"What's your new job?" Red '43 asked the following morning over breakfast.
I couldn't tell her. She was my best friend, ever, close enough that we had discussed the possibility of applying for a shared apartment. It would be nice to have someone to fall asleep with and wake up next to. It would be nice to have a bigger apartment, even if the space was shared. Now that we were both twenty-one (twenty-three in Red '43's case), a cohabitation request was possible.
However, if we were to cohabit, no way could I do what I had done the night before. Only with absolute privacy would I dare to have a silicone replica cock in my apartment. Only with the certainty that no one would know would I kneel before that cock and practise sucking on it. To go further and do what I had actually done the night before, was so unthinkable in the cold light of day that just the thought of it had my cheeks burning with shame.
Romantic and other relationships were inevitable. Some cohabitations endured years. Decades, even. But sexual contact was strictly forbidden outside the sex booths. Even cohabiting partners were required to maintain certain formalities. Hugging and kissing were permitted, of course, but any touching that was sexually intimate would result in immediate termination of the cohabitation, and likely further punishment too.
There is no hiding from the Organiser. The Organiser sees all. The Organiser had to know exactly what I had done the night before, and I kept expecting an announcement from it that I had transgressed a fundamental rule of our civilisation.
I couldn't tell Red '43 that my job was to suck Managers' cocks all day, or that I didn't want to cohabit with her because I needed privacy to fuck myself at night with a huge, pink, silicone cock.
Red '43 laughed. "You've gone quite red, Red '86."
"I'm an assistant at a clinic," I said carefully. "A fertility clinic. I have to collect samples."
"Ohh," she said, clearly intrigued. "Interesting."
"I'm really not supposed to talk about it."
"Aww." Laying her hand on mine and smiling warmly, she asked the one thing I was dreading. "Have you given any thought to my proposal?"
What if we did? What if I didn't have that silicone cock at home? What if I could come home after a long day spent sucking cocks and know that Red '43 would be there? That we would sit together talking and watching vids and touching and kissing and holding each other like a normal couple?
I had a sudden vision of myself in the sex booth, my ankles secured in the stirrups, the door opening to reveal... not a man, but Red '43, brandishing my pink dildo in her hand, thrusting it into me, fucking me with it until I screamed in ecstasy.
"I don't know," I whispered. "I don't think I could sleep with you and not put my hands where they shouldn't be."
"'86!" she hissed, understandably shocked. She glanced about us to check that no one was listening. "You can't say things like that."
"Sorry," I whispered.
Red '43 studied me in silence for a long minute. "Maybe we shouldn't rush into anything," she said, with a coldness in her tone that hurt me.
"No," I agreed, utterly miserable.
*
My second day at my new job was much like my first, except that I was more or less expected to just get on with it. I got to work, undressed and put my clothes in my locker, was given a booth and an appointment schedule by the Manager, Yellow '56, waved hello to Blue '97 and wished good morning to a few other fellow workers, and then it was just me, naked on my stool, facing a hole in the wall with a curtain on the other side.
As I sat there waiting for the first cock of the day, I was overwhelmed by the surrealism of my situation. I had had three jobs in my past, and had heard of many hundreds of other jobs, but I had never heard of any that involved sexual contact. Not, of course, that anyone would have wanted to talk about such work, but I hadn't heard even a rumour of it.
Were there cases where coworkers or friends transgressed the rules and touched each other inappropriately, only to end up being driven apart by a culture that rejected such behaviour? Absolutely. Such events were rare and made for shocking and delicious gossip, vague words implying scandalous details. Were there cases when couples dared go further and actually fuck? Well, yes, but such acts were even rarer, and criminal. The punishment strict: relocation, and allocation to the worst jobs.
Sex was strictly regulated. That was the way of it. So how was it that my job required me to do something so sexual I felt almost like a criminal?
The curtain pulled aside, and a cock longer than any I had tasted the day before pushed through the hole. It was still mostly limp, but twitched impatiently and a bead of clear fluid glistened at the tip. An ugly, squirming creature that I was reluctant to approach. On the other side of that hole was a man. A Manager. One of the lucky one-in-a-hundred who were elevated in rank at the age of thirty, and were thus entitled to oral service once per month.
Supposedly for health reasons. To relieve stress. Nothing, in other words, to do with the necessary sexual function of procreation. Not even a requirement that a man and a woman should be involved. The day before, I had watched Blue '97, an attractive young man of about my own age, sucking another man's cock. I understood of course that man-woman pairings were irrelevant to romantic and other relationships, even cohabitation, and I knew that, outside of the sex booth, sexual contact was wrong regardless of genders, but the idea that sexual contact between two men could be something so utterly routine as to seem almost normal was baffling.
I stared at the limp, twitching cock. With a sigh of resignation, I leaned forward to take it in my mouth, to suck on it, to lick the sensitive underside while tasting the saltiness and smelling the raw muskiness of sweat and sexual arousal. It swelled in my mouth, hardening, growing in length, forcing my jaw open wide, and I made a tight ring with my lips as I bobbed up and down along the shaft.