Chapter 20

Friday, Jess was driving over to join me in Boston for the weekend.

My roomie Paul had sped off to be with his girlfriend Toni just as soon as he was released from his final class of the day. He’d had a massive anticipatory grin on his face all day, right from the very first moment I saw him in the morning – now he had a girlfriend, he was absolutely a member of the ‘Thank God It’s Friday!’ club. I just hoped he’d remember in his haste to get laid that there would be highway patrol or traffic cops all the way to Worcester...

I would never tell him I knew from personal experience how great a time was ahead of him, but I will confess to briefly imagining for myself how incredibly sexy Toni would look in her black bodysuit as she greeted him ... Damn, it was almost a shame she was now off limits to me – though I was delighted for the both of them that they’d found each other. She had done him the world of good – you wouldn’t be exaggerating if you said getting together with her had been positively lifechanging for him – and she was delighted to have a decent, honest, non-asshole boyfriend who was learning to be quite the stud. I was rooting for them to make it as a couple: I’d hate it if they didn’t work out.

In preparation for getting laid myself, I took a shower, shaved extra-carefully, donned freshly laundered clothes, made up the bed with fresh sheets, and generally tidied up my room. Not that it needed a whole lot of work, but you know how a guy wants his girl to be impressed?

As I waited impatiently for my girlfriend to arrive, I thought back to the two big events that had brought us together.

First, the – once again, lifechanging is not too strong an expression – moment on Friday March 9, 2018, not quite one year before, when I’d first set eyes on her very pretty face, somehow had managed to conceal my total bewilderment that my parents were actually hosting a masked sex party, and almost been unable to believe my luck when we’d stripped, and she’d led me through the kitchen and into the old family games room where we’d quickly become more than intimate.

How crazy – how weirdly fortuitous – how decadent had that set of circumstances been?

I couldn’t even claim the credit for being at my family home at that precise moment. I should have been hundreds of miles away – my slutty ‘girlfriend’ Amy’s cheating on what I HAD thought was a developing and exclusive relationship was responsible for my unexpectedly heading home for Spring Break, rather than accompanying her to warm sunny Florida as we’d planned.

Had it been the machinations of fate, some exceptionally auspicious alignment of the planets, or just sheer good fortune that had brought both Jess and I late to the party, her pulling her car up as I exited mine? Whichever, it had my eternal gratitude.

And the second momentous occasion, made even more special because it had taken a whole lot of cunning, persuasion and perseverance on my part to arrange: the Friday six weeks later, when I’d booked us a room at the Westin for our first ever one-on-one date. She’d resisted the idea at first – I’d soon learned that it’s not considered cool in the lifestyle to actually want to date and get to know better one of your casual sex partners, which was why I’d tried to become Jessie’s friend as well as fuckbuddy. Okay, I did have a secondary motive, to use her as my route to revealing my true identity to her roomie, my sister Laura, but my declared hope of becoming her boyfriend had always been one hundred percent genuine.

Knowing we had all weekend ahead of us, just the two of us, we’d ‘made love’ more than ‘had sex’. Yes, the anonymous masked sex with her at the two parties we’d attended had been the very best of my life to date, but openly making love took it to the next level and beyond. Fondling, exploring, cuddling, kissing, stroking, spooning, licking, caressing, nibbling, melding – for both of us it had been a loving experience outside anything we’d ever done before. Both of us had more than an inkling there was a connection between us closer than hooking up at the parties: that lovemaking had reinforced the feeling enough for me to confess my real identity.

Which had been no less transformational to my life than meeting Jess in the first place.

It hadn’t even occurred to me back then that I might end up with two girlfriends...

This coming weekend, with no time limit or external distractions, I hoped to repeat that total private intimacy with Jess.

With the sex parties, the complications of my incestuous family, the emotional traumas of their stupidly dangerous wild days, and my own devils, we’d kinda missed out on the whole boyfriend / girlfriend experience.

I hoped this weekend we’d catch up a little on the romance side: you know, the holding hands as we strolled together, the tender glances and public displays of affection, the feeding each other dessert in a restaurant – all that kind of stuff.

Maybe I’ve allowed Jess and Laura to make me watch too many romcoms with them, maybe I’m a subconscious romantic, feeling I’ve missed out on a few ‘normal’ relationship stages. I mean, getting naked together within five minutes of first meeting is so NOT your standard ‘boy meets girl’ sequence, outside porno scenes.

Though when we weren’t out doing the romantic thing, I wasn’t expecting us to move far from my bed.

How did ‘Otter’, the guy in “Animal House” put it? Remember the scene as he prepared for his date, boasting to ‘Boon’ about how he was gonna pork Marlene Desmond and hear her usual scream of ‘Oh god oh god!’?

And then that totally classic line, “I’m hoping for a deeply religious experience.”

Which was my expectation also ... Except I actually meant it.