Thirteen—A Session
The question of touching comes up the way the other questions have—not asked directly, not at first. It’s there in the way he shifts slightly closer, or lets his eyes rest on my arm or shoulder a moment longer than looking requires.
The question underneath the question is always the same: is this allowed, and if it is, what does that make me?
So I make it easier. I ask.
And what comes out, when it does, is sometimes surprising in its simplicity. Not anything elaborate or charged. He wants to know if he can touch me. Or whether we might hug.
Just that. A hug.
The word lands in the room with a weight that tells you everything about how long it’s been, how much he’s missed it without knowing that missing it was permitted. No one hugs him.
He says it almost as an aside, the way men mention the things that hurt most—briefly, without eye contact, already moving on before you’ve had time to respond.
We hug. Or I take his hand, or I let him put a hand on my back, or we sit with our shoulders touching. Whatever is asked for and feels right in the moment. Because the visual is only one sense and the body knows this even when the mind has forgotten it.
Touch is grounding in a way that looking isn’t—it confirms that something is real, that you are real, that another person is genuinely present with you rather than simply near you.
And men are so starved of it.
Not of sex. Of this. Of contact that isn’t transactional, isn’t building toward something, doesn’t require anything in return. The kind of touch that says you are here and that is enough. Most men haven’t been touched that way since childhood, if then. Some not even then.
He wants to know what else might be possible. Not sexually—he’s understood by now that sex isn’t what this is, and most men arrive at that understanding more easily than you’d expect once the anxiety settles.
What he’s asking is something harder to name. Whether there are other ways to be close. Other ways to be known by another person through the body rather than around it.
We talk about what intimacy actually is. It’s a word that has been so thoroughly colonised by sex that men can barely use it to mean anything else, which is a quiet kind of poverty.
Intimacy is just this—being known, being present, being in contact with another person without a performance running. It can happen in a conversation. In a long silence. In the fact of two people sitting without clothes on a sofa talking about nothing, which turns out to be talking about everything.
He’s trying on a different idea of himself. A man who can be close to another person without it meaning something he’s not ready for it to mean. A man whose body can be present in a room without apology or agenda.
It’s not a transformation. It’s more like a memory of something he didn’t know he’d forgotten.
You are here: Naked But