it's a small (awkward) world

Mera and I are moving this weekend and I took today off work to pack and start cleaning. I've got soooo much to do, but instead of jumping right in, I'm going to sit here for a few minutes and blog. Because blogging sounds a lot more fun than packing and I just haven't had time to do much of it lately.

So Mera and I might have a "sex bed" made for us. I have fantasized often about having a bed specifically constructed with sex in mind. It could have any features I want: bars to hold onto, rings for attaching bondage gear, special drawers for the toys, a headboard with shelves and hooks for lube and accoutrements. The possibilities are endless.

Mera and I got this idea last weekend at a picnic in a nice sunny park with all Mera's coworker's from the queer youth organization where she works. Someone was leaving, there was a going away picnic, and we all convened on a North Portland park for bbq and daytime drinking. It was obviously a fun time.

We were sitting for a long time chatting with one of Mera's oldest coworkers, Xena, when the sex bed topic arose. Xena's girlfriend is a woodworker, among other things, and in the nine months they've been together, they've started building sex beds for people. The bed they made for themselves is probably their fanciest yet and Xena told us about it in great detail.

Which was cool, but also a little weird, because unbeknownst to Xena, I already know her girlfriend and their bed. Biblically...

I met Xena's girlfriend, Sam, last year online during my "swinging single" phase. I met a lot of women during that phase and had quite a good time. Sam was a quiet, brooding rugby player of the overly-masculine variety and I had a very brief fantasy that she would become my big, butch "boyfriend" and use her woodworking skills to help me build my own kayak. We went on three dates: the "meet 'n greet" coffee date, the "real" date in the evening at a nice restaurant which is when we made out for the first time, and the "seal the deal" third date, which ended with a roll in the hay, that is, a roll in what would eventually become her and Xena's "sex bed." (For the record, she and Xena weren't yet dating when I had this experience with Sam. They met shortly thereafter.)

My experience with Sam ended on a sour note. She's got terrible social skills, though she's quite good at getting the ladies into bed. She turned just enough charm on me to get my clothes off, but otherwise, she was a dud. In the end, the sex was anticlimactic and she emailed me the next day and informed me that, in her humble opinion, my hymen was probably still intact (because I protested her immediate insertion of three fingers into my snatch without any warning). Unfortunately, she informed me, deep penetration was her favorite thing about sex, so having sex with me wasn't really gonna work for her. Sorry.

Sorry indeed. It was a disappointing and humiliating experience to say the least and it never occurred to me that, nearly a year later, I'd find myself sitting in a park, hearing stories about her from her new girlfriend who was utterly clueless about the whole thing. And Mera forbade me to tell her! I felt so weird, sitting there listening to Xena open up and tell me things about her relationship, I found myself right on the verge of saying "I know," when she would divulge some juicy info about Sam. It felt so wrong to keep quiet, but Mera insisted that it wasn't my place to "out" Sam like that, that the information had no value to Xena and that it would be more inappropriate for me to bring it up. I trust Mera's judgment, so I buttoned my lip and kept up the charade.

Now it looks like we'll probably have Xena and Sam make a sex bed for us. This promises to be as awkward and disastrous as any Seinfeldian misadventure. I have vowed to steer clear of Sam and to conduct all the sex-bed business through Mera. I am horrified to imagine the moment when Sam and Xena walk in and Sam and I are "introduced." Will Sam say "hey... don't I know you?" Will she react clumsily, will she gasp or stare? Or will she play it off like we're really just meeting for the first time?

Or will she not even recognize me or remember fucking me last year?? After all, she's a total player, she probably fucked a lot of women last year. Maybe she can't keep track of them all?

I just don't want to have to look Xena in the eye and say "Yeah... sorry... that whole time you talked to me at the park about Sam...? I knew all along who she was. Ha ha. Small world, huh?"