Written a while back. 500 word flash fiction from the prompts 'double up', 'terms and conditions' and 'sometimes when I'm bored'.
We met through a chat room. Something innocuous, so generic I can't quite remember what it was – Tampa Bay Backpackers? Clearwater Chevvies? The chat room was real enough; but in our circle of quiet deviants, us strangers united by indiscretion and desire, the unwritten guide directed us to these online confluences of oblivious Real Users. We'd slide into conversations and drop subtle keywords to indicate our ubiety; turns of phrase that the average RU wouldn't look at twice, but that careful eyes could pick out and hone in on. Yes, the chat room was real – but we weren't, not in a way that belonged.
When we'd found each other, when our gentle tendrils had reached out groping into the void and returned to us with the promise of companionship, we quietly excused ourselves in turn from the room's endless flow of chatter and retired to a private room. As these things do, we started with high boundaries and shields of deflective humour, each of us carefully chipping away at the others' defences while tentatively de-constructing our own. We probed – what do you like? What do you feel? What do you need? When we had established commonality a lascivious hour or so later, we took the next step – phone numbers were exchanged, a place, a time, an agreement.
It was my first time with two. I'd found myself becoming bored of my particular brand of divergence, feeling less satisfied after every encounter, leaving each rendezvous with a more noticeable unsatiated hole of yearning that hadn't been filled. I had spent hours staring at a pale ceiling, barely visible in the darkness, running metaphorical figures and crunching figurative numbers, and had concluded that maybe what I needed wasn't necessarily different, but rather more.
Butterflies flitted wildly in the confines of my abdomen as I prepared. I had my ritual – shower, scent, make-up, clothes – and conducted it with the efficiency of a practised hand. I had eaten earlier in the evening, a habit formed from too many late nights on empty stomachs, and my muscles and I were eager to work through that fuel.
The location on this occasion was relatively near. A secluded spot on an estate, no cameras, no security – the perfect place for us to conduct our little soiree. I was the first to arrive, and lingered in the shadow of a warehouse, engine idling, until my companions pulled up alongside. We locked eyes through car windows, features highlighted by the orange glow of distant streetlights, trying to ascertain our identities with furtive glances before exiting our vehicles. We were all familiar with these theatrics, this two-step back and forth of nervous trust and tempered eagerness. Just one of the facets of our furtive ritual, part essential tedium, part solatium foreplay.
Over car bonnets we leaned and signed our names on slips of paper, terms and conditions, little materialistic contracts dictating the confines of our encounter, as if such encounters could be confined at all.
And then, we danced.
