Iny Roommate Adventures

I've always had a kinky streak. My particular loves surround exhibitionism and captivity: I love my body to the object of others' gaze, and I delight in the helplessness of being under someone else's power. Combining the two is also great, of course.

Initially, I was ashamed of these desires. But as time went on and I explored them, I grew bolder and bolder until, one summer weekend, I went a little too far. Or did I? Because what unfolded was, in a way, the natural, logical conclusion of all my fantasies.

I'm 26 years old. It's summer, swelteringly hot, and relentlessly humid. I'm a graduate student in New York City and, to save money, I live in subsidized university housing. It's a 2-bedroom apartment that I've lived in for a year now, since last July. My old roommate--a shy, fellow graduate student in his mid-20s named Patrick with whom I got along famously--has moved out. He got sick of the city and decided to move to a commuter town along the Hudson.

His replacement (I get no say whatsoever in the matter) is due to arrive at some point today. I'm lying on my back on my bed, trying not to move. There's no air-conditioning in the apartment (my old roommate took his old, window-mounted unit with him) and, though it's only 9:30am and I just took a cold shower, I'm already sweating. After drying off I put on underwear and that's as far as I got. The thought of covering my body in clothes in this heat seemed more than stupid, it was insane.

It occurs to me that my new roommate--a total stranger with whom I will have to share my home--is on his way and could arrive at any moment. I should put some clothes on before he gets here, a voice in my head suggests. The rest of me agrees, but I don't move. Moving means generating heat and putting on clothes means sweaty clothes sticking to my skin. I know I'll just want to strip them off the moment I put them on.

But your new roommate will want to meet you, the voice of reason persists. You'll have to put on the "friendly roommate" act and offer to help him move in and all that. You can't do that if all you're wearing is a pair of skimpy, thin cotton briefs. I mean, talk about awkward!

I listen to this voice play out what's going to happen if I don't get dressed and feel myself smiling. An erection starts growing in the pouch of my briefs--and, to be fair to the voice in my head, they are really skimpy. I've long been a devotee of minimalist underwear. These weigh practically nothing, are part spandex to make them fit tight, and do the bare minimum to cover my cute-but-ample ass and my junk. Because of the spandex, the pouch stretches to accommodate my cock and balls, leaving little to the imagination.

What if I don't get dressed? this new voice suggests.

Then your roommate will think you're completely weird and your whole relationship will be awkward and strained from the start.

But weird and normal are just subjective definitions. We define them for ourselves collectively, my academic brain chimes in. If you assert from the start that wearing nothing but underwear around the apartment is totally normal, then it will be.

And why will your roommate agree with this new normal?

Because we'll assert it! The kinky voice declares, suddenly excited by what the academic voice has proposed. If we do it with enough confidence, it should work, right? I mean, he's the one coming into a new space. If we act like this is the way it's always been in this apartment, he'll feel obligated to accommodate it. For him to insist that we change will feel like trying to change what's normal, not the other way around!

After all, contributes the academic voice, sagely, he doesn't know that we didn't walk around in our underwear when Patrick lived here, does he?

The rational voice stares in incredulous silence at the others, then washes his hands of the matter. You can't blame him--it's simply too hot to get into a heated conversation about anything right now. My back is wet against the sheets. I roll over onto my stomach and reach my left hand to the small of my back.

Yup, soaked.

What am I supposed to do? The New York summer without AC is insufferable. If I weren't so poor I'd have my own place and could walk around as naked as I want, but because I can't afford it I have to suffer under layers of pointless clothes? I resent the thought. It's enough to make me a Marxist. In fact, my inner Marxist joins the kinky and academic voices in the "anti-clothing" camp. The rationalist seems to have given up active opposition.

But he'll see us naked! That's embarrassing and humiliating!

Ah, yes. The body shame voice. I've known this one since I was very little. Terrified of changing clothes in front of others. Mortified at the thought of anyone looking at his body. It's funny, too, since I've never been overweight, or anything. There have been times I've had a little extra, but never much, and certainly not now. The constant walking this city demands combined with my grinding poverty have caused me to shed pounds like lovers shed clothes. I'm down to 150 lbs, which isn't a lot for a guy of 5' 11". My body isn't toned or anything, but I do pushups and situps regularly. I think I look pretty good, if I'm being honest.

