As soon as I got out of the bus, the cold air assaulted the tip of my nose, the only part of my body I hadn't properly managed to shield with wool sweaters, hat and scarf. It had been a fairly short drive all the way up 16th street but, as is often the case in DC, a few minutes on the bus and a few blocks walk can drop you in a drastically different urban landscape, can make you tread where gentrification hasn't yet gilded the lead of deprivation.
Still, a welcome confirmation, since a threesome was what I had in mind when filling my search criteria. It was a freezing, damp, and gloomy Sunday early afternoon, the city had seemed empty and slightly forbidding. I was looking for the warmth and agitation that horniness uniquely brings, those days when coffee and The New Yorker just don't quite cut it, when love is something of the recent past and possibly of some near future, when friendships take a break between the high spirits of a Saturday night and the checking-ins of a Monday morning.
It was one of those days best spent alone, in the comforting heat and hands of strangers. The first half-hour of cruising on the hook-up site had been a little tedious: a forty-five-year old who kept referring to himself as "boi", a young man who dubiously and quite lavishly insisted on his inexperience, another who launched, after a couple of "what's up", into a monologue on the detailed sexual program he had in mind for both of us or, I suspected, for him and anyone who might believe his picture was actually his.
I had closed all the active windows and restarted the search, narrowing on couples. They had appeared on top of my results and I had sent the lame and innocuous "Hey". They quickly unlocked their pictures blurry but promising , asked for mine, and double-checked "Top?
Within a few minutes of a short, rapid-fire exchange of sexual snippets, my mind had sharpened their pictures, as it does, and ignited the necessary mixture of curiosity, anticipation and overpowering excitement.
