Questionable Consent / Not Too Hard To Ask

I was beside myself when she sat beside me on the plane. Not sure what it was. I’m in contention for Biggest Slut I Know – it’s not a lack of lovers – but even after four months of fucking and flirting with random friends, the pressure of her forearm against mine on the armrest sent spasms through my consciousness and all of a sudden I was questioning consent.

Was that on purpose? She’s … touching me … what do I do?

See also: crashing at a friend’s house this summer. A friend who’s still in high school while I most assuredly am not. Sleeping under blankets on the floor less than a foot from a sexy slumbering seventeen-year-old girl with plaintive eyes, a slight smile, and the arms of her age appropriate partner around her waist. And I’m sure it was a total accident that we brushed against each other. I’d like to take no responsibility. See I’m a queer boy, so I’m supposed to be one of the good ones. And yet, somehow, flailing gently in the dark, hoping some of me lands next to some of you and that you don’t mind; waiting for you to move as my fingertips barely, gently, graze your stomach … bears a stamp of rape culture that I have very little trouble seeing with both eyes open.

But … watching that movie at another friend’s house, sandwiched between two beautiful boys, a pillow resting against my leg as another new and unnerving unnamed acquaintance laid her head against my leg … I couldn’t concentrate. Suddenly, The Incredibly True Adventures of Two Girls in Love held my attention less than The Incredibly Trite Arousal of This Guy in Heat and I wanted more. So, I slid my foot towards her. She leaned back a little. I guess she liked it? Couldn’t have been that comfortable. Then she reached back and laced her fingers around my ankle.

So what?

I might have spasmed. I might have sobbed. I wanted her touch so badly that the confirmation in that contact – or the uncertainty of an unfamiliar hand – leaves me shuddering even now as I sit on someone else’s floor, pressing my fingers into another keypad, attempting to absolve myself of the questions, again and again, I’m too presumptuous or petrified to vocalize.