“You smell amazing,” he said too loudly. The volume was jarring in contrast to the silence in the room.
“Thank you,” I whispered back.
It was supposed to be platonic, but our rising body temperature made it clear that it wasn’t. We were attracted to each other and while cuddling was nice, we were both trying to get as close as possible.
“I’m getting a little hot, do you mind if I take my shirt off?” he asked.
That was dangerous. I didn’t want it to escalate but I also thought about how nice it would be to touch his skin directly.
My dopamine-soaked brain won, and I said, “Sure.”
I ran my hand over his body, softly playing with his chest hair.
My cheek was resting against his collarbone, my breath coming out hot over his chest and while I knew I shouldn’t do it, should have tried harder to stop myself, I couldn’t resist flicking my tongue across his nipple.
He let out a deep, guttural groan.
For someone who had been celibate for five years, I was demonstrating remarkably low self-control.
I wanted to take off my shirt too, to feel his skin against mine.
I was crossing a line. I knew it, but the sweater in-between us felt like a concrete partition.
“Would you mind if I take my shirt off, too?”
“Be my guest,” he said.
I pulled my sweater off over my head and laid next to him in my bra.
“My God, you’re magnificent,” he said, his eyes full of desire as he grazed my breasts with his eyes.
Damnit, I was a sucker for compliments. I still wasn’t used to people telling me I was beautiful, so compliments melted my willpower more than any other drug.
He caressed my arm while I nuzzled my head in his neck. We were escalating the intensity, touching and responding to each other without making it overtly sexual.
He moved quickly and was on top of me, grinding his hips into mine, raising and lowering his pelvis against me, aggressively dry humping me.
I hadn’t been dry humped in years.
I was about to tell him to knock it off when he yelled loudly and stopped.
“I just came,” he said.
I looked down and saw a wet spot on his sweatpants. I hadn’t seen anyone cum in their pants in over a decade. I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or get pissed off.
It had happened in less than thirty seconds, which left me bewildered by the whole situation. We hadn’t even kissed.
“I’m gonna go clean up,” he said, heading to the bathroom.
I sat up, trying to sort through the emotions I was feeling. I was confused about what had happened. Aroused by the closeness of his body. Angry that he had used my body to cum without my consent, even if it was just dry humping. Then again, it was in his pants, so I guess it was harmless. And I probably shouldn’t have taken off my shirt or licked his nipple. Then again, he shouldn’t have humped me. Was he in the wrong? Had I encouraged it? Was I in the wrong?
The whole situation was bizarre, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
I was still waffling over these emotions when he left. We didn’t kiss or hug but waved to each other on the way out. I told Lindsay about it the next morning and she was as baffled as I was. She said he gave her a weird vibe and she wasn’t surprised.
He texted me the next day to set up another cuddling session. That’s what we were calling them, apparently: “sessions.”
If by session he meant “cuddle and then I’m going to cum in my pants while dry humping you,” then I didn’t want to. I probably should have told him to buzz off, but I didn’t because despite being annoyed, I kept remembering the look on his face when he said, “You’re magnificent.”
I had to put my foot down and set a clear boundary.
“We crossed lines we shouldn’t have crossed. I’m not looking for a Friend with Benefits,” I wrote. I already had Amit and I was satisfied with that situation. Two Friends with Benefits was way too much.
If Steve couldn’t be my cuddle buddy, then it was on to another message in my inbox.
“We’ll just cuddle this time. Last time was an anomaly. We’ll set a timer and everything,” he promised.
He came up to Harlem three days later and I told him the new rules, which someone had suggested on the Cuddling Cave website. We’d set an alarm for forty-five minutes and cuddle fully clothed over the covers. No kissing. No nipple-touching. Definitely no orgasming.
Platonic.
I laid down next to him, the sound of my heart thudding in my ears. I focused on my breathing, in and then out. In and then out. Eventually, I entered a meditative state where I was relaxed and comfortable. I was experiencing the “feel-good” chemicals the website had gone on and on about.
By the time the alarm went off, I was almost asleep.
We took our time sitting up, peaceful smiles on our faces. This was exactly what I had been looking for. We had been successfully platonic, and I felt amazing, like I’d gone to the spa, done yoga, and slept for twelve hours.
We platonically cuddled again two more times before he started texting me daily.
I didn’t have time to cuddle more than once a week, a fact that he was disappointed about.
“Why don’t you call your other cuddle buddies?” I offered, trying to be helpful.
“I want to cuddle with you. I can’t stop thinking about it,” he said.
We scheduled another appointment for the following week. Amit had been MIA for two weeks now, so I was looking forward to seeing Steve.
I set the alarm and snuggled into his chest, breathing in the scent of his cologne, listening to his heart beat.
Instead of relaxing into a meditative state, I could feel our body heat rising.
I had set strict rules for good reasons. It had worked for three sessions.
The alarm buzzed, I silenced it, and returned my head back to Steve’s chest. Neither one of us moved.
He ran a finger along my collarbone.
