So last night, velvet was having difficulty saying the embarrassing things I wanted her to say out loud. This irked me.
I told her to get on the bed, on her knees, and start touching herself. I then placed a belt around her neck, looping it into a makeshift noose.
I laid down on the bed in front of her, the end of the belt in my hand. Then I placed my dirty foot square in the middle of her immaculately made up face. She tried to pull away, but doing so made the belt tighten. I smiled and stroked myself as I told her:
“You can have either pride, or oxygen. Take your pick.”
With a few condoms in hand, I rejoined Rex upstairs. We were back at it in a few moments, Rex slipping two fingers inside me while he bit on my ear. He leaned up and pulled out his cock, pumping his hand over it before asking, “now, can you suck this?” I thought I could hear a tiny bit of the kind of condescension I like.
The sex was simple, urgent. He shoved my legs up to my chest and we stayed like that after we finished. Still inside me, he leaned down and kissed my forehead.
“Well, hi.” I said.
“Hey there.” He chuckled.
We stayed like that and talked. It was almost comical, doing that sort of small talk after we’d already fucked, playing out the whole flirtation thing backwards. He played with my hair while I talked about myself. We discovered we both came from the same place before we’d moved here, that we both worked in the same field. We had mutual friends in our old city. It was bizarre.
And, yeah, when we were back up on our feet, he asked for my number. Thankfully, I got smart and gave him my phone, telling him to put his name in it. Which is, you know, how I discovered his name was Rhett and not Rex. I stood between his legs while he sat and he added me to his phone as well, one hand typing the number and the other resting on my butt.
“Wait a minute,” Rex said as I was pulling my skirt by on. “Can I take a picture of you?”
I turned to him. “Really? Why?”
He shrugged. “It’s something I’ve always done after significant or interesting things.”
“What, this is significant and interesting?” I teased.
“Well, yeah.” Rex replied. It was his first play party in this new city.
I looked away and straightened my posture. “Keep my face out of it.”
The couch cleared off for us, and “Rex”/Rhett and I settled down on it. Someone set a timer on their phone for three minutes. I laid back and Rex angled himself over me, looping an arm around me and kissing me again.
I genuinely want to say we made it to three minutes. Even two and a half. But at some point I had my legs around his waist and Rex’s hands were moving over my body, starting to remove the rest of my clothing. His lips were soft, the stubble on his face rough, his hands strong and imploring. There was something about it that just worked, some weird combination of that fact that I hadn’t been to a party in a while, had come into this evening with no expectations, and had suddenly gotten into this encounter with someone I had pretty strong chemistry with.
“Honestly, it was like a porn,” Pup said later. “Not like, in terms of hotness. It was hot. But in terms of people just kind of dropping everything and wanting to fuck.”
There was a rule at the party to use the rooms upstairs for sex or scenes in order to respect people’s bondaries, and so we decided to try to be discreet and sneak upstairs. Of course, just about everyone in the group noticed. “Wow,” the host said. “Didn’t even get to three minutes, huh?”
As I headed up the stairs, I looked to Pup to make sure this whole thing was all right, and was rewarded with just about the goofiest grin and thumbs-up ever. (Poly victory?)
When we got upstairs, we discovered someone had moved the condoms out of the room. I took a deep breath, headed back down the stairs, and called out to the host, “hey…can we get a condom?”
“We should, ah, we should maybe do something later,” I said to the guy on the couch who had kissed me while I was blindfolded. He looked a bit older than me, blond, a bit mischievous-looking (though considering the context, this made sense.) He was rather tall, though I had deduced as much when blindfolded from how I had to tilt my head to kiss him. When I propositioned him like that, in possibly the vaguest way possible, he – and a few other people around the circle – laughed. “Uh,” I added, “what’s your name?”
I was blushing. Pup was cracking up next to me.
The guy on the couch said his name, but I totally misunderstood it. (For the purposes of anonymity on the Internet, let’s say his name was Rhett and I misheard it as Rex. It was that level of like close-sounding names.) And rather than asking him to repeat himself I was like, internally, ok I think I heard Rex let’s just go with that but maybe don’t call this person by his name right away in case you’re really wrong.
People continued drawing cards around the circle. I watched Pup give a guy a pretty righteous spanking from a dare on the guy’s card, as well as saw him go to town licking this girl’s toes. I mean, the entire group was sort of speechless and transfixed watching it. Otherwise, there were kisses, slaps, massages. When it was “Rex”’s turn, he drew a card that had him share the craziest place he’d ever had sex. And though the location was pretty wild, it didn’t give much indication as to whether he fell more into the category of “swinger” or “kinkster.” After all, the whole kissing thing could have been because he wasn’t actually into hurting people or humiliating them.
When my own turn came up, I thought I might have the chance to see. Instead, I drew a requisite “check-in” card, which I am ***NOT COMPLAINING*** about because checking in is super important during an activity like this. But I got my opportunity when “Rex” drew a card and smirked.
“So, it says to have three minutes ‘in heaven’ with another person in front of the group. Any takers?” he asked. He was looking right at me.
I pretended to be all easy-going and raised my hand, saying, “oh, I’d be down.” But internally I was like:
I’d told everyone my limits and clarified what didn’t feel good for me, though I could not clearly express what I wanted. There wasn’t much I could put to words, considering what was about to happen.
