Twenty-One—Men Who Come
Let me tell you about surprise. Not his—though there was plenty of that, and I’ve described enough of it already. Mine.
I’ve been doing this long enough that very little catches me off guard. Men’s wanting, men’s questions, men’s capacity for both tenderness and awkwardness in the same afternoon—none of that surprises me anymore. I’ve made a kind of peace with the full range of it.
But occasionally something stops me.
A man—not young, not inexperienced in the way the world measures experience—lying on the bed while I ran a hand lightly across his chest. A small involuntary sound. Then stillness, the particular stillness of a man who has just felt something he didn’t know he could feel.
His nipples were sensitive. He hadn’t known.
I didn’t say anything immediately. Just noted it, the way you note something that requires a moment to absorb. Then I moved lower. The inner thigh. The shift in his breathing. Then, carefully, the testicles—and the look on his face of a man receiving entirely unexpected news about himself.
He hadn’t known those were sensitive either.
He had lived in this body for the better part of five decades. He had had sex, relationships, a marriage. He had a body beyond his penis—had always had one, had been carrying it around all this time—and had never once explored it. Never been curious about it. Never had a reason or a context or a person willing to show him that there was more to find than the part he already knew about.
How could you not know? I thought. Not unkindly. Just—genuinely. The way you might wonder how someone has never tasted a particular food, never heard a piece of music, never stood in front of a painting that stops you in your tracks. How does a person move through a life and miss this?
But I knew the answer before I’d finished thinking the question.
Because nobody told him. Because the script he’d been given—sex as a focused, goal-oriented, time-limited event organised around a single outcome—left no room for wandering. For curiosity. For the slow discovery of a body as territory worth exploring rather than equipment to be operated.
He hadn’t been negligent. He’d been faithful to the only map he’d ever been given.
It just turned out the map was almost entirely blank.
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