Page 2 of For Real

I was also supposed to have brought a shtick of some kind—like gifts or a Hula-Hoop—to help me be charming and easy to interact with. Except I had about as much interest in being charming and easy to interact with as I did in being nice. Nice had no power over me. It couldn’t make me scream or beg or come or feel whole.3

Sam knew nearly everyone. Some of them even remembered me. But I brushed through the conversations. The topics were mainly restricted to art, sex, and ourselves, three things I really didn’t see the point in talking about.

Eventually—because it was that sort of club—we were obliged to watch cabaret.

“It’s at times like this,” I told Grace, looking dismally into my glass of warm lemonade as someone subjected us to erotic performance poetry, “I really wish I drank.”

“And I thought you were supposed to be a masochist.” She put an arm around me and pulled me briefly into her side. I hated how good it felt just to be held.

I scanned the gathered revellers. And, of course, among all the half-familiar strangers, there was Robert, who time will never make a stranger, no matter how much I wish it could. Whatever magnet drew us once was broken now. It had left me simply spinning, a compass without a lodestone, while he didn’t see me at all.4

He was with his new…boy, lover, sub. Who wasn’t new anymore.

When the ordeal with the performance poetry was over and the music began again, I broke the rules and slipped away from Grace and Sam. Wandered.

The organisers had tried hard to transform this piece of nowhere East London into a space. There were lots of intricate little corners, apparently designed to encourage play in the purest sense of the word.

The last thing in the world I wanted to do was play. In any sense of the word.

Voices—talking, laughing, screaming, coming—washed over me like the sea. The dungeons and the make-out rooms were less an orgy than a queue. In my experience, one of the less well-advertised secrets of group sex was how often it came down to logistics.

Karmic spite sent me stumbling by the playrooms in time to see Robert and his…his other.

We’d never been public, Robert and I. What we’d had, what we’d done, had been too private and too precious. We wouldn’t have displayed it before the world any more than we would have let someone watch us in bed on a Sunday morning, where he would bring me toast and tea and the Times, and lazily suck me off. It’d been ours.

Now his and this other man’s.

This other man who suffered for him and begged and wept and carried Robert’s marks and kisses on his skin. The secrets that used to be mine.

I stumbled away before I was spotted—staring like a man through a window at something he would never have—and went in search of Grace and Sam. I found them sprawled on a tatty velveteen sofa. They shifted apart to make room.

“I’m sick of seeing Robert everywhere.”

“Oh, baby.” Grace gave my arm a little squeeze.

“I feel like I’m stuck in a reverse Alanis. Every time he scratches his nails down someone else’s back, I feel it.”

Sam blinked. “Wow, man, that’s a seriously dated reference.”5

After six years, they’d pretty much run out of sympathy on this one, and I didn’t blame them. There were only so many times you could wipe up someone’s tears and tell them there were more fish in the sea.

I used to think there were too, but I was tired of swimming. And either Robert was a merman, or I was just a really weird fish with a particularly obscure mating ritual. Even to other weird fish.

“Nice crowd, though,” tried Sam. “Friendly. Safety conscious.”

“Kink crowds are the same the world over. The good ones are already taken”—I gestured to them both—“the hot ones only talk to each other, and everyone else is desperate.”6

Grace rolled her eyes. “You do know you’re one of the hot ones, right? You could have any dom in this room if you looked marginally more approachable than an underfed piranha having a bad day.”

“I’ve had all the doms in this room.”

“You’re extra specially hot when you’re slutty,” purred Sam, stroking the inside of my thigh, which, even through my trousers, made me shiver. Which he knew it would. He went on in a very different voice, “Even if you’re blatantly lying.”

Literally the case or not, it still felt true.

“Oh my God.” Grace sat up abruptly. “Look at the foetus.”

We looked at the foetus.

---