Brad was mortified. He stuck his own hand down there to try to assist, knowing that he’d be less gentle than she was being. By squeezing himself like he was trying to murder a garter snake, he managed to shove a bit in. The rest followed through careful, but hurried, kneading.

And it felt wonderful.

And he was still largely flaccid.

And he orgasmed anyhow.

All in about five seconds.

Liz looked down at him, sort of cocked her head to one side like a terrier looking at a squeaky toy, and said, “Did you, uh … already?”

“Yeah, I, uhm, think so. Yep. Sure did.”

“Huh,” Liz said, sliding off of him and standing up. The air smelled a bit like ass, and Brad felt slimy-sticky. “That was surprising.”

“Man, you’re telling me!” Brad said. “I mean, not only did it only last two seconds, I couldn’t even get it up.”

Sometimes the trick to failure was to lay claim to it before anyone else could. At the moment, Brad figured he had nothing to lose.

Liz pulled up her panties and jeans and began to zip up. Brad rolled off of the couch like a walrus, then waddled toward the bathroom with his slacks around his ankles.

How could she not, like, wipe herself down? That couldn’t be pleasant, or hygienic.

Brad made it to the restroom and did his best to clean himself up before pulling his clothing back up. He knew it’d be an imperfect job – one of the downsides to male anatomy was that, invariably, ten minutes after you got laid, or whacked off, or otherwise ejaculated, a little bit more would show up and ooze out as a sort of sexual afterthought. Which would be fine if you were, say, naked in bed, but when you’d gotten dressed again, it was a very frustrating thing – going to all that trouble to get clean, only to be betrayed by your own body.

At least he wouldn’t be as sticky as she was. Brad washed his hands carefully, with soap and everything. Anal sex-flavored pizza wasn’t particularly appetizing. As a man who took his pizza piously, he had to ensure the vessels of its delivery were cleansed.

In spite of the mild shame, Brad was still pretty pleased with how the evening was going.

He re-emerged into the apartment with his slacks cinched in place around his gut, his hands smelling a bit girly because of the scented soap that had been his only bathroom option. Girly was better than girl’s ass.

“Wonder how long we’ve got ’til that pizza gets here, huh?” Brad asked. “I mean, damn, I’m hungry! Even hungrier than before.

“And maybe after we eat, we can, like, give that another go. I think you’re just too hot. So you get me all excited, so I’m, y’know, twitterpated. Can’t perform properly. But I bet next time’ll be better, way better. Awesome.”

“It’d better be,” Liz said, snuggling up next to him on the couch as he sat down. “I have needs. So you’ll have to improve.”

That sounded somewhat ominous. Brad felt his penis seem to try to shrink down there in the presumed safety of his slacks and boxer shorts.

He wasn’t sure how other men felt, but for him, at least, there was nothing quite so intimidating as a sexually demanding partner. The more she wanted it, seemingly, the less he did.

Maybe he could work on her over dinner, convince her she didn’t want it, so he would. After all, once he wanted it, it should be easy to convince her to want it again – he could just rub it on her ’til she came around to his way of thinking or fell asleep. Either way led to the same thing.

If he had been alone in his own apartment facing impotence, the solution would’ve been simple: some nice rape or bestiality porn would’ve fixed him right up. Somehow, in spite of their explicit relationship, Brad just wasn’t comfortable suggesting that kind of sexual aid to Liz.

What would he say, precisely? “Hey, Liz, how about we watch a nice hardcore video of simulated rape! Or some girl suck off a stallion! Wouldn’t that be AWESOME?”

In spite of how frisky-friendly she seemed to become when they were alone, and away from work, Brad was still in that dangerous “breaking in” period of the relationship – a stage where it was far too easy to break things.

The whole concept of rape porn was risky business all the way around, anyhow. To begin with, what did it imply about your opinion of women, if that got your rocks off?

Brad had spent enough time around militant lesbians to know that he, like all heterosexual males, was basically a pretty lousy guy – and that was if he only engaged in consensual, mutually satisfactory sex. Take out the consent, remove the satisfaction, and you were, well, a pretty lousy guy, right?

Somewhere, at some point, Brad had read that women were supposed to fantasize about rape. That served as his only, narrow grain of hope in what seemed to him an otherwise untenable position. Like a Nazi apologist insisting that the Holocaust was a myth, the notion of female rape fantasy gave Brad the sliver of hope.

