Chapter 6: Sharing thoughts
The living room was a cathedral of quiet, the only light the erratic flicker of the muted television, painting their still bodies in washes of blue and grey. The air felt used, thick with the scent of sex and sweat and the old paperbacks lining the shelves. Nico’s chest rose and fell steadily beneath her cheek. Lisa’s right hand, resting on his stomach, was sticky. The evidence of his climax was cooling on his skin, on her fingers, a tangible record of what had just happened.
She traced idle patterns in the mess, her touch light. His breathing hitched.
“Tickles,” he murmured, his voice gravelly with exhaustion.
She didn’t stop. Instead, she lifted her head, propping herself on an elbow to look down at him. In the strobing light, his face was all shadows and sharp angles, his green eyes dark pools. Her own heart was a slow, heavy drum.
“Do you remember my other deep fantasy?” she asked. The shyness was real, a flutter in her throat, but she pushed the words out.
Nico’s eyes, which had been half-closed, opened fully. He blinked, processing. The memory of her whispered confession in the stark lamplight of his bedroom surfaced. ‘I’ve always wanted to kiss someone after they’ve… finished. In my mouth. To taste it together.’
A flush crept up his neck. He was flustered, a little shocked she was bringing it up now, here, with the physical proof of it cooling between them.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice tighter now. “The… sharing thing. The kiss.”
“Right.” Her finger swirled slowly. “We did half of it. My half.”
He understood immediately. His body tensed under her hand. “Lisa. No. Come on.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s… it’s different.”
“How?” She kept her tone soft, genuinely curious, not challenging.
“It just is!” He let out a short, frustrated breath. “Look, what you did was… amazing. It was hot. But what you’re talking about is… I don’t know. It’s a guy thing. It’s gross.”
“Gross.” She repeated the word flatly. “The thing you just happily put inside my body is gross once it’s outside?”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it,” he said, shifting uncomfortably. The couch springs groaned. “It’s about… tasting it. Yourself. It’s weird.”
“Women are just expected to do it,” Lisa said, her voice dropping to a whisper. She looked at her glistening fingers. “It’s part of the script. Swallow, be a good sport, don’t make a face. And we do. Or we learn to. But the idea of a man tasting his own… it’s treated like this ultimate taboo. Why? Have you ever even tried?”
“Of course I haven’t tried,” Nico scoffed, but the defensiveness was cracking, revealing embarrassment. “Nobody tries. It’s just… known.”
“Known by who? Have you ever asked another guy? ‘Hey, so, what’s your opinion on the flavor profile?’”
“Don’t be an ass.”
“I’m not.” She leaned closer. “I’m serious. It’s a double standard built on nothing. On a feeling. A feeling you’ve never actually tested.” She lifted her hand, turning it so the faint light caught the streaks on her skin. “You trusted me with something huge tonight. Something that scared you. This is just a taste. Literally. One small, weird, intimate thing.”
He stared at her hand, then at her face. The flickering light made her expression hard to read, but her eyes were earnest. “It’s not the same.”
“It’s exactly the same. It’s vulnerability. It’s sharing the whole experience, not just the parts that are easy or conventionally sexy.” She paused, letting that sit. “You said you wondered about being used for pleasure, about surrender. This is a version of that. For me. Let me have this.”
Nico was silent for a long time. The refrigerator kicked on with a low hum. He was wrestling with it, the deeply ingrained cultural disgust warring with the new landscape of trust they were mapping.
“If I…” he started, then stopped. He cleared his throat. “If I did. I wouldn’t kiss you after. Not like that. Not with it… in your mouth. That’s a bridge too far.”
Lisa felt a surge of triumph, carefully tempered. She nodded slowly. “Okay. That’s fair. No kiss after. That can be your boundary.”
He let out a long, shaky sigh, closing his eyes. “God. This is insane.”
“So was the strap-on,” she reminded him gently.
A faint, reluctant smile touched his lips. “Yeah. Okay. Fine.” He opened his eyes, looking at her with a mixture of dread and fascination. “What’s the… procedure?”
She smiled, a real one that reached her eyes. “Okay. First, relax. You’re not eating a bowl of it. It’s just a taste.” She lifted her hand towards his face. “I’m going to put a little on your finger. Just smell it first. Get used to the idea.”
Hesitantly, he raised his own hand. She guided his index finger, swiping it through the cooling residue on his abdomen. He brought his finger up, his nose wrinkling instinctively before he stopped himself.
