“Well it’s true,” you type. “You were an asshole. It broke my heart having to act like your friend without being with you.” You exhale with the whooshing sound that means the text went through.
“I told you from the beginning I didn’t want anything,” comes the reply. There is ice in those words. Not just ice. Hail, sleet, rain. It’s a fucking blizzard. “I don’t know what sort of weird game you and Mariah are playing with your coven or whatever. Just…leave me alone.”
He’s right. You had built a little gang of Empowered Women! who were all screwed over by the same guy (swirl your wineglasses, roll your eyes, amirite?) only because you desperately, desperately wanted him in your life somehow. You couldn’t stop talking about him, and the only people who would tolerate you when you couldn’t stop talking about the boy you slept with once were the girls who also couldn’t stop talking about him.
Brooklyn Guy is gone. He blocks you on Twitter, and you, in misguided vindictive fury, block his phone number.
Over the next few days, the group texts sputter into infrequency and then finally stop altogether and you realize, with a creeping awareness, that a smaller cluster of girls have formed a new group chat, without you. Your selfishness, your insecurity, your jealousy, your cruelty: It all bubbles up inside of you in a moment while you’re scrolling pointlessly on your laptop one afternoon. After a few moments of inactivity, the screen goes dark, and you’re left staring at the black mirror balanced on your stomach. It shows the double chin and the frizzy halo of unwashed hairs and the grimace of chapped lips and the cluster of acne around your eyebrows.
You see them in pictures on Instagram at brunches you weren’t invited to. Your little coven is over. And you’re left lonelier than before with a stone in your gut that ached whenever you thought about what happened, how you needed to be loved so badly that you became someone unlovable.
How do you salvage your pride and self-esteem?
A. By getting a new boyfriend immediately and forgetting all about Brooklyn Guy. But ideally, getting a new boyfriend that would make him jealous.
Turn here.
B. By trying to meet another group of friends.
Go back here.
WHICH SEXUAL FETISH BEST FITS YOUR ZODIAC SIGN?
Aquarius: Sex on the beach
Pisces: Water sports
Aries: Latex
Taurus: Anal
Gemini: Threesomes
Cancer: Hotel room sex
Leo: Knife play
Virgo: Exhibitionism
Libra: Being blindfolded
Scorpio: Using candle wax
Sagittarius: Teacher role-playing
Capricorn: There’s something about wearing lingerie that makes you feel like Marilyn Monroe, like, you should be in a silk robe, popping bonbons into your mouth with perfectly manicured fingernails. You’d be draped seductively over satin sheets in a room that you call your “boudoir” with a seductive purr.
But you are not in some glitzy dressing room or hotel lobby surrounded by singing men in top hats. You are exiting a cab in Bushwick, on an empty street flanked by an empty lot on one side and by warehouses on the other, wearing a corset that belongs to Suze, who is at least three sizes bigger than you in the boob area, and all of the corset tightening in the world can only do so much to help the inch or so gap that exists between the rigid, boned fabric of the corset and the top of your boobs.
“This is the address,” the cabdriver says hesitantly, watching the four girls leave the back of his cab. Suze bounds out, as the de facto ring leader (i.e., the only one who knows where she’s going). In addition to the corset you borrowed from her (red brocade—she’s in her black leather one), you’re wearing her makeup, but your own jeans. “Last time it was in a different building, but I think they change them every month just for, like, safety stuff,” Suze says, scanning the buildings for an address number.
“Safety stuff?” you ask.
“Yeah, just like so the same creepers don’t show up. That’s why you had to register online and bring your ID.”
Suddenly, you seem very far from your bed and your laptop, and a realization opens in your mind like a cracked egg. “Is this…an orgy?”
Suze is already bounding through a thick Frankenstein-looking door and climbing the dim staircase. “It’s a make-out party,” she says. You know that. That was what she’d told you, and that’s what had been on the website through which you bought your ticket and offered up your name and the promise that you were over eighteen. “But, I mean, yeah,” she adds when she hears your hesitation. “People will probably be having sex.”
“IDs?” says the man at the door. Whatever you imagined a bouncer at a make-out-but-possibly-sex party would look like, it wasn’t this. This man is slightly overweight and appears to be about midforties, thinning hair pulled back into a ponytail. You look beyond the entranceway and see the vibe is less sex dungeon and more “dorky college a cappella group letting loose.” You see three men wearing fedoras. Every instinct in your body is telling you to leave, to go home. This isn’t a place for you. Your places are bookstore coffee shops, and Harry Potter–themed amusement parks, not warehouses with strangers who all seem to be wearing at least one embarrassing article of clothing.
But the taxi is long gone by now, and you have no idea how far into Bushwick you’ve ventured, and you’re already here. It’s an experience. It will be fine.
By the time you were twenty-one years old, you still had never had an orgasm. That was just around the time you started to wonder if something might be wrong with you. It wasn’t as though you hadn’t been having sex—you had—or that you weren’t attracted to boys—you were—but just that that particular moment, the moment as depicted in books and TV shows and Katz’s Delicatessen scenes just had never happened for you. There were never “waves of pleasure” or “explosions.” If “you’ll know it when you have it,” then you had definitely never had it. There was just general wetness and a moderately pleasant feeling and then a wait for it to be all over. Boys rarely checked. If you moaned a little, they’d be content to satisfy themselves, completely convinced that they brought you to orgasmic bliss and back again.
