“Good for you, you mean?”
“No, I meant good for my audience. They only ever hear a female’s perspective. Mine and my guests. But it would be good to hear from a normal guy for once. I think having a different opinion might be refreshing.”
“Refreshing, huh? Help your listeners?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, how could my huge male ego say no? As long as you can promise it’ll stay anonymous.”
“It will,” she says. “I have another idea!”
“I’m starting to get anxiety every time you say that.”
“No, it’s not groundbreaking, trust me, just an idea to help with the anonymity thing. How about we use a fake name when I refer to you?”
“A fake name? Like what?”
“I don’t know, whatever you like. Pick a name, any name.”
“Kylo.”
She looks at me sideways. “Kylo? What kind of name is that?”
Then it’s my turn to look at her sideways. “Oh, come on? Kylo. Like Kylo Ren?”
“You’re not helping me any.”
“Clearly you’re not a Star Wars fan.”
“And clearly you are,” she jokes. “Whatever floats your boat Corm. . . I mean Kylo.”
“That’s better.”
“Alright, then we can do this?”
After I agree, she sets up her mics and other equipment she has in one of her bags. We haven’t unpacked our clothing or toiletries yet, but she’s got a giant black bag of electronics unpacked. I have to admit, I have a little bit of a bias when it comes to the social media stuff. I’m not really a social media guy—I know it sounds old fashioned as hell, but I don’t even have any of those pages. Well, actually, I have one that we can all access for the company, but I don’t have any of my own. I’ll have to check out Tori’s stuff at some point. I did look at one thing she has online. . .
She finishes shuffling around and sets up the mic in between us. “I feel pretty important right now.”
“That’s your ego again,” she says with a smile. “Are you ready? I didn’t hit ‘record’ yet.”
“As ready as I’ll ever be. Do you have to do, like, an intro or something? Like on the radio?”
“Not yet,” she tells me. “I just record the conversation, then later I’ll record the intro and do my sponsorships.”
“Oh, okay. Sorry for all the questions, I’m new to this.”
“No worries. Here we go.”
She presses a button and sits back. I guess this is how a podcast begins. “Welcome to another episode of the podcast, Tormentors. This is your girl, Tori Klein, bringing you another very special episode. Brace yourselves, ladies, tonight I have our first ever male guest, a good friend named Kylo. Why don’t you introduce yourself to our audience?”
I lean into the mic. I feel stupid for some reason. “Hello, ladies.”
“Kylo agreed to be on the show to give us a male perspective on some of the issues we love to talk about here. So, Kylo. . .”
“Actually, Tori, seeing as how this is an. . . unorthodox episode, would you mind if I start off asking you a question instead of the other way around?”
She looks at me but doesn’t want to stop recording. She furrows her brow like she’s interested and scared at the same time. “Okay, sure.”
“Why do you hate men so much?”
Her eyebrows shoot up higher than I thought eyebrows could. She’s not mad, I can tell that much—that look is more like someone who just accepted a challenge to debate.
“A little context here, ladies. Kylo here is something of a Tormentor hater. He thinks I’m a man hater. But, for the record, I don’t hate men.”
“Okay, fine, but you definitely hate aspects of them, right? I mean, don’t you use that hashtag?”
“Which one, Kylo? I use a lot of hashtags.”
“What is it again? #slavestotheirdicks? Tell me that’s not a man hater hashtag?”
“Huh,” she says. “I didn’t know that you were a Tormentor.”
“I’m not. I just looked at your pages.”
“Sure,” she says dismissively. “But that hashtag isn’t man hate, it’s just the truth.”
“I don’t think so. I think you’re a dick hater? What did a dick ever do to you? And feel free to answer that in as much detail as you’d like.”
“I’m not a dick hater. I just hate that dicks take over a man’s identity. It acts as a sex organ, a second brain, a decision maker. Face it, men are obsessed with them.”
“Define ‘obsessed.’”
“Obsessed—like, thinking about it, and with it, all the time.”
“I definitely don’t think about my dick all the time. I mean, I’m thinking about it right now, but only because we’re talking about it. Otherwise my thoughts would be fairly dick free.”
“It’s subconscious with you guys. You all don’t even know that you’re doing it.”
“Oh, come on. How can you claim to know that men are thinking about their dicks at all times?”
“Have you ever worked in a school? Any school, it doesn’t matter what grades or ages.”
“Can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure, no.”
“Well, as my listeners already know, my mom teaches undergrads. Most of them are about three months removed from renting a tux for their prom.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll give you three guesses as to what the desks in her lecture halls are covered in.”
“I’m guessing survey says. . .”
“Ding Ding,” she says. “Giant, veiny cocks. Always huge, and always multiple ones on each desk. The artistic depictions vary from kid to kid. Why are you laughing?”
“Because we all do that. I’m not saying it makes us obsessed, but we’re all very accomplished dick artists.”
“And that doesn’t sound obsessive to you at all? You think when I’m bored at a doctor’s office I like to draw my tits on the magazine table?”
“Okay, point taken. Great image by the way. Now tell me about the dick variation. I’m curious.”
