by Kris Ripper
I turned, mustering age and bearing and a little bit of Cary Grant. “Please don’t be nervous.” Only it wasn’t an entreaty, it was an order, with a polite please on the front of it.
Keith giggled and thudded his head into Josh’s chest. “I am so . . . freaking . . . nervous. Oh my god.”
“Don’t be.” I looked at Josh, whose hands had begun running up and down Keith’s back. “I forbid it. We will have fun, and you will laugh at how bad I am at whatever you have in mind, and I will try not to let the world go gray.”
Keith lifted his head. “Yeah, don’t. So when Cam freaks out he loses color. Like, in his vision. I told him he has to let us know if that’s happening.”
“Definitely. Let us know how you feel about everything, okay? That’s the only way this works. And, in retrospect, probably why it works better if you’re friends with people, not strangers.”
I nodded.
“Uh, okay, so let’s go in the bedroom, because that’s where everything is, but we’re still not going to do anything yet.” Keith hesitated, then extracted himself from Josh and took my hand. “Come on.”
Their bedroom was also very them. The dark comforter was probably Josh’s influence, but the string of white fairy lights over the headboard said Keith to me.
He flicked on the overhead light and went to the closet. “All right, I’m gonna pretend I’m not Nervous Nellie. So, uh, yeah, okay, here’s stuff.” He dragged a big box—or maybe it was a trunk—into the room and flipped the lid open.
I stared from a safe distance away, mouth dry. There was more stuff in there than I’d expected. Some of it looked medieval.
“How do you feel about me touching you?” Josh asked, suddenly close beside me. He put a tentative hand on my shoulder, and I couldn’t help going a little stiff, so he withdrew.
“Oh— No— I mean yes—” I forced myself to take a breath. “I don’t mind being touched. I might be . . . out of practice. Sorry.”
He turned me, keeping a firm grip on both of my shoulders until I was facing him. “I want to respect your boundaries, but I’m not sure where they are. Is this okay?” His hands squeezed.
“Yes,” I murmured, dropping my eyes.
“What’s happening right now in your head?”
“Sorry, I— Nothing. Only that this is new and I am not accustomed to a lot of—” I gestured. “People don’t stand this close to me.”
“We noticed,” he said.
“And if you don’t want us to stand this close to you, it’s cool,” Keith added.
“It’s not that. I mean, I do want . . . this. Whatever you’re offering. I do.” I reached up, putting my hands over Josh’s. You’d think a broad, strong man like him would have big, thick hands, but he didn’t. Josh had the hands of a musician, someone used to doing technical things with them, trusting them to know the next note, the next chord. “I do. But I’m not used to it.”
“Then we’re all doing things we aren’t used to. Let’s start with paddles. Keith loves his paddles.”
“I really do.”
What followed was something like an instructional social club, the mores of which I learned as we went. Despite their history, there were moments when Josh clarified his intentions, or requested permission, or took things somewhat slowly with Keith, and I couldn’t tell if they were doing it for my benefit or if this was the way of things between them.
Then again, probably like any couple, certain evenings had certain moods, and tonight’s mood was slow and steady.
At first Josh demonstrated everything on the bed. Then he handed items to me, and I felt them, turning them over in my hands. They gave me space to do this while they sorted out their trunk of goods, laughing to themselves. I sat beside them, taking whatever they handed me, considering paddles and different kinds of whips, different kinds of hides that went into them. Floggers and wrist cuffs and ankle cuffs and crops, and a collection of things Josh referred to as “all about sensation” while Keith pretended to shudder.
A small wheel with spikes on it, meant to be rolled over skin. Three objects of varying shapes that I realized only after accidentally turning one on were vibrators. Not everything was recognizable; some had tines or bristles or feathers.
“What do you do with all this?” I finally asked.
Josh grinned. “I restrain Keith, blindfold him, and do whatever I want. Want to watch?”
