Call Me by Your Safe Word

BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS

Anhedonia plagued him at the oddest times. Often, and especially, on Sundays.

As Oliver stepped into the bathroom and locked the door behind him with a twist of the expensive lacquered doorknob, he realized that not a single person had asked him a question about himself in sixty-eight days. One more day and a grim numeric milestone would be reached. And there would be nothing funny about it.

Besides... even if (or "when?" he thought hopefully) someone ever asked him a personal question again... "Hey Oliver, how ya doing?"...

...What the fuck would he even say?

What conversational balancing-act between veracity and brevity could possibly allow Oliver to reply to a question like that without lying? How could he even begin to convey the vast banality of his daily existence and the world-shrinking decimation of his emotional palette during the decade he had spent married to Rhonda? The million little deaths he died every day? The threadbare windswept cobwebs left neglected to multiply inside his heart of hearts?

What was the word he was searching for? "Anhedonic" was accurate, and "numb" was too, but neither truly captured the existential state of Oliver's life condition. What was the word?

"Hurry up in there!" Rhonda's shrill screams pierced the oiled redwood of the bathroom door and made Oliver wince.

"Okay, Honey!" he whimpered in response.

He looked in the mirror and attempted to summon a sigh, which arrived in the form of a shudder. What was the word?

He reached his left hand forward and grasped the girthy gleaming handle atop the marbled porcelain sink, scraping his oversized and tarnished wedding band against it with a startling "squeak!" He squeezed his hand tightly around the engraved "C" on the handle and hot water gushed forcefully from the tip of the faucet, a jet of white liquid spraying into the gaping hole below with a level of water pressure that only the oldest of money could even consider prioritizing. What was the word?

The "C" on the silver handle did not mean "Cold." The "C" represented the French word "Chaud," which meant "hot," because Rhonda and her entire family and all the appliances in their house were French. He numbly pulled the imported handle forward.

Even as he pitied his pleasureless pilgrimage of a boilerplate life —

No one had asked him how he was doing in sixty-eight fucking days! — he nurtured a simultaneous and masochistic gratitude that no one (no one!) seemed to give a fuck. The truth was that he wouldn't have had any answers anyway. Oliver's life had become hard to describe. If anyone had asked, the answer wouldn't have come! The answer would have tap-danced mischievously on the fleshy dripping tip of his meaty tongue, remaining just out of reach of his probing and inarticulate consciousness. What was the word he was searching for? What was the word?

"How many fragrances does one woman need?" Oliver wondered, his interior dialogue robotic, monotonous, rhetorical, inquisitive. He swept a half-dozen bottles of perfume onto one side of the shelf below the spotless bronze-framed bathroom mirror. Then he placed his heavy silver safety razor into the modestly-sized void he had created for himself. What the hell was the word?

If someone asked him how he had been doing lately, what would be his reply? What was the word?

As he cupped his hands under the powerful running faucet and splashed hot water onto his face, he realized that the word was "Claustrophobic." Life with Rhonda was claustrophobic. A constant struggle for space.

The next time someone asked him how he was doing, he'd be honest and reply: "Claustrophobic." He sprayed shaving cream onto an open palm. Radical honesty felt radically possible.

"Hurry the fuck up, Mister Sloth King! The service is going to start!"

He splashed water on his face again. He did not reply. A dim realization flickered to life between quivering cells of his most closely-guarded anxiety matrices: Rhonda needed so many perfumes because she knew that her husband didn't like the way she smelled. And she was beginning to realize that no matter what she did, that would never change.

He picked up his safety razor and dragged it gingerly against his throat. Stubble was for grad students and the downwardly mobile. All the Harvard Professors he looked up to shaved daily. Throughout history, even.

"HURRY UP HURRY UP HURRY UP—"

"I'm sorry, pumpkin!"

He looked at the mirror, pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, straightened his back, twisted his torso diagonal to his reflection, and for a moment his jawline was taut and angular as it was in those rarest of dreams devoid of his frequent defeatism. He mouthed the words:

"I'm not sorry for a damn thing, you fucking bitch. I'm leaving you. And I'm GAY!"

And all was silent for a minute but for razor scraping off stubble.

Anhedonia plagued him at the oddest times. Often on Sundays. Often in the bathroom, when he shaved. And the word that best described his life was "Claustrophobic." They were all now late for Sunday Mass. He absentmindedly remembered that today was his birthday. He was thirty four.