Maybe, somehow, someday, he’d end up with a girl who really, really liked that sort of thing. They’d do rape role play. It’d be, Brad was sure, awesome.

There were a few obstacles, though, like the fact that Brad never, ever, ever wanted to talk about rape with anyone, much less a girl. Or the fact that Brad didn’t want to talk during sex, much less interact in the sort of verbal and violent manner you’d have to in order to pull off a convincing rape. “Uh, yeah, slut, you take it. You take it, or I’ll, uh, hit you good. Yeah.” He had a hard time picturing it.

It wasn’t hard to figure out the appeal of rape porn: It was quasi-plausible. As a portly gentleman, there weren’t a lot of realistic scenarios that ended up with Brad having sex with a hot, squirmy, young thing … not unless he paid, and he was far too socially inept to pull off the grand feat of hiring a hooker.

Sure, there was Liz, but she was more in his ballpark. Bony, greasy, totally insane, and weird on top of it all. Even with all those downsides, she was at the top end of what he could reasonably expect to score – right up there with those disfigured by car accidents, and perhaps the elderly but still horny.

Brad’s sexual prospects were poor. This Liz thing was a major feat.

Then, of course, there was the matter of the bestiality. Now, Brad was no sicko – he didn’t go in for the stuff with, say, golden retrievers or goats. But something about equine-on-girl sex was just, well, hot. Hot and very wrong. Maybe hot because of the wrongness.

Again, how would he propose such a thing to Liz? Just leave it running on the computer by “accident” and hope she saw it? Saw it, and didn’t immediately take a knife to his junk?

Or maybe they could honeymoon in Tijuana, and he could take her to a donkey show. He’d never been, but he’d heard plenty.

If it went badly, he could claim he hadn’t known what the show entailed, and if it went well, then he’d have a partner in crime, as it were. Not that he knew precisely what he’d do with such a partner, anyhow. Buy a stable? Rent?

Dirty naked imaginary Liz made a brief reappearance as he ruminated on ruminant sex. She looked pretty good getting it on with a horse. Maybe that could be a long-term goal or something.

Heck, she was crazy enough; maybe she’d let him film it. That’d be good for some cash, he was pretty sure. There couldn’t be an overabundance of “models” willing to do that sort of work, right?

Filled with the warm glow of future hypothetical debauchery, Brad encircled Liz with his arm and distractedly squeezed at her smallish breast. Life was good.

A loud knock came at the door. Life was moving from good to great.

Brad jumped up and ran around the corner, intent on not being visible when Liz talked to the pizza guy. She gave him a puzzled look as he ran, but with the knocking, there was no time for her to ask what the hell he was doing.

He stood eagerly in the tiny kitchen, listening as Liz went through the standard back-and-forth with the pizza dude. Hi there, twenty-three-fifty, there you go, thanks, have a great night.

The door closed, and Brad came darting back around the corner, a dish towel he’d found on the stove in one hand. Pizza, after all, had a tendency to be greasy. Brad hated greasy. Towels were awesome.

“Did you have to pee or something?” Liz asked.

“Nah, I just hate talking to strangers,” Brad said, “so I ducked into the kitchen.”

“I was already going to the door,” Liz said. “You wouldn’t have had to say anything to him.”

“Yeah, it’s hard to explain,” Brad said. “It’s just a thing. I like to avoid people whenever possible. And when there’s a knock at the door, my instinct is to run. It’s not a cop thing. It’s just a recluse thing.”

“Like the spider,” Liz said.

“Uhm, I guess so?” Brad said. “Only, less venom?”

The pizza was still steaming hot. Brad pulled out a piece, and then very daintily bit off the smallest bit of a corner of the slice to prevent scalding his tongue. Nothing worse than scalding your tongue on the first bite and missing out on all the deliciousness for the rest of the meal.

Like most brief opportunities to achieve the sublime, Brad ignored the chance to savor the blend of chewy, greasy, crisp flavors that made up the pizza. Instead, he inhaled it at the highest rate its latent heat would allow.

After the first half-dozen slices, he noticed that Liz was watching him wide-eyed, in apparent horror.

“Uhm, whachmif?” Brad asked. He wasn’t entirely sure what words that had entailed, and sort of suspected that it was possible the part of his mind dedicated to interpersonal communication had bailed out halfway through and left the final word choice to the gibberings of his id.

