In Lieu of Rent, Ch 1 [exhibition] [f,7m]

When I was a PhD student in Seattle in my mid twenties, I lived on a tight stipend. I rented a room in a big house near campus with seven guys—all young, fit undergrads—for $630/month, leaving me very little left over for grocery and healthcare, let alone travel or fun or an emergency expense.

One night we were all sitting in the living room up to our own activities, and I made a mistake. I sat on the floor typing my thesis on my laptop, which rested on the coffee table, and when I twisted to stretch after a long period of productive but statue-like stillness, I knocked over my housemate’s mega-size diet coke onto my keyboard, frying my $1,300 machine. I could not afford to replace this.

For me to continue my work, I would have to bus to the library and pay by the hour, and even then I wouldn’t have access to my zotero collection of sources or my zettelkasten of notes. With just two semesters left to finish and defend my thesis before my stipend ran out, this felt like the toll of the final bell, the end of line, the end of hope. This may seem dramatic to those who have not been in the throes of a PhD, but I promise that in the circumstances it was a reasonable and proportional reaction.

Matt, sitting on the couch behind me, said something that should have offended me. He said if I stripped off my clothes right then and there and sat in his lap, he’d take me out to buy a new laptop tomorrow.

He and the others told “jokes” like that a lot, sharing the common theme that if I would just become the house plaything, I wouldn’t have to pay rent, and they’d take care of me, stuff like that, which I rolled my eyes at and endured because, again: only $630/month rent. But I didn’t roll my eyes that time, because the thing was I needed that fucking laptop.

I stood up, pulled my dress over my head, unclasped and dropped my bra, and sat in his lap. To make my cooperation very clear to everyone present, to leave him no room and no excuses for not purchasing me a new laptop, I wrapped my arms around him and nuzzled under his chin.

He did buy me the laptop, so I won on that front, but I didn’t foresee the floodgates I’d open by acquiescing to his request. Together, my housemates, through Matt as spokesman, reiterated and developed on the offers they’d been making in quasi-jest since I moved in: if I would strip and suck them off on-demand, they’d pay my rent.

“That’s not much money,” I said.

“Just the stripping then.”

That one impulsive act had not just given them permission to ask for their grander fantasies, but also devastated my inhibitions. Stripping in front of them once, and not disliking it, had opened my mind. We shook on it: I would strip any time they asked, right where I was—as in, no trips to the closet, no “give me minute”—and if I was at home, the request was valid. After stripping, I would have to wait one hour before redressing, returning to my bedroom, or even touching the clothes I’d removed. In exchange, I paid no rent.

In the first month of our arrangement, I was asked to strip only once. This is not to say there was no sexual tension between us. There was plenty, mostly felt by me. Any time I argued with one of them about house chores or who should get to use the living room TV, I did so knowing that at any point during our heated discussion they could ask me to take off all of my clothes and I would have to continue the argument in the rather silly position of being naked in an inappropriate place, or else have to pay $630 on the spot to compensate for the broken deal, and in either case winning the argument would be moot.

As to why they were so conservative about their requests, I suspect they conspired together to ration the requests and keep me on my toes, loading all of our interactions with that power imbalance. It did not help that I told them what I did with the extra $630/month. Instead of saving up an emergency fund that would have let me move out short-notice, I bought a car, so the majority of that extra money vanished into a car payment, the rent for a parking spot out back, and gas. My dependence on our arrangement was more or less total.

The one time that month they did ask me to strip was premeditated, I’m certain of it. They’d invited people over for a drinking-and-charades party, almost all men from the various sports teams they played on, and I, knowing the risk of embarrassment I faced if I left my room, holed up upstairs and kept my bedroom light off hoping they would assume I wasn’t home.

But they’d planned for that. The one woman they’d invited was a mutual friend between Matt and I, though much closer to me—we’d gone to high school together and saw each other at least twice a month for some social reason or other—and as soon as she arrived, Matt told her I was upstairs, where he knew I was because I’d completely forgotten to move my car, which sat in my parking spot innocently broadcasting the fact that I was home to anyone who glanced at it.

The friend Matt sent up to fetch me, Sam, was not the most reasonable. I ignored just one knock and instead of assuming, say, that I had headphones in and was occupied with something in my room, she asked through the door what she had done to deserve the humiliation of her best friend ignoring her. When I opened the door on her second, more aggressive round of knocking, I fully intended to explain why I couldn’t leave my room that night, but once I was looking into her proper, prude, and emotionally fragile face, I realized I couldn’t, and with a terrible sinking feeling I descended with her to the party.

My housemates treated me respectfully. For the first hour, I mingled with guests, played some beer pong, and lowered my guard. At some point Matt herded everyone into the living room for charades, which we played in teams of eight with just two people performing at once, and by the time we finished the first game, I’d forgotten about the danger I was in.

