Proxy Lovers Ch 04

"What's the best compliment you've ever gotten?" Sofia asks me over her plate of wings.

Our kitchen has a kind of window onto the living room. I bought us these really tall bar stools so we could use it as a table. I'm in the kitchen, adding more cayenne pepper to my sauce while the next batch of wings cooks in the air fryer because Sofia said it wasn't spicy enough.

"Best compliment?" I have to think about that one. The first thing that pops into my head isn't a story I would tell her, except we've been having sex with other people recently, so I think I'm good. "It was when I had just started at Local Eats."

For context: Local Eats was a website and app that was my first full-time writing job. It was supposed to be like TripAdvisor but cooler. We got a stipend to go to restaurants and whatever that might be fun and review it. The stipends added up to more money than our salaries, and the whole thing folded up after two years.

Another rich kid's dream down the toilet.

"The boss told us to go to 'edgier' places, so this other guy, Matt, and I decided to hit a strip club. We had five hundred each and thought that would make us big spenders. But I did have enough for a private dance. I was really nice and polite, and she gave me a really good dance. So good that when she got off me, I was sticking up out of my pants.

"We had dressed business casual, so I was wearing a tucked-in shirt, and my dick had pushed my shirt up and out of the way. The stripper kind of yelped, thinking I had taken it out, but then was like 'no, his hands have been on the back of the bench the whole time'. She went 'Wait, is that real?' And I was like 'Yeah'. She invited me into the VIP section and asked if she could look. I told her that I couldn't afford it, I was on my last hundred, and she was like 'it's my treat'.

"So, we go into the VIP area, and she takes my pants off. I'm being really careful not to break any rules, mind you. She gave me another lap dance, and I almost did an LDK, but told her to stop before that happened."

"LDK?" Sofia asks.

"It's strip club slang for cumming in your pants."

"You said you weren't wearing pants."

"Still," I shrug. "Anyway, she said that she usually just did handies in the VIP section, but asked if she could give me a blowjob and added 'my treat'. So I was like 'hell, yeah'. She gave me a pretty good blowjob and her phone number, and I left."

"Holy shit!" Sofia yells. "You got a blowjob from a stripper?"

"And didn't pay for it!"

"Did you call her?"

"Of course! We hooked up a couple of times, and then she was suddenly always busy. 'You can come see me at the club' kind of thing."

"Sure," Sofia nods.

"It was a bummer, but we didn't have much to talk about, so it was fine."

"You didn't go back to da club?" She says, doing the head bob from Megalopolis.

"Not that one," I take the chicken out of the air fryer and scoop some of the hotter sauce into a bowl. "But we did review a lot of strip clubs for the site."

"And you never saw her again."

"Actually, I did run into her again. I was reviewing this basement bar, club, or place that had live music. Turned out, she was the bassist in a punk band that was playing."

"Wait, this girl was a stripper and the bassist in a punk band? How did you two have nothing to talk about?"

"Honey, I have zero tattoos."

"Fair point," Sofia says, waving a hand over the wings to cool them down. "Still, she sounds awesome."

"Yeah, we hooked up again that night, and then I never saw her again."

"What was the band?" Sofia has her phone out now.

I have to think about this one. "My Angry Pony, I think."

Sofia types and scrolls. "My Raging Pony?"

"That was it!"

Sofia taps some stuff. "Oh, they haven't updated it since 2018." Then she turns to the phone for me to look. "Is this her?"

There's a photo on Instagram of a woman with double undercuts and Bettie Page as a Catholic saint tattooed on her arm. She's slamming on a bass guitar mid-concert and sticking out her tongue.

"That's her."

"Damn," Sofia says, taking back her phone and tapping some more. A minute later, she gasps. "She's on OnlyFans!"

"Sofia,"

She shrugs. "That's just interesting."

"Oh, no...just try the sauce."

Sofia puts her phone down and blows on a naked wing before biting into it and blowing some more. Finally, she tries the sauce. She takes a long breath in around the bite of wing. Then proclaims: "Yep, that's the one!"

"Yes!" I turn around and write down the final measurements for this sauce in my notebook.

