Tariq raised a single slender eyebrow, his face a picture of amused bewilderment. "Really?" he said, sounding so surprised that Caden almost thought it was an act. "It's a total dealbreaker?" Caden wasn't exactly shocked by the response to the somewhat... emphatic... opinion he'd just stated; six months of dating in his new hometown had taught him the hard way that trying to find a boyfriend who hadn't fallen for Revolution's creepy new sex doll scam was just about impossible. Especially not in a city where they were the single largest employer.
Still, Tariq had been smart and funny and charming all evening... and his tight shirt outlined a set of abs that Caden couldn't stop sneaking glances at... so he decided to persevere even in the face of the early warning signs of another convert to the Cult of Boys(tm). "Absolutely," he replied, giving Tariq just enough of a smile to let him know that he wasn't upset at being asked while still making it totally clear that he wasn't joking even a little. "I used to put it in my profile, but I got too many 'replies' that were just people trying to convince me how great they were."
Tariq nodded sympathetically, and Caden couldn't help noticing that even his chin looked sexy. He wanted to run his pale fingers over the light brown skin, enjoying the feel of the other man's sharply chiseled features... but patience was a virtue. He sat on his hands instead and listened. "That couldn't have helped," Tariq said thoughtfully, favoring Caden with a dazzling smile. "Nothing makes you sick of something faster than a whole crowd of people who can't wait to tell you what you're missing."
Caden's smile broadened as a wave of gratitude washed through him. "Exactly!" he said, nodding in relief at the thought of someone who finally understood. "Like, I already think the whole thing is borderline fucking creepy. How do all these sex robot fetishists think that swarming me with freaking 'Join... Us...' is going to help?" He winced a little inside at his own comment--he'd probably just come on way too strong just now. Even if Tariq didn't have a Boy, he almost certainly had friends or exes or fuckbuddies who did. He might even have been to one of the 'borgies' that had become the latest sex party trend in San Francisco, although personally all Caden could picture when he saw that word was a bunch of pasty guys wearing smart glasses and nothing else.
Tariq didn't seem dismayed, though. He just patted Caden warmly on the arm and said, "Creepy like how?" Normally that would have been a red flag to Caden--he'd been on too many dates where what started as 'just a few questions' about his dislike for the Boys turned into an agonizingly lengthy debate about the validity of his feelings. But he was already beginning to feel like he could relax around Tariq and share his emotions without getting shut down by the usual techbro intellectual arrogance he found in his current dating pool, and he only hoped that Tariq felt the same spark that he did.
All of which meant that Caden was a little less guarded than usual in answering Tariq's question. "I guess it started with the name, you know?" he said, shifting position to get a little more comfortable. "Like, before I moved out to California, I lived a lot of my extremely closeted life in West Texas, and I heard a lot of people tell me what people like us were like. I'm a little sensitive to anything that suggests I might be attracted to boys by this point." He frowned a little, not really enjoying his walk down Memory Lane, but the warmth of Tariq's hands against his skin felt too good for him to stay unhappy for very long. It was so much nicer to focus on the pleasant things that were happening right now instead of his unpleasant past.
Caden shuddered, dismissing the memory. "And the ad campaigns are just so full of toxic masculinity, you know? They're all about these smug, douchey alpha male types, swaggering around and treating you the way they know you secretly want to be treated. It's just this absolutely unrestrained caveman bullshit, right down to that weird aroma they have that's like someone combined body odor with what teenage boys imagine Axe Body Spray makes them smell like. I'm not into that. I like someone who's, you know... strong and sensitive." He leaned flirtatiously into Tariq's touch, and was rewarded with a gentle squeeze that made his head practically swim with delight.
Tariq nodded affirmatively, encouraging Caden to continue. "I mean, I didn't hate them, not right away. I thought they were kind of gross and douchey and totally not for me, but I was just, not my kink and nobody's forcing me to buy one, right?" Caden hoped he wasn't dominating the conversation--he just felt so comfortable around Tariq that the words simply tumbled out of him one after another in the sheer joy of talking to someone who seemed to enjoy listening to him. He was almost drunk on conviviality, far more than the two glasses of chablis he'd had back at the wine bar could explain. He was slim, yes, but he wasn't a total lightweight.
Surprisingly, it took Caden a moment to get his thoughts back on track. Tariq's hands must be distracting him more than he realized. He didn't normally think about taking things back to the bedroom on a first date, but.... "Um, so right, so I was going to be all 'live and let live'," he continued, pushing away the momentary preoccupation that had taken hold of him. "But then I dipped my toe into the dating scene, and it was just, wow. Every guy and their brother had a Boy, and all of them wanted to show it off to me. It was like I couldn't cross the threshold of a man's apartment without hearing, 'Would you like to give my Boy(tm) a try?' It was just fucking exhausting."
Caden's eyes widened. "Um, not that I'm not open-minded," he said hurriedly, his mind still half on that 'bedroom' idea that had distracted him a few moments earlier. "It's just that when I do express a limit, I want it to be respected, and even after I started telling guys that no matter how out they were, the Boy needed to stay in the closet, I still had dates trying to sneak their sex robot into things. Literally, in one case. We were making out on the couch and suddenly I felt those weird buzzing hands of theirs rubbing my back." Caden shuddered at the memory.
"I never even had time to get used to the idea, because they were all just so fucking obsessive about it! They were like those people who hand out religious literature on campus or something, always push push push the second they got an opening. It got so bad that the second I got a whiff of that funky man-scent the Boys used, I turned around and walked right back out the door without another word." Thankfully, Tariq's apartment smelled like it had been freshly scrubbed that same afternoon.
"And every time I even fucking mentioned it on social media, I pretty much had to clear my calendar for the rest of the day to argue with dipshits who shilled non-stop for every product Revolution ever made. It was like they'd been adopted as the mascot of financially comfortable gay men in STEM and I was the only guy who hadn't gotten the memo, y'know? Just nonstop mansplaining about how good they are in bed and how magic their fingers are and how they know every sexual technique ever invented and how their ass tastes like freshly-baked cookies and... God. Fucking god." Caden rolled his eyes at the memory. "I was just, 'Look, I don't care how good they are in bed, I can't fucking stand them!'"