Sam and I performed first in the second game. All the party guests by this time had had a few beers or shots or glasses of wine, and the energy in the room was high. Sixteen men sat on the couch and the floor in a semicircle around us, ready to watch and shout guesses. We’d already been told our secret word to act out (dolphin), and were waiting for Matt to flip the hour glass. But he didn’t flip it. Instead he shot me a knowing look, and said, “Now.”

“Why not use the hourglass?” I said, thinking he meant for us to start our turn then.

“Strip. Right now.”

There were some mutters around the room wondering what he meant, but only among guests. None of my housemates seemed surprised.

Sam put a hand on my shoulder. “What’s he asking?”

I still couldn’t explain it to her, so I ignored her and complied with Matt’s command silently. Out of fear, I’d worn my most complex outfit, but I’m not sure what my reasoning was in retrospect. It made no difference except to prolong the uncomfortable process of stripping. I had also taken up the habit of shaving often, just in case, because I feared they would say something about my bush, but now that I was about to show them, I worried that shaving would suggest an eagerness on my part. No time remained to change course, though. I pulled my sweater over my head, unbuttoned my dress shirt, unclipped my skirt, and on and on, stockings and etc, until I stood bare in front of the entire party.

Sam kept asking me what I was doing, but I couldn’t even look at her, and she retreated to the kitchen to calm down. I followed her in.

“Sam, are you okay?”

“What does that mean, am I okay? You’re naked right now! At a party with like forty men!”

“There’s only sixteen men, and it’s—I wanted to explain this to you earlier, but I—”

She raised her palm in front of my face. “I don’t want excuses. I think what I’ve learned tonight is that we obey very different value systems, and perhaps our friendship was not what I thought it was. If you think better of this,” she said, gesturing vaguely to my body, “call me.” With that, she left.

I felt admonished, small, and alone after she left. Was what I’d agreed to so morally abhorrent that I now repelled my close friends? No, I didn’t think so. I was an adult woman, was I not? Twenty-five was old enough to make such choices.

After Sam’s rejection, I wanted to reject her back, or at least reject what she stood for if I couldn’t do that. Where I might otherwise have been inclined to loiter in some side room until my hour was up, I felt impelled to rejoin the party. I plopped down on the couch in the middle of my housemates, and reassured them everything was fine.

They had called an intermission from charades to smoke from a pipe, and I let one of them show me how to take a hit from it. He wrapped his arms around me to control the pipe’s choke on my behalf, and I leaned into him. It was a crowded couch, and simply by being there I was rubbing against more guys than I could name. I not only allowed, but invited and encouraged, some of them putting their hands on my thighs, or on my waist. To spite Sam, I wanted to share myself.

To my surprise, I became completely comfortable. We played more charades, took more hits, and I forgot to watch the clock for the end of my hour. I only redressed at the close of the night, when everyone went home.

After that night, they asked me to strip a bit more often, but still only a few times a month. Once at a cookout, another time when I was cooking my own dinner in the kitchen. Nothing more cruel or forward than that. It was still the tension, the implied power they held over me, that they enjoyed most.

And that power had only grown. The end of our lease was coming up, and over the past year or so our street had been subject to industrious gentrification, with new luxury buildings rising up out of nowhere in mere months. Our landlord had notified us of a rent doubling, but I hadn’t bring it up with the housemates. Surely they would bore of the gimmick of telling me to strip soon, and start to look askance at the $90/month they pooled for the privilege. Would they really pay $180/month for more of the same?

It was due to this fear that I started going on dates hoping to find a boyfriend to move in with. After a while, I hit it off with a sweet man at the community center I volunteered at, the first lead of real promise. We went on four dates and got on well together, so I wanted to invite him over and cook for him. This posed serious risk, of course, so I planned it on the Friday night before my housemates’ spring break, because they were all flying out to Croatia together in the morning. I expected to have the house to myself. I was wrong.

We were out on the back deck, me and this guy, whose name was Henry, and I was grilling us some vegetables. He leaned back against the deck railing and asked me questions about my PhD research. I said I’d rather talk about anything other than work, and he understood. “What would you like me to ask you about?” he said. I found that so earnest, so sincere, that my heart swelled a little. This was the wholesome side of male attention I’d been missing.

“Ask me about my cooking,” I said.

We talked about how I learned to cook, what recipes were special to me, and I asked him why he enjoyed his favorite band’s music.

It was in the middle of that easy conversation that a car pulled into the back lot behind the deck, and Matt got out of it, followed by two of our housemates. The three of them hustled up the deck stairs in their gym clothes drenched in sweat and smelling like it. Knowing what they might ask me to do in front of Henry, every thud on of their ascent felt like a small death.

“God, that smells delicious,” Matt said when he reached the top. “And who is this?”