But for whatever reason I developed early a crippling fear of being seen naked. Which, somewhere in the twisted maze of puberty got transmuted into a powerful sexual response. Now, the very situations that mortified the body shame voice turn me on like flipping a light switch. And I enjoy it.

Yeah, but that'll be so much fun! the exhibitionist says, gleefully tormenting body shame. I visualize the imminent encounter for a minute. I imagine a knock at the door, imagine myself walking over to answer it, feel every square inch of exposed skin on my slender body.

Just then, the doorbell rings. For real.

Sudden, sickening fear clenches within my gut--body shame reacts quick as lightning. I lie there on my bed, paralyzed. I have a few seconds left, I say to myself. I can still put clothes on and be normal.

Please do... body shame begs.

...or don't, the exhibitionist tempts.

It'll work, the academic asserts confidently. Test the hypothesis!

In the end, it's mostly paralysis that wins, because the doorbell screeches again. It's one of those awful, pre-digital age ones that sounds like someone scraping their fingernails down a chalkboard. A combination of feeling terribly guilty for making someone wait at the door and not wanting to hear that noise ever again pulls me from my heat-induced stupor. In a last-minute surge of effort, the rationalist teams up with body shame to win a small compromise: I strip off my skimpy briefs and replace them with spandex boxer-briefs (even my 'modest' underwear are skimpy and minimalist) before leaving my room. Then I hustle to the door.

It does indeed feel strange, those last few steps before I get there, knowing with increasing certainty that I'm about to meet and have an extended interaction with total strangers with my body mostly naked and on display. I intuitively know the emotional reaction of the first few seconds is going to kick like a sour candy on my tongue.

I open the door. Three guys are standing there in shorts and polos. They're all white, fit, and have blonde or brown hair. They look like members of the yacht club. What do you expect from a private, east coast university? the academic offers, voice dripping with self-righteous condescension. But really, these guys are like privilege incarnate. Not that I didn't grow up white, male, and middle class. But I'm from the desert West. We don't have anything like these guys out there.

But back to the present. I look from face to face, smiling, trying my best to act like everything's normal. I watch their eyes start out making eye contact, then drop to take in my body. When they make it back up to my eyes again, there's a new awkwardness there. That moment squeezes mouth-puckering sourness into my gut. I love it. I feel the swelling in my briefs start to grow again.

"Hi!" I say, cheerfully. "Which of you is Mitch?" I'm already starting to feel more confident, settling into the delicious embarrassment and relishing their gazes on my exposed body. One of the three holding a cardboard box gives a half-wave. "Well, come on in," I say, standing back and holding open the door.

As they walk in, laden with boxes, I press my back against the wall to make room and glance down at my body: nipples (I've been told I have large, sensuous nipples), flat stomach, belly button, thin fabric boxer-briefs doing a poor job hiding a modest bulge at my crotch, bare thighs. Strange as it might sound, I want to know what they were seeing in that moment, and ongoing. After all, I've already committed to this whole "I walk around strangers in my underwear all the time and I'm not phased by it at all" act, so there's no going back. Not if, as the academic urges, I want to test the hypothesis.

The three of them set down their burdens, straighten back up, and look around. The door opens into a small, square entryway. A hall extends opposite the door while the two bedrooms open into this space on the left (Mitch's room) and the right (mine). The kitchen and bathroom are midway down the hall, with the living room at the far end.

"That's your room, Mitch," I say as I block the door open with a box. "My old roommate had a window-mounted AC unit, but at the moment there's no air-conditioning."

Mitch nods as the three of them glance over at me again. This time Mitch's friends' eyes start at my crotch and slowly drift up my chest to my face. I pretend not to notice, but inside I'm loving it. It's clear that they're shocked I would share the shape of my body with strangers, and they're not the odd ones--our society definitely makes it out to be a transgressional act. But this is precisely why I love it. I thrill at the way it attracts the gaze, surprises and distracts.