“She’s shown me pictures. Some have balls and some are just free floating, like space cocks, not bound to any testicles and seemingly devoid of any gravitational pull.”
I can’t help but laugh out loud. “That was funny. What else?”
“Name it. Circumcised and uncircumcised, long and thin, short and fat, hair on the balls, hairless balls, about to go into some poor, unsuspecting male stick figure’s mouth. Erupting with cum like a volcano—name it, I’ve seen it drawn by grown men who are paying a lot of money to get a degree. Stop laughing!”
“I can’t!”
“My thing is this — men are always trying to get laid, right?”
“Usually, yeah.”
“But they’ll never draw pictures of vaginas. I’ve never seen one.”
“That’s ‘cause we have porn. There’s no need to draw pussies when they’re right there in our pockets—figuratively speaking.”
“You’re gross, you know that?”
“Why am I gross? ‘Cause I’m telling the truth?”
“No, you’re gross because you’re gross—and by ‘you’ I mean all of you.”
“All men are gross? ‘Cause we have a biological imperative to have sex and jerk off?”
“That’s crap.”
“It is not. Men want to have sex with as many women as they can to spread their genes. It’s a real thing.”
“Yeah if you’re a male wolf. Humans have the power to fight against their genetic impulses—we’re not animals.”
“Look, I’m not saying that guys have the right to do whatever they want because of their biological impulses—far from it—I’m just saying that those impulses exist, whether women want to admit it or not. Any way you want to slice it, it’s part of our DNA. Now, what individual men choose to do with those feelings and thoughts is a different story.”
“Like jerking off way too much.”
“Woah, there’s no
such thing as too much, first off.”
“Why don’t we let our audience be the judge of that. What’s your number?”
“My number?” I repeat.
“Yeah, the most amount of times you’ve jerked it in a single day.”
I stop and think for a second. “I want to say seven.”
“Seven! Holy shit.”
“I think seven. No less than six—I might be a little off. But it was definitely either six or seven times in a day.”
“You must have been coming dust at that point.”
“Pretty much. Basically, just a spasm that feels good for a second, followed by you feeling creepy and questioning your life decisions.”
“As well you should. But, look, I’m not a prude, and none of my listeners are, either. We like sex, I just hate that guys are directed by their little heads and not their big ones.”
“Let’s go back for a second—you’re saying that you don’t find sex disgusting then?”
“Hell no,” she says. “I find the idea of a guy touching himself pretty hot, actually, just not seven times a day to some gross porn on his phone. But given the right set of circumstances, why not?”
As soon as she says that, it’s like I have no control over my body. My pants start to stiffen, and everything that I was feeling a second ago—sarcastic, nervous, unsure, all of a sudden just becomes an overwhelming feeling of being turned on. Hearing her talk about guys stroking themselves turning her on turns me on so much that I start to get hard. I don’t even think about it, but as soon as I feel my cock start to rise, I put my hands over my lap.
I need to stop, but I can’t tell her why, so I look down at my watch for effect. I don’t want to interrupt the flow of this whole thing, so I type out a message on my phone and show it to her:
Can we stop?
She hits the button. “No problem. What’s wrong?”
Nothing. Just getting hard as a rock, you? “Nothing,” I lie. “I just need to head into work in a little bit so I wanted to have time to unpack. We can keep going later.”
“Alright.”
She starts to put her stuff away and I’m still as hard as I was before. I take a few deep breaths and hope this thing is going to go down before I stand up to unpack. Right now, it’s not looking promising.
Tori
I have to give him props for his honesty.
We’ve been living together for about fifteen minutes and he just finished telling me about his masturbation patterns. He’s more open than I thought he’d be, I’ll give him that.
But now that we’re done with our first session we have to actually start living together. We’re just sitting here, staring at each other on what’s a surprisingly comfy couch (good job, Cynthia).
“So. . .” I say hoping that he’ll take some initiative. “Have you ever done this before?”
“Pretended to be someone’s boyfriend so they can get a publishing deal? Nope, can’t say that I have.”
“No, dummy, not that. I mean, have you ever lived with a woman before?”
“Like a girlfriend?” he asks.
I raise my eyebrow. “No, like your mom.”
“I would never live with my mom again. She was a boss—if my brothers and I ever left a thing on the floor or a dirty dish in the sink my mom would kick our butts and not let us leave the house until it was cleaned up. Love her to death, but I’d sooner move in with my knucklehead brother than live with her again.”
“Sounds like my kind of woman. But about my question, though?”
He hesitates, like he doesn’t want to talk about what I’m asking, but I want to know. “Yeah,” he finally admits. “I’ve lived with a woman before. My last relationship.”
“I’m guessing by the sound of your voice that it didn’t go well. What happened?”
“Jesus, Tori, are you always this forward? We just met each other.”
“I was just making conversation—I wasn’t trying to make you uncomfortable.”
I’ve never heard him be that snippy with me. I must have hit a sore spot. I don’t want to push too much—yet. But maybe he’s right, it might be a little soon to be swapping romantic histories. I know if he asked me the same question I really wouldn’t want to discuss it, so I let the whole subject go. “Fine. Let’s unpack, shall we?”
