Wallflower at a Sex Party
Chapter 6: This is the Kink
The air is thick as syrup, buzzing with brazen activity. Brains are drenched in oxytocin, vasopressin, and dopamine, seeping into a potent nature-made concoction of shared psychedelia that overlays the unseen, unspoken interconnecting threads between us like the soft sticky ghostly web of a caterpillar tent. Through the silk strands, we touch one another from across the room. We breathe someone’s distant exhalation and drink someone’s undiscerning moan and eat someone’s shivering giggle. Naked bodies are draped, bent, married, melting. It is a scene from an ancestral memory; foreign but familiar, ordinary but obscure, belonging hand painted on the curve of a Grecian urn or crudely graffitied on a toilet stall door in a public restroom. I am glad to be here and I want to go home.
The beautiful budding bisexual man has found a playmate. Her pale, lithe frame is wrapped in thick, rough Shibari ropes, and they are giddy with excitement as they extend on their tip toes to admire her reflection in a narrow oval mirror. “God, you look SO GOOD,” he squeals. When we weave past them she stops me to ask if I will take a picture. I position her phone to capture her sultry pose, appreciating the way she has found her perfect companion, and the way I have found my own.
There is an undeniable ecological intelligence in how couplings and throuple-ings and throngs organize themselves within the collective erotic organism, even barring the predictable, disappointing parameters of pretty privilege. Contrary to the boom ra ra of polarity, like attracts like at a sex party. There is always someone who shares your kink, and people tend to stay within their comfort zone even as they endeavor to push their own boundaries.
The looping music in the background creates the unmistakable atmosphere of a carnival, and I catch glimpses of amorous vignettes in the shadows, my eyes moving through feasts of delight on a dizzying merry-go-round of quickly shifting focal points. Because we are wallflowers, we find a wall to steady ourselves. We sink to the floor on the edge of splendor, taking inventory. The werewolf wants to play. He goads me to reveal myself to him, as if tugging at the buttons and hemline of my internal clothing. He implores me in a textured, quiet voice to let him in.
“Who do you find the most attractive?” he asks. I consider his question thoughtfully, embarrassed to undress my own superficiality when I have been silently judging everyone around me for their lack of imagination. I know I am no better, but I want to impress him, so I begin with facts that feel slightly unexpected.
I gesture to a curvy, voluptuous genderqueer person with a half-shaved head sitting cross legged with a group of four. “They look relaxed and comfortable in their own skin,” I say, “I find that attractive. They’re grounded and at ease.” He agrees with me, this is always sexy.
“Who else?”
I direct his gaze towards the bookish poly couple with advanced degrees who were swooning over my vocabulary at the supper table. She is younger, he is older. They arrived from across state lines as if from a foreign country, and are a refreshing diversion from the typical, flouncy, new Age adjacent aesthetic in the local community. She boasts a stylish bob and dorky outdated glasses, with a graceful, slender figure and firm tits that bounce with an elasticity that fills me with envy (my own figure having sacrificed such perks years ago in exchange for quenching the insatiable thirst of multiple infants). He is tall, well groomed, and clean shaven. Salt and pepper hair, Croatian accent, a soft double chin on a rounded oblong face.
“They’re cute…” I say, “I like watching them together. I like that they are focused on one another even though there are so many other options. He knows exactly how to touch her. Their familiarity is hot to me.”
He nods, “Who else?”
I relent, allowing him to strip me bare, “I’m attracted to the obvious ones too…the woman who looks like a pinup model. She’s stunning. Look at her natural waistline, and the way her jet black hair falls down her back...I can’t take my eyes off her. I’m attracted to the honey blonde beauty in the fancy lingerie. And, despite myself, I keep watching that conventionally attractive couple over there who are being very picky about who they want to play with.”
I raise the stakes, offering more self exposure than he requested, indulging in lamentation about how hard it’s been to lose my looks. I was spoiled. I know it’s stupid. But I miss men drooling over my body. I miss being as beautiful as the pinup model and the honey blonde and the academic with the bookish bob. I miss being the center of attention.
I am fishing, and he responds hesitantly, torn between taking the bait and not wanting to dismiss my self deprecation. He pulls back from my side lying position to stare at the slope of my waist and curve of my ass and says awkwardly, “I mean, okay. But come on. You’re not too bad to look at.”
“Thank you,” I reply, performing exaggerated placated insecurity so he can enjoy feeling like he is making me whole again. I am relaxing into role play now, enticing him with the implied arc of our meeting. I need healing, maybe he will heal me? I’m sad, maybe he will make me happy? I know he likes my body, and I know he likes it when I don’t know how beautiful I am because all men like it when I am apparently oblivious to the power I command over them; I walk the edge of a naivety I no longer carry but can still recall well enough to make him hard for my awakening.
The virgin is my eternal archetypal bedfellow, and her deflowering follows me into every hollow mythology involving forbidden fruits, foreboding serpents, and wolfish bad boys brooding at a sex party. I blush at the unoriginality of my own sexual fantasy, the true debauchery unfolding around this newfound moment of knowing well and good our myths are written in real time, and we author them as we are authored by them. I am in the ritual now. This is the kink.