Even touching yourself did nothing. “Just relax and find what feels good!” said encouraging commenters on blog posts where other people complained about not being able to orgasm. Porn was either anemic or filthy. So you continued on your quest and eventually the world of written erotica brought you to strange places and acts that you hadn’t read about yet in Cosmopolitan. It was an undeniable improvement. You were definitely making progress.
Your orgasm became something of a scientific challenge. Twenty-five percent of women are unable to orgasm, a statistic online declared. You at least deserved rigorous testing before you acquiesced to being one of the unlucky few.
And so, in the pursuit of orgasm, discovering you had a fetish was something akin to discovering a new freckle or a mole on the back of your hand. You’re not sure whether it’s new or if it’s always been there, but oh well, you think. I guess this is just a part of who I am now and I’ll have to deal with it accordingly.
And then you moved to New York, and your new friend Suze—sweet, bubbly, funny Suze—mentioned how she went to dungeons in college, and that universe of things that you had only read about in incognito mode on your computer (hiding the evidence even from your recently viewed pages) became something people, real people, were allowed to participate in.
“I—me, too,” you said. “I mean, not me too, I’ve never done that but it…turns me on.” It was far more difficult than you could imagine to tell a friend, even in the logical context of a conversation, that something turns you on.
“I should set you up with someone!” Suze said. “And there’s this party next Friday you should totally come to. It’ll be super casual, just to give you an idea of the scene. Do you have something you can wear?”
You didn’t. So you borrowed a corset. And took a cab with her to a place
filled with a subculture of people you had always assumed would never intersect with your life in any way.
The room had filled up—people were smoking on the patio, and you’d have to press up against at least a few embracing couples if you wanted to cross the room.
“Cash-only bar,” Suze says. “I’m going to go to the bathroom.” The other two girls you arrived with have already left to wait in line for drinks. You look at Suze. “Just…mingle,” she says.
A karaoke stage and microphone languish empty and unloved in the far corner, between a few dark, black leather couches low to the ground that you already know are going to see some fluid exchanges later. There is almost no one here that you want to make out with. A few cuteish boys hover around a Spin the Bottle game that someone started, but they all seem to already have their arms around girls a little cuter and a little skinnier than you. Why are you here if there’s no one you actually want to have sex with? you ask yourself. And then there’s the more important question: Why are these people playing Spin the Bottle like they’re horny middle schoolers?
“Meet anyone cute?” Suze asks when she returns, bearing a bottle of beer.
You shake your head. “I don’t think it’s really my crowd.”
“Mmm, yeah.” She looks around. “I think the last one had a cuter turnout. I mean, we should still try to have fun.”
Suze joins the game of Spin the Bottle.
Here is what having fun looks like at a sort-of orgy for you:
You scan the room looking for someone with the least embarrassing attempt at a sexy vampire goth aesthetic (think eyeliner and fishnet gloves). You politely reject the few truly pitiful boys in Hot Topic necklaces that approach you.
BOY IN HOT TOPIC NECKLACE: So where are you from?
YOU: Chicago
BIHTN: Cool. Want to make out?
YOU: No, thank you.
BIHTN: *walks away*
It’s an easy and loyally-held-to formula.
You can join the game of Spin the Bottle or step outside onto the patio, where the couples who have moved very quickly past making out have decided is a good spot to claim and sprawl across the lawn chairs in a mosaic of unidentifiable ass cheeks. Instead, you watch Suze drift from group to group, occasionally joining mouths with a boy or girl of relative attractiveness. You’re here, so…
“Hey,” you say to a boy who is not cute, but is tall, and sometimes those can be the same thing. “Want to make out?”
He shrugs and puts his arms around you and you kiss for a few minutes—strange, not unenjoyable minutes. And then you two separate, and ten minutes later you see him kissing another girl, because that’s what this place is. You just got your feelings hurt by a stranger at a party designed for people to kiss a bunch of people.
The line at the bar hasn’t diminished and so you’re facing down the rest of the night sober.
Why does everyone who is into BDSM also have to be into The Nightmare Before Christmas? you think as a girl walks by with Jack-Skellington patterned leggings disappearing into combat boots. What is it about enjoying a little spanking in bed that also coincides with Tim Burton’s aesthetic? You are on the island of misfit toys in cheap pinstripe trilbies. The white-collar sadist types have to be out there, most likely snorting cocaine somewhere in Murray Hill by the thousands, but you are hardly the lithe girl in Tiffany earrings who marries a Wall Street broker. Who is left for those of you (hopefully) destined to date non-sociopaths?
Once, you and your little sister convinced your parents to take you to the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Wisconsin. It had been advertised with a big sign on the interstate, and the four of you drove gleefully, imagining giant turkey legs and a few bitter teenage employees furtively texting from phones hidden in jester uniforms, maybe a few horses trotting around a dusty field.