“It smells like… chlorine and something else,” he muttered.
“That’s the reality of it,” she said softly. “Not porn fantasy, just biology. Now, just touch it to your lips. Outside. Don’t even taste it yet.”
His hand was trembling slightly. He pressed the pad of his finger to his bottom lip, holding it there. His eyes were locked on hers, wide with a kind of horrified concentration.
“Now,” she whispered, her voice a low guide in the dim room. “Lick it. Just once. A tiny sample.”
He exhaled sharply through his nose, then his tongue darted out, a quick, birdlike movement. He recoiled immediately, his face contorting.
“It’s bitter!” he gagged.
Lisa couldn’t help a small laugh. “Well, yeah. It’s not maple syrup. But is it the end of the world?”
He shook his head, swallowing hard. “No. It’s just… intense.”
“Okay. Good. You survived.” She shifted, moving to straddle his thighs, looking down at him. Her own hand was still coated. “My turn. Open your mouth.”
“Lisa…”
“You agreed. This is the sharing part. Open.”
With a look of utter resignation, he let his mouth fall open slightly. She used two fingers of her clean hand to gently guide his chin. With the other, she slowly, deliberately, painted a streak across his tongue.
He made a muffled sound, a groan of protest deep in his throat. His eyes watered, but he didn’t pull away.
“Close your mouth,” she instructed softly. “Don’t swallow right away. Just let it sit on your tongue. Let your saliva mix with it. The flavor will change.”
He closed his eyes, obeying. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he fought the reflex to gag. She watched the play of emotions on his face: revulsion, concentration, then a slow, dawning curiosity. The extreme bitterness was fading, blending into something merely salty, musky, strange.
“Now swallow,” she whispered.
He did. His throat worked. He took a sharp breath in through his nose afterwards, like he’d taken a shot of strong liquor.
For a moment, they just stayed there, frozen in the tableau. The TV flickered, casting a car commercial’s silent jubilation across the walls.
Nico opened his eyes. They were clear. “Well,” he croaked. “Now I know.”
“And?” Lisa asked, her heart pounding.
“And…” He seemed to search for the words. “It’s not good. But it’s not… catastrophic. It’s just a taste. A really, really personal taste.” He looked at her, and the shock had melted into something softer, more vulnerable than before. “That was the fantasy? Making me do that?”
“The fantasy was sharing it,” she corrected, leaning down to kiss his forehead, careful to avoid his mouth. “Not making you. Sharing it with you. Thank you.”
He nodded, his arms coming up to wrap around her back, holding her close against him, sticky mess and all. He buried his face in the crook of her neck. “You’re a very strange woman, Lisa.”
“You’re a very brave man, Nico,” she whispered into his hair.
They lay tangled like that as the late-night news began its silent march across the screen, the world outside their fragile, sticky bubble continuing on, utterly unaware.
They lay tangled like that as the late-night news began its silent march across the screen, the world outside their fragile, sticky bubble continuing on, utterly unaware. His breathing deepened, steadied, his arms a loose cage around her. The stickiness between them was cooling, a tacky glue.
“You’re thinking,” Lisa murmured into the quiet, her lips moving against his collarbone. “I can hear the gears.”
Nico let out a soft huff, a half-laugh. “Just recovering from my culinary adventure.” He traced a slow line up her spine with a blunt fingertip. “And thinking about what you said. About my fantasies.”
She went still, listening. The hum of the refrigerator seemed to grow louder.
“The anonymity thing, the gloryhole idea,” he started, his voice low and tentative in the dark. “It always felt safe because it was empty. No person. Just a function.” He swallowed. “But after tonight… the idea of it being a specific person. Your mouth. Your hands. Knowing it’s you, but not seeing you, not having to perform… fuck.”
His heart thudded against her ear. “That’s different,” he concluded, the words barely audible.
Lisa lifted her head, searching his shadowed face. The blue light traced the curve of his jaw, the tense line of his mouth. “Different how?”
“Scarier. Hotter.” He met her gaze. “Because it’s real. It’s you.” He took a shaky breath. “And the other one. The bondage thing. Letting go of every decision.” His fingers tightened slightly on her back. “It wasn’t just about being tied up. It was about who was doing the tying.”
The air between them changed, charged with a new kind of potential. The confession hung there, raw and unmistakable.