THIRTY MINUTES LATER

On a honking four-lane freeway on the brisk sub-thirty-two morning, Oliver's regal chrome Mercedes Benz was swiftly castrated by potent murmurs of multicolor morning traffic.

Rhonda scanned satellite channels and landed on an inappropriately enthusiastic radio host informing their subwoofers of a grisly five-car pileup ahead. Then she dramatically turned the radio off before the host got to finish a sentence.

"Jesus, this reminds me of the opening scene in La La Land where everyone gets out of their car and sings," she remarked with a snort.

"I want to see that!" cried Oliver Jr. from the back seat. Rhonda glared back at her son.

"Too bad, because you can't!"

"That's not fair!" Oliver Jr. cried back.

"When you're older we'll watch it together," Oliver interjected into the argument.

"KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE ROAD, DAD!" shouted his son and wife in unison.

"Yeesh!" Oliver kvetched as he obeyed reluctantly. "We're going zero miles an hour!" This fact was undeniably true.

"And it still isn't fair!" Oliver Jr's cracking voice chimed in.

BAM!

All of a sudden, their Benz was violently impacted by a powerful force from the rear!

Oliver always wore a seatbelt, so he escaped the collision without injury, but his wife and son had defiantly removed their own seatbelts even after he had diligently ensured their use as a precondition of ignition. The unsecured forms of Rhonda and Oliver Jr. had thus been flung forward onto the airbags in front of them and then back into their seats with such force that both were knocked out cold — Rhonda in the passenger seat with a lit cigarette now extinguished on the mane of her synthetic chinchilla overcoat, and Junior in the back looking more like he had drifted off into a peaceful slumber than been rendered unconscious by impact.

Who the fuck had hit them? Oliver's interior monologue had curled upwards from monotonous capybara moaning to the snarling unapologetic space-taking of an undefeated king cobra!

Through the rear window, a black Tesla Model S with illegally-dark windows and a seemingly beefed-up and spiked front bumper conspicuously lacked a visible license plate. Its driver was completely obscured by the dark windshield.

Oliver wanted to go fight the other driver that very moment, but his better nature prevailed: First, he checked the pulses of both of his unconscious family members to make sure they were alive. Thank Goddess, they were.

Then he opened the door to his car and stepped out onto the frigid highway. He was wearing a synthetic blazer that hadn't been designed for this freezing temperature. Fortunately, the guy getting out of the Tesla wasn't either. In fact, the other driver was only wearing slacks and a dress shirt, which must have been custom-ordered because he was

Gigantic.. And colossal. And ripped. And he must have stood seven feet tall. And most of all... he was somehow familiar! The man was massive, yes, and thickly bearded, yes, but those unmistakeable cheekbones... those eyes... yes, yes, yes...

Oliver shivered dramatically and involuntarily, literally quaking in his boots. He knew this man. He had seen him before. And he remembered everything.

Right at that moment, the traffic began to speed up.

"Take it," shouted Elio. He ran forward and thrust a business card into Oliver's hands, then back into his menacing modified Tesla, which seemed to have sustained zero damage.

Oliver stared blankly at his cosmetically-mutilated rear bumper for a moment, then turned around and followed suit.

THE NEXT DAY IN THE FACULTY LOUNGE

Oliver was pleased to discover that his persistent anhedonia post-car-accident was suddenly and thrilling gone, vanished along with its twin non-feeling of numbness.

He munched day-old yet delicious celery sticks dipped in hummus as he perched at a table in a wood-lined lounge with a few tenured colleagues of significance, whose publishing pullquote potential he nevertheless had long-ago deigned not to pursue. He reached furtively into his pants pocket and fumbled around looking for the card Elio had given him. Then he found it, and grasped it tightly in his hand, and couldn't help but grin broadly when he remembered that—

"Ollie— is that your Beemer with the rear damage I saw in the faculty lot this morning?" Such a question dripped bad faith and fermented snark in the semi-professional context of faculty colleagues, and to Oliver the remark meant war. Guerrilla social warfare that would inevitably reach heights of passive aggression that he had once thought impossible to personally embody...

"That depends, Malcolm. Is this the name and information of the guy who rear-ended me?" Oliver took out the card Elio had given him from his pocket and waved it provocatively.

"I don't know. Is it?"

"You tell me," said Oliver as he passed the business card to Malcolm. In less than five seconds, Malcolm's eyes widened into flying saucers.

