loungelizard | Prisma ♦︎ Inbox

Larry lets out a discontented hum as he cracks open two bottles from the fridge, then pours them over ice. Ford did technically answer his question, but...it not really the one he was looking for.

"I figured it was something like that." After all, Ford has some toys that would be impossible to handle without some trial and error. "But you clearly must've found something to get you over the, uh...hump." After a pause, he redefines: "...The pain."

Ford clearly enjoys it now. And yeah, he knows Ford is welcoming to a little bit of pain, as a man of more substance than Larry. Yet Larry knows that Ford isn't experiences pain when he's penetrated; there's a subtle difference in the pitch of air being sucked through teeth due to pain versus due to pleasure.

... Hm. Ford sits up a little straighter. He draws a line he doesn't like, frowns, traces over it with a better line.

It's true he can handle pain a little better than Larry can. He spent a lot of the apocalypse with a recently-dislocated shoulder (turns out when you're repeatedly electrocuted while hanging by your wrists it fucks you up something fierce). And, honestly, sometimes what he wants is a little bit of sting, because sometimes that's what you get with a near-stranger at an inter-dimensional hub motel. Sometimes that adds to the experience of something rough and impersonal, where those things are part of what makes it exciting. And that's the only time it ever was part of the equation: when he let it be. By the time he let anyone else near his ass he was more than practiced enough at being a persnickety, demanding bitch about it because he already knew exactly what he liked. There was no room for it to be an issue.

"Ah... lube? Even with precious little experience it wasn't hard to pick up that lubrication was key in most situations." That doesn't seem like quite the answer Larry is looking for, though. The way he's phrasing things...

"...I'm sorry, do you think pain is..." He rolls a few words around in his mouth before settling on: "... standard?"

Larry lets out an unconvinced hum when Ford mentions lube. No, that didn't make much of a difference last time...

"Well, yeah." He returns to the living room and plants Ford's glass back on his coaster. "Every time I've been on the receiving end, it's always been...well."

Larry plops back down into his chair.

"A pain in the ass," he says, with a half-baked smile. Low-hanging fruit, maybe, but is there any other way to talk about this other than behind self-defensive humor? Absolutely not.

Ah. Now the way Larry reacted all the way back in December when Ford explained to him what topping was makes a lot more sense. No, of course he wouldn't want a man to do that to him if he thought it being unpleasant was part of the deal.

"It shouldn't have been."

He sets his pencil down and his sketchbook aside. He's not going to get good work done with the conversation going the way it is.

"It's true that the anus isn't necessarily meant for insertion. Of course it's going to hurt if you just shove something up there. It takes practice and preparation." Maybe that's why he got so good at it. It was something that took time to learn to do right, and there's nothing Ford Pines likes more than a new skill to acquire, particularly one that will earn him praise down the line. "Anyone who told you that it was supposed to hurt was either incompetent or incredibly lazy."

Larry sips from his glass as Ford goes through his explanation, pulling up his feet onto the chair.

"No one...told me anything was going to hurt." Which is only true on a technicality, so he elaborates: "No one told me it was coming, either, actually..."

Larry shrugs, as if the weight of the implication wasn't there.

Ah.

That sucks.

And is frankly surprising, coming from someone who has always given Ford the impression that he is if nothing else very focused on healthy sexual practices. Hell, he's more of a stickler for some of them than Ford is. The very unpleasant implication hangs in the air between them. Ford decides he isn't in the mood to tackle it head-on just yet. Now that's a personal question. Instead he takes a long sip of his drink to give himself time to formulate a good response.

Ford Pines isn't what you would call 'woke'. He wouldn't know what the fuck that was if you asked him. But he understands basic human decency and in particular he has a lot of opinions about doing things to other people's bodies without their express invitation.

"... That may be the difference, then. I had several years of experience gained on my own to draw from when I started inviting other people to join me. It was never a, ah, surprise. I never had to learn to like it. I always did. It was always something that I wanted."

He idly swirls his glass, watching the ice clink together.

"I'm sorry that you weren't as lucky."

"Huh."

Larry thinks he gets it. There was a period of time where Ford knew that anal was a thing before he tried it, and decided he liked the idea of it enough to try it. Larry knew that anal...existed, only in the far-reaching corners of his peripheral knowledge, but he never met a woman who wanted to take it on and he certainly didn't want to volunteer for it.

"Yeah, that makes sense."

