There are thirty-seven men from all walks of life crammed around eight small tables in this tiny room. We’re so close to each other I can see pores in the skin of the guys beside me. We’re half drunk, tired and wired, yet you wouldn’t even need to be paying attention to hear a pin drop at the other side of the room.
What silenced us? Anticipation. The air is so thick with it I can almost smell it. We all know what’s coming. We’re all here for the same thing, we’re all so hungry for it a soft tap on the head of a microphone was all it took to put every one of us into a trance-like state.
I’m staring at the small stage the tables are clustered around. My head runs through what’s to come and my nostrils flare as I breathe in. I smell drywall. Printer ink. The sweat of a long day on a building site warring with the expensive aftershave of a day sat in an office doing fuck all.
When the lights start to dim I get a lump in my throat. When the red curtain flutters, just a bit, I get a lump in my jeans, too. Was it an accidental touch that made the velveteen fabric shiver? Was it an intentional tease? Or was it just a natural breeze that need has warped and given meaning to?
The curtain moves again, and I hear a sound. It’s a man mumbling. I imagine that I hear the gentle tones of a woman’s response, refusing to acknowledge the logic that tells me I’m wrong. There is a woman behind there, of that I’m certain, but she won’t be doing any talking. Women don’t speak around men anymore because we don’t deserve to hear them.
It’s been years since I heard a feminine voice breathe my name. Years since I felt soft, yielding tits against my face, slender legs hugging my hips, a tight cunt sheathing my cock and squeezing it until pleasure pours from its tip. It’s been over a decade since revolution released women from the destructive grasp of men.
We did it to ourselves. We tried to control women. All of them. We tried to own them, to take their lives and shape them into whatever it was that we wanted them to be. We tried to keep them down in the dirt where society had conditioned us to believe they belonged. And then the tables turned.
A collective gasp rises into the air around me and my gaze snaps up from the barrier that separates us from the stage. The curtain is moving in earnest now. I’m salivating. Palpitating. I can’t breathe or blink or shift in my seat to try to find relief for my swollen cock. I just wince as it gets harder and more bent beneath stiff denim.
Please. Please, God, make her stop fucking stalling. Make her stop with the build and the tease and just give me what I fucking need. My cheeks flame and I try to smother the thoughts running through my mind. Even after ten years of suffering I still want to be in control. I still think it’s my divine right to have what I want. But God isn’t going to help me. He was supplanted by the Goddess at the same time men were supplanted by women.
Another gasp floats toward the ceiling and this time my own is mingled within it. Through a small gap halfway up the curtain, five tanned toes appear. Their nails are painted black. I suck my lip into my mouth and try not to hear the lowering of a zipper behind me. I see a foot, arched forward, pushing the toes into a point. Around the middle toe, there’s a silver band, covered in stones that spark beneath the stage lights. A chain leads over the instep, coils around the ankle.
Jesus fucking Christ, I can see an ankle. More zippers are lowered behind me, to my left and to my right. My hands grip the edge of the table and I stare, digging my nails in until they pierce through oilcloth and scrape against plastic. A calf becomes visible, then a knee, then a thigh.
The perfectly formed leg kicks, the chain around the ankle glitters, mesmerising me. A tattoo of a thin vine snakes from ankle to thigh, getting thicker and heavier as though it’s intended to make us imagine what it blossoms into once it reaches its end. A bloom none of us will ever know the fragrance of.
In a movement so sudden, the leg vanishes, drawn back behind the cover of the curtain. I want to scream, to rage at the asshole to my left who’s busy coming all over his own steel-toed boots. I wish I’d had the sense to take my pleasure when I had the chance, but I’m still convinced that I’ll get more than my due.
That minute-long flash of leg could be all I get to see. Only being permitted to look at a woman once every three months is bad enough, but such a fleeting glimpse is just cruel. But it’s our own fault. My own fault. I need to keep telling myself that.
Someone cries out and the curtain reclaims my attention. It’s moving again. Through a gap slightly higher up than before a hand appears. More silver bands sparkling on long fingers with black painted nails. Clasped in that hand is an unpeeled banana.
I bite my lip until it bleeds, watching a wrist appear, then the bend of an elbow. No more waiting, I can’t risk it. A guy yells at me when I stand up to unbutton my jeans, so I sink back down quickly and shuffle in my seat until I have my cock in my hand. Oh, the fucking unfairness of it! Why is it going soft?
I stare at the arm, at the banana. I try to imagine that hand wrapped around my dick, stroking it, pulling the foreskin back, holding it upright and ready for a slit seeking tongue. But no matter how hard I fantasise or how hard I tug, my cock continues to deflate.
Then I see a shoulder appear. There’s a bump behind the curtain. I see a hip, the curve of a waist, and then…oh someone help me…and then a heavy, jewel-encrusted tit. The woman shakes her body and the tit jiggles. Men around me groan as they come. Some even cry out thanks to the Goddess for letting them be here to see.
I want to come. The fist I’ve made around my cock does all the right things. My balls are ready. So am I. But my body won’t comply. Please, please, please. The woman shakes her wrist, getting faster and faster. I follow suit, tugging harder, stretching, pulling, trying to will life back into my useless cock.
It isn’t going to happen, she’s going to go any second now and I won’t have… I hear the most incredible sound in the world. Her laugh. It tinkles in my ears. Her hand tightens around the banana until it splits and pale flesh bursts from the top, and then she’s gone.
“Thank you,” I sob, staring at the now still curtains as the weakest of orgasms seeps from the tip of my soft cock.
Silence descends once again, and I know that thirty-seven men are all thinking the same thing. We should be grateful that women would give us this much because it’s more than many of us have ever given them. But, deep down, we’re all aware that we’re not. And until we learn to be, this quarterly peepshow in a seedy club is all we’re ever going to have. Truth be told, we don’t even deserve that much.
