a masturbator wrote:
By the time I was a teenager, masturbation had become not just a secret hobby, but a carefully curated ritual, and I devoted myself to it with the single-minded determination of a budding connoisseur. My penis, then still an awkward, almost comically eager sprout, had already become the axis around which my inner world spun. I experimented with every conceivable means of friction and grip, from dry-palmed haste to the elaborate, slippery mysteries of lotion. But the crowning innovation of my adolescence was the sandwich baggie method—a true home-brewed masterpiece of onanistic engineering.
The setup was precise and deeply private. I would seize one of the sandwich bags pilfered from the kitchen, coat the inside with a luxurious swirl of Vaseline or whatever lotion my parents weren’t likely to notice going missing, and then wedge the slick little contraption between the upper mattress and the box spring. The first time I tried it, the sensation was so powerfully, shockingly pleasurable that I went cross-eyed and nearly bit through my lower lip to keep from making a sound. Better than my own hand, better than the surreptitious grindings on pillows or the sides of couch cushions, this was hands-free, immersive, and for a minute or two, my entire reality.
I learned to time these sessions with military precision, always waiting for the rare and beautiful occasions when the rest of my family would be out shopping or at sports practice. The house, usually so echoingly full of overlapping voices and footfalls, would be entirely, luxuriously mine. I’d lock the bedroom door (even though I supposedly had nothing to hide) and go to work with a scientist’s focus. The mattress would creak and bounce with my efforts, but never enough to draw suspicion. I could lose all sense of time, pressing my hips into that yielding comfort, an animalistic urge mixing with the hyper-intellectualized panic of getting caught.
What I didn’t expect was the day my friend Tony caught me in the act. He wasn’t supposed to come over until later—he didn’t even knock, just barged in, as was his style, and immediately understood what he was witnessing. Instead of recoiling in horror or launching into the expected mockery, he only grinned, eyes wide, as if I’d just revealed the secret code to a forbidden game.
“You gotta show me that,” he said, and I did.
Before this, our shared explorations of sex had been limited to giggling over the glossy pages of his father’s European porn rags—the kind with candid photography and soft focus, the women all oddly aloof and the men with mustaches you could lose a squirrel in. We’d thumb through the magazines together, side by side, knees pressed close on the carpet, each of us pretending to be more jaded than the other. When the excitement reached a fever pitch, we’d retreat to separate bathrooms for solitary release, locking ourselves in and reappearing minutes later, red-faced and breathless, never speaking a word about what had just happened.
But after the day with the baggie, everything changed. Suddenly the distance between our mutual fantasy and our private realities grew smaller, more porous, and our afternoons became a new kind of collaboration.
Tony’s house was the epicenter of our innovations. His parents both worked late, and his little sister could be bribed with a single five-dollar bill to keep her mouth shut and her headphones on. We started with the idea of side-by-side exhibitionism, always keeping a chaste two or three feet of air between us, but after I showed him the sandwich baggie trick, he was hooked. He even went a step further, cutting up silicone bits from an old oven mitt and layering them inside the bag for extra texture. It was both hilarious and, in the language of teenage boys, terrifyingly effective.
Somehow, it always ended up being his parents’ bed that we used for these sessions. Maybe it was the sheer size of the thing—king-sized, with a luxurious pillow-top and sheets that felt like they belonged to someone much richer than anyone we knew. Maybe it was the forbidden thrill, the faint perfume of adult sex that lingered in the linens and the knowledge that we were defiling an altar that was expressly, glaringly off-limits. Or maybe it was the structured symmetry: Tony on one side, me on the other, the mattress a literal buffer between us.
We never talked about why we chose that bed. We just did. We also never talked about why, despite the sudden closeness, we insisted on keeping our bodies hidden, our faces pointed at the ceiling, our hips thrusting downward into the anonymous, soft darkness. There was a line neither of us wanted to cross—a line so important that, paradoxically, it became the focus of our arrangement. We were not, we insisted, doing anything “gay.” We were just maximizing the pleasure of a time-honored activity, with an audience who could appreciate, if not the mechanics, then at least the artistry.
The rhythm of these afternoons became almost ritualistic. We’d hang out in Tony’s room, killing hours with video games and trash-talking the other kids from school. At the appointed hour, we’d make our way to the master bedroom, each with a plastic baggie, a bottle of lube, and a towel “for cleanup.” We’d nestle in on our respective sides, sometimes sharing a laugh about how dumb this was, sometimes just laying there in electric silence. The first few thrusts were always awkward, mechanical, but then the animal part took over, and we’d get lost in our own velocities. The mattress would dip and rebound with our efforts, absorbing the sound but not the intent.
The only rule—never spoken, but always enforced—was that we’d never look at each other’s bodies. No eye contact except at the finish, when we’d both prop ourselves up on elbows and, through the gap in the bedspread, watch each other’s faces contort with climax. That was the only moment of pure, unfiltered mutual recognition. It became the highlight, the reason for the whole endeavor, and I’d count down the seconds with mounting anticipation: would Tony come before me this time, or would I win the unspoken race and get to see his face go slack with pleasure first?
Over time, our technique became more sophisticated. We experimented with different lubricants, even going so far as to steal a sample-sized tube of KY Jelly from the pharmacy. We tried different positions—lying flat, on our knees, standing bent over the mattress like marathon runners at the starting line. Once, Tony suggested we race to see who could finish first; another time, he challenged me to see who could hold out the longest without coming. I never asked him if he fantasized about anyone in particular, but sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I’d see his free hand stroking the air, as if tracing the curves of an invisible body.
What I remember most about those afternoons was the blend of embarrassment and elation, the thrill of doing something so private so close to another person, and the way it never felt even remotely romantic, only necessary. Like two astronauts floating in a capsule, sharing the same recycled air, counting down the days until they could see sunlight again.
Eventually, like all adolescent rituals, the tradition faded. Tony got a girlfriend, and with her came a new world of half-explored bodies and nervous, hurried fumblings in parked cars. I started focusing on my college applications, pouring all my energy into essays and extracurriculars. The sandwich baggies remained, gathering dust in the back of my closet, until one day I threw them out, feeling suddenly, inexplicably grown-up.
But to this day, whenever I think back on those years, I remember the strange, unspeakable bond between two boys and a king-sized mattress. Not the mechanics, not the orgasms themselves, but the fleeting, silent communion of two faces seen through the shudder of shared pleasure, the wordless acknowledgment that, for a while, we were in it together.
You must understand: the only part of watching each other unload was seeing each other’s facial response. The rest of us was hidden by the bed.
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