“You want it to be me,” Lisa said, not a question.
“Yeah.” The word was an exhale, a surrender. “I do. Which is insane, because you’re… you. Lisa. Who steals the last yogurt and leaves passive-aggressive notes about dishes.”
A smile touched her lips. “And you’re Nico. Who uses all the hot water and draws weird, sad garden gnomes.” She grew serious, her hand coming to rest on his cheek. “Tell me what the fantasy looks like. With me in it.”
He closed his eyes, as if visualizing it was easier than looking at her. “There’s… a scene. In my head. Not like, with whips and dungeons. Just my old bedroom. The one upstairs.” He paused, gathering the images. “You’d have me on the bed. You’d use my own belts. The soft one from my good coat, the one I never wear. And the one from my jeans.”
His description was painfully specific, unbearably personal. “You’d loop them around my wrists and then around the bedposts. Not tight enough to hurt. Just… secure. So I couldn’t move.”
“And then what?” she whispered, captivated by the detail, by the trust implicit in him sharing it.
“Then you’d just… look at me.” His voice grew thicker. “For a long time. You’d touch me wherever you wanted. Or you wouldn’t touch me at all. You’d just make me wait. And I couldn’t do anything. No sarcasm, no deflecting. Just… exposure.” He opened his eyes, and the need in them was a physical force. “You’d be in complete control. Of what happened. Of how it felt. Of everything.”
Lisa felt a corresponding pull low in her stomach, a flush of heat that had nothing to do with embarrassment. It was power, but a solemn kind. A gifted responsibility.
“You’d trust me that much?” she asked.
“I think,” he said slowly, “after letting you paint my own come on my tongue, we’re kinda past the trust checkpoint.” He gave a weak, shaky smile. “It’s the logical next step. For my messed-up brain, anyway.”
She considered him, this brooding, sarcastic boy offering her the keys to his deepest vulnerability. The shadows in the room seemed to lean in, listening.
“Would you ever want that?” he asked, the bravado gone, leaving only a naked hope. “With me?”
Lisa didn’t answer with words. She leaned down and finally kissed his mouth, a deep, slow, claiming kiss, tasting the faint, residual salt of him and the truth of his question. When she pulled back, her blue eyes were dark and sure.
“Lets go to the adult video store,” she said.
Nico blinked, the hazy intimacy of the couch shattering around him. “Right now?”
“Is there a better time?” Lisa was already untangling herself, the cool air hitting the places where their skin had been fused. “Your parents are at that weekend conference. My mom thinks I’m at a study group. The store on Eighth is open until two.” She stood, a pale silhouette against the flickering screen, and extended a hand. “Come on. Let’s go look at some terrible movies and overpriced leather.”
He took her hand, letting her pull him up. His body felt loose, spent, but his mind was sparking with a frantic, new energy. “This is the weirdest date I’ve ever been on.”
“It’s not a date,” she said, grabbing her sweater from the floor. “It’s reconnaissance.” She tossed his shirt at him. “For the operation.”
The night air outside was a shock, crisp and smelling of damp concrete and distant rain. Nico’s ancient sedan coughed to life, the headlights cutting two weak tunnels through the suburban darkness. The silence inside the car was different now, charged with a shared, clandestine purpose.
“So,” Lisa said, her face half-illuminated by passing streetlights. “The gloryhole thing. Be honest. When you picture it… are you on your knees? Or are you on the other side of the wall?”
Nico’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. The casual directness of her question, here in his beater car, was somehow more intense than in the shadowed living room. “I don’t know. Both, maybe? It changes.”
“But the core of it is the anonymity,” she pressed, not accusing, just analyzing. “No face, no names, no conversation. Just… function.”
“Yeah. I guess.” He switched lanes, avoiding her gaze. “It’s about being reduced to a single thing. A mouth. A cock. A hole. No performance review afterwards.”
“But you just told me the idea of it being my mouth was scarier. Hotter.” She turned in her seat to look at him fully. “So is it the anonymity, or is it the specific person you’re anonymous with? Someone you trust enough to not look at you while they use you?”
The question sliced through him, precise and unsettling. He’d never parsed it that finely. The fantasy had always been a vague, safe blob of transgression. Now she was holding it up to the light, examining its components.
“I don’t know,” he admitted, the confession pulled out of him. “Maybe it’s both. Maybe the trust makes the anonymity deeper. You’d know it was me, but you’d be choosing to treat me like a stranger. That’s… fucked up. And compelling.”
