Twenty-Eight—Men Who Come
There’s a moment I’ve seen enough times to recognise it now, though it still pleases me every time it arrives.
A man I’ve seen a few times. We’re on the bed, both naked, talking about something inconsequential—the way you do when the body is comfortable and the mind has stopped its monitoring.
He’s been tentative up to now. Trying things carefully, checking as he goes, the way a man does when he’s not sure where the edges are. We’ve cuddled. He’s touched and been touched. Nothing has been refused because nothing has required refusal.
And then, mid-sentence, mid-laugh, he simply rolls and lies on top of me.
Not as a move. Not as a proposition. Just as the next natural thing, the thing his body decided without consulting the part of him that worries about such decisions. And we keep talking. As if it’s normal. Because it is normal. Because in this room, at this point, it has become normal.
That’s the moment I mean.
Not the first nervousness, not the relief when something is allowed, not even the satisfaction of a want finally acted on. This. The moment a man stops waiting to be told it’s alright and simply does the next thing. The moment consent—already given, already present, already mutual—stops being a concept he’s managing and becomes just the air in the room.
He didn’t need permission. He never did. What he needed was a context in which his own wanting was already legitimate before he’d done anything to earn that legitimacy. A room where the answer wasn’t going to be no.
Not because anything goes—it doesn’t, and he knows it—but because what he actually wants, it turns out, is well within what two people can honestly offer each other.
This is what I mean when I say my permissiveness has boundaries but those boundaries almost never matter. Because the men who find their way here aren’t coming to transgress anything. They’re coming to find out that they didn’t need to transgress in the first place. That the wanting was ordinary. That the body lying on top of another body, talking and laughing as if it’s normal, is just two people in a room who have agreed to be honest with each other.
No gatekeeping. No dispensation. No one granting anyone anything.
Just consent. Which was always enough. Which was always all it needed to be.
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