“That is quite the predicament,” Felix said. “Just like how…” He reached into the box on John’s lap, which was now nearly empty. He drummed his fingers on the cardboard that was right above John’s crotch, sending sparks up John’s painfully restrained erection. John shuddered. Felix continued, “The last few are always so hard to get out of the box…”

Felix took his time rooting around.

Heat flushed down John’s legs and rose in his face, his eyes fluttering shut momentarily.

Finally, Felix relented, grabbing the last few samples and putting them on the table.

John kept the empty box in his lap. He now had even more erection to hide. “I um, I get the feeling that you’re flirting with me,” John said.

“Do you like it?” Felix asked.

“I do,” John said.

“Do you like boys?”

John was actually kind of surprised that Arya hadn’t brought it up before, though he would certainly talk it through with her when he got back. “I wouldn’t have thought I did, before but… I’m a lot more open, now, than I was… before.”

Felix grinned coyly. “Yeah, I bet you get that ass wide open.”

John’s heart fluttered.

“If you’re… open to it,” Felix continued, “I was thinking I could give you a bit of a hand job, to thank you for giving me that juicy insider info. Not to completion, of course, I wouldn’t ruin your game.”

John immediately imagined the feeling of Felix’s hand on his shaft, which set him throbbing even harder. Felix seemed nice and John was probably just being prejudiced, but he didn’t want a seemingly spontaneous encounter to suddenly become a bill. “I really respect your line of work, but I’m not sure something… transactional is what I’m looking for, right now.”

“Can I give you a pitch?” Felix asked.

John would have expected the man to be more pushy in general, but he was now appreciating that Arya’s emphasis on connection and consent was not as unique as he’d thought.

“Yeah, okay,” John said.

“I actually get off on it being transactional. Doing it for the money… or, well, not really me gaining the money, but them losing the money. I’d suck off just about any man who burned a fifty for it, y’know?”

John did not know. “How do you… how do you like it, as a job?”

Felix shrugged. “A job’s a job. It has its fun moments. It has its tedium. Some occupational hazards. I like sex. I like the acting, I actually wanted to go into theater, before I got into this.”

“Does it feel… fake to you, then?”

“Not at all. I guess you could call it… storytelling, more so. Like, I’m telling a story together with my client. A story is real enough, in your head.”

For the second time, John was struck by how quickly and accurately Felix could sum up the words that he’d been struggling with for so long. It was not that Arya was fake, it was that she was a story. Stories were real. They weren’t people, but they could feel like people. “I might just have to have you write my review, you’re way better at talking about this than I am.”

“Well, then you’d have to suck me off,” Felix said coyly.

“I will take that into consideration,” John said.

“Is that code for ‘no’?” Felix asked.

John shook his head. “It’s code for ‘I’ll take that into consideration’.”

Felix seemed to brighten even more. 

“So,” John said, “Is it just a coincidence with your line of work and this gig? Or did they ask for your best bedroom eyes, handing this stuff out?”

Felix laughed a bit harder than John expected, giving John the feeling that there was some other layer of humor that he was unaware of. “I had thought it was a coincidence at first. I’m listed on a site for odd jobs, but now that I think of it, they had my email directly. They could’ve gotten it from the agency, I guess. I couldn’t figure what their angle was, but, I guess it makes sense to have a sex professional represent a sex game, if they’re not going to bother to send one of their own.”

“I think they’re trying to build the mystique,” John said. “The less you know about it, the less you can spoil the surprise for others.”

“Well, now I can spoil the surprise for them.”

“Will you?”

“Nah. I can respect the rules of the game.”

The way that Felix looked at him, John was sure that Felix was also speaking of John’s own game, and his standing offer. Felix had given his pitch, but John hadn’t given a response. Felix did truly seem to be enjoying himself, and who was John to judge Felix’s sincerity? Like Felix had said, it was about the storytelling, so even if Felix was ‘acting’… that didn’t mean that it diminished his enjoyment, or John’s.

The image of Felix masturbating later to the memory of stroking John under the table flashed through John’s mind, and his dick twitched in response.

John cleared his throat. “I didn’t get distracted from your pitch. I accept your offer.” He instinctively wanted to clarify the guardrails and rules of the encounter, and he realized that was because Arya always did. He couldn’t believe it had ever not been habit. 

He considered what the stop signal should be. Perhaps he could grab Felix’s wrist. But, actually, if he grabbed Felix’s wrist what he’d really want was for Felix to keep going. The tension of gripping Felix to try to slow him down, and Felix pushing back… it excited John even more. “If I need you to stop, I’ll pretend to sneeze. If I grabbed your wrist and you kept going, would that be okay?”

Felix grinned eagerly. “Grab me as hard as you want. Until I fake sneeze. That works well here.”