"Well, looks like you guys have it covered," I say, excusing myself from sweat-duty. The apartment is a 4th floor walk-up, so they have their work cut out for them. "I'll just be in my room if you need me for anything." I turn and walk into my room without closing the door. I generally leave it open unless I truly need privacy, but this time it's quite intentional: I want them all to know that they didn't catch me off-guard, that I'm not at all bothered by being around them in my underwear. I sit down at my desk and start working on my laptop.

The prospect of getting to survive the summer heat without clothes starts to feel more real.

At various points during the move Mitch asks me to help him make a decision about where furniture or kitchen appliances should go. I join him and his friends in the kitchen or the living room, and during these conversations it's painfully obvious that my continued lack of clothes (surely I've had time to put something on since they arrived) bothers them--especially Mitch's friends, it seems. They strike me as bros, dudes who carefully police their own masculinity and others' in order to ward off accusations of being too feminine. I'm sure they're used to mostly-naked female bodies attracting their gaze, so this must be a strange flip of the script.

The rest of the move-in goes pretty smoothly, though. Before long, Mitch and his friends depart to grab lunch; when he returns, he's alone.

"Welcome to New York," I greet him in the entryway.

"Yeah, thanks," he replies with a slightly shy smile and nod of his head. He makes eye contact as he says this and tries valiantly to keep his gaze there, but his eyes drop and spend a full second or two scanning my body. Without saying anything more he turns and heads into his room.

So far so good, I think to myself. I didn't flinch. The "new normal" has been established. Now my job is to keep reinforcing it.

*************************************************

I spend the next two weeks relentlessly doing just that. When I'm home, I never wear anything but underwear. Before I leave the apartment I throw on some shorts and a t-shirt, but as soon as I get back I head to my room and strip it all off.

Honestly, it feels really good to do so. After walking home (I have pretty brisk natural gait, I can't help it) and climbing four flights of stairs in this heat and humidity I'm always sweating, so getting rid of my clothes feels so liberating.

The next time I run into Mitch after coming home is always the most "intense." Since his room is near the front door, like mine, he often sees me come home dressed. So when we then pass each other in the narrow hallway and I've got nothing but a thin bit of cloth across my crotch he's always taken aback, often visibly so. Playing off these moments as totally normal--suppressing the impulse to apologize for surprising him or making him uncomfortable, or to retreat to my room and put something on--is the key to my plan. But I always feel the shock of each encounter--the resetting of my knee-jerk reaction to being seen naked in settings where normally one wears clothes.

As the days and weeks wear on, though, I come to enjoy it more and more. I start looking forward to walking into the kitchen in a speedo, bending over to pull ingredients out of the fridge, and start making dinner, all while Mitch watches from a different part of the kitchen or the dining table. I'll either offer a casual "hey" and a smile or just stroll in with a practiced nonchalance without making eye contact at all. But I notice out of the corner of my eye how my body catches his gaze every time. Sometimes, when he thinks I'm not aware, he stares for a minute or more at a time.

I should mention at this point that I'm actually heterosexual. Not that there's anything special or 'good' about that, it's just the way I am. But honestly my sexuality is more sharply defined by my kinks than by any static 'orientation.' Having my (as far as I know) straight roommate take in every detail of my body while I chop yellow squash is, for me, at least as exciting as having vanilla sex with a girl.

My most fulfilling sexual encounters have all revolved around kink. I have a pretty extensive rope and bondage toy collection, and I often attend kink community rope practices, where riggers and rope bottoms get together to meet one another and work on their skills. I have a number of friends in the City that I regularly see there, and sometimes we get together in private and play. I'm almost always the bottom, and my rigger friends know how sexually aroused I get when tied up and mostly or entirely naked. Some of them are just rope friends--we don't sexually pleasure one another beyond the excitement of rope itself. With others, we incorporate direct sexual stimulation, but this almost never includes penetration. As a result I think of myself more as a "kinky asexual" than a heterosexual man, since the latter implies a pretty straightforward desire to penetrate orifices, which I largely find boring. No offense, it's just the way I'm wired.