Instead, you paid for your tickets and entered a small nation-state. The faire was massive and sprawling, multiple “realms” with full rides and endless booths selling clothing, weapons, and vaguely medieval-themed accessories. “Look at this,” your mom said, calling you over to a booth selling armor. She held up a chain-mail shirt. “Four hundred dollars.”
“It’s all crafted by hand,” the booth vender offered helpfully.
“I just can’t imagine who is investing all of this money to come here,” my mom said. “Do they come week after week?”
“They must,” I replied, watching a woman with an overflowing corset pass on the arm of a man cosplaying Criss Angel. “It’s like a community, right? It has to be. You invest in the costume and come to the faire. It’s a hobby.”
It felt like we had been permitted a secret glimpse into a strange and extensive club that was at once both completely foreign and far more massive than we could have imagined. It’s the same with this party. A part of you wishes you could say fuck it all and throw yourself into this society of guys in eyeliner and girls who wear fishnet tights, people who do exactly what feels sexy to them and damn to hell anyone who might shame it in the outside world. But a bigger part of you just wants to go home.
Suze is still off playing Spin the Bottle, flanked by the other friends you came with. The black couches in the back of the room are, as you predicted, now writhing with bodies. It’s time for you to leave.
You say goodbye, walk down the narrow stairs to the street, and find a corner where mercifully a cab appears as if summoned by your desperation and the universe’s recognition that a girl should not be outside in Bushwick, alone, wearing a corset and coming out of a sex party.
You’ve tasted the BDSM world for the first time. Do you continue?
A. Yes. Try to meet someone. See if it works for you in real life.
Turn here.
B. No. Revert back to the version of yourself at the last save point. This will never be for you.
Turn here.
Suze does end up introducing you to someone, a man she has been hooking up with. “He’s nice, and safe, and you’ll have fun with him,” she says. She’s right. Things have been going well.
Before your third date, he sends you a text. “My place, 8pm. 76 B–––—St. Bring gym shoes.”
You’ve never gone out with a dominant man before, someone who would actually call himself a “dom” because he’s involved enough in the BDSM scene to know what that even means. Two months ago, you barely knew there was a BDSM scene outside of middle-aged swingers in Akron and dungeons for senators getting whipped by high-class call girls, but it feels very New York to have a BDSM lawyer for a boyfriend—like Christian Grey or Patrick Bateman. Preferably the former because you’ve been wearing your nice Big Girl coat that your mom bought you from Banana Republic over to his place and you don’t know how to get bloodstains out of wool.
“I don’t really form attachments with people easily,” he said to you on your first date. You went to a crepe place on the Lower East Side, arriving five minutes early so you had to linger in the tiny restaurant, eyeing the other tables and hoping you didn’t look too much like a lost tourist with your backpack on.
The only photograph you had of him was a bruised ass from his FetLife profile. He could be anyone.
Then a man came out of the back of the restaurant, the restroom, wearing a full suit, and you didn’t really think it was him, until he made his way over to you and kissed you on the cheek.
He was older than you expected, with a receding hairline like a golf sand trap and sleepy eyes that reminded you of Matt McGorry from Orange Is the New Black. He recognized you more easily than you would have liked; you’d strategically placed a black bar over the eyes on your FetLife profile that Suze had built with you and forwarded over to him (a comparatively mild picture of you leaning seductively over your friend’s couch in a black robe with cascading cleavage).
“That easy to recognize me?” you asked.
“Yup,” he answered simply, and took a sip of water. So he wasn’t one to “yes and.” But that’s okay. Maybe you’d been dating too many freelance writers who
had nothing better to do than spend their parents’ money on UCB classes. He was an adult. With a job. And a suit. He paid for a cab back to his place.
He doesn’t tell you what the gym shoes are for—you secretly hope it’s a strange sex thing and not going to the gym together, because you hate running the way a girl who grows up the slowest one in her class will always hate running. You go to a gym exactly three times a year when enough motivation accumulates in some forgotten region of your brain that you are forced to buy a new pair of expensive headphones and an app on your phone that promises to train you for a 5k because this time you’re going to be one of those girls who works out, goddammit, this time it’s going to stick! (It doesn’t.)
“Should I eat dinner before?” you text back. You’re hoping that your very subtle hint will remind him that 8:00 p.m. is what you consider on the late end for dinner and you get hungry, especially when your meal will only come after a mystery sex or exercise adventure.
“No, but a snack or something is fine,” comes the reply.
As of now, here are the possibilities of his mysterious gym shoe requirement ranked in order of how much you’d enjoy them:
1. He’s taking you rock climbing at an indoor climbing-wall-slash-restaurant. The benefit of this option is mostly food.
2. He’s taking you rock climbing at a normal indoor climbing wall. The downside here, obviously, is no food. Another downside is he will see how little upper arm strength you have.
3. The gym shoes are for a sex thing. (Your lack of upper arm strength might also come into play here?)
4. He’s going to make you go to the gym with him.
At 7:58 you show up at his thirty-eighth-floor apartment, wearing the jeans and sweater you wore to work that day but presciently packing exercise clothes just in case in your backpack alongside your gym shoes.
Choose Your Own Disaster Page 14