“Ugh, you’re a pig.” Keith smiled and scooted over next to me. “Give me your arm.”
I did, and shivered a little as he unbuttoned the cuff and rolled my sleeve up to my elbow.
“Wartenberg pinwheel, technically.” He ran the wheel over my forearm and I jumped. “Now imagine that on your dick.”
“No, thank you.”
“I’m gonna do it again.”
The feeling of it was simultaneously prickly and uncomfortable and intrusive. I allowed him to keep my forearm, but I was close to pulling it away.
“See?” He looked right at me. “It’s wild, right? Letting me make you feel something you don’t want to feel.”
He put the wheel down and picked up the thing that looked like a feather duster with very few feathers, brushing it over the same stretch of skin. I shivered. “Am I imagining that I can feel that more than I would have been able to before? My skin feels more . . . awake.”
“Exactly.” He put the duster down and dragged his fingernails across my arm, and this feeling was bright, as if I could see the paths they left. “Crazy, right?”
“Yes. Crazy.”
“Crazy hot,” Josh said. “If you want to feel any of this stuff on you, Cam, we can do that.”
I surveyed the whips and paddles and straps and everything else. “Maybe. But I don’t want to be restrained at any point.”
“Me neither. But Keith is like . . . amazing.”
“Shut up.”
Josh tugged him close. “You are amazing. You know I think that. Completely amazing.”
“You’re cracked.”
I’d never seen them kiss like that, intensely, as if nothing existed but this kiss, as if no one existed but the two of them, bodies held by some tension that was only partly about their arms around each other.
“Should we show him the paddle?” Keith whispered into the silence that followed their parting.
“Hell yes. You good?”
“I think so. I mean, a little weird, but solid.”
“You want to tell Cam?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
I realized I was staring at them, and perhaps I should have been pretending not to notice that kiss, or the way they molded into one another, or the way even after they separated, each of them seemed to remain attuned to the other.
“Hey.” Keith offered me a hand. “Check it out. I’m gonna lean over the bed and Josh is going to paddle my ass. That should be fun, right?”
“Are you still nervous?” I asked.
“Oh my god, I’m like lightheaded with it.”
“Can I do anything to help?”
He hesitated. “Maybe. Will you hold my hands? You don’t have to hold me down, but will you hold on to my hands? I always had this thought, in my head, of maybe having someone to hold on to while—you know.”
“Sure. Of course. Where do I—”
“Here.”
They positioned me on the upper half of the bed, and Keith bent over the foot of it, reaching both hands over his head. I clasped them in my own and he murmured something I thought was “Thank you.”
Josh had stood off to the side, watching, waiting for us to settle in. Now he lifted the paddle he was using to show me—wooden, rectangular—and advanced on Keith.
“Babe.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m pulling these down, okay?”
Keith didn’t say anything for a long moment, and Josh stayed very still. Then: “Yeah, okay.”
Obviously partial nudity might be involved, which I knew intellectually, but seeing Josh actually tug Keith’s slac
ks down and run his hand over the skin he’d just exposed was an entirely different thing.
Keith’s fingers twitched in mine.
“Don’t hump the bed,” Josh ordered, grinning.
“Shut up.”
Smack.
Keith’s fingers tightened, painfully, then released.
But Josh was still grinning, and he reached out for another caress. “So rude.”
“Uh . . .” Keith shifted slightly, maybe pushing into Josh’s hand, maybe evading it. “If you weren’t here I’d call Josh ‘master’ and try to make him uncomfortable. I’ll . . . try not to do that right now.”
Smack.
Keith inhaled, loudly, and exhaled. “This is, uh, an interesting experiment in sensation and psychology right now.”
“Yeah, babe?”
“Yeah. I feel way more exposed right now than I do when I’m actually naked.”
I realized I’d stopped breathing, as if I’d taken the hit myself. Or as if I was bracing for the next one. I forced my fingers to loosen on Keith’s. If anyone should have a death grip, it was probably him.