During lockdown, this was one of a dozen hobbies that we dabbled in. I've always been okay in the kitchen, but it took being home 24/7 for me to really try at it. Sauces are fun, so I've been making my own for the last four years. I have two that are really good. Our friend, Matt (not the one I went to strip clubs with), has said I should try to start a business out of the sauces, but I'm not there yet. For now, I'm happy bringing my sauces to parties and basking in the compliments.

I tell Matt that when I have three really good ones, I'll give the small business thing a try. Looking down at this latest recipe, I think I might have three.

--------------

Sofia/Carl and Me/Trish came out the same week. Neither of us could quite believe how not ridiculous we looked. Sofia said that she didn't feel natural in the moment, and I thought for sure my whole dark-romance-alpha-male schtick was going to look silly, but none of that came across. We weren't talking about submitting them for Oscars consideration or anything, but we weren't embarrassed either. 'Not embarrassing' was as high as we were going to set the bar.

The videos were even encouraging. After the first one, I had had all these worries about how Sofia would react. A fantasy is one thing, you know, but the reality is often very different. Now that we were both in it, it was easier to feel confident about doing it again and thus to get excited about doing the next one.

I know, obviously it's exciting to get to have other sexual partners without threatening your real relationship, but there was more to it. The most predictable thing was that Sofia and I were having way better sex at home. Nothing had really changed--Sofia's handcuff idea was on our minds, but hadn't happened yet--we were still doing our usual things, but it was like we were more into each other.

Yes, I know it sounds weird. "You watched your fiancée ride another guy's dick and now you like her more?" Thing is, that isn't it. I like Sofia more because of Sydney and Trish, not Carl. Sex with Sofia is like home-cooking, where Sydney and Trish are like restaurant chefs. Yes, they know what they're doing and it is a pleasure to dine out, but nothing compares to home-cooking, does it? Now, if you've been eating at home day in and day out for years on end, you lose some appreciation for it. Dining out helps you appreciate home-cooking.

That's pretty predictable, though, right? The thing I couldn't have expected was how playing alone would change things. Yes, I could just watch Sofia/Tom and jerk off into a hand towel and be done with it. But in trying to last longer, I had stumbled onto an idea that had never really occurred to me: literally anything other than jerking off.

Isn't that weird? How many dudes are out here with elaborate self-pleasure routines? There are fleshlights and stuff, but when we--men--think of self-play, it's watch some porn, make yourself orgasm, return to life as usual. Some guys need something oddly specific to get turned on, but I've never heard of a guy with a box of toys just for himself.

Maybe I'm way behind. I don't know. It's not a popular conversation topic. Maybe that's the problem? Not that I'm wanting to get some beers with the boys and discuss our masturbation techniques.

All of this to say that, right now, I'm going through all of the profiles on our city's OnlyFans creator subreddit, trying to find someone who has a specific vibe. I'm hoping to find a woman who doms, but not in a pain-and-humiliation way. The scenario I'm imagining is that I'm tied up and she 'tortures' me by arousing me with a dozen things other than touching my cock. I can't be the only guy who is interested in that. If scat, furries, and FinDom can have communities, my thing definitely can as well.

I know it sounds cliché that I'm a guy looking for a she-pleasures-me scenario, but in my circles, there's this idea that 'real men make women cum'. First of all, it seems taken for granted that if a guy cums, that's enough. Like that's the be-all, end-all for guys. Second, there is a fairly explicit paradigm where men are in charge in the bedroom. A lot of women seem to think that sex is something that happens to them, not a thing they participate in.

I can count on one hand the number of times women initiated sex with me before I met Sofia. Even with Sofia, peak sexual aggression from her is initiating once a month. One of the hottest things about Sofia's video with Carl was that she was doing most of the work. Again, I see the cliché, but it's not that I don't want to do anything; it's that I don't want to do everything. I'm used to doing everything. Domming for Trish was easy because that's what most women I've been with are like. Well, not on that level, but in that vein.

So, I want to try doing nothing, but I don't want to be a living sex toy like Carl. I want to be treated the way the women I've been with wanted to be treated. My lesbian friend--yep, just the one--calls it being a 'pillow princess'. It sounds fun. At least once, you know? Maybe once in a while.

Now that I think about it, what if I was tied up and 'tortured' until I was so turned on that I ravished my torturer? That would be fun. Sort of combining my pillow princess fantasy with consensual-non-consent. I could call it 'werewolfing'. Is that already a thing? Hold on.

