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A Different Kind Of Dungeon Master
Date: 2/4/2024, Categories: Love Stories, Author: KathrynLocksley
My improbable adventures in sexual domination started completely without warning, on a Saturday night a couple years after college. I was sitting on the couch in my apartment, with my arm around my best friend, Rachel, who was sobbing into my favorite Renaissance Faire cloak. “This is pathetic,” she said, sitting up, blowing her nose, and putting her glasses back on. She had done this three times already — said something final-sounding and started cleaning herself up as if she intended to change the mood, but none of her previous attempts had lasted long enough for us to make a start on the new RPG campaign I’d designed for us. I was kind of glad she wasn’t set on playing the game. I’d put a lot of work into it, with the expectation that her boyfriend, Cameron, would be joining us. I’d put in lots of little moments where the two of them would have to work together, and although it would bepossiblefor Rachel to just play multiple characters to get through it, I suspected it would be more of a painful reminder than a distraction from the fact that Cameron was, for whatever reason, not here. Rachel hadn’t gotten around to sharing the details yet, and knowing her, they’d be sparse when she did. Another wave of tears hit her, she took the glasses off, and I put my cloak back around her. I would have liked to hug her properly, head on, but then she might rest her ear on my chest and hear how rapidly my heart was beating. This was not the first time we had gone ...
... through these motions. Rachel had had eight boyfriends over the course of the seven years I’d known her, and every single one of them had left her sobbing into one or another of my costumes somehow. It felt like I was going to die, every time. Partly because it hurt so bad to see Rachel in pain, and partly because whenevershe broke up, it meant the guy was going to disappear frommylife too. It almost always happened once I’d come to think of him as at least a casual friend, which I didn’t exactly have a ton of. These guys weren’t the stereotypical red-flag-athons you’d expect to see with someone who’d had eight serious boyfriends in seven years. I never knew what happened between them behind closed doors, but Rachel always seemed, at least from an outside perspective, to have pretty solid taste. Cameron had been my favorite so far. He’d shown up to my mom’s funeral with a bouquet of daffodils, which I think I’d mentioned her liking maybe once before. But I’d be lying if I said that was what was bothering me most. The truth was, Rachel’s breakups sent me into a cold sweat, because her having a boyfriend made things… simple. When she had a boyfriend, I could tell myself that that was it. The current guy across the gaming table from me was the one who would be her permanent, endgame partner. Any window whereI could have been that guy was closed and gone, and that was just the way things went. It was fine. It was good. It was better that way, in fact, ...