“Were you really hungry?” Liz asked.

Brad, recognizing that it’d be best not to eat another slice while they were having this particular conversation, took a moment to paw at his face with a napkin, removing some of the slick pizza by-catch away.

“I, well, I mean, I was kinda hungry,” Brad said, trying to be honest. “Maybe even really hungry. But I really like pizza. So it’s hard to say for sure. I’ll, y’know, slow down or something, so you get enough.”

“I’m fine. That was just scary.”

“Sorry,” Brad said. “I’m a pretty enthusiastic eater. Like a piranha. Or maybe a nine-inch dredge.”

“I’ve never seen anyone do that,” Liz said. “It was like you were angry at the pizza. Or like you’d just murdered the pizza, and you had to eat it before the cops got here, to dispose of the evidence. Or like a dog that’s stolen a bag of fried chicken, and it knows its owner is going to try to take the chicken away so the dog doesn’t choke on chicken bones, but the dog has decided that the chicken is so delicious, it’s worth dying for. That’s sort of how you ate.”

“Huh. Never thought of that before. It’s kinda awesome. And y’know, even when I was a skinny little kid, I really put the food away. Sort of wondered if maybe I should try to become a competitive eater, so this one time, I cooked two dozen hot dogs, and sat down to see how quickly I could eat them.

“I haven’t wanted to eat hot dogs much since then. Throwing up that much, that fast, will sorta do it to you. Dunno how competitive eaters keep in the game, what with the vomit. Puke is a real turn-off for me, delicious-wise.”

“I think I’m going to go lie down,” Liz said.

This was wonderful news to Brad, as Liz lying down implied a lot of things: that she’d be in a bed; that she’d be in a position where her various parts would be conveniently located for penile accessibility; that, perhaps, she was even inviting such access by her actions. It was awfully early for sleep, after all.

As soon as she was out of the room, Brad turned back to the pizza. He was fond of cold pizza, but he wouldn’t have cold pizza. Future Brad would. And Brad didn’t really care much about future Brad. Future Brad needed to fend for himself.

There was sex to be had. And before that, pizza to be quickly disposed of. With luck, Brad could soon be basking in the warm glow of two endorphin floods: postcoital and postfeast. It was going to be a beautiful night.

Morning came in like a burglar, masturbating on your high school debate team trophy.

Brad’s recollections of the night before were somewhat hazy, but he did know they involved sloppy, fairly poorly executed sex. That, and Liz sobbing for a while afterward.

That part had been highly lame. He’d had to pretend to fall asleep immediately, so as to avoid being a bastard for not asking what was wrong.

She seemed fairly cheerful now, though. Almost manic.

“Get up, get up! You’ve got to get dressed! We’re going to have a wonderful day,” Liz said. “My parents are coming over!”

This was quite the proverbial Clydesdale kick to the nuts. Brad could already picture it. “Hello, uh, Mr. Liz’s Dad. I spent the night sodomizing your daughter, and then she cried. I felt bad, but at the same time, I was sort of basking in that post-orgasm glow. So I suppose my bad feelings were tempered a little.

“She has very small breasts. I suppose that’s your wife’s fault? Genetics, and all that. She doesn’t give head, does she? Because that’d be swell. Your daughter, I mean. It’d be kind of weird getting it from your wife.”

Brad wondered if Mr. Liz’s Dad would be bringing a shotgun. Judging by how crazy she was, that didn’t seem entirely out of the question.

He also wondered what her last name was. He knew he’d been exposed to it in the past, and he should probably know the answer. But he didn’t.

The sweating began. Or maybe it got worse. Brad usually woke up slick in the morning, unless he had the air conditioning cranked down to ice-cube levels, which resulted in electric bills way past his pay grade.

So, unless it got to the 40s at night, Brad usually slept uncomfortably warm. Every bed he slept in was stained a greasy yellow, and his sheets typically became unbearable in about a week – not that he washed them at that point. That’d be both sensible and sort of pleasant.

He could already see his canary-esque influence on Liz’s white sheets when he glanced back down at the bed. She slept with a lot of blankets, and even her sheet was somehow incredibly warming. So Brad’s sweat glands had been on high alert. Each night he’d slept next to her, he’d had to flip the pillow at least twice because he’d soaked the side he was lying on.

“Parents. Huh.”

