Foreword
Before I tell you what happened between us, I should tell you what was happening in the world that made it possible.
Older men — particularly older white men — have been handed a clear cultural instruction in recent years: your time is done. Step back. Stop taking up space. The desire you still carry is an imposition. The women you notice don’t want to be noticed by you. You are not a potential lover, you are a problem to be managed. The polite version of this is called “being age-appropriate.” The honest version is erasure. I understand why the instruction exists.
I simply chose not to follow it.
And then there is the generation she came from. Young men raised on pornography and the dopamine slot machines of dating apps, who arrive in relationships with no emotional vocabulary and no financial capacity and no real desire for the sustained work that intimacy requires. Men who hunt, and fuck, and move on — and then return, baffled, when the woman they treated as interchangeable stops being available. The apps formalized this into mathematics: the top ten to fifteen percent of men receive nearly all the attention, and use it to cycle through women who receive nothing in return except the education of being discarded. The women who didn’t give up entirely on dating arrived, eventually, at a kind of furious pragmatism. Sofia arrived there at twenty-two.
We found each other in the gap between those two worlds. A man who refused to disappear and a woman who refused to settle. That is the most neutral way I can describe what happened. It is also, I suspect, the most honest.
Here is what actually happened.
The cities are real — Lisbon, Cyprus, Budapest, Ayia Napa, Granada, and finally the Adriatic on a ship we both now refer to as the cruise from hell. The forty-eight-year age gap is real. The dual voice is real: Sofia wrote her sections — some from scratch, some in response to passages she felt I had got wrong about her. The desire, the jealousy, the shame — all real, in both directions.
Here is what I would have you understand before you begin. When we met, I was seventy years old and white. She was twenty-two and African. After retirement, divorce and impotence at sixty-seven I took the decision to rebuild and reinvent myself: mindset, body, libido, hunger, the refusal to become invisible. I was part way through that transformation when we met. Better, but unfinished.
At twenty-two, Sofia was arriving at her own crossroads. Beautiful, but manipulated and insecure. Shaped by men who preferred her smaller. Who got more from her that way. Men who had never bothered to give her an orgasm. Their pleasure, not hers.
She wanted to break out, but didn’t know how to do it. I wanted to continue, but needed better company.
We collided with the specific force of two people who have each decided, separately, that they have nothing left to lose. I was wrong about that. So was she, in different ways.
What held us together — through the shame, the infidelities, the forty-eight-year gap, and the specific weight of a white man and an African woman in a world that had strong opinions about that — was the incredible sex and the mutual caring. That sounds reductive. I mean it precisely. The desire was the thread that survived everything else: the thing we returned to when language failed, when pride was in the way, when the world outside had made itself impossible. This book is explicit about that because there is no honest version of this story that isn’t.
People will have opinions about what we are to each other. About the age gap, the money, the desire. Some of those opinions will be right. I have tried to see what we are from the outside as clearly as I could, while still being helplessly the man inside it.
She agreed to tell her side. That she did so at all is the thing I cannot fully explain right now.
The only fact I’d ask you to hold onto as you read.
Mark Harde, Lisbon, 2026
Blurb
She wore turquoise lace and told him to close his eyes.
He was seventy-three. She was twenty-five. The Adriatic glittered beyond the cabin glass, and for fifteen minutes, nothing was complicated.
Forbidden Spice opens at the edge of everything falling apart — then travels back forty months through cities across Europe and the fullest telling of an impossible love affair: two people who should never have worked, and then did, brilliantly and disastrously, and kept doing it anyway.
Mark rebuilt himself at sixty-seven — body, hunger, the refusal to become invisible — and arrived at seventy-three certain he had made Sofia the goddess she is becoming. Sofia knows exactly who she is becoming. And is not so sure she owes it to him.
Told in two voices — Mark’s rendered desire and Sofia’s razor-sharp interior counterpoint — Forbidden Spice is autofiction about the oldest question: what happens when you fully awaken someone? What do they do with what they’ve learned? And does the person who lit the match get to claim the fire?
It is explicit. It is unflinching. And the ending — which Mark imagined before he understood that reality would be stranger — is devastating.
He always told her she could command any room. Win any heart.
She believed him. Then she stayed... until she left.