I tied the blindfold over my eyes and waited.
For a moment, nothing happened. Naturally, my thoughts drifted to the worst ideas: no one else was into this or into me, I’d upped the ante way too soon, I was making people uncomfortable. It’s the kind of insecurity that has plagued my relationship to kink forever: the fear of being the only one who actually enjoys it. Which, yeah, at a play party is absolutely absurd.
The moment, though perhaps an eternity in my head, was maybe the length of one deep breath. And then everything: hands, mouths. Someone untying the belt on my skirt. Someone biting my neck. A hand in my hair, a hand on my ass. A hand settled at my side, pulled me a bit forward, and someone’s lips met mine. I reached up and placed a hand on the body in front of me. As I felt the scrape of an unfamiliar patch of stubble, I realized I wasn’t kissing someone I had kissed before.
The whole thing – the hands, the fingers, the mouths – was impossibly hot, but something was incredible about the fact that a stranger had come over in the midst of the probing and grabbing and biting to grab me and kiss me. Maybe it was the fact that the action was the most vanilla of anything that was happening, the most commonplace. The only thing that could have been done outside of the context of me being blindfolded at a play party. My friend suggested that it was the fact that the person had grabbed me and initiated something so intimate in the midst of a group like that. “It was like he was claiming you,” she said. I don’t know how sold I am on that idea.
And just as quickly as it all began, it was over. Someone reached out and tickled my stomach, making me double over. I recognised the host’s voice: “I think that’s enough for you.”
I removed the blindfold and sat back down, barely able to look up at the group now that I had no idea who had been touching me and where. Even though I knew it wasn’t him, I turned to Pup and asked, “was that you kissing me?”
“Nah,” he said. “I was biting you mostly.”
Mustering up all the bravery I could manage to make eye contact with everyone, I looked around the circle and asked, “all right, who was it?”
I’ve been thinking a lot about the meeting between Trump and Obama at the White House, and here’s the thing.
Obama used to be a law professor. This is key.
Law school is so, so different from college.
In college, everyone expects there to be a “syllabus day,” kind of a grace period where they can show up and get the lay of the land, figure out the bare minimum that they can get away with, the TA gives everyone their office hours, there’s an introductory lecture, and everybody leaves a few minutes early to go take a nap or something. You do the bullshit assignments, you say something in class now and then to get your participation check mark, and figure out how badly you can do on the final and still pass.
But see, in law school, all the methodologies you’ve spent the last 17 years operating under go out the window. Day one of law school is you being thrown into the deep end of the pool—you’ve had a homework assignment for two weeks now, and it’s to read the first 200 pages of your casebook. And now it’s you and the teacher (who is usually as smug as Alex Trebek) gauging and assessing what you managed to absorb while you skimmed through all those pages of reading so you could hurry up and get to the other 150 pages of reading for your next period class, in front of 50 people who are all smarter than you. And if you fuck up, or you didn’t do the reading, you are at the mercies of not just the professor, but the silent satisfied judgment of your peers.
Law school is hard, and it will make you feel stupid and tongue-tied and like you don’t know anything and can’t form an argument—because you don’t, and you can’t. Everybody there has had a 4.0 since birth. Everybody there was the smartest kid in their class, and you’re all rabidly competing for a sliver of a chance at something down the road. It’s petty, and savage, fiercely entrenched in a culture of formalities and ceremony, and exactly like Washington DC.
Yesterday when I was driving home, the NPR reporter talking about the Oval Office meeting mentioned that Trump had thought it was going to be a “getting to know you” type meeting, but that he was surprised when Obama stretched their talk out to 90 minutes before sending him along to the Capitol building where he met with congressional leaders for more lengthy meetings and stuff he didn’t want to do.
And he hasn’t even gotten to the actual job yet.
So think about that as we go into this.
Trump walked into the Oval Office like a two-pump-chump freshman thinking it was syllabus day, and what he got was the first day of law school, and he hadn’t done the reading like everyone else had, and Professor Obama decided to put him in the hot seat.
This was Obama’s chance for the most perfect revenge that would never be picked up on as revenge at all. He was gracious, polite—everything he needed to be for a peaceful transition and a good review from the press. And that would continue when the doors were closed, because that’s the key. Not a Come to Jesus meeting, oh no. If Obama were smart—and he is very smart—he would have treated Trump like an equal, and brought the discussion to a level that assumes far more of Trump than anyone has so far. Assumes that he’s an adult who’s been paying attention. Statistics, esoteric minutiae about the executive branch procedure, economic growth numbers, labor figures, domestic policies, countries Trump has never even heard of, shit that would never in a million years have been in Trump’s campaign soundbites or digestible summaries.
No way to escape. No aides to remember any of it for him. Just the two of them.
Because that’s what would strike a precise chill into Trump. The thundering realization that he’s woefully unprepared for the hard, boring, thankless reality of this, and Obama’s version of a smooth transition won’t and shouldn’t include remedial civics.
That’s what I saw when they shook hands and Trump stared at the floor instead of looking back into Obama’s face. He’s just figured out how little he knows about any of this.
And that should give you a small glow of satisfaction, because after those meetings, Trump definitely has the 1L Terror Shits. In January, the night sweats and insomnia will show up, but for these first few weeks—nothing but diarrhea and self-doubt.
