Permission

At the ninety-minute mark Mason shifted.

Mason: Alright. I want to talk to the new ones for a second. The quiet ones.

James’s grip tightened involuntarily.

Mason: You’ve been in here a while. Listening. Some of you since the beginning. You haven’t sent anything. You’re telling yourselves you’re just here to see what this is about. That you’re curious. That you’re not like the other guys in this chat.

A pause that seemed to go on longer than it was.

Mason: You are exactly like the other guys in this chat. The only difference is they already know it and you’re still negotiating with yourself.

James let go of his cock entirely. Not a decision — more like something pulling his hand back. He was breathing harder than the situation technically called for. His cock was harder than it had been when he was touching it. The denial of his own hand had done something, some feedback loop he couldn’t explain but was experiencing with complete clarity.

Mason: Here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to create a payment profile if you don’t have one. You’re going to send me twenty dollars. Not because twenty dollars matters — it doesn’t, to either of us — but because the moment you send it, something shifts. You’ll feel it. And then you’ll understand what all these other guys are doing here every Friday night.

piglet_chicago: So true Sir. That first send changed everything.

devoted_atm: First tribute is like a door opening Sir. You described it perfectly.

Mason: And until you send that twenty? I need you to keep your hands to yourselves. I’m serious. Don’t you dare cum before you send. You don’t have my permission. And you need my permission.

already_sent_99: Already sent Sir just now.

Mason: Good boy.

James sat with his hands at his sides and his cock aching and Mason’s voice in the room and thought: this is insane.

He thought: he has absolutely no idea if I cum or not.

He thought: twenty dollars.

He thought about the orgasm he’d had last Friday — notably good, better than anything in recent memory — and looked at his current state, which was two hours more activated than last Friday had been, and tried to think rationally about what would happen if he just finished this right now, which was the sane thing to do, the thing a forty-one-year-old man with his faculties intact would do, and then he could be done with this —

He stood up.

He actually stood up from the couch. Sweatpants around his thighs. He shuffled, graceless and urgent, to the kitchen where his jacket was draped over the back of a chair, because his wallet was in his jacket. He extracted it with hands that were not entirely steady. His Amex. He went back to the couch.

He found the tribute link in Mason’s bio. Opened it. Twenty dollars. He had to create a profile first — done in under two minutes with the anonymous email he used for everything he didn’t want connected to his name.

He looked at the payment screen.

He thought about closing it.

His thumb pressed Send.

The orgasm came before the confirmation screen loaded. It came from somewhere low and absolute and fully gathered — two hours of accumulated pressure releasing all at once — and James made a sound he would have been embarrassed about if anyone had been there to hear it. He gripped the edge of the couch cushion and held on. It went on longer than it had any right to, longer than anything he could remember in years, rolling in waves that left him gasping and weightless and completely hollowed out.

When it was over he sat in the silence of his apartment, chest heaving, and looked at his phone.

Payment confirmed: $20.00

Mason was still talking. Twenty-two people in a Spaces and James had just — for twenty dollars —

He cleaned up. Pulled his sweatpants up. Lay down on the couch because the bedroom felt like a project requiring planning he wasn’t capable of.

He thought he would think about what had just happened. Process it. Make some kind of reasonable adult assessment of the evening.

He was asleep in four minutes.

He woke at 7:12 AM with his phone on his chest and his neck at an angle that was going to make itself known later.

He looked at his phone.

Mason’s profile was open. Not the Spaces — that had ended hours ago. Just the profile page. The bio. The most recent photo, a gym mirror selfie from Thursday, Mason in a white tank top, the kind of expression that managed to convey both complete indifference to the camera and total awareness of it.

James looked at it for a long moment.

His thumb drifted toward the follow button — his real follow button, his actual account, the one with his name on it — and hovered.

He closed the app.

He lay on the couch in the grey Saturday light and listened to the city starting up outside and understood, with a clarity that felt new, that the six days he’d spent on Instagram telling himself he was staying away from X had been like standing one inch behind a line and calling it distance.

There was no line anymore.

He wasn’t sure there had ever been one.

He got up, rolled his neck until it cracked, and went to make coffee. He didn’t check his phone for twenty minutes, which felt, given everything, like the most discipline he’d demonstrated all week.

His payment confirmation email arrived at 7:34 AM.

Thank you for your payment of $20.00.

He read it twice. Then he set his phone down and stood at the window with his coffee and looked out at Chicago going about its Saturday business thirty-four floors below — people moving through their ordinary lives, ordinary Saturdays — and felt something he couldn’t quite name. Not shame. Not anymore. Something more like the specific calm of a man who has stopped pretending he doesn’t know what he wants.

He went and took a shower.

He thought about Mason the entire time.