Objectify

Les and Polly do Kenny and Dolly

It was fine when we hung out at his place in his man cave with his enormous television and his forty billion games.  It was all about the creep, crush, kill, ah-oh, holy shit did that just happen, I win, you lose of the game.  It didn’t matter that I was me.  Ordinary boring old Les, professional kickass lawyer in a man’s world, but out of the office, overweight, introverted and mostly socially inept. 

A lot socially inept.

It didn’t matter that he was the hottest man to ever look at me and not around me, over me or through me.  And yet he was precisely the man to do that.  He had a faux mo-hawk.  He had a plug in one ear.  He had lickable tattoos.  He was the kind of man whose muscles had their own individual workout regime and were in competition with each other for the sole objective of being glorious.

He was a lot glorious.

So after the initial shock of understanding he was actually looking at me and he did actually require a response to his questions, I was all good about going to his place.  We shared a pizza and a beer.  And the only joystick I aspired to hold with the one pointed at the TV.  Except that was a big slimy lie I told myself so I wouldn’t freak out and do something stupid, like touch him and make him look at me differently, so differently he saw who I really was.

Not for him.

The truth is I wanted to hold everything of his I could get my greedy little hands on.  I had these fantacies that he’d get too drunk to mind if I pawed at him and wouldn’t remember it afterwards.  He never did.  He was all about the game.  Teaching me ones I’d never played and trying to pulverise me in ones I knew well, laughing maniacally when either one of us did something dumb and got penalised or killed.  

Sometimes I let him win.  I was good at games, but when he won he’d jump about, carry on as if he’d conquered Everest and it was a whole other experience to watch him dance around like that shaking his hot butt and flexing all over the damn place, so I let him win more often than I should’ve.

That’s how it went with us, we ate take-away and played games and I stopped worrying about what to wear when I went to his place and simply wore what was comfortable, and after a while I forgot to feel like playing games with Polly was a rare privilege extended out of kindness, or more likely a huge set up whereby I’d start assuming we were genuinely friends and he’d be working up whatever prank would best make me feel like the biggest idiot in the world.

And a while after that I started wanting more than pizza and pixilation on screen.  And it was a shock to realise he did too.

He nearly gave me heart failure.  He won a particularly brutal round of Mortal Kombat and I got ready for the compensation of his victory dance.  He dumped the controller, leapt to his feet and rocked it out for about a minute after which he stopped dead looked at me and said, “Don’t hate me.”

I had two heartbeats to get ready for the crushing disappointment of some awful set up where his man cave was really a TV studio and I was the unwitting but should’ve known better contestant in World’s Biggest Romantic Dunderhead.

And no time at all to get ready for him to take my face in his hands and kiss me.

He kissed me.

He went down on one knee, held my face still and kissed me.

Well, that’s what he would’ve done except I kind of snarled from the shock so all he got was teeth.  He said, “Pucker up and go again, Les,” and I was so out of my depth I did what he said and he kept hold of my chin, but his other hand went to the back of my neck and it was so warm and he was so close and I had to do something with my hands or I was going to put nail marks in his leather sofa.