He said something that made me think.

There was this thing that happens during sex that took him out the moment.

She would comment on how hot he was. She was picturing what it must look like from a different perspective. And she wasn’t sleeping with him, exactly, but with an attractive person. As if he were an aspirational lay that she had to admire in flagrante delicto.

He didn’t like it and he couldn’t say why. I told him he was a stunt dick. Crude, but similar to the sexy lamp test Andrea had mentioned to me the night before.

I guess all of us, even basic white boys, can be fetishized against our will.

I’ve slept with beautiful dummies. I don’t think I told a single one of them that they were beautiful. At least not before I got what I wanted. I think they liked me for it. It made them work harder. The prettier a guy is, the less inclined I am to mention it. Why state the obvious? My powers of observation are better used on more subtle things.

But it must be odd to them, to not hear the part of the script that’s been repeated over and over until it’s taken for granted. I know it to be true about myself. I can predict what they’ll say about me. Eventually they all say the same things. The ones who said it too readily bored me. The ones who reserved their words of praise made me work harder, too.

What a twisted game it becomes…hiding admiration so deep that any real expressed sentiment becomes a reason to distrust. Don’t show your hand. Don’t seem to eager. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Tell me who I am without telling me who I am.

The whole thing is perverse, this desire to live in the land of unknowing. It can tip into masochism. But when everything is laid bare and knowable, we stop feeling that tingle in the chest cavity. It’s why people eat hot sauce or fugu. The danger reminds you that you are alive. The only thing sexier that the conquest and the eventual retelling to friends is the anticipation.

Such is the life of the hunter.