“You have the most perfect body I’ve ever seen,” he said.
He always managed to melt my resistance with his damn compliments. How was a lady supposed to restrain herself when a gent was bathing her in such lovely accolades?
I looked at him for a moment and decided to break my own carefully crafted rules. I was tired of being someone who made arbitrary rules and then felt guilty for breaking them, when no one but me even cared at all.
“I don’t want a Friend with Benefits,” I said.
“I know.”
“But I also want to kiss you right now.”
He looked surprised.
“I want to kiss you, but I don’t want to set a precedent. I love cuddling with you. Sometimes I’m going to just want that. So, if I kiss you right now, can we agree that sometimes we kiss and sometimes we’re platonic, but we’ll always discuss it clearly?” I asked.
He agreed.
Clothing came off as he kissed downward toward my thigh. I wasn’t ready for oral sex. We hadn’t discussed our sexual history and it felt too intimate.
I still wanted to fool around, though, so I caressed his body before positioning his dick firmly between my breasts, using my arm to squeeze them together for extra pressure. I moved my breasts up and down until I was certain he was going to wake all of my neighbors with his moans. He came, strongly and fiercely.
Into his own eye.
I marveled for a minute at his utterly inconvenient aim and the white liquid coating his left eyelid.
He leapt out of bed, jumping around, screaming, “It’s in my eye. Fuck! Fuck! I gotta clean it before I get pink eye.”
I scrunched my eyelids together, “What does that have to do with pink eye?” I asked.
In a panic, he told me about a time at summer camp when a fellow camper got it and the counselor told them that pink eye was caused by cum. He had been afraid ever since, frantically washing his hands every time he jerked off.
I couldn’t help myself, laughi
ng lightly at first as he rushed off to the bathroom. By the time Steve returned from the bathroom, I was on the ground, incapable of breathing because I was laughing so hard.
“Wait, you think that pink eye . . . is only . . . caused by . . .” I couldn’t finish my sentence.
I doubled over in another round of laughter at this revelation. I imagined him hearing that a fifty-year-old coworker was out because of conjunctivitis and thinking, “She got jizz in her eye!”
I waited until I could talk and gently explained that pink eye wasn’t always a direct correlation to cum in the eye.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” I said.
Still giggling, I sat down on the bed beckoning him to come join me.
He sat down next to me. “I’ve never orgasmed like that in my whole life,” he said stroking my hair. “My body responds to you in ways I don’t understand.”
I thought about everything I knew about Steve. He was young and had told me he didn’t talk to women until late adolescence. He alluded to the fact that he was a sexual veteran, but all evidence pointed elsewhere. As much I wanted to believe I was a sex deity who turned men’s bodies to mush, it seemed more plausible that Steve was more inexperienced than I was. For the first time in my life, I was the one with more sexual competence.
I invited him to stay the night but he said he couldn’t sleep with someone else in a bed and he needed a good night’s sleep, so he left and headed home.
I ran into Mary in the hall, on her way to use the bathroom.
“Heard Steve. Are you guys, like, dating now?” she asked, yawning, her eyes only half open.
“I mean no. We’re . . . doing a thing? We’re cuddle buddies?”
I tried to think of the right title but I couldn’t because what we were doing was abnormal, we weren’t exactly cuddle buddies anymore but we also weren’t Friends with Benefits.
I turned to the Internet for help and typed, “What do you call someone you sometimes platonically cuddle with and sometimes fool around with but don’t have sex with?” My fellow Interneters were as confused as I was, commenting “That’s not a thing.” and “It’s called a clusterfuck, and I agree, not a thing.”
A few weeks later, Steve left for Florida. To my surprise, I missed him. Amit was still mysteriously MIA and I was craving affection.
In truth, I was craving Steve.
I looked up “cuddling” to see if anything came up about it being addictive.
Turns out it was.
According to Google, cuddling was biologically addictive because it caused the brain to release oxytocin, which makes someone feel more loving toward their partner. Couples who cuddled could feel withdrawal symptoms when their partner was gone thanks to the reduction of oxytocin.
I texted him the sentiment, “I’m going through withdrawal.”
“You have no idea what that does to my body,” he wrote back.
I had a little bit of an idea.
“I think I like you,” he said.
“I think I might like you too,” I replied.
“Let’s go on a real date when I get back?” he asked.
“I’d like that,” I said.
We met up at an Italian restaurant for our first actual date and he was standing inside waiting for me to arrive.
“Hi!” I said leaning in to kiss him.
He turned his head. “Oh, I don’t do PDA. Kissing should be reserved for the bedroom, unless you’re already boyfriend and girlfriend,” he said with as much self-assuredness as he said everything.
I stared at him, realizing that even though I’d seen the man cum in his own eye, there was still a hell of a lot I didn’t know about him.
The date was going well enough. I could ignore the fact that Steve chewed with his mouth open and acted like he was the expert in literally everything, but things took a turn when I told him about one of my other experiences on Cuddling Cave.
