look at her breasts. This had to be a test. But I couldn’t tell if passing the test meant looking, or not looking.
I had been OMing for eight months. OM was a partnered practice where a man stroked a woman’s genitals, up-down, up-down for fifteen minutes. In this time I’d seen and stroked hundreds of women’s genitals. Pussy, as was the agreed upon vernacular. What lay below a woman’s waist was no longer mysterious to me. There was no sense of accomplishment or satisfaction of curiosity when I accessed it. Many of the women I had met that year asked me to touch their vulvas before telling me their names. But since women kept their tops on during OM, I could still wonder about their breasts; The degree of curvature in the underboob and overboob, the shape and shade of their nipples. Sarah’s nipples were shaped like rivets on denim, but bigger and flesh-colored. They pointed slightly upwards matching the angle of her nose.
“This will work,” she said, holding up a black dress from a hanger. I glanced one more time at her rivets before she clothed herself.
“I have to go in a minute, so let me just tell you what I see,” Sarah said. She hunched over to rummage through a pile of shoes at the bottom of her closet.
“You’re getting a lot of ass right now, right?” she said.
“Um, yeah.”
“And it was fun at first, but now you’re getting diminishing returns on pleasure.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Got it.” Sarah rose from the shoe pile holding two matching pumps. She squeezed them on her size four feet. “You know, I was thinking about you last night…”
My heart fluttered.
“I was thinking about how far you’ve come, considering where you came from.” Sarah moved over to her makeup mirror. “You have a lot of Orgasm now. So you’re like a magnet for women who want Orgasm.”
Orgasm, to most people, was an event of pleasurable contractions and electrical impulses in the nervous system causing pleasure. But to me, that word had come to mean so much more.
“But these women aren’t willing to do the work to have their own Orgasm. So they are trying to steal yours. They think you are the Orgasm. They are trying to claim you.” Sarah leaned into her vanity and touched up her eyelashes. “But you are not the Orgasm, Ruwan. You’re just standing in front of the doorway to the Orgasm.”
She adjusted her hair. Then for the first time this afternoon she turned to look at me. Warmth filled my insides. Something about her attention always felt so good.
“Listen to me Ruwan. This is something you always need to remember. Women are going to try to use you as a backdoor way to get Orgasm for free. They will try to marry you. They will try to get pregnant by you. They will suck you dry if you let them. But you must never let them. You can date, you can have Makeouts, but always guide them to walk through the front door themselves. You are not the Orgasm. You’re just a messenger of Orgasm. Do you understand?”
“Yes. I think so.”
I looked back at this conversation many times. Over the following year I looked back each time my perceptions jerked forwards and back again. I would consider all the decisions that I made that led me to this point, and the consequences that led thereafter. But in this moment I questioned nothing. I had no fears or doubts. For in this moment I was plugged into a power much greater than myself.
“Thank you Sarah.”
She smiled. “You’re welcome Ruwan. You’re one of the good ones.”
Sarah winked at me with both eyes, because she couldn’t do it with one. She about-faced and called her driver in oxytocin voice.
“Moa! I ready to go downtown and make some money!”
Everything in this world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.
~ Oscar Wilde
Thank you for reading. I’ll keep in touch about updates on my book and send more preview chapters out in the near future.
-Ruwan