Josh ran the paddle over his skin, rubbing it, and Keith kind of wiggled after a minute of this, like it wasn’t enough. “You want to start? We could do more of what we’re doing, just playing around.”
“I want to take off my shirt. Actually, it’s sort of the last thing I want, but I’m obsessing over it, so I probably should so I can be part of the scene.”
“Do it.”
Keith squeezed my fingers one last time and released. He slid backward, kneeling on the floor, to unbutton and peel out of his shirts, which he tossed into the corner.
“This is what I’m talking about,” Josh mumbled, picking them up and dropping them into the basket in the closet.
“I can’t exactly move freely at the moment.”
“You say that like if you could, you would have done something else. Back over the bed, babe. You don’t mind Cam seeing you, right?”
“No. I mean no, it’s fucking hot. I just feel kind of shy.”
This time Josh’s voice was harder. “Over the bed, babe.”
Keith slid up over the bed, all bare skin now, slacks still caught at his thighs. His back was no longer pink, as it had been at my apartment; now it was pale, freckled, incredibly soft looking.
I salivated, gazing over his skin, wondering if I would ever slake that particular thirst. The thirst of wanting to taste him, to know what he felt like on my tongue, and what he sounded like when he was at someone else’s mercy.
“You can touch him,” Josh said. “Like last time. He and I have talked a lot about it. He wants you to touch him, Cam.”
I moved in a little closer, and instead of touching Keith’s back, I found myself pressing my fingers to the back of his neck.
“That’s nice,” he whispered.
It was strange, touching Keith under Josh’s gaze, but it wasn’t as awkward as I would have thought. His presence made me, if anything, bolder than I would have been on my own. I pushed up into Keith’s hair, gently, and he sighed again. Then I let my fingertips drag all the way down, tracing his spine until I could no longer reach.
“You have freckles,” I said.
“Yeah, you do.” Josh sat down on Keith’s other side, and now both of us were drawing invisible pictures on his skin, lines and swirls. I connected his freckles like they were constellations, reading meaning into the pictures.
I’d always been intrigued by the sensual, but rarely had I found a partner with whom to indulge my interests. Dating profiles are not set up for “I want to spend hours learning the landscape of your skin until I can walk it with my fingertips in the dark,” but that was far closer to what I wanted than a blowjob that only existed for the sake of being a blowjob.
This was just Keith’s back, and I had so much more to map.
Josh tickled his ribs along the side and Keith squirmed. “This is why I tie him down. So ticklish.”
“You are not torture-tickling me tonight, so forget it.”
“No, I’m not. I’ll save that for tomorrow.”
“You wouldn’t really?” I asked.
“He totally would. It’s the worst, Cam. It’s fucking horrible.”
“So . . . why?”
Josh’s nails made a slow path up Keith’s side again, making him giggle. “Because I like to push him and he likes to live up to my expectations.”
Which sounded fine, if somewhat one-sided. “Does he push you?”
“Are you kidding?” He leaned forward and kissed Keith’s spine. “I love this idea, of having another person, but it’s fucking hard, too. This is how he pushes me and how I live up to his expectations.”
“Josh took it kind of hard last time. I mean, both of us took it hard, but I just felt more embarrassed than I’d ever been in my entire life. Josh felt responsible.”
“I was supposed to make it safe for you and I fucked up.”
“It wasn’t unsafe. It was just embarrassing.”
I returned to my earlier position at his neck. “Is this embarrassing?”
He shifted. “A little, but not in a bad way. Like, there’s embarrassing that you know will be embarrassing forever, like it’ll live in your memory as this humiliating thing that you’ll never really get over. This isn’t that.”
I considered it, parsing my own memories for the ones with claws. “Okay. I think I understand. What’s this, then?”
“This is like . . . early. This is the awkward thing that happens in the beginning, before everything starts to feel normal.”