"It can't be..."

"It is."

Malcolm audibly gulped, unable to deny the card's seeming authenticity. The other colleagues quickly crowded around him to share the burden of witnessing the wallet-size object of Malcolm's adulatory fixation. One by one, each colleague's jaw slackened and fell dangling downward without conscious volition.

"Please hand it back."

"Okay," replies Malcom. "But does he... does he really work that high-up in the Pentagon?"

"Real security clearance, gentlemen. And access to government slush funds to repair or even replace my poor abused baby Beemer... That's what this.. what's his name?" Oliver eyed the card conspicuously, performatively. "That's what this 'Elio Perlman' is going to give me."

"What's his security clearance got to do with it?"

"Hopefully you'll never need to know," remarked Oliver as he picked up his plate of bagel crumbs and stood up from the table.

"Sounds like blackmail," said another man curtly.

"Sounds libelous," Oliver's voice echoed behind him as the door pneumatically collapsed shut in his wake.

In the hallway, Oliver pulled out his phone and dialed the number on the card. The phone rang once and then a voice picked up, a voice that he had reminisced about every day for untold eons of emotionless breeding and unholy null-meaning communion with a wife who had sensed his fundamental indifference to her existence and satisfaction only after they'd been married for years. Rhonda cheated on him, of course, of which he proudly knew and assumed nothing. And as the voice on the other end of the phone addressed him, his total indifference to his own willing cuckoldry felt instantly and wildly justified.

"Perlman."

"Elio... is that — is that you?"

For a moment there was only Elio's heavy breathing.

"Meet me at the Harbor at midnight. Bring a scarf."

"A scarf? But—"

"The safe word is Vagina."

"What—"

"Because Vagina turns both of us off."

Buzzzzzz. The line was dead.

And Oliver's heart was more alive than ever.

THAT NIGHT

The Boston Harbor was freezing, vast, and devoid of non-rodent life. Oliver crept slowly along the cobblestone road in his semi-crushed Benz a few minutes prior to the appointed hour. A tail light had been destroyed in the collision, but he'd yet to receive a warning about it...

The moonlight was enough.

As far as Rhonda knew, Oliver had stayed late at the office grading overdue dissertations... and he had... but now...

Then he saw it. A hulking, seven-foot-tall bearded figure standing directly in front of the path of his car. He screamed and slammed on the brakes as the figure nonchalantly walked forward and jumped in the passenger seat.

"All these years later, and you still smell the same," said Elio as he put on his seatbelt.

"You too," said Oliver. "But you sound different. Your voice has the same inflections but it's been pitched down about half an octave."

"Basic will do that to you," replied Elio gruffly. "SEAL training will, too. I never wanted to be all...domesticated like you and pops, I guess."

"When the fuck did you become a Navy SEAL? What did your dad say about—"

"Dad's dead," Elio interjected. "Has been for about nine years."

"Oh, I'm sorry for..."

"Don't be. Can I ask you a question, Oliver?"

Oliver gently stopped the car and looked directly into Elio's eyes, elfin and languid, awash with unrepentant desire. As he reset his count of days since he'd been asked a personal question from sixty eight to a merciful zero, he watched Elio's eyes light up at the touch of

his, dancing with ardor and illicit intention.

"Anything."

"Did you bring the scarf?"

"Yes."

"Do you love her?"

"No."

"Did she get you a birthday gift?"

"You remembered my—"

"Yeah, I remembered. And I've got your birthday gift right here, bitch. Now BRING THAT MOUTH OVER HERE because this fat fucking cock ain't gonna suck itself."

Oliver couldn't help but comply.

He leaned over the divider between them and opened wide. What entered his mouth was gargantuan beyond his most wildly idealized recollections of the last oral encounter he had enjoyed with this particular phallus. Oliver's own dick had stayed the same size over the last ten years — What kind of hormones had Elio been taking that had increased the sheer capital funding his personal endowment by so many envy-inducing percentage points of thickness, length, and vascularity... oh god, the vascularity...

Each vein stood out beneath the paper-thin skin of Elio's colossal shaft as Oliver did his best imitation of an Anaconda, unhinging his jaw and inhaling the entire length of Elio's freakishly overdeveloped cock.

"Do you remember that peach you ate in Italy? The one I jizzed into?" grunted Elio as he held his member all the way into Oliver's throat and past his esophagus until the bulging mushroom tip nearly entered Oliver's small intestine.

