Excerpt: Sex Addiction
From my novel-in-progress: Say You're Sorry
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” the man says.
Lucas looks to the side, avoiding eye contact, avoiding the comment.
The man chuckles and pats him on the shoulder, “it’s alright. You don’t have to tell me.”
He lets Lucas in and heads down the hall. Lucas follows him. The man is right, it has been a while. Almost a year. Lucas was trying to quit this kind of stuff. Keep it vanilla. Rough but still vanilla. Trying to keep it clean, if he was going to continue doing this, which he seemed to have no indication of stopping any time soon. He wanted his frequent fucking to at least resemble normal hook up culture.
But here he was again. Defeated. Seeking. Filled with shame and excitement. A rat in an experiment blasted with dopamine knowing he’s about to get his treat.
He follows the man into a room in the back. It’s gained some new toys since then. Lucas eyes a machine with a dildo on a pole; a fuck-machine, literally. He feels his face get warm at the thought of having one of those at home. He’d love that. But he also knows he’d never leave the house, never stop using it. He’d use it to absolutely ruin him, until Sam walked in on him internally bled out and dehydrated, literally fucked to death. The thought scares him, and fear joins the feelings he’s having.
“Alright, get undressed,” the man instructs, offering Lucas a little crate to place his stuff in. He hasn’t seen this crate in a while. He remembers it.
It’s fear at how out of his control this behaviour is. How inevitable his death-by-sex would be. Even without the machine, he knows, somehow, that it’s going to be sex that leads to his end. He’s going to go home with the wrong stranger one day, or catch aids, or just need the level of harm to increase exponentially for him to still feel the thrill until it accidentally goes too far.
And it terrifies him, that he’s still undressing. It terrifies him, that he’s this scared and still can’t turn around and go home. It terrifies him, that part of him feels nothing about the risk. Like he’s on autopilot, like he’s being controlled by someone else, like he’s not in charge of his own decisions. Like sex is a fate locked in canon, an inevitable event, and he has no choice but to witness himself move toward it.
“What do you feel like using today?” The man asks.
Lucas scans the room. Something that would let him disappear into oblivion.
“That,” Lucas says, pointing at a padded bench with a holed plank at the end, for him to stick his head and hands through. Like those old style punishment.
“Alright, get in position,” the man says, opening the plank.
It’s all very procedural. No foreplay. No sensuality. No sexuality. If you follow sex into its extremes far enough, it stops being sexual again. It blurs, blends with all these other issues that sit close in the brain, chemically, and you lose touch with what sex is supposed to be.
That’s what Lucas didn’t want. Why he tried to stop doing this. He doesn’t like this direction, doesn’t want to go in this direction.
But still, he lies down on the bench and places his neck and wrists in the gaps. The man closes the plank around him and Lucas feels his heartbeat speed up. A sense of fear — he can’t move now. He can’t retaliate, can’t leave. This fear that Lucas has learnt to connect with sex. Arousal means both horniness and agitation. The body can’t tell the difference between fight or flight and fuck, so if the mind can’t either, the self-preservation instinct basically runs head first into danger.
Lucas takes a deep breath as the man circles around behind him. He can’t see what’s incoming. He can’t see what’s going to happen to him next. He just has to take it. It’s completely out of his control.
“Remember the safe words?” The man asks.
Well. Not entirely out of his control.
“Yellow for ‘do something else’, orange for ‘not so hard’, and red for ‘stop’,” he lists off like he’s remembering his homework to his teacher.
“Good boy,” the man says, and lays a hard smack on Lucas’ ass.
Writer’s note: this is the same Lucas (Ortega) as mentioned in my Substack novel “A Normal Amount of Damage”