Okay, so 'werewolfing' is a different and probably more niche thing. Maybe I can still get away with using the term.

I'm not finding anyone that's close to what I'm looking for. But since the new videos dropped, I have gotten a few requests. Sofia has gotten way more, obviously, but Trish left me a glowing review on the community subreddit, so that's gotta be helping. A lot of the requests I'm getting are for something like what Trish got, but not as extreme. That tells me that I need to do something different right away. I don't want to be known as a dom; a guy who can dom, sure, but I guess I want to be known as a switch. Maybe.

This is how outside my experience I am: I don't know how to experiment. Yes, I could arrange a werewolf session with Sofia, but I have to be careful with her and that's not really the thing I'm imagining. I feel like I need to know what I want with her.

Oh. Shit. I should not feel that way. That's something she and I need to address. But not today.

Today, I'm supposedly in for something special. For reference, it's been almost two weeks since my session with Trish. It's Thursday evening, and Sofia is downtown at a hotel shooting with YourFitCub, aka Tyler. Tyler says he's nineteen online, but we confirmed that he's actually twenty-one. Dude looks sixteen to me. As the name suggests, Tyler's thing is MILFs, which in Pornlandia means large-breasted women over thirty.

I guess most women have their first kid in their mid-20s, so it's not unfair to call a 30-year-old a MILF, but I know Sofia isn't wild about getting that label. She chose him for two reasons: the first is the money, and the second is the age. YourFitCub has one of the highest monthly revenues in the community.

Tyler is a full-timer. He does two or three of these sessions a week, often with women who aren't on OnlyFans themselves. His Instagram is very much geared towards women (and probably a lot of gay men), but his OnlyFans and Reddit are more male-oriented. So, while his Instagram is all pictures and reels of him being a sexy, young dude with lots of talk about why older women are great, his OnlyFans is semi-POV videos that are much more focused on the women he's banging.

Both feeds get multiple posts per day. The OnlyFans content is a bunch of pics and teasers for the new videos, which are PPV. He says about 15% of his subscribers pay for the full videos, and it's half his income; which is sizable. Sofia gets 35% of the PPV money for six months after expenses, like the hotel room he paid for.

This is one of the rates Carl suggested. A lot of collaborations are 50-50 both ways (if they profit share at all) because both creators post the same or almost the same video of their session. However, our channel is about her and me, no guests. So, Tyler gets a bigger cut because he's doing all the promoting and getting nothing back from us. It would be 25%, but Sofia is the focus of the video, not Tyler.

Anyway, Tyler estimated that Sofia would be getting $800 from this, which is more than we've made from our subscribers so far. Of course, we barely promote. We got the same deal from Carl and are only expecting about $300.

The other thing Sofia liked about Tyler's offer was that, before meeting me, she had a couple of long-ish relationships with older men and wants to see it from the other side, as it were.

However, this "something special" Sofia promised me started last week.

After my sort-of threesome, Sofia wanted to talk about boundaries.

"Okay, so, we agreed that any playing we did with others had to be recorded for the other," she said. "What are the limits on playing?"

"Oh," I said. "What are the options?"

"Well, let's say I was vetting a new collaborator and we went for a public meet-up, like what we did with Trish and Addie, but it's just me and him," she explained. "That would basically be a date. Sure, we'd talk about money and stuff, but it's also deciding if I want to sleep with him."

"Right, yeah. Dinner isn't playing."

"What about dancing?"

"Hmm," we hadn't done that with Trish and Addie.

"I mean, that's still in the realm of a basic date," she said.

"Sure."

"I have gone out and danced with plenty of guys I didn't sleep with."

"I think a selfie would be enough,"

"Yeah?" She said. "Guys can get pretty handsy."

"Okay, anything that goes beyond dancing is definitely playing. So, if he's getting too handsy, I would want you to shut that down."

"And playing is still confined to content," she said.

"Yes."

Sofia thought for a second. "What about impromptu content?"

"Like if you went clubbing with a guy and wanted to make a blowjob video in the back alley?"

That made Sofia laugh. She's never done anything that public. "Sure. Is that allowed?"

"Let's cross that bridge when we come to it."

Sofia nodded. "Now, this selfie. How soon do you need it?"

"What are you thinking?"

"Can I show you when I get home?"

I played the scenario out in my mind. "Yeah, that's fine."