Lisa nodded slowly, storing the information. She watched the neon-lit storefronts slide by. “And if we were to… explore that idea. Would you want me to watch? Through the hole, or from the side? Or would you want me to be the one who doesn’t know? To just… service a stranger through a wall and walk away?”
Nico’s heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. He could feel the ghost of her taste, bitter and intimate, on his tongue. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” he said, the words rushing out. “Talking about it, thinking about it… it’s one thing. Actually planning it? I have no map.”
“That’s the point,” Lisa said softly. “We’re drawing it together.”
The video store, ‘Video Vault,’ was a relic trapped between a laundromat and a shuttered nail salon. Its windows were tinted dark, plastered with peeling sun-bleached posters for DVDs nobody bought anymore. A buzzing fluorescent sign bathed the entrance in a sickly green light.
Inside, the air was thick with the cloying scent of cheap vanilla air freshener trying and failing to mask older, muskier smells. Racks of garish boxes lined the walls, their graphic covers a riot of exaggerated anatomy and bad Photoshop. The carpet was a sticky, matted navy blue.
A bored-looking clerk with a lip ring glanced up from his phone, gave them a disinterested once-over, and went back to scrolling.
Nico felt profoundly, ridiculously out of place. He’d been in places like this before, but always with a layer of ironic detachment, a smirk ready. Now, with Lisa’s hand slipping into his, it felt real. The fantasy had left his head and was now contaminating the sticky floor under his sneakers.
Lisa, however, moved with a focused curiosity. She browsed the racks not with titillation, but with the analytical air of an anthropologist. She stopped at a section labeled ‘Novelties & Accessories.’ Her eyes scanned over the packaged items with clinical interest.
“Look at this,” she murmured, holding up a box containing a flimsy-looking black blindfold. “Five dollars for a piece of satin and an elastic band. The markup is criminal.” She put it back and picked up another, a set of faux-fur-lined handcuffs with a tiny, comical key. “These wouldn’t restrain a kitten.”
Nico stood close behind her, his chin near her shoulder. He could smell her shampoo cutting through the store’s stale perfume. “We’re not here for the props,” he whispered, his voice low. “We have belts. We have my old bed.”
“I know,” she said, her eyes meeting his in the reflection of a glass display case. “We’re here for the… ambiance. To make it real.” She turned, facing him. Her blue eyes were serious. “The fantasy in your head—the belts, the bed, you surrendering—that’s yours. But my role isn’t just to follow a script you wrote. I need to own it. To understand what I want from it, too.”
He swallowed. “And what do you want?”
She didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she led him to a quieter corner, away from the clerk. The hum of a malfunctioning freezer case vibrated through the floor. “When you talked about it,” she began, “you talked about exposure. About me looking at you. Touching you. Making you wait.” She stepped closer, her voice dropping. “That’s a lot of power. It’s a lot of focus. On you.”
He nodded, not trusting his voice.
“So I’m wondering,” she continued, her gaze unwavering, “if part of the gloryhole idea, for you, is about redirecting that focus. If I’m just a mouth behind a wall, then all the attention, all the pressure, is on your sensation. On what you’re feeling. Not on me, or my performance, or whether I’m doing it right.” She tilted her head. “It’s a way to be selfish. To receive without having to give anything back but a physical reaction.”
Nico felt seen, utterly and terrifyingly dismantled. She was inside the machinery of his desire, tracing the wires. “Maybe,” he croaked. “Yeah. Maybe that’s it.”
“So for my version,” Lisa said, a new certainty crystallizing in her tone, “I think I’d want to watch.”
He blinked. “Watch?”
“If we ever tried something like that. Not from the hole. From the side. In the same room.” Her fingers brushed against the sleeve of his jacket. “I’d want to see you. All of you. The vulnerability, the abandon. I wouldn’t be a disembodied mouth. I’d be a witness. That’s what I’d want from it. To see you let go completely, because you trusted me enough to be there.”
The implication settled over him, heavy and hot. It wasn’t about anonymous function at all. It was about profound, witnessed surrender. The fantasy morphed again, sharper and more frightening.
The clerk cleared his throat loudly, making them both jump. “You guys gonna buy anything, or is this a field trip?”
Lisa looked back at the clerk and answered "Just a field trip. We're going to the cabin's in the back of the store when we're ready".