I had gotten a message from a man who ultimately confessed that he had lied about his age and used a fake profile picture. It turned out he was in his fifties and married. Instead of apologizing for deceiving me, he acted like I should cuddle with him anyway.
“He was probably very lonely,” Steve interjected aggressively, as if I was confronting him personally.
I couldn’t figure out why he was defending this nameless, faceless man on the Internet over taking my side.
“Of course,” I replied. “I can empathize with that, but loneliness doesn’t give you the right to be deceitful.”
“Well we can’t all be young, thirty, and beautiful,” he said resentfully.
I stared at him for a moment, alarmed that he was directing his anger at me. What annoyed me the most was the implication that this man’s loneliness was somehow my responsibility and therefore entitled him with access to my body. I could empathize with the problem, but I didn’t have to be the solution.
“You think I don’t understand what it feels like to think no one is ever going to touch you?” I asked pointedly.
“Well, good-looking women usually don’t have that problem,” he muttered.
I pulled out a picture of me from when I was younger and shoved it in his face.
“I know what it’s like to feel undesirable. Still doesn’t give you the right to lie.”
We ate in silence for a few minutes and when the waitress walked by I asked for our check.
We both went home alone.
The next morning he texted, “I’m sorry about yesterday. That guy shouldn’t have lied to you and I shouldn’t have defended him.”
I didn’t respond and an hour later he wrote, “Look, I can’t explain it, but I’m infatuated with you and I hate it because I hate feeling out of control. Why do I respond to you the way I do? It doesn’t make sense and I like it when things make sense. I like order and you’re chaos and I want you more than I have ever wanted anyone.”
He was Christian Greying me.
Talking about how much he needed and wanted me, making me feel powerful, and sexy, like there was something uniquely special about only me that made him go crazy with desire.
As ashamed as I am to admit it, I fell for it.
We had a few good “sessions” or dates or whatever we were calling them after that. Usually we met up at his place, cuddled, did some light fooling around, and then he would pay for my car home since he couldn’t sleep with someone else in his bed. I didn’t know if we were officially dating or not.
For lack of a better term, we were in a situationship.
And there’s nothing I hated more than being in an ambiguous gray zone.
I invited him over a few days later to clarify things.
When he got to my apartment, there was a news report on in the background about a new #MeToo allegation.
“This stuff is crazy, ya know? Like, you can’t do anything these days. The company I work for has stopped hiring women because we’re so afraid of sexual harassment claims,” he said.
I stared at him, dumbfounded.
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got a bunch of programmers. They’re awkward. They don’t have, like, any experience with women. A girl joins the team and naturally they’re flies to honey. They don’t know they’re sexually harassing someone.”
My mouth dropped open.
“Steve. You’re talking about adults. They know the difference between right and wrong. You can’t just shrug your shoulders and be like, ‘whoops, he didn’t know that was inappropriate.’” I said, gritting my teeth. “And even if, even if, that was the case, shouldn’t your solution be to educate them? Not a fucking ban on hiring women. Do you understand how this makes me feel? To know that women have fewer opportunities because some grown-ass men can’t figure out how to not sexually harass someone?”
The argument escalated until I was too upset and could hardly speak. Steve wasn’t listening; he was too focused on being right and making his point.
I stood up and glanced in the mirror
. My face was covered in dark, blotchy hives, the kind I only got when I was feeling an intense emotion.
And then, despite myself, I began to rage cry.
I wanted to be a strong, bold woman who held her ground but I couldn’t stop myself. I was so mad. The country was in crisis and what was playing out in the world was very much playing out in my own life. My argument with Steve was triggering the countless arguments I’d had on Facebook and in person. It was triggering the countless times I read comments where people made excuses about sexual assault and gender discrimination. I was tired of asking the same goddamned questions, again and again. Questions like: How could things change if we didn’t start holding people accountable? How could young women believe they were smart and valuable, when both corporations and the justice system continued to fail them? How could I teach women that their voices and thoughts mattered when I couldn’t even make a man I was intimate with listen to my voice or validate that my thoughts mattered?
In response, Steve stood up and hugged me tightly against his chest. It took everything I had not to punch him. I was mad at him but also mad at myself for crying. The only reason he was listening now was because I was feeding every stereotype about women being emotional and it was possibly invoking his need to protect me.
“It’s frustrating. I know. It’s gotta be frustrating,” he said, stroking my back. He was trying to comfort me, but it felt condescending.
We sat down on the couch and he tried to soothe me, but I was still too mad. We turned on a sitcom to try to change the mood and sat there in silence for another thirty minutes barely talking to each other, before he pulled me closer to snuggle him. I didn’t want to touch him. This issue was important to me and by not even trying to understand my perspective, I felt like he was part of the problem.
Despite my lack of reciprocity, he kissed me.
Before I knew it, he was dry humping me. He didn’t give a shit or couldn’t figure out that I didn’t want that.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I said, wiggling my way out from under him.
“Fucking really?” I said again, my hands on my waist, glaring at him.
The Coitus Chronicles Page 15