“Okay. Cool.” John looked out over the crowded convention center, realizing what was about to happen, and his mouth went dry. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” he said quietly.

Felix patted his arm reassuringly. “All the more fun, then. You can let me take the lead. Here, we should scoot up nice and close to the table, and you can ditch your box.”

John did as Felix recommended, and it ironically made them look like they were even more attentive to the table, though they would be the opposite.

Felix waited for gaps in the crowd to give his instructions. “You should unzip yourself and get situated, that’ll be best.”

The sensation was already intense as John undid his zipper, a thrill coursing through him. As he finally freed his dick from its captivity, he sighed with relief. Even just this was a welcome respite.

He heard Felix’s chair shift and knew what was coming, and then Felix’s hand, warm and soft, was on his shaft.

John put his elbows on the table and rested his chin on his hands.

Between the deprivation, the long arousal from telling his story, and the thrill of being in public, every touch felt absolutely incredible. Felix started with his fingertips, mapping out John’s shaft, and then gently curled his fingers around, but didn’t stroke yet.

Even with all of his experimenting with Arya, John had not yet played a game where the premise explicitly excluded orgasm. This game was about only the pleasure in the present moment. John couldn’t stop himself from imagining blowing his load under the table, gripping the velvet edges, painting his jeans and the floor and the inside of the velvet, struggling and only barely succeeding to hide his true activity through a feigned yawn or stretch.

That was a dangerous fantasy, though, in that it rapidly built John’s arousal. Felix continued stroking, still light and soft, but enough to make John quiver periodically.

Though, as Felix continued, John realized that it wasn’t building him towards orgasm. He realized that that shouldn’t surprise him. Everyone was different, and he would have had to coach Felix if Felix was going to get him off with a hand job.

The serendipity was that John could then lean into the pleasure more, not at risk of breaking his rules, just savoring the sensation of another person’s hand on him. It always felt different, when the touch came from someone else. This was a different sort of wonderful than what he and Arya shared.

Soon a dreamy, hazy pleasure settled over John, distinct from the hot, urgent need that was more often his experience. As folks stopped by for their samples, Felix continued to rattle off his script.

 John wondered if to the people who came by, he himself simply appeared to be high. His eyes were certainly dilated and unfocused, his cheeks flushed, his posture melting back into the folding chair.

Felix gradually accelerated his pace, but he was limited by friction and fortunately professional enough to not push it. He had to pause to add more boxes to the table and when he did he kept one in hand. He opened it and tipped out the contents, which was a tiny glass vial. Under the table, where John watched out of the corner of his eye, Felix poured out the contents onto his hand closest to John.

A moment later, John’s shaft was enveloped in soft, slick heat. The lube was the same that had come with his own box, silky and slick to the touch. The sensation heightened and John’s toes curled in his sneakers. He put a hand flat on the table so that he could grip a handful of the velvet and squeeze, trying to find somewhere to bleed off the warm energy that was building in his shaft.

Felix was enthused by that reaction, and just as John was starting to worry that he might have to tell Felix to stop, Felix changed it up. He put his fingers under John’s tip and swirled them there, gently brushing by the incredibly sensitive spot of John’s frenulum, and causing John to shudder and grip the velvet more tightly.

Felix’s fingers then wandered lower to John’s balls, which he first cupped and then gently massaged. And he continued to do that for a while, building a different kind of tension and sensation for John, a mix of blissful pleasure and also throbbing denial. 

The touch felt so good, but his shaft begged for sensation again. He forced himself to keep his hands above the table. He thought about putting his hand to his already slick shaft and indulging, but then he was really sure he wouldn’t last. So, the thought remained just a thought.

As John stole a glance over and saw Felix’s look of mischief, he’d have sworn that Felix had been tempting him on purpose, seeing if he could get John to touch himself.

Felix continued for a few more long, agonizing, wonderful minutes. John took deep breaths, settling back towards savoring the pleasure and away from the table-gripping urgency.

Then, suddenly, Felix returned to John’s shaft and started pumping, hard. John was certain then that Felix was testing him. Not so much breaking the rules as provoking John to assert them.

John’s hand darted under the table and he grabbed Felix’s wrist, hard.

Felix’s face flushed pinker. He pushed against John’s grip, as much as he could without revealing the struggle above the table. John had the better leverage, so Felix’s hand stayed more or less in the same spot, and so Felix started brushing his fingers over John’s shaft again.

With his hands still on Felix’s wrist, John moved his hand back and forth, stroking himself through Felix’s grip. Felix caught the drift and flexed his fingers to vary the sensation.

A warm buzz lingered, but John’s urgency faded again. John eventually released Felix’s wrist, and Felix kept up the slow stroking.

In a quiet moment where nobody was close to the table, Felix said, “You’ve got some serious discipline, don’t you?”

