The Game

Leicester Square, he’d turn my own words and mannerisms against me.
    At the end of the night, I saw a two-set sitting at the bar in the Peacock Lounge: a tall, creepy, bespectacled brunette with incongruously large fake breasts and a short blonde tomboy with a white beret and a small, thick, curvy body.
    “That blonde girl’s a porn star,” Mystery said. He was the expert. “Her name’s Faith. That’s your set.”
    Despite the year and a half I’d spent in the community, despite being supposedly the best, I was still intimidated when I saw a beautiful woman.My old AFC self was always threatening to snap back, whispering that everything I’d learned was wrong, that I was bowing before false gods, that all this game talk was just mental masturbation.
    But I pushed myself to enter the set anyway, just to prove that little AFC voice in the back of my head wrong. As soon as I opened my mouth, I went into autopilot.
    I opened with jealous girlfriend.
    I gave myself a time constraint.
    I negged the target about her hoarse voice.
    I did the best friends test.
    C-shaped smiles versus U-shaped smiles.
    ESP experiment.
    “There’s so much I can learn from you,” Faith said.
    “We love you,” gushed her creepy friend.
    They were eating out of my hands. I’m a nerdy Elmer Fudd spouting bullshit tests I made up, and these two girls whose collective breasts weigh more than me were staring at me rapt. I had nothing to be afraid of. No guy out there had the tools we did.
    I must kill off that inner AFC. When will he die?
    I signaled to Mystery to wing the obstacle. As he sat next to the creepy girl, I went back on autopilot.
    Evolution phase-shift.
    Smell.
    Pull hair.
    Bite arm.
    Bite neck.
    “How do you rate yourself as a kisser on a scale of one to ten?”
    Suddenly, Faith jumped out of her seat. “I’m getting too turned on,” she said. “I have to leave.”
    I couldn’t figure out if she was just giving me an excuse because I had made a mistake at some point in the sarge, or if I was really that good.
    I approached a nearby set—two hippie girls on a bender—and was in with them instantly. Ten minutes into our conversation, however, Faith returned, grabbed my hand, and said, “Let’s go to the bathroom.”
    We walked into the restroom on the side of the Peacock Lounge, and she lowered the toilet seat and sat me down on it. As she unbuttoned my pants, she said, “You so turn me on, intellectually and sexually.”
    “I know,” I told her.
    “How?”
    “I felt our connection all night. Even when I was talking to those two other girls, I saw you looking at me.”
    She kneeled on the floor, circled her hand around my limp father of thousands, and lowered her mouth over it. But I couldn’t get hard. I was overwhelmed.
    I stood up and pushed her roughly against the wall. I circled my hands around her throat and made out with her, as I’d seen Sin do to women in his house when I was still an AFC. Then I pulled her pants down, sat her on the toilet seat, fingered her, and went down on her. She arched her back, fluttered her eyelids, and moaned, as if she were about to cum; but instead she suddenly switched positions and went down on me again.
    “I want you to cum in my mouth,” she said.
    I still couldn’t get hard. This had never happened to me before. I mean, I’m hard right now as I’m remembering this.
    “I want to be inside you,” I told her, in a last-ditch effort to get my blood flowing to the right place.
    She stood up and turned around. I pulled a condom out of my pocket and thought about every beautiful woman I had approached that night. I started to get a little harder. She sat down on me, her back against my stomach, which was the worst position for a semi-erect dick to reach around. As soon as I was partway inside her, I went soft again. I couldn’t figure out if it was the two Jack and Cokes I drank that night, the lack of foreplay, the intimidation factor of being with a porn star, or the fact that I’d masturbated earlier that day.
    When we walked out of the bathroom, half the workshop students were standing there waiting for a lay report. One of the hippies I had been talking to before went to the bathroom and emerged afterward with my condom wrapper in a Kleenex. Evidently, I had left it on the floor, and she felt obliged to show it around. Everyone was celebrating a feat that hadn’t actually happened.
    I couldn’t look Faith in the eye afterward. I had built myself up as such