"Now, what if I decide it's a no-go? Like I go dancing with him and I'm not into him. Like maybe he tries to get too handsy and I tell him 'no' and he pushes it, so I'm like 'nope' and it's off. Would you still want to see the selfie?"

"I guess not."

"Okay," Sofia smiled in a weirdly satisfied way.

"You have something specific in mind." I said, knowing her. "What is it?"

Sofia sighed and grimaced good-naturedly at me. "I want to surprise you with something."

"Hmm...surprises aren't really part of this."

"True, but it's not playing, not really. How do I say this without giving it away? I want to take some classes and surprise you with this new thing I've learned. But it's not like blowjob lessons or anything. Actually, if we weren't doing this 'lending' thing, I wouldn't have felt I needed to mention anything about it. I could just do it and be like 'I took a class' and that would be it."

"Really?" I asked.

"Well, because..." she spoke slowly. "If we were still totally monogamous, I don't think that you would think that maybe I did anything non-monogamous. Like I just took a saucy class. But since we do play with others sometimes, there's a possibility...like that. Does that make sense?"

"You want to take a class for something sexy."

"Yes,"

"But it doesn't involve someone else touching you?"

"Well...not in a way that would...okay, let's say I took a...shit...a posture class."

"Posture class?"

"Yeah, like some old, British lady has me walking around with books on my head."

"Is that still a thing?" I asked.

"Not important. In a posture class, the teacher would be touching me, but to adjust my shoulders or straighten my back. That kind of thing."

"Oh, so like a yoga class?"

"Yes, something along those lines."

My brain was scrolling through all the options. "So, you're taking a yoga class to be more flexible?"

Sofia held back a smile. "Or something similar? Come on, I want this to be a surprise."

"Yeah, okay. I don't need photos of that."

"Yay!" She did a little clap. "This is going to be great!"

That was last week, and she's been late coming home every weekday since and coming home sore. She hadn't talked about the soreness, but I can see it. For a while, my leading theory was massage classes, but then she said her video with Tyler, today, would be something special. That makes me think whatever it is is something she'll show off in the video. I'm back to thinking she was taking classes to learn to do the splits or something.

I know it involves her legs. That's where the soreness she's not been talking about is most obvious to me.

The current weird thing is that Sofia has been gone for an hour. The hotel is a fifteen-minute drive away, so I guess there's more than the usual amount of warming up or settling in or whatever. I didn't think they were doing anything complicated, not like I did with Trish. For that video, we did a speedy walkthrough, ran down the safe words, and talked about spanking technique.

It has been a full ninety minutes since Sofia left, and I get my first message: a photo. And now, I get it. It's a selfie of her with Tyler, and, damn, she does look old enough to be his mom. But that's not the thing. Sofia has gone full goth. There are blue streaks in her hair (no idea how she pulled that off). Her lipstick is bright blue at the center and grading out to black edges, which must have taken a while. She's got heavy, dark, angular eye makeup going on; the whole bit.

Was she taking a makeup class?

In the photo, Sofia and Tyler are standing side by side, arms around each other's waists and just grinning up at the camera. He's wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt like he's ready for bed, and Sofia has her silk robe on.

And that's it. I don't expect I'll be getting anything else for a little while. But I want it. Goth girls aren't one of my kinks, but they aren't not one of my kinks. And Sofia looks different enough that she could be a different person. It makes this photo look like a preview for a porno, and I really just want to open it and get to work.

I guess it is a preview for a porno. I just can't open it for another...who knows how long.

So, while I squirm in anticipation, I get myself ready. For the last couple of weeks, I have been doing some shopping. I have found what I believe to be the softest fleece pants on the market, and I have a toolbox of toys just for me.

Things I have learned this week include that perineum vibrators exist, very few of the wearable ones only vibrate the perineum, and that any toy large enough for me at full size has to be custom-made. Yeah, there's gotta be a company that specializes in very girth men's sex toys, but I haven't found it yet, and I'm not ready to shell out several hundred dollars on a toy that I'm not sure I really want.

All that to say, I went DIY. Something that's pretty easy to find are briefs that leave your sausage and beans swinging in the wind. I also found this flat, oblong vibrating thing that looks like a skipping stone and is narrow enough to sit fairly comfortably between my legs. The briefs are tight enough to press it against my skin.