It's simple. Larry didn't want it, so he didn't like it. That's why it hurt. That means that this weird curiosity bug that bit him a few days ago isn't because he wants to try it, it's just because he wanted to understand it. That's all. Simple, clean, easy.

He turns to his computer and loads up a game to play for his break.

Edited 2020-06-01 10:22 (UTC)

What. No. Ford frowns in that particular way he does when a sketch isn't coming out how he likes it, except his sketchbook is still closed and his pencil is still down. Larry doesn't get to start a conversation like that out of the blue and then end it just as abruptly. Even Ford, who has always been a fan of a well-timed non sequitur, doesn't find that satisfying.

"Hold on."

The more he thinks about this conversation the more questions he has, actually, and he can't decide which of them feels the most pressing. In the end he decides to just dive the fuck in. That's what he's always done. If it's a mistake he has to trust that he'll be able to fix it.

"Do you mean to tell me that the reason you were so insistent on not being gay is because that was your only experience with it prior to me?"

It's an oversimplification of the situation, but if he added all the proper caveats he'd never get the question out. Conflating being gay with enjoying anal sex is inelegant, but it gets to the heart of the issue he thinks he might have hit on here. No wonder it took Larry so long to warm up to the idea of not being straight if he was primed to think of it in those terms.

"Hm?"

Larry looks over from his monitor when Ford tells him to hang on.

"Uh...No? I'm not gay because I'm not into men." As soon as he finishes the sentence he clicks his tongue and rolls his eyes at himself. To this day it's still a knee-jerk set of words. "Er, I'm not gay because I'm into both women and men. You know what I mean."

Not wanting to be penetrated was a factor, but not the sole reason, for Larry to avoid crushing on dudes, so Ford isn't wrong with his assumption. In fact, throwing out all of the caveats may have worked in his favor by cutting through some major assumptions for this conversation:

Larry shrugs and holds out a hand to explain himself. "Both times were with women, actually."

He pauses.

"Well, uh, one woman for sure. Still confused about the other."

Yeah. Ford knows what he means, because that's the same reason he doesn't call himself gay either. Queer always worked better for his needs in the rare event someone explicitly asked.

The clarification does throw a wrench into the assumptions Ford was making, which is probably for the best. He needs to get better about not assuming. We all know what assuming does. That's probably why he doesn't immediately ask 'what was she', because it occurs to him two seconds before those words leave his mouth that Larry probably doesn't mean she wasn't human. That's a Ford thing.

"What about her was confusing?"

It's straying a little off-topic but there wouldn't have been any point to bringing it up to begin with unless something about it was relevant.

"She had..."

Larry's eyes ping to the side of the room as he considers a choice of words and tries very, very, very hard not to picture what went down that night.

"...organically grown equipment...to do the task."

His eyes return to Ford.

"I don't know how that's possible, but that's how it was."

Oh. Ohhhh. Okay.

Ford is aware that that's a thing, if only because it naturally came up in his studies of anomalies. Humans born with chromosomes that didn't fit the XY or XX pattern, humans that didn't fit into a strictly-delineated binary of gender or physical sex. It was never something he studied in depth because compared to aliens and unicorns it seemed almost mundane. Thanks to his hands he already knew the human body was a strange and fragile thing and expecting every single to one to fit a specific mold was wishful thinking. He never pursued it further than that.

He's kind of wishing he had now if only so he could offer a better perspective on this. Not that it wouldn't have still been the perspective of the 1970s, early 1980s at best, so... y'know. It's also pretty obvious from Larry's facial expression that it's not something he likes talking about much, and Ford can understand why. Ultimately he decides to take the approach that feels most comfortable and straightforward: simple acceptance. That's not the point of this conversation. It was a simple question and Larry answered it and there's no reason to get side-tracked discussing the finer points of human genetics, gender and social presentation right now. Ford doesn't have a PhD in Queer Studies anyway so what would he know?

"Ah. I see."

He rolls that around in his mouth for a few moments to buy himself time, before continuing:

"Regardless of whether they were men, women or neither, my point still stands that that is not standard practice. You've seen the preparatory work I have to do every time we're together." And that's as someone who's been doing it for decades, who likes it! He still bothers, because he's not stupid! "Neither of them made so much as an overture in that direction?"

Like... did Larry think he was doing all that for show? Just because he liked to have stuff up his ass? Because that's true, but it also served a practical purpose.

Larry is silent for a while. Is this really about preparatory work? Would he have liked it any more if he had been better prepped? That doesn't really seem right...

