Ben & Luke
I had been dating Luke for several weeks when I got his text. I don’t actually remember how we met. It’s funny with memories of dates and boyfriends. I have had very few proper relationships in my life, the kind you don’t call dating but being a couple, two people who love each other and are committed to each other. I was in three or four of those relationships and that’s counting first teenage loves. But those relationships were always long, several years, and deep and I remember every single part of it: how we met, how we fell in love, how we fell out of love, how I felt during every single moment.
Then there was dating. A long wild string of affairs and hook ups and flings and crushes. Collecting boys or were they collecting me? Of those I often remember only fragments. I always remember the sex. I remember the feeling of their cock inside me or their greedy hands on my body and I remember their intense yearning - the crazy madman desperate desire in their eyes. Flickering like fire, wild, primal. I always remember the sex but how I got there is often a blur.
I also remember their sweet gestures. Taking care of me when I was ill, packing my bags for the hospital and taking me there, helping me and my flatmates move, gifting me cars. Sex and sweet gestures, a kaleidoscope of hard cocks and body fluids, and their childlike desperation to please me and be loved by me.
Luke was not one of those men. He too was older, they all were, and he too had the need to please me but his vibe wasn't predatory. He probably met me at the cafe I worked at, he probably asked me out, I probably said yes, since I always did. I didn’t know how to say no. I liked Luke. He was sweet and charming, very good-looking with a sexy smile he was so generous with. He had a way of speaking that was peculiar and cute, not quite a lisp but suggesting a similar kind of vulnerability, imperfection.
He also had a dash of stupid in him and was unmistakably needy, which added to my feeling safe and comfortable around him to the point of feeling superior.
Luke meditated. That wasn’t unusual for Bondi where he and I lived. Bondi Beach people meditated, did yoga, and lived sugar-free, vegan lifestyles long before it became a thing of the masses. But that wasn’t my lifestyle. I was a 20-year-old student and surfer who enjoyed road trips, messy evenings at the pub, and dancing with my girlfriends to music everybody else loved too.
“...and later we’ll go to the beach and meditate”, Luke would suggest after breakfast. I didn’t meditate, I never said I did. The assumption made me angry. I didn’t like when people assumed their reality as mine. I still don’t like it. It makes me mad when people push their worlds onto me. When they assume I walk and talk their walk and talk, oblivious to the fact that I have my own walk and talk my own talk. When they are so blissfully ignorant to the existence of a myriad of realities beside their own. It is the opposite of curiosity and empathy.
It bores me.
So Luke bored me a little but not enough to put me off completely. And being with him wasn’t overwhelming. It wasn’t too intense. It was simple and easy which was a nice respite.
Luke was a finance guy who was a closet artist. He was just doing an evening course in video art and he eagerly shared all the things he was working on with me. He was very content with his achievements as a new artist and particularly proud of an experimental piece of video art I didn’t understand. Of course, I didn’t say so but I thought it was bad. He was ecstatic. He thought he had done so well. I found that so precious. People’s ability to passionately love their work despite its mediocracy never seizes to fascinate me. How do you love something so dearly that is so far from perfect? Today I'm thinking Luke was maybe not that stupid after all. I might have learned a thing or two from him.
So we had been dating several weeks before I got his text: “hanging out with Ben, want to come over?”. Ben was Luke’s best friend. I had met him once before, they came over to the cafe I was working at and got cold-pressed juices or Kombucha or whatever. Ben was hot AF, oozing much more confidence than Luke. There was an effortless self-assuredness about him that wasn’t cocky or intimidating. Ben held power but didn’t use it to overpower Luke, although he so easily could have. Ben looked like superman, but the daytime version. The nerd that becomes superman when nobody is looking. What’s his name again? Right, Clark Kent! Ben looked like Clark Kent.
“Hanging out with Ben, want to come over?”
I was at home, I didn’t have any evening plans and also I knew exactly what this was. I could feel it. Maybe in the words, maybe in me. I knew what this was and I was in. I was excited. The sort of calm, peaceful excitement that gently pushes you forward easy does it neither anxious nor hyper, just steady calm forward motion into an unknown you’re already friends with. Intuition.
I remember the sex, but I don’t remember how we got there. Where did all the beginnings go?
Ben and I were making out on the sofa and it felt good. Ben was all the things Luke wasn’t, the firm hand I craved so much, calm masculine energy pouring from a well of deep, gentle security. Luke was there, Luke was around, but he didn’t join. Maybe he watched, maybe he didn’t. He probably didn’t. He kept his distance. A half-naked silhouette in the corner of my eyes, whenever I would open them briefly to come out of the depth to take a breath. A quick return to the real world, to pause and to regulate. Vision does that. Whenever intensity gets too overwhelming I use looking to regulate. And vice versa, when I need more intensity: I close my eyes, open my eyes, look or don’t look, meet a gaze or avert it. Vision is a tool for sensory regulation that’s always available to us. We are the sole operator. Vision also regulates intimacy and I find it so oblivious and pushy when somebody tells me: Look at me!!!
Luke remained a silhouette.
It wasn’t like we excluded him, it was more like he excluded himself, removed himself to make space for us. For me. It felt like he gave me a gift. Maybe this is my first memory of submission. Submitting to the scheming of another, trusting they will use their power only with my best interest at heart. What makes an experience of submission a cathartic one, leaving you energized, powerful, and free? Maybe it is intention.
Ben and Luke came to visit me at my coffee shop the next day and greeted me with mischievous smiles. I felt ecstatic. Used without being taken advantage of. Spoiled, seen, cared for.
Luke and I stayed in touch but soon I lost interest in him after all. For a while he would come over to my place late at night, wake me up knocking at my window, drunk and confused, saying he missed me, saying he loved me. I never let him in, not once. I didn’t even pity him. I was just annoyed. How dare he interrupt my sleep like that! How dare he be so vulnerable and needy of my love!
Today I feel a little ashamed for having been so insensitive. I wonder if I broke his heart and how much. Can you break a person's heart a little? Why is it that people who politely knock are so seldom let in?
Ben, I never saw again, not even casually, not once. I kept his business card for many years. I might still have it somewhere. I used to collect them, all those contacts and business cards and pieces of papers with names and numbers scribbled on, James, Pete, Michael, David, like physical evidence of my prey/predator, the visual soundtrack to my promiscuity. Ben’s card was always on top of the stack, leading the pack.