So this whole experiment with my roommate is quite fulfilling and exciting, sexually speaking, even though we never touch. One of the biggest risks and challenges, in fact, is keeping my emotions in check enough to prevent getting a large erection, since my choice of clothing leaves no way to hide it. On more than one occasion during the first two weeks there's been a sizeable bulge in my loins that I'm sure Mitch noticed. I wonder what he made of it. I honestly wonder what he makes of the whole thing, in fact. Does he buy the whole "I never wear underwear around the apartment" act, or does he sense that I'm messing with him?

I begin to suspect I'm doing too good of a job of normalizing my nudity around the apartment, because wearing nothing but boxer-briefs quickly starts to feel boring and ordinary. To keep the intensity up, I continue pushing the boundaries. After a couple of days I start wearing plain, white, cotton briefs. They have a certain place in the American male psyche (think Calvin Klein underwear models) that makes being seen in them particularly vulnerable, and I enjoy it for a while. But wearing these, too, starts to become rote.

Next, I switch to wearing my super revealing speedos. I have three pairs--white, black and blue--and they cling very tightly to my body. These make my junk pretty obvious and outline my ass really nicely, and I feel I've crossed a line when I first wear them. But Mitch says nothing, so I keep at it.

At some point in these first two weeks I realize this whole thing has turned into more of an obsession than I had originally anticipated. I notice one day that we haven't really developed much of a relationship since he moved in, and I'm pretty sure the fact that I'm always nearly naked has played a large role in keeping Mitch at a distance. I tell myself I don't care--he isn't the kind of guy I'd hang out with or bond with anyway--but I wonder if the experiment has gone far enough.

But rather than reel it in, my exhibitionist and captivity-loving selves start craving the constant erotic energy the experiment is producing. Without any serious opposition from my other, more rational, selves, I keep escalating as each new level of exposure becomes banal. After speedos, I do the boldest thing I've done yet: I start wearing thongs around the apartment.

My special relationship to thongs stems from the fact that while my body is pretty slim, my butt is substantial. An ex-girlfriend once bought me a pair of tight-fitting jeans because, as she put it, "I've got a lot going for me back there." The parts of my body that most stand out--my large, brown nipples and my juicy butt--inspire the most embarrassment and, therefore, the most excitement. I debate for days whether I dare to expose my ass to my roommate. Then one particularly hot, horny afternoon I decide to go for it. After taking a shower, I put on a gray thong and open the door to my room. Mitch is in his room and his door is open, but he's not looking my way. If he had been, I might have lost my nerve and backtracked. Instead, I head to the kitchen where I start doing dishes I've left piled in the sink.

Before long, Mitch comes in. I don't look over, but there's a pause before he opens the fridge; then it stays open for quite a bit longer than necessary to pull out the milk. I can feel his eyes on my bare derriere. Again, I feel I've crossed a line. Surely he must notice that I keep wearing less and less? my rational voice chimes in. The exhibitionist is loving this, though, so I keep scrubbing plates with my sponge, my eyes fixed on my work so Mitch can drink in the narrow elastic band around my waist and the "T" of fabric at the top of my ass without interruption. A substantial erection begins growing. It's mostly blocked by my body at the moment, but that's literally the only part of me that is covered, so it would be impossible to hide.

"Hey James, come check this out," he says. Shit, I think. I'm wearing nothing but a thong and I'm turned on and my roommate wants me to come over and have a conversation. This is insane! Indeed. An insanity of my own making. I put down the dish I was washing and turn around to face him. He's over at the dining table. I put my hands on the kitchen counter and lean back, hoping to appear nonchalant. I admit I also flex my abs a little bit to try and look sexier, since I know I'm totally on display now.

"We just got this from the university housing office," he says, getting up to hand me a sheet of paper he's just pulled from an envelope. I take it and he goes back to sit down.

I won't bore you with the details, but we have a conversation for the next 30 minutes or so, as the topic drifts from the housing notice to the upcoming Yankees-Red Sox game to a fun bar Mitch had discovered the previous weekend. One way or another, Mitch keeps me pinned there in the kitchen, wearing literally nothing but a thong.