"Well...yeah," he says slowly. "Uh...Nari used lube...and..."

...and...

No, that's about it.

"We still had sex," he offers, an awkward non-sequitur delivered with an off-kilter smile; an attempt to steer the conversation into waters that didn't seem so murky.

Ford knows all about deflection. He does it himself whenever a conversation strays too dangerously close to making him think about things he doesn't much like thinking about. He recognizes it in Larry's words now. He could let the subject drop: that would be easiest. But he isn't sure it's an option he could personally be content with.

"... Why?"

I mean, obvious answer. Larry Laffer has a laser focus on getting his dick wet. It's hard-coded into him.

"Maybe I'm picky, but if someone did something to me that caused me actual pain it seems to me that the clear next course of action would be to leave." He considers for a moment, and then amends: "Pain I didn't want and wasn't expecting, I mean."

The sting of nails or teeth is fine, in moderation. Someone just slapping down some lube and calling that good enough is not.

Boy.

They're really gonna talk about this, huh.

"I signed up for it. I just didn't know what I was signing up for. I mean -- it's the twenty-first century, I figured people found out all sorts of new, fun ways to have sex -- and I didn't want to seem like I wasn't 'in the know'!"

So yeah, he recognizes that he's some fault here for saying 'yes' to an offer that he didn't know the full details of. Laser focus, dick wet, etcetera.

"Aaaaand...it may have involved a ball-gag and a hogtie...so it made it a little hard to throw a yellow flag in the heat of the moment."

Yeah, they are. The more clarification Larry gives the more Ford's demeanor changes. He's still concerned, don't get him wrong, but that's a picture he has a lot less trouble parsing. It tracks, honestly, for a man who backed himself into the corner of pretending to be a totally unrelated drag queen for months because it seemed better than being honest.

"You're almost as good at getting yourself into inadvisable situations as I am. No wonder we wound up gravitating toward each other."

Sure, the situations are a little different, but that makes sense. Ford is more likely to wind up in an unexpected monster fight or in an alien jail, but the general idea holds true. They both tend to get themselves into situations and just trust that they can get out of them somehow, and sometimes that goes more badly than others.

"...You never told me why you asked."

Because he didn't ask why. He just assumed, and that's how they got on this tangent, and he can already feel it heading into another long, tense conversation and boy does he not want to do that again if he can help it.

Larry gives him an exasperated smile and half-giggle, half-sigh. Ford doesn't even know the half of it; most of his adventures are nothing but inadvisable situations and, frankly, Prisma holds the record for "place where Larry has the longest string of sexual incidents that had a genuinely happy ending (for him)."

But he's not going to argue Ford's point as being almost as good. He doesn't feel like getting into bad fights is the trophy he wants to claim over bad sex. It's supposed to be that Ford is the fighter and Larry is the lover. It's like peanut butter and jelly, baby.

"Oh, uh..."

Larry taps on the corner of his desk for a moment as he tries to get his brain to change tracks.

"You always look like you're having such a good time with it. I just...want to understand it better, I guess?"

Look, he's always appreciated a hole that allows him to put his dick in it, but even Larry knows that there's more to it than gyrations and being "good at it" involves a lot more than feedback (and demands) given on the fly.

Listen, Ford just tends to think of 'almost ushered in the apocalypse' as a little bit above other things on the inadvisable situations scale. It's not really worth quibbling about. In the end they're both dumbasses and that's why they love each other.

"Do I?"

It's not as though he can see how he looks, after all, and it's not really in his nature to consciously try and put on a show. It's just, like with most things, Ford wears a lot more of himself on his sleeve than he realizes. That's as true during sex as any other time.

"... I admit I've never given serious thought to it."

But the fact remains he does have a preference, one that he's pretty vocal about, and there has to be a reason. Doesn't there? Now that the thought's been put in his head he's going to chew on it until he comes to some sort of answer, because he can't just not overthink something as ridiculous as why he likes having stuff up his ass as much as he does.

"It does feel different. In more than the literal sense. There's a certain feeling of, uh, accomplishment I suppose you could say that I don't experience with other acts." He grimaces. "That sounds stupid now that I've said it out loud."

Of course Larry's noticed. It's what he gets out of sex, moreso than orgasm. He gets those little reactions out of his partners and he keeps digging deeper, because climax is so much sweeter when you get to listen to someone else groan your name.

"No, no," Larry assures him. "That makes perfect sense..."

He's been there. