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But he just looked at her, an unreadable expression on his face. He took a drink of his hard seltzer and shifted uncomfortably on the couch.
More time passed.
She finally burst out with, “You’re not saying anything!”
“Because it gave me a fucking hard-on when you said that shit about using your body for my pleasure,” he said in a very scratchy voice. “And I don’t know what to do with that.”
She laughed softly.
“It’d make sense,” he finally came out with. “From the perspective of, uh, mating. Wasn’t Hollis saying something like this at the bar?”
She nodded.
“It would make sense for it to turn you on. It would make you more likely to engage in the activity that would, you know, result in more offspring. It would make sense for you to like it. But I think it’s kind of horrible and awful, and I refuse to think it’s inescapable, because I won’t live in a world where it’s destiny for one group of people to oppress another group of people. I mean, we’re verging into Nietzsche superman territory here. Just a hop, skip, and a jump to saying one species is naturally superior, and—”
“Are we, though?” she said. “If one thing is true, does it really mean that it knocks over a row of philosophical dominoes?”
“Well…” He hesitated. “Where’s the line?”
“You and your lines,” she said, but she felt fond about it. She liked him. She liked the way he thought. Maybe she liked it because it was different than the way she thought. “Do we have to move the line? Or…” She tapped her chin. “Could we just look at it a different way?”
“What’s another way to look at it?”
“Well, earlier, when we were, um…” She felt shy for some reason. “When we were playing,” she decided to say instead of some other more lewd word, “you said that we connected.”
“Yeah,” he said, thoughtful. “I had this idea that it was a game, and that there were rules.”
“Rules?” What was he talking about?
“Uh, yeah, I started to get kind of aggressive, and I felt that it was shifting the energy, so I stopped. I wanted to follow the rules of it. You were the one in charge, and I was the one submitting to you, so… I don’t know, in a way, we both surrendered to the rules of it. To the roles we were playing. And it was just pretend. If it had actually bothered me, I could have said something, and it all would have stopped.”
“Right,” she said. “Both of us surrendering, I like that.”
“Yeah, and that was maybe why it was so powerful,” he said. “Because we did it together. I felt so close to you. It just sucks that you didn’t have a good orgasm when we were doing that.”
“I didn’t say that!” she protested.
“I mean, technically, I didn’t have a great orgasm either,” he said with a little laugh. “You know, I wonder if that’s the difference, though. For my orgasm to feel good, really good, I want to feel like I have control of it. And maybe, for you to really have a good orgasm, you need to be out of control.”
She thought about this, turning it over and over.
“Or, you need to let me have control,” he said, softly, his voice going velvet.
She gasped.
His voice was still quiet. “I think you don’t really believe that your orgasm is, uh, necessary to the whole thing or something. You think it’s optional, but it’s not. And I think you need to accept that the only way I feel like the entire act was, uh, successful, for lack of a better word, is if you come. So, you should… you should surrender to me, and you should be able to trust me to give you pleasure. Except I’m not very good at it, am I?” Now, he’d gone a little rueful.
“I didn’t say that either,” she said, and her voice was soft, too.
“What if…?” He lifted his shoulders and the tips of his wings. “What if it’s just a game? It’s a game about dominance and submission and there are rules you can apply—or not apply—and if you’re both playing the same game at the same time, it’s like some kind of magic. But if you’re playing different games, then… it’s like trying to kick a field goal while the other person is trying to set you up to make a layup. It’s just never going to work.”
“I like that,” she said, sitting back down on the couch with him. She reached for his hand.
He took it, massaging her palm.
“But what if we both want to play different games?”
“We’ll just teach the other how to play,” he said. “And we can learn the rules to other games, too, try them out together. We don’t have to play the same way every single time.”