He seems relieved that I changed the subject. “I thought you’d never ask. And maybe later on we can do some boyfriend and girlfriend stuff.”
I give him the side eye. “Cormac, I told you, I’m not. . .”
“Oh, loosen your sphincter, Tori, I wasn’t talking about sex. But—side note—it is interesting that you keep bringing the conversation back to that.”
“Stop it, I do not. It’s you who keeps bringing it up, not me.”
“Really? Have I ever looked at you—a woman I’ve known for about a week, and asked ‘Hey Tori, you mind if I have sex with you?’”
“You don’t have to. And no man says that.”
“I don’t have to?” he asks.
“It’s obvious. It’s all over your face.”
“Are you saying I’m making sex face?”
“I am.”
“And can I ask, what exactly does my sex face look like?”
“Like the face you always make when you look at me,” I tell him.
“Now who’s the arrogant one? I look at you and you assume I want to have sex with you?”
“Never mind, you’re too much of a child to admit that you want me. I get it. It’s fine.”
“I don’t. . .”
“Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s all in my head, right? Let’s drop it.”
“Fine by me. And all I was going to say was that we should go out—maybe meet each other’s friends. I know normally that would take longer than the first night of being in a ‘relationship’, but we’re on the fast track here. What do you say?”
I breathe a sigh of relief. “I’m sorry, I just thought that. . .”
“Men are always thinking about sex, even when they’re not thinking about sex? I know, you have a lot of biases to get past. I’ll be patient with you.”
“Excuse me?” He has such balls. “You’re going to be patient with me? Are you kidding? I’m the one who should be taking the deep breaths.”
“And what exactly have I done to you except hate your book and agree to this crazy experiment? You act like I’ve been trying to sleep with you since we met.”
“Yeah, I saw how you were looking at me during the pitch meeting. Maybe I’m not so experienced when it comes to relationships, but I’m not stupid. I could tell that you wanted me.”
“Here we go again!” he says.
Things are starting to get heated. I can tell he’s annoyed with me constantly bringing this issue up. I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot. “Sure,” I say randomly, “we can go out. But let’s work out the sleeping arrangements first so we don’t have to do it when we get back.”
“Take the bed. I’ll take the couch. And before you go on about fake chivalry, it isn’t—it’s just me being nice. I want you to be comfortable, and I’m no stranger to sleeping on couches.”
That was sweet, and unexpected. I love that he’s thinking of me. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. But if it’s all the same, I’ll still use Cynthia’s husband’s closet and drawers for my stuff.”
“Oh, yeah, of course. Why don’t we go unpack?”
“Sounds good. Should we text whoever about later?”
“Right. I forgot for a second. I’ll call my best friend and producer, Shoshana. You’ll love her, she’s. . . different.”
“I like different. Does she know about this whole thing?”
“Yeah, I told her.”
“Alright, that’s not the worst thing in the world. I’m gonna bring an old college buddy. He sure as hell doesn’t know, so he’ll be your first test.”
“My test?”
“Yeah,” he says. “To see how good of an actress you can be. The
re’s a bar in town that Cynthia took me to one time that’s really cool. Strong drinks and live music on weekends.”
“Sounds fun. Let me see what she’s up to, alright?”
“No problem,” he takes a step towards me. I don’t know why, but at first, I think he’s going to kiss me. The thought comes out of nowhere, and to my surprise, I don’t step back or move at all. For just a second, I close my eyes and wait. Then I hear the sound of his voice.
“Can I take your bags into the room while you text Shoshana?” His hand is already on my suitcase, and I love that he asked me first.
“Yeah. Thank you. I’ll message her now.”
I take out my phone and hold it, but I’m not doing anything except watching him walk to the bedroom. The view isn’t bad at all. He’s wearing shorts that show off the ass I’ve never noticed before. His legs are muscled, and I can tell looking at them that he spends a lot of time in the gym. I catch myself watching until he’s out of sight, and that’s when my concentration comes back.
I don’t feel like texting, so I step back out into the swampy jungle outside to call her. “Be right back.”
“Alright.”
Opening the front door is a terrible mistake. It’s even more gross than it was when I first got here, if that’s even possible. It feels worse, anyhow. I dial Shoshana’s number.
“Hey. I expected your voicemail,” I say when her voice comes through.
“I’m off today, what’s up?”
Off. She never takes off. “Are you sick?” I ask.
“No. All my clients cancelled.” Shoshana’s an occupational therapist by trade. Even though I pay her pretty well to keep my disorganized life in order, she still sees a few clients, mostly home visits for kids with special needs. “I had three yesterday, but I guess things come up all the time when you have kids.”
“Perfect!” I yell, a little too excited.
“Huh?”
“Today’s the day,” I tell her. “You know, move-in day.”
Shoshana yells into the phone like I just announced I was getting engaged. She’s the best cheerleader you could ever hope for, even when you don’t really need one. “Would you relax? It’s not that serious.”
“It’s very serious to me. Are you sleeping in the same bed? Did he ask to kiss you? I need to know everything!”
The Three Kiss CLause Page 10