“You’ll love them. My mom and dad are the best. They live in Texas, but they visit at least every other weekend. We’re very close. They like to make sure I’m doing well.

“I’ve told them about you, so they’re very excited. Dad said he wanted to talk about plans with you. I’m sure you two will love each other. He’s very smart. But I guess you shouldn’t call him Dad, at least not yet.”

“That’s really something,” Brad said. “This sounds kinda, y’know, planned. Organized, even. In a very scary way.”

“Don’t be a giant moron,” Liz said. “Nobody planned anything. My parents love me. They love to visit me. And today, they get to visit you, too.”

“Isn’t this a little early?” Brad asked. “Shouldn’t we be, like, further along before we throw parents into the mix? I mean, I don’t really like seeing my parents, let alone someone else’s.”

“That’s very sad,” Liz said, “but not very important. You need to take a shower and shave. They’ll be here in an hour.”

“I wonder if this is what it felt like to get swept up in, say, the cultural revolution?” Brad asked. Oddly, or perhaps not, one thing was finding resonance: It was, somehow, peculiarly stimulating to imagine meeting Liz’s father so soon after having molested her in such unspeakable ways. In fact…

“So, an hour is kinda soon, but not that soon,” Brad said, moving closer to Liz so he could cup her ass with his hands and sort of grind into her from the front. Dirty Liz and daughter Liz had a brief battle, Brad was fairly sure, but the fight ended badly for him.

“I have to clean, and you have to shower,” Liz said, borderline angry. “We can’t do things like that while my parents are on their way! In fact, after last night, I’m starting to wonder if we should have sex at all until we’re married!”

Brad’s ardor dissipated faster than French teenagers in teargas. Had daughter Liz just murdered dirty Liz and buried her in a shallow grave?

“You’re joking, uh, aren’t you?” Brad asked, feeling himself being herded toward the bathroom. “I mean, we just got started, y’know? We can’t quit now.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Liz said. “Get clean. I have to vacuum.”

Brad shut the bathroom door and locked it. He stared at himself in the mirror, feeling the loathing he usually did whenever he saw his own reflection.

He glared, willing the image on the other side to drop dead, even baring his clenched teeth, although none of it seemed to make much point. Mirror Brad never died, and mostly looked sort of sad and slightly broken down.

Liz could feel that she’d won this round, but Brad knew otherwise. If she was going to refuse his affections, he’d get her back: He’d masturbate in her shower while she cleaned the apartment. That’d teach her.

Not that Brad had any idea how, precisely, it’d teach her … or even how she would ever find out. But he was determined to teach her. Somehow.

He started the water going, and as he lumbered in, an idea began to coalesce. Rather than your traditional, quick rub-out into the drain, he’d go ahead and try to jerk off onto the tile, preferably in one of the spots that hardly ever got wet when the shower ran, so his spunk would remain there until she discovered it, one way or another.

The notion got him fairly excited. The same bizarre desire to inflict humiliation that drove at least part of the appeal of the facial leapt at this chance. He could just picture her, perhaps relaxing in the tub, when suddenly, she’d notice a strange, dried, white smear there on the shower wall, below the showerhead.

“What’s that?” she’d ask herself. “Dry shampoo?”

Maybe she’d reach out a finger and touch it. “Feels sort of tacky for shampoo,” she’d say.

Maybe she’d even … maybe taste it. Yeah. Maybe she’d put her finger into her mouth and taste the mysterious, tacky stain. There’d be no mistaking that taste. Salty.

Shampoo wasn’t salty. Neither was conditioner.

What would she say then? Would she squeal in disgust and jump out of the tub, all wet and glisteny and nude and startled? That’d be kind of awesome. Or would she, you know, go for another taste?

Brad was getting quite worked up.

The second taste – that was definitely the hotter option. Having gotten a little taste, she’d need more.

Maybe she doubted that first one. Maybe she just, like, loved what she’d gotten. She had to finish it. Finish every drop. Yeah. The dirty little slut. Every drop.

The moment of truth arrived, but Brad’s fantasy had worked too well – he was totally lost in the midst of it. Accordingly, his aim was waaaaaaaay off. None of his ejaculate made it onto the wall where he’d intended to leave it. Instead, he fertilized part of the shower curtain, a bottle of shampoo, his right foot, and his right knee.

“Oh, crap,” Brad said, trying to grab some and hand-spread it onto the wall. The effort didn’t work very well, and he was also suffering from the general sense of “screw it” that usually comes after orgasm. Maybe next time.