“This is my date. His name is Henry,” I said, trying to communicate with my face that this wasn’t the time to make an impolite request. “We get along very well. I like him a great deal. Aren’t you supposed to be in Croatia?”

“Our passports didn’t arrive in time so we skipped,” he said to me, and to Henry, “Pleasure to meet you. I wonder how much you know about our housemate here.”

Henry innocently replied that he knew I was a good cook, which Matt and the other two chuckled at.

“Is she?” Matt said. He stood behind me and put his hands on my shoulders.

Henry cocked his head at this, eyed me curiously.

“It’s too good for me not to ask, you know that,” Matt said.

I sighed. I knew it was. And it was both too late and too early to explain the situation to Henry, too late in that I was about to demonstrate it to him in full so why bother, and too early in that he wasn’t hooked deep enough to accept the explanation even if I’d had a low-pressure opportunity to deliver it.

I stripped, showing myself to Henry naked for the first time in full daylight in the company of others instead of alone together in my bedroom, as I’d hoped.

Henry seemed distressed. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m sorry, Henry,” I said. “This is—I should have told you about this.”

Matt messed up my hair a bit, then said, “Well, we’ll leave the two of you to it.”

After they’d gone inside and shut the door, Henry said, “You do that because they ask? Any time?”

The confidence and comfort I’d gained naked around my housemates was nowhere to be found in this confrontation. I adjusted my posture to make sure my chest looked large enough, and then kept adjusting it, and all I had to offer Henry were meek and vague statements about saving money on rent, to which he said, “Well, ah. I’m open-minded, I think, but I’m afraid this is a bit beyond my personal comfort zone. If you can understand. I’m sorry.” And that was the end of things with Henry.

I stood there on the back deck in a self-loathing stupor until I whiffed the vegetables burning on the grill. When I went inside and scraped them off the plate into the kitchen trash, I teared up, which one of my housemates noticed.

“Didn’t go well huh? Want a shot of whiskey?”

It turned out I did. I wanted five, in fact. And once I’d downed them, and gregariously coerced my three present housemates to down the same amount—though it hit them less powerfully, them being considerably larger than me—I felt I at last had the confidence to broach my concerns re our arrangement and the pending rent increase. I asked them to take a seat on the couch as if I were going to deliver a presentation, and monologued my concerns in front of them.

During this I could not avoid feeling shame about our age difference. The oldest among them was twenty, the youngest nineteen, and here I was, an older woman who was supposed to be a role model or mentor offering guidance, begging them for rent assistance in exchange for my nakedness. This shame, I think, affected my tone, and I think I sounded rather pitiful by the end. All I needed, I emphasized, was one more semester to defend my thesis. Just one more semester.

When I finished, they nodded, but no one immediately replied.

“It happens we’ve given thought to the same issues,” Matt said at last. “And the seven us are willing to continue comping your rent at the higher rate.”

My heart sprouted wings at this, it felt like. I was going to graduate. “Really?”

“_If_ you’re willing to adopt the terms of our original proposal.”

Their original proposal. Not just stripping, but also blowjobs on demand. My jaw ached just thinking about that. Seven men able to demand a blowjob of me at any time? Could I physically manage that? How much time per day would I end up spending with a cock in my mouth?

“For how long would I have to, uh, _perform_ each time?”

“You’d have to swallow.”

“And what if you never come? What if you ask me for two in a row and it’s impossible?”

The three of them huddled and whispered for a moment, then broke apart. “We’re prepared to offer constraints,” Matt said, “of at most one request per person per day, and to add a timeout of one hour if we don’t come. That said, there is incentive to—”

“Yes, yes, I know.” He meant that the blowjobs would have to be good to keep the deal alive. But I already knew that for other reasons. I’d have to achieve an impossible level of skill if I wanted any time to myself under these terms. I’d need to bring them to orgasm in mere minutes. But it was just for one semester. I thought I could pull it off. I said I was in. “Let’s start next week, when the new lease terms kick in.”

I could tell that this last caveat frustrated them. There I was, promising to give take their cocks in my mouth any time, naked, inebriated, yet still withholding for just little a while longer.

But it was Friday. Next week wasn’t far, and they made it clear that they intended to “break me in” before the other four returned from Croatia. On Saturday Matt stopped me when we passed each other on the stairs and said, “I think I’ll have you swallow my come right here.” He said the same thing about the back deck and the front yard. One of the other housemates said he wanted me to swallow him as soon as he walked in the front door, and the third wanted me to swallow him at his bedside, right after he woke up.

All day, they were telling me these things, and I began to doubt my decision, but what was I going to do with less than twenty-four hours to find an alternative? I pushed the thought away as best as I could.

Sunday morning, I awoke to knocking at my bedroom door. It was about to begin.

Source: reddit.com/r/Erotica/comments/x15crs/in_lieu_of_rent_ch_1_exhibition_f7m