Milked

Loren | nothing more than a thing.

Because when you saw me, when our gazes locked, when you smiled at me for that first time, it took me only those few moments to understand: you knew who I was, you watched me, you were a fan. And a bold fan, at that, because you started coming over to me. You asked me what I was studying; I said bio. You asked me who my teacher was; when I answered Professor Alder, you said you'd had him too, and you fucking lied, because news flash: Professor Alder is an unmarried woman, and there is no male instructor with her same last name at ASU. Then you suggested that I come over to your house so you could help me study. I said yeah, and then I lied too: I told you my test was the next day (it was two hours later; we wouldn't have had time to "study" at your house had I revealed that). Then you scribbled down your number and said to call you later, and you smiled again.

And fuck, that second smile.

That smile still gets me to this day. That smile is like a mild dose of euphoria. I don't think you realize how powerful it is, either, even with girls responding to it the way they do, crowding around you and trying to make you laugh so they can see it some more, feeding off of it like it's a drug.

It was only upon looking at that scribbled note you wrote me that I learned your name: Shane. Shane, the closet bi who satisfied his gay urges with porn, that is until he met his favorite star.

Shane, the guy who I'd been regularly sleeping with for four months.

Shane, the guy who I'd been regularly chilling with for four months.

Shane, the guy who, for some reason, confused the hell out of me. What did I want with him? Where did I want to be with him?

"Fine," I told him. "Let's go back to the way things were before last Friday."

He smiled that sexy smile. "Awesome. You wanna come over after you feed Gemma? I'm not touching my textbooks tonight."

"What's on the menu?"

"Takeout?"

That meant he was buying. "Sure."

I went over to Gemma's bowl and filled it with fresh water. Then I took out some canned food. As soon as she heard it open, she was at my leg, rubbing against it and meowing.

"Hey little lady," I said, running my fingers from the top of her head and down her spine. "I'll miss you tonight."

"You know —" Shane started, then stopped abruptly.

"What?"

"Nothing."

I got the feeling he was about to tell me I could just bring Gemma over, but he wasn't going to cross the line twice.

So I spent the night at Shane's, and we ordered Himalayan and watched Netflix and drank craft beer and ended up, yet again, naked and in his bed, where I realized I had always known I'd come back to him, even after he went all boyfriend on me.

Because I loved having sex with Shane. Not only did he have the ability to maintain all of my favorite positions; he was dominant, the kind of dominant I liked.

So many people had weird ideas about submissiveness and dominance; they thought those terms were relegated to BDSM culture, that the dominants were always on top, and wore leather and chains, and tied you to the bed to hurt and humiliate you until you cried. But really, from my view, almost every sexual encounter contained a partner who was dominant over the other, and not usually in a dominatrix sort of way. The dominants were the ones who took charge, who made the majority of the decisions, who showed; the submissives followed happily—they wanted to be shown. Culture equated masculinity with dominance, which was why so many men were nurtured to be dominant while women were nurtured to be submissive, but you could always find us, the oddballs, the ones like me and that girl Skylar. There was even a group of sexual deviants in the Phoenix area who had regular meetups and hookup parties, and who criticized the common view of sexual orientation being based on gender, advocating their idea that attraction was based on where someone fell on the submissive/dominant spectrum; they had even passed out flyers at ASU promoting this view, which was how I found out about it. I liked this view, and I adopted it. Fuck being bisexual: I was attracted to dominants.