“Just lots of practice, I guess,” John said, “Though I assure you I don’t feel very disciplined.”

“I could really put you to the test,” Felix said, sounding genuinely excited. 

John wasn’t so arrogant to think that he could truly tell, but Felix didn’t seem to be acting at all this point. 

“The ultimate risk reward,” Felix continued. “If you win, you get to go tell Arya that you passed the ultimate test. If I win, I get a delicious snack.”

“So wait, what, if you win I’m buying you a funnel cake?” There was, in fact, a funnel cake stand a few stalls down.

Felix snorted. “Uh. No.”

John understood suddenly that Felix had meant John’s ejaculate, not a convention snack. He was offering to suck John’s dick. “Oh.” Felix was exactly right that it would be the ultimate risk reward. It would be the test of all the control and denial that he had been cultivating these last weeks. John wanted that. He wanted that very much.

“Is that a ‘yes’?” Felix asked, eager.

John nodded.

“Still good with a fake sneeze?” Felix asked.

John nodded, not able to do much more than that. 

Felix scanned the convention floor, waited until no one was looking, turned and pretended to bend over to pick up another box, and then crouched suddenly to the ground and ducked under the table.

A long, long moment passed before he did anything else, perhaps waiting to see if anybody reacted to his sudden disappearance, but more likely he was teasing John. It was working. John felt hyper-aware of everything around him, from the roaring sound of the crowd to the sensation of the still air on his exposed dick, to the dampness of the velvet under his sweating palms.

And then, Felix’s hot, soft, wet mouth around his shaft. John couldn’t help but moan. Fortunately, nobody was too close to the stall at that point.

Felix took his sweet time, slowly touring John’s dick with his tongue, even taking a moment to hold one of his balls totally within his mouth, and then the other. 

Mercifully, excruciatingly, Felix didn’t know John’s preferences or tells and therefore was not at high risk to actually make him come. 

As conference-goers came up for their samples, John greeted them according to the script, his voice husky and soft with pleasure, his eyes gentle and fluttering, his cheeks tinted red. 

When nobody was paying him direct attention, John let himself gasp and moan, the noises swallowed in the constant din of the convention hall. 

He longed to thrust deeply into Felix’s throat, but he withheld. First off, Felix might not appreciate that. And second, even if he did, there was no way that John could face fuck him subtly. So, he was resigned to accepting whatever hot, wet, sucking stimulation that Felix would provide. 

And his hands were not idle, as they greedily wandered John’s thighs and calves and even his ass, emboldened by their code for ‘stop’. At one point, Felix struck up a regular rhythm with his tongue and throat, one hand on John’s balls and the other on his ass, and John was perilously close to needing to ask him to stop, an urgency building that John would soon be unable to leave unanswered.

But just as John was mustering a fake sneeze, Felix changed his tact, and John faded back into a quieter pleasure. 

And it was wonderful. And sensual. And thrilling. And without John’s climax to end it, it was dependent on Felix’s interest and comfort. Eventually Felix’s attentions tapered off and faded, and John watched for a good opportunity to signal Felix that he could return to the table.

When he popped back up, Felix’s hair was in a bit of disarray and John tucked it back for him. John’s shaft was cold with the lingering moisture from Felix’s mouth, and he enjoyed the novel sensation. 

As Felix settled in, John glanced over and noticed that Felix was sporting his own erection behind his tight pants. He scooted up to the table to hide it. 

Felix was flushed and breathing heavily. “What if I…” he whispered to John, “What if I came under the table.”

“That would be pretty hot,” John said. 

Felix’s dick was out faster than John thought possible to work a zipper and then Felix was stroking himself under the table, just as John had imagined himself doing. And Felix was not bound by the rules of the game. John found himself suddenly excited that anyone might find release in such a place, even if it wouldn’t be him.

He took the lead greeting guests as they approached as Felix stroked himself with fresh lube under the velvet-covered table.

John leaned back in his chair so that he could see Felix’s hands, working furiously away at his erection. 

In a lull of foot traffic, Felix panted, “If you can’t come then… I’m gonna come… hard enough… for the both of us…”

Felix was not particularly subtle as he came, his eyes rolling back and his breath coming in ragged gasps as he spurted on the inside of the velvet, but his timing was lucky and nobody took any particular notice.

After he settled, Felix licked himself off of his fingers. “What a good gig,” he huffed.

John grinned and his dick throbbed. “I should get going, but I’ll be in touch about the review.”

“You better be in touch,” Felix crooned. 

John gathered himself and rose from the stall, lest he linger and ruin his game. He would not be able to last much longer behind that velvet table with Felix. And, there really was more of the convention that he wanted to see.

So he bid the young man a warm farewell, for now, and headed back out into the hall.