Oliver could only reach behind his back and deliver a feeble thumbs up in response. He was loving this treatment. He had been laboring under a laughable delusion of his own desire to be loved, when what he had really been feeling was a desire to be treated like a complete and utter cocksleeve by the seven-foot-tall high-cheekbones Adonis of hypermasculinity whose jizz he had once slurped from a peach during an idyllic summer in Italy.

"I put something in that peach. Something you didn't know about."

Oliver's eyes widened in surprise, his unhinged jaw stretching beyond the limits of human anatomical possibility and resembling nothing so much as a haplessly one-tongued alien xenomorph. He was even beginning to turn purple, and the drooling saliva gushing from his mouth was still barely enough lubrication to cover the sheer surface area of Elio's massive, veiny, throbbing fuckstick.

"And do you want to know what was in that peach, Oliver, you little slut?"

Elio gave Oliver one last colossal thrust lengthwise into the deepest bowels of his oral abyss, and then grabbed Oliver's hair

and pulled his gasping head apart from the glistening idol-sized monument of masculinity that the spit-covered and jaw-popping Oliver was so grateful to slavishly worship.

"That peach you ate had Rohypnol in it. I only pretended I didn't want you to eat it. I raped your sleeping body that night, Oliver. Twice."

"What?" Oliver spluttered through spit and tears. "But you could've just asked and I would've..."

"Do you ask a carpet permission before you walk on it, Oliver? Do you ask a piece of paper permission before you write on it how much you love your master?"

"My master? But..."

Thwack! A sharp smack to the face silenced Oliver's feeble objections to his old friend's new self appointed label.

"Sir. You will refer to me as 'Sir' from now on. That or 'Master.' Or 'Daddy,' if you want to be a basic bitch. And I know you're a basic bitch at heart, Oliver. And you know how I know? Because when I raped you in your sleep, you ejaculated. Twice. And I didn't even touch your cock. Zero stimulation. All I did was fuck your pretty little sculpted ass. And in answer to your question, about why didn't I just ask... did you ask to eat the peach I jizzed into, Oliver? Did you?"

Elios's eyes had grown wild with aggression and intensity.

"No, sir..." whispered Oliver.

"Louder."

"NO. SIR."

"Good boy. Now get out of the car and bend over the hood. But wait... hold on a second."

Elio reached into the pocket of his jeans and extracted a king-size red sharpie marker. "It's always a good idea to mark your property," he smirked.

Then Elio uncapped the marker, reached forward, and wrote a few large capital letters directly onto Oliver's forehead.

"Can I ask what you wrote, Master Elio?"

"No you may not, boy. And don't look in a mirror until you get home. Now get out and bend over. Oh yeah, and bring the scarf."

This was asking a lot, because the Mercedes was parked directly on the street with both floodlights beaming.

"Pull those ass cheeks apart for daddy," Elio commanded the shivering mass of cock-hunger that was bent over the hood of the luxury vehicle in front of him.

"Yes, sir..."

There was the sound of a loud loogie being hocked, and the squelching friction of a hand spreading fluid against skin, followed by the immediate sensation of a foreign object requesting entry into his anal port of entry that represented nothing less than the most bold invitation to asshole dilation that Oliver had ever received in his life.

"Oh Elio, it won't fit..."

"It already did, bitch. You were just passed out from a roofie I gave you at the time."

"But it wasn't as big back th—"

Oliver was silenced by a scarf, his scarf, shoved unceremoniously into his mouth and a manhood of planet-devouring proportions announcing itself proudly as it barged past the sphincter-guarded waiting room of his phat trembling booty.

He screamed into the scarf, but Elio just laughed. "I like it when you scream, boy," cackled Elio as he thrust deeper into Oliver's ravenous cavernous wormhole. "It reminds me of your wife, Rhonda."

Oliver was confused. "What?" He yelled into the scarf.

"Yeah. I fuck your wife Rhonda when you're out of town, Oliver. Didn't you know that already? She said you seem okay with it, because she doesn't try to hide it."

Elio thrust deeper and deeper into Oliver's ass, squeezing his cheeks together to emphasize an already-torturous degree of tightness around his throbbing battering-ram of utter anal destruction. The thrusting was growing even more intense.

"How does it feel to know you're getting fucked by the same cock that fucks your wife? I feel like a modern-day Caligula. By the way, how's my son doing?"