“You think this will feel normal at some point?” I trailed a path down to his shoulder.
“That’s how it goes. I mean, I think that’s how it goes.”
“Not that we expect you to commit to some kind of long-term thing with us if you don’t want to,” Josh said.
Keith turned to look at me. “You do want to, though. I mean, not like I can read minds, but everything about you says that’s what you want. You want the security of having something consistent.”
“I don’t usually have that, so I guess I wouldn’t know.” Except I did know, and he was right. He was inescapably right.
“So right now I’m kinda shy because you’ve never seen me naked, and next time I’ll be less shy.” He drew my hand to hold it against his cheek for a moment. “Next time, Cam. Okay? You can count on that. Even if tonight went badly, we could try it again. We really like you.”
“And tonight’s not going badly,” Josh said. “Ha. All along I thought you’d scare if we talked like this could happen more than once. If I’d known you wanted to hear that, we would have started with it.”
I felt far more naked than Keith was, but I was still making constellations on his skin. “I’m not good at new things. If we do it again, I’ll be able to visualize it, I’ll be able to feel the space better, that’s all. The first time I do something is excruciating because I can’t imagine how it will go.”
“But do you still see colors?”
I looked down into Keith’s eyes. “Blue. Very blue. Clear and deep, like water you see near the equator, blue all the way down to the ocean floor.”
His lashes fluttered. “Thanks, Cam.”
Josh surprised me by tilting my chin up. “Yours are hazel with little flecks of gold, like you’ve got buried treasure right below the surface. I’m really glad you’re here.”
I swallowed. “Me too.”
“Good. Now let’s play with Keith. I want to show you how to use the paddle. You don’t have to try it tonight if you don’t want to, but you should hold it, swing it, maybe against your palm so you can feel the impact. I get it about needing to visualize things. This way you’ll have the tactile to go along with it. Cool?”
“Cool.” More than cool. Incredible.
By the end of the evening I’d held everything they liked using, and taken some experimental swings against the bed (with Keith well out of the way). He’d pulled up his slacks but left
his shirt off, and I had grown brave enough to touch him even when it wasn’t necessary. Sometimes I touched his arm when I asked him how a certain thing felt. Josh demonstrated the safe places for the whip or flogger to fall, and I showed him with my hands on Keith’s skin that I understood, taking all of it in on a mental film reel so I could replay it later, study up.
I had felt their buckling restraints, and Keith had giggled, slipping one over my wrist so I could see that it didn’t hurt.
“Now I haff you right vhere I vant you, Mr. Rheingold,” he said in what I supposed might be a terrible Russian accent, though I hadn’t ruled out anything Eastern European. “Now ve vill do vhatever ve like to your body.”
Even though it was one cuff around one wrist—and thus decorative, not restricting—I still felt a trace of its power.
Josh laughed. “You are never getting an acting job, babe. That was horrible.”
“I know! I’m like the worst. Every time I do an accent it comes off, like, racist or something.” He unbuckled the cuff and the moment passed and I smiled—at their antics, at Keith attempting more bad accents, at the fact that I was here with them, and they seemed to accept me, somehow.
There was a sweetness to that first night. A soothing kind of air to their bedroom, where we played, and explored our ideas, and enjoyed one another. We didn’t do anything more risqué than those first few smacks with the paddle. Josh demonstrated using the bed, just as he expected me to practice. But there was an intimacy between us, and when I left, rather later than I had expected (after we’d eaten a meal of leftover macaroni and cheese, but the good kind, baked with a crisp crust on top), I felt strangely full, almost buoyant.
Sometime later, Keith texted.
Keith: You home safe?
Cameron: I am. Thank you for dinner and an informative evening.
Keith: You’ll have to come again soon, Cam.
Cameron: That would be nice. Good night. (And to Josh.)
Keith: Good night back (from both of us).
I went to sleep more sated and satisfied than I’d felt in months. Perhaps longer.