Liz’s parents came in like Israeli commandos. Not that they were Jewish, just that their entry happened so fast, you didn’t really know what was happening, and you couldn’t really understand what they were saying.

Brad gathered that Mr. Liz’s Dad was called “Rick” and Mom was “Mona.”

Mona was all giant smiles and sort of dead behind the eyes. She shared Liz’s great love for quarter-inch foundational makeup and had the same sort of powdery-grease sheen.

She spoke softly, like Quaaludes sort of soft. There was an odd rhythm to her, like you’d start to feel seasick if you spent too much time in her company. Every so often she’d sort of erupt into life and behave in that giant Texas way all Texans seem capable of, laughing way too loud, or telling a story in some brash, sudden manner.

Rick was intense, like a Gestapo arc light trained on a huddled group of would-be escapees. He smiled a lot, if you counted pulling the flesh back from your teeth as a smile. He asked a lot of questions, all of them short and fast, like a .22-caliber Gatling gun.

The weird pleasantries flew by and around Brad like an sudden, disorganized storm. He craved pharmaceutical support desperately. Pills, any pills, to make this all seem like a really funny exercise in futility. Snort it, shoot it, smoke it, whatever … He just knew he wasn’t doing a very good job of taking it. Not so far.

Finally, he latched on to a question that seemed to require some sort of thought-out response: “So, Liz says you two might be getting married?” Rick asked, though it seemed fairly rhetorical, at least the way he put it.

Brad squinted back at the blaring light that was Liz’s father. “I’m, uh, … It’s kinda early, y’know? We’ve talked about a lot of things.”

“Well, don’t talk too much,” Rick said. “People talk themselves out of things all the time. You don’t want to miss out on my little girl. And anyway, you clearly are very close, for you to have come over this early on a Saturday to visit.”

Brad frowned. Did they not know he was sodomizing, and then sleeping with, their daughter? How could they not realize? His hair was still wet from the shower, and he even smelled like her, since it was either that or go sans deodorant … It was never a good idea to skip deodorant when you sweated like Brad. But to do so when you were going to meet your girlfriend’s parents, well, that would be insane, which Brad liked to hope he wasn’t. Yet.

“How’s the cable working?” Rick asked, mercifully turning his attention away from Brad. “They sent a piracy pulse last month. It didn’t hit you, did it?”

“It’s fine. I watch it every night,” Liz said. She looked pissed off, but Brad wasn’t sure why. Had he said something? His mind was getting fear-hazy, and he just wasn’t sure.

“Yeah, I’m a big TV guy,” Brad said.

Rick had gotten down on the floor by the television and was fiddling with the computer next to it. Without looking up, he said, “Huh. Well, there’s usually not much worth watching. But that means there’s even less worth paying for, which is why no daughter of mine will.”

Brad felt dense. Was this some challenge to his manhood? Was Rick implying that he, Brad, wasn’t good enough to supply good cable to Liz? That seemed a slightly odd way to evaluate a suitor. Which, by the way, he wasn’t, necessarily.

Still, never back down from a challenge, and all that. “I’ve always paid for very good cable. I believe in having a full selection of channels,” Brad said, feeling a bit defiant. Sure, the cable had been turned off a few times, but he always got it turned back on. He was a winner.

“Really?” Rick said. “You think that’s smart, paying those inflated rates for their diluted content? I’m glad my daughter doesn’t agree with you. I raised her to be smarter than that.”

Yeah, this was great. Rick was a charmer, and he was winning.

Best of all, Brad hadn’t even known it was a contest. Now that he was losing, he still wasn’t sure where the starting line had been. “I’m, you don’t?”

“I’m sorry, Brad, but you don’t seem to have replied to me in any meaningful manner,” Rick said. “Maybe you should sit down a minute. You seem nervous. Clearly, it has you tongue-tied.”

As if Rick had recited some powerful, though localized, incantation, naked Liz showed up in Brad’s imagination, pantomiming the act of being “tongue-tied” in a very inappropriate manner. Brad felt the stirrings of an erection.

Mona was staring at him, smiling in this creepy, vacant manner. Well, staring near him. Her gaze seemed like it was just the tiniest bit off, sort of like Robocop’s targeting before what’s-her-name fiddled with him in the abandoned warehouse scene.