Drew Smith - Arcade

The husbands sometimes had things in mind that they didn’t want their wives to know about until the critical moment. One man messaged me without his wife’s knowledge prior to our meeting. He wanted me to get his wife on all fours on the bed. He wanted me to stand next to the bed and fuck her from behind while he slid under her and went down on her. Then he wanted me to come in his mouth when I was ready. I met with the couple. Neither of us mentioned to the wife what had been agreed upon earlier, though the husband and I shared several looks of complicity. The wife was clueless, but totally agreeable to whatever we asked of her. They had gone out for drinks before meeting me, and she alternated between ravenous passion and spaced-out bleariness throughout the encounter. What I remember most of her in retrospect was the taste of wine coolers on her breath, a flavor I hadn’t encountered since junior high school. The husband and I were as wide-eyed as if we were on speed, maneuvering his moaning wife like a slightly overweight doll. I spent the evening completely focused on what I was supposed to do. When I finally got her into position, her husband moved beneath her. Barely even acknowledging her vagina, he surprised me by sucking and licking my balls until I got so close I pulled out and whipped off the rubber just in time to glaze his beard. He went to the bathroom afterwards and while he was out of the room his wife thanked me over and over again. “Thank you so, so much,” she said. “You don’t know how long we’ve had this dream.”

In two other episodes, I met with couples without touching or being touched by the men at all. Once, the husband, who had a ponytail, sat on the end of the bed jerking off and calling his wife a whore. I didn’t come that night.

The other time, the husband got naked with me, but was only interested in watching me have his wife anally. She seemed to want the same thing. I met them at their house in the suburbs, and they showed me with pride a large collection of dildos. I did fuck the wife in the ass, but felt bossed around and micromanaged by both of them. They seemed to have such a specific thing in mind, I got the idea that the encounter was being filmed. I spent much of the experience scanning their room for innocuous-looking items that might conceal a spy camera, ultimately fixating on a shelf of teddy bears whose dead eyes could easily have been recording everything.

I treated the website as a part-time job, as any single man had to do in order to have sex with the couples there. In joining the site, I joined hordes of local males locked in competition for the same few willing vaginas. Inwardly, I reassured myself of my commitment to high standards of attractiveness and class, but I often caught myself in deluded cycles of rationalization, forgiving poor grammar and spelling as coincident with the kind of reckless abandon to be expected of the types open to atypical sexual practices. When necessary, I told myself that their photos weren’t truly representative, the subjects were likely attractive but unphotogenic. Other times, I had to work myself into extended sessions of fake self-reproach, railing against my own shallowness in order to persuade myself to message people on the site that my desperate horniness would permit me to fuck but who I would never want anyone to know I’d gone to bed with.

One got the impression that the couples’ inboxes were packed to capacity with thousands of eager entreaties. In order to receive even the most perfunctory of introductory replies to a message, you had to be smart and charming and have pictures of your dick that made it look absolutely enormous. You had to become great at reading people based on their profiles and send them emails feigning casual detachment while pretending to be precisely what they desired and nothing at all like your true self. I relied upon the few marketing tricks I knew, along with recommendations I’d read about excelling in job interviews — namely, mirroring in your portrayal of yourself your target’s language about what they desired. I can hardly endure thinking back on the countless occasions I labeled myself “laid back,” a description given in such bad faith that it would be laughable to anyone who ever encountered or even observed me under normal circumstances.

During a long dry spell, it occurred to me that I should investigate how other single men went about charming the couples I was failing to attract. That’s when I had what I thought was a brilliant idea. I sent the same message to about a dozen other men looking for MMF (or MFM) threesomes, my hand shaky and nervous as I copied, pasted, and hit send over and over again. I reassured myself that no matter how they replied I had obligated myself to nothing. In a way, it was like a performance art project.

“I know this is a long shot, but have you ever considered fooling around with another guy one-on-one? Nothing hardcore, just fooling around. Jerking off, looking at porn or whatever. Regular masculine str8 guy here, but it’s hard meeting women on this site. Seems like they’re deluged. I know how to keep a secret if you do. Might be fun.”

I received only one reply, from a small town police officer who lived not terribly far away. Burly with the classic cop moustache, the utility belt and holster draped over his closet door, the commendations for community service and bravery adorning his entry in Wal-Mart picture frames. He was perfect. One day in bed I told him if I could have ordered someone from a catalog it would have been him, and he said he felt the same way about me.

We spent hours and hours on the phone, far more time than we ever spent together in person. Face-to-face meetings only happened on rare occasions when I felt I could escape without being questioned by anyone about my whereabouts. I considered it a successful outing when I didn’t have to lie to anyone, when no one noticed or questioned my absence. That was maybe half the time. The other times, I lied. I was always collecting lies when they occurred to me, so I could use them when I needed them.

In all those hours of talking, many of them as he circled his town in his police cruiser, I heard a world I never would have known. I heard his CB crackle and I wondered how he managed to make out what the people on the other end were saying. I learned about the side jobs he had in his off hours, doing security at events and picking up cash drops for busy restaurants around town late at night.

He told me about everyone with whom he had ever been to bed, including his ex-wife. He had even slept with a handful of guys from his small town and on the little trips he took by himself to Reno and Acapulco. He had played with other cops, men who went home to their wives afterwards, the way I went back to my empty apartment an hour’s drive away.

MALCOLM WORKED DURING THE DAY, AND I DIDN’T GET OFFuntil late at night, so coordinating phone calls was difficult. Occasionally he would make an effort to stay up late to talk to me. For his trouble, I told long stories in which I recalled every single detail about my times with the cop, hoping he would verify that the connection I perceived was far stronger than whatever he might be experiencing with the kid, whose cluelessness and lack of sophistication might be charming for a short time, but not much longer, surely.

“The last time I called him was Friday,” I told Malcolm.

“I know,” he said.

“Do you still think your idea is the right one? Maybe I could email and just check in. Just something casual.”

“I don’t think you could do that without sounding very, very desperate.”

“Maybe you could write it for me and I could just edit it.”

“We’re not there yet, Sam,” he said.