The Game

he said. “If they call me, I’ll tell them I need to get my life straight before I sarge them. I choose life. I will not be game.”
    “You have to treat school and studying like you treat seduction.”
    “Yes,” he said, as if he’d just had an epiphany. “I will make school wings. I will make study pivots. I will fuck-close my tests.”
    “That may be taking it a little too far. But, um, good for you.”
    “I feel free,” he said. “Whoa.”
    And I’d like to say that’s how we all felt, that we all realized we’d become too consumed and came to our senses, that we put our lives in balance and got our priorities straight, that we relegated seduction to a glorified hobby.
    But there is a concept in hypnosis called fractionation. And it states that if a person under hypnosis is brought out of trance and then put back under, the trance will be even deeper and more powerful.
    And so it was with seduction. We all came out of it for a moment—we opened our eyes and saw the light of the real world. But then we went back under, deeper than we ever were before—and to an extent beyond what any of us could have imagined.

PEOPLE USED TO LOOK OUT ON THE
PLAYGROUND AND SAY THAT THE
BOYS WERE PLAYING SOCCER AND
THE GIRLS WERE DOING NOTHING .
    B UT THE GIRLS WEREN’T DOING
NOTHING—THEY WERE TALKING .
    T HEY WERE TALKING ABOUT THE
WORLD TO ONE ANOTHER. AND THEY
BECAME VERY EXPERT ABOUT THAT
IN A WAY THE BOYS DID NOT .

    —C AROL G ILLIGAN ,
In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

Petra was a nineteen-year-old Czech with long chestnut hair, a thin goldenbrown model’s body, and no more than a dozen words of English in her vocabulary. I met her and her cousin on the island of Hvar in Croatia with a Seattle PUA named Nightlight9. We showed them our magic tricks. They showed us their popcorn. On a piece of paper, we drew a picture with a clock and a time on it to rendezvous that night. They met us and led us by the hand to a small, deserted beach. They took off all their clothes except their panties and tennis shoes, and ran into the water. We followed and made love to them as they chattered away in Czech to each other.
    Anya was a whip-smart twenty-two-year-old Croatian who was vacationing with her younger sister. She oozed confidence, sensuality, and good breeding; her sister was the opposite. Nightlight9 and I met them on the beach in the Croatian town of Vodice. That night they slipped away from their parents, and we wandered along the waterfront until we found a docked sailboat. We snuck on board and had sex in the galley. I left twenty euros for the bottle of wine we drank.
    Carrie was a nineteen-year-old waitress at Dublin’s in Los Angeles. She approached me and complimented me on my dreadlocks; I neglected to tell her I was wearing a Rastafarian wig as a joke. I met her the next day completely bald, but we still ended up in bed together. When I e-mailed her the next day to tell her she’d left her rings at my house, she responded, “I don’t wear rings. They’re not mine.”
    Martine was a free-spirited blonde I met in New York, with milky skin, smeared red lipstick, and an iron-on T-shirt. I’d opened so many sets that I can’t even remember what I said to her. The next night, we went to a bar. I brought along two other girls so she’d have to work for me. For a second I felt guilty about that. But only a second. In the bar, I asked her how good she was in bed, on a scale of one to ten. In my hotel room, I found out. She was a seven.
    Laranya was a JAP in the body of an Indian woman. I’d met her when I was in college and we were both interning at the same weekly newspaper.She was the hot intern; I was the shy intern. But when I ran into her years later in Los Angeles, Style took her out on the town. The first thing she said when we woke up together was, “I can’t believe how much you’ve changed.” Neither could I.
    Stacy was a twenty-eight-year-old anorexic I met in Chicago. During a lengthy e-mail correspondence, she seduced me with her intelligence, candor, and poetry. When she finally came to visit, I was disappointed to discover that she was awkward and ineloquent. She probably felt the same way about me. Nonetheless, I brought her directly to my bedroom, and we began to make out. I put a finger inside her and felt a fleshy cord bisecting her vagina like a tennis net. It was her hymen. I told her I didn’t want to be the one to take her virginity.