u/JustAGentleMouse

So, I've had kind of a week. Nothing too horrible--it's just been stressful and I haven't been sleeping well. I feel all my anxiety coiled up in my body. I feel like what would really benefit me, and what I really need, is to have my brain blasted into the next galaxy with orgasms and praise.

But of course, stress is doing what it does best and is just being a total libido killer. I just cannot muster any desire to touch and be touched, even though I do think it's what I need! And my partner would love me to muster it, even though (for the record) he's not putting any pressure on me to do so and would rather wait until I want it as much as he does. And I want to want it.

So my question--and I guess I'm asking generally, but especially through the lens of being in a soft pleasure-focused D/s relationship--how do you get into the mood when you want to be, but you're just not?

(I feel like I have asked this before, across the internet. It's the eternal puzzle of my sex/kink life, lol.)

It was the summer after high school, and I spent most days with my two close guy friends, whom we'll call Ben and Simon. We were 18, but we were pretty inexperienced. Ben had allegedly gotten to third base once, and I had shared a few chaste kisses with guys who were not actually interested in friend. Simon had never kissed anyone, as far as I know.

Ben was a big guy, with brown hair and steady blue eyes that radiated quiet confidence. Simon had jet-black hair and glasses. He was one of those guys who started high school as a nerdy underdog type and then, over the next four years, quietly became hot without anyone realizing it. A little bit of a Clark Kent situation.

I was stick-thin and lanky, with long dark-blonde hair and very pale skin. I was cute but not hot, and I was shy and critically lacking in self-confidence. My friends always (lovingly) made fun of me for being flat-chested, ghostly white, and skinny. I was a straight-A student and a people pleaser, with an offbeat sense of humor that only came out around people I knew well.

We were all very much in a friendzone with each other. Ben and Simon had both told me at some point that they had crushes on me, but nothing ever came of it, so I figured they'd gotten over it. I was regularly allowed to spend the night over at Simon's house, with Ben present, and no parents ever blinked an eye: that's how platonic our friendship seemed, and was. Both of them joked around with me in a sometimes flirtatious way, like putting a hand on my thigh and playing chicken as they moved it upward, but it was all pretty innocent.

On the night this happened, I don't really know how it started. It was one of the sleepovers at Simon's house. We had just watched a movie and probably goofed around on the early 2000s internet for a while (Strong Bad, anyone???) before deciding it was time to go to bed. I always slept on Simon's bed, and Ben and Simon had sleeping bags on the floor (don't ask me how that was fair--it was Simon's mom's rule, lol). But currently, we were all sitting on the bed chatting and joking and procrastinating going to sleep, just trying to prolong hanging out the way teenagers do. 

I was wearing a spaghetti strap tank top with no bra (because I didn't really need one) and blue plaid cotton pajama bottoms.

Simon had a large bottle of lotion on his nightstand. Ben saw it and we both started teasing Simon, who insisted it was there because his hands got very dry. Sure, dude.

Ben squirted some lotion onto his hands and then, out of nowhere, wiped it on my shoulder. 

"Hey!" I objected to the big cold glob. 

"It's okay," Ben said. "I'll rub it in." 

He rubbed it into my bare right shoulder. Then Simon did the same thing--squirted lotion onto me, rubbed it in. Ben started rubbing more lotion onto the other side. It was all very goofy and none of us really knew why we were doing it, except, in retrospect, I guess they were sexually frustrated 18-year-old boys who wanted an excuse to touch their female friend. 

They kept rubbing lotion onto me, and then I noticed that Ben's fingers were no longer on my shoulder but the top of my chest. They moved down past my collarbone and grazed the lacy neckline of my tank top. 

I became very still and curious about what he was doing, hyper-aware of the contact point between his fingers and my skin, and my heart picked up pace. As Simon continued rubbing my other shoulder, Ben's fingers had already moved inside the top of my shirt, and were pressing lotion into the top of my breast. 

"What are you--" I ventured in a quiet voice. It felt good and I didn't want him to stop, but also didn't know how to react. 

"Shhh," Ben hushed me. "Just let it happen. Are you chicken?"

I shook my head defiantly. "Of course not."

Simon had stopped with the lotion and was watching now. As if rehearsed, they both started hushing me--"shh, shh"--which put me in almost a trance-like state, where unusual things were permissible. Ben's hands crept closer and closer to my nipple, and his fingertips finally grazed it. I gasped, then blushed. My heart was racing. I felt my nipples harden, but tried to remain nonchalant. 

"There it is," Ben said, his voice soft. He circled my nipple with his finger, then lightly pinched it. "Simon, you gotta try this."

My face was hot. Simon put his arm around my shoulder and hovered his hand over my breast, and then checked in with me. "Is this... okay?" 

I nodded, still blushing furiously, and felt his hand cup my breast and brush my nipple with his thumb. I was getting wet.

Ben started to pull down the straps of my tank top. I made a feeble attempt to brush his hand away--not really wanting to, but feeling like I should--and Ben said, "Shh, let it happen. Hold her arms and help me, Simon." 

Simon, again, asked me if it was okay, and I said, "Sure, whatever," trying to sound casual. (Also can we just take a moment to applaud this guy for checking in and asking for consent??)

So Simon held my thin wrists firmly behind me with one hand. The other hand followed Ben's lead. (This part I remember as really turning me on--Simon holding my arms from behind and allowing him full access to my body.) Positioned on either side of me, they each slid a strap of my tank top down over my shoulder and pulled the shirt down to my belly button, exposing my breasts fully to the air-conditioned room and the overhead light and my friends' eyes. 

Once I was completely exposed, they were quiet for a moment, taking it in, then each began touching me. They teased and pinched my nipples, lightly squeezed me, grazed their fingers over my breasts. They even remembered the lotion and rubbed more of it into the thin, sensitive skin around my nipples. It was a powerful, heady sensation for someone so inexperienced, both being physically turned on by the breast play and also having this out of character moment with my two close friends, as though we'd all stumbled into an alternate reality where this sort of thing was normal.

And yes, I wanted it to go further, for them to trace their fingers down my stomach, to my thighs, to pull off my pajamas and probe the dripping wetness between my legs, to push me down on the bed and spread my lips and stroke my clit in slow circles like they were doing to my nipples--and yet, the tiny portion of my brain that was still thinking rationally knew I wasn't ready for that. Even if they did it, and it felt good, and it didn't complicate our friendships... then what? There were two of them and one of me. I had never even seen an actual human penis close-up before and my careful, anxious brain wasn't ready for the implications of any of that.

I don't know how long they kept at it. It could have been 10 minutes, it could have been 2 hours. Time passes strangely when these things are happening. Eventually, one of us--probably me--must have said that we should really go to sleep, and we dispersed. In retrospect, I'm sure they both had terrible blue balls, which I feel mildly bad about, but that wasn't really on my radar at the time.

It was all a long time ago, and it's hard to imagine that getting my boobs touched was at one point so thrilling, but it really was. (And I still get a little turned on when I see bottles of that particular brand of lotion.)