingering looks at jewellery stores, some fucking talks about upcoming BTOs, i end it. Please la, i have a freehold condo where i can walk to Orchard road, why would i want a BTO in Lim Chu Kang lane 4?
Oh, there are no BTO in Lim Chu Kang? Wait just a while longer, there will be BTOs everywhere. The dead have to make way for the living. In 50 years, maybe there will be BTOs in our land waste island and above the sewage treatment plant in Bedok. Maybe even one right beside the islands where the military does their live firing.
I end things cleanly with enough tears to make him think it’s breaking my heart too.
They recover eventually and move on. They always do. Twenty-four-year-olds are made of rubber. They bounce.
Rule four: no overlap. One at a time. I am not greedy. I am disciplined. This is not a buffet. It’s a carefully curated dining experience and each course is enjoyed fully before the next one arrives.
Rule five: the most important one.
I never make the first move in bed. Never. Not the first kiss, not the first touch, not the first time. He must initiate everything. He must believe, fully and completely, that he is the one leading, that i am the shy, slightly overwhelmed older woman who can’t believe this handsome young man wants her, that every escalation is his idea.
It protects me. If it ever goes wrong, if feelings get messy, if someone gets hurt, the narrative is clean. He pursued me. He initiated. I was just a woman who said yes.
Terrible? Yes.
Effective? Also yes.
Six years. Nine men. Not a single complication. Not a single angry ex showing up at my condo. No single social media post about the “toxic older woman.”
Nothing. Because each one of them left the relationship believing it was beautiful, believing he’d been loved.
I’m good at this. The way i’m good at brand strategy. It’s the same skill set. Just applied differently.
Am i evil? Come on la.
Those young men had the best six to eight months of their lives. The best sex, the most attention, the most affection. They learned things from me that will make their future wives very happy.
I bet you wished you met someone like me when you are 23. I may not be the one you grow with but i darn well make sure the orgasm you get is the one you spend the rest of your life chasing.
You’re welcome.
I first saw James at a café in Tiong Bahru.
Not the trendy kind with the exposed brick and the $9 flat white served with milk hand squeezed from the udder of a pure breed cow.
It’s the old traditional kopitiam at the corner of Eng Hoon Street, where the kopi uncle still makes it with the sock filter and the condensed milk comes from a can with a dent in it.
I go there on Saturday mornings. It’s my ritual. Kopi C less sugar, two soft-boiled eggs, kaya toast. I sit at the same corner table and read the news on my phone and enjoy being anonymous. In the kopitiam, nobody looks at me twice. I’m just another hot woman having breakfast. The uncles are more interested in their newspapers and complains about the governemtn. The aunties are more interested in each other’s gossip.
That Saturday, James was at the next table.
Something in my peripheral vision pulled my attention.
He was maybe 24, 25 at most. Lean. Clean face, slightly tanned, the kind of tan you get from playing sports outdoors. He wore a simple white t-shirt, jeans, and sneakers. His hair was slightly too long, falling across his forehead in a way that made him push it back every few minutes with his fingers.
He was reading an actual book. Physical, paperback, dog-eared at the corners borrowed from NLB. I couldn’t see the title but the cover had that look, literary fiction, the kind that bookish boys carry to café to feel intellectual.
My internal radar pinged.
Age: correct range.
Appearance: above average.
Demeanour: unguarded. Alone on a Saturday morning reading a book at a kopitiam.
Single. Almost certainly single. Guys in relationships don’t sit alone at kopitiams on Saturday mornings pretending to read. They’re at brunch with their girlfriends at some overpriced place in Dempsey, taking photos of acai bowls.
Forearms : Good enough to hold me down while i…ok, let’s not go there so fast.
I watched him for maybe five minutes. He was completely absorbed, he might actually be reading. Then he laughed at something he read, yes, at the book.
A small laugh, more air than sound, the kind that makes you wonder what was he reading, and then he looked up, almost reflexively, embarassed he laughed in public to a book.
His eyes swept the kopitiam and landed on me.
He smiled, visibly mmbarrassed.
Alicia : Good book?
I heard myself say it in a casual and light tone.
James looked at me. And i saw it happen. The rapid calculation behind his eyes as his brain processed that the woman speaking to him was attractive and interested to talk to him.
His ears went red.
James : Oh…ya. It’s…it’s pretty good actually. Haha. The writer started writing erotica on line but then moved on to other titles.
The “haha” was nervous. The laugh of a boy who is not used to beautiful women initiating conversation with him at breakfast.
Perfect.
My smile widened, not with warmth, but with predatory focus. I uncrossed my legs slowly, a deliberate performance of stretching, then crossed them again. Yes i’m fucking cock teasing. My calf rose, hovered for a heartbeat in the humid kopitiam air, then descended to lock over the other knee. I shifted my hips just so, angling my entire lower body toward the sliver of morning sun cutting through the window.
The light hit my skin, illuminating every inch of the waxer’s art that i overpaid for. I showed the impossible smoothness, the sheen of my skin. The hem of my cotton shorts crept higher, exposing the taut, vulnerable skin of my inner thighs. I held the pose, letting him look his fill.
I saw him swallow his saliva and quickly look away.
I smiled as i sipped my coffee. I’ve found my next prey.
Coming soon