Time passed and the doppelganger couple, Lily and Jim, got engaged. Prior to their engagement, but after Jim’s big reveal, Lily had invited me, just me, out for drinks a couple of times. My suspicion was that Jim had told her about our conversation. Now she knew that we knew of their open relationship. But did they know of our half-open relationship? Had Lo told her, him, them? Or did Lily just suspect?
In any case, one thing was very clear to me – Lily was trying to seduce me. She opened up to me, very casually and very explicitly, about the nature of the “intimacy” issues between her and Jim.
“As you know,” she began nonchalantly, “before I moved here, before I met Jim, I had a very active and interesting sex life.” Everything about her was always “very interesting,” or at least she tried to make it seem so.
I just nodded my head as if to say, “Go on.”
“I was with a lot of men.”
This was clearly a ploy to get me to want her. It was the fish hook that she thought she’d use to reel me in. Nothing sparks desire for a woman like knowing that that woman is desired. But what she didn’t take into consideration was my total contentment to Lo.
“They taught me things,” she said, alluding mysteriously to techniques and esoteric sex lore. “And they were good. Big and good.”
I didn’t need eyes that could see around corners to see where this was going.
“And Jim,” she continued, “I love him. But. . .”
She didn’t say it, so I did, “But he’s small.”
“Yes!” She felt relieved. “So small!”
“Small can be cute,” I suggested.
“Cute doesn’t cut it,” she retorted.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said, not knowing what she was after – empathy, sympathy, understanding, or my cock.
“Thanks,” she said flatly.
“So that’s why you’re in an open relationship?”
“Yeah, but it’s not working out as I had hoped. I was hoping that I’d be able to get some satisfaction in bed and he’d maybe learn a thing or two. You know he’s very inexperienced sexually.”
I nodded or grunted or some such thing.
“But he just hasn’t been able to seal the deal with anyone else and it’s making the whole situation untenable.”
I thought for a while about the obvious question and then, throwing caution to the wind, I blurted it out. “Why don’t you teach him? I mean, if he has a lot to learn in bed, who better to teach him what you like?”
She leaned in very close to me and said in a more hushed tone than the bravado voice she had been speaking in up to now, “Because I’m a sub. I don’t want to teach him. I want him to take me, teach me, tell me what to do, and make me do it. But he’s so nice,” she said it like it was a bad word, “he defers to me all the time.”
“Ah,” I said, leaning back and taking it all in.
She was still leaning towards me, which placed her eyes slightly below mine and so she was looking up at me with an expression that said, “I want you to take me, teach me, tell me what to do, and make me do very bad, dirty things.”
Just at that moment, I perceived ever-so-faintly the melodic voice of Camila Cabello waft through the restaurant singing:
Yes, she wanted to do bad things to me. Very bad things. Though the image of Sabina Spielrein being spanked over Carl Jung’s lap (as depicted in the movie A Dangerous Method) crossed my mind for an instant, I wasn’t going to have it. First, Lo. Second, I like Jim and if he’s already beside himself with jealously, then I’m not going to put our friendship at risk for a tryst.
But in that moment I struck on an idea. “What if Lo taught him?”
“Lo?” she repeated, sitting back in her chair, pondering the possibilities.