I am at an orgy in midtown, and I am cranky.
Fellow introverts might recognize the source of my malaise. I’m in New York visiting friends. We spent all day at the gay nude beach, and now there is the orgy. Sometime between day time and dinner time, my thoughts have refocused from plans and restaurants to genocide.
And, like the toddler I can often be, I don’t recognize my cranky until it was all encompassing.
I arrived at the orgy thoroughly over the whole affair—not just that specific party, but the notion that humans would choose to spend time together in any way whatsoever.
It’s one of those times I feel like the dude from that old Twilight Zone episode who locks himself in the vault to read and emerges later to find the whole world has been decimated by an atom bomb. The scene where he emerges gives me a joy I assume more normal humans feel during the heroine’s big solo in a Disney movie.
“They’re all dead!” I’ll shout with glee. “I’m all alone! With my books!”
The party is distinctly kink-oriented, offering few fuck-on-able surfaces but a wide array of wooden blocks, bondage crosses, and a cage.
I’m a vanilla girl with vanilla needs. My idea of an orgy is a party where you fuck, not flog. To each their own, but there is nothing of my own here.
I sit on the couch, watching my partner canoodle with friends old and new, building a grumble so palpable I feel like I’m generating one of those Charlie Brown over-the-head squiggles with my mind.
I’m making small talk with friends when Fiona approaches. Fiona is a sadist. And like so many excellent tops, she can instantly see my state.
“What do you need, sweetheart?” she asks.
I shrug and grumble something about maybe making my way back uptown alone.
But, while I may consider myself vanilla, I share one key thing with masochists: The more I like a woman, the more she scares me. And the more she scares me, the more I like her.
Fiona scares me. She’s not only a sadist, she’s a good sadist. Composed and regal, kind when it counts and mean when it really counts.
She makes me feel simultaneously like a bad puppy and a duchess in her court.
She suggests piercing me.
I want to say, “Ha! No! God no!” But I don’t. I furrow my brow. I am surprised by my non-reaction. Fiona says, “I’ll go get my gear while you think about it.”
The first time I was ever pierced, it was my eighth birthday and I was at Claire’s Boutique with my mom. I cried so much after they did the first ear that my mom had to take me out of the mall because I was scaring off other customers. My mom had to basically bully me into going back in for the second ear to avoid looking like the lost member of Wham! for the rest of my life.
I’d seen erotic piercings before, but nothing about them was erotic to me. While I wait for Fiona’s return, I chat with my friends, all of whom love piercing.
“It’s the best natural high,” says Chad.
“Piercing is my favorite thing. It’s the most intense form of penetration,” says Jane.
I realize that what I need is a paradigm shift, and that will be most easily accomplished by endorphins and novelty.
Fiona returns and I say, “Let’s do this.”
She guides me to the examination table, one of the few padded surfaces in the space. I lie down and she lays out her gear. There are surgical needles, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, gloves, and a tackle box. The tackle box becomes important later.
We discuss the number of needles and placement. I suggest we start small. We agree on six piercings on my chest and add more if I decide I want it.
Chad strokes me with a bunny fur glove as Fiona disinfects my chest.
She tells me to inhale and exhale, and she pierces the first needle through my skin. I can’t watch. I squeeze my eyes shut.
It feels like a bee sting. A sharp heat followed by an intense warming as my blood rushes to the wound.
“I think what I’d like to do,” Fiona says, “is decorate your chest with some charms. How does that sound?”
“Uh…sure?”
I have a needle in my breast that was not medically sanctioned and a sadist leaning over me. I am inclined to say yes to whatever she suggested.
Fiona digs through the tackle box, removing a roll of fishing line and pair of surgical scissors. Then she opens the smaller compartment. It contains a vast array of small plastic trinkets including farm animals, ballerinas, fake jewels, and more.
“I’m feeling piglets,” Fiona says. “What do you think?”
“Sure,” I slur.
Fiona pierces me five more times, three hypodermic needles embedded in each breast.
She strings filament through the needles while I focus on breathing.
Then she takes each piglet, and with a fresh needle, pokes a hole in their plastic, threads the fishing line through, and ties them off.
Fiona asks if I’d like some pictures. I nod.
She takes out her phone, glances quickly around the room to make sure none of the particularly aggressive dungeon mods are watching, and snaps a few photos.
Chad comes back to stroke me with the bunny fur. I feel drunk though I haven’t had a drink. I’m high though I haven’t smoked. I am, in two words, fucked up.
She helps me sit upright. The weight of my breasts tugs at the piercings. For the first time, I look at her handiwork. Six piglets, as pink as my flushed nipples, dangle from the swollen skin on my breasts. She teases them a bit, and I feel the filament rub at the inside of my skin. It’s a completely novel, sickening feeling.
I feel woozy.
“You want to wander with these in for a bit?” Fiona asks. “Show them off?”
I shake my head. “I think I’m ready to—not have them—if that’s alright.”
“Of course, baby,” she coos. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She takes the scissors, snipping at each filament and dragging it out of my skin.
A small ruby of blood appears at each piercing except one. The middle puncture on my right breast begins with a ruby and turns into a stream, then a river. Blood drips down my breast and splashes on my thighs.
Fiona is unconcerned. “Looks like I nicked a vein,” she says like a knitter who dropped a stitch. “I can clean you up,” she says. “Or I can drizzle some rubbing alcohol over your chest which will make the blood cascade beautifully down your breasts, so they all look like that one.”
“Uh,” I say, looking up from the already cascading blood, and I do what any good Tennessee William’s heroine does, and swoon.
My head lolls back and Chad catches me. My eyes focus on the wooden-slat ceiling.
“I guess that answers my question,” Fiona says. “Here we go.”
She soaks a cotton ball with alcohol and dabs it at my wound, wiping the blood away. She presses a bandage against my wound, and I take deep breaths. Chad scratches my head and rubs my shoulder.
“Cool, huh?” he says.
I will say this, my mood changed.
I reassemble my clothes and go out to the sidewalk to smoke. My partner joins me there, tentative, testing my mood.
“How was it?” he asks.
“It was a supposedly interesting thing I never want to do again.”
“Sounds about right.”
“What now?” he asks.
“We go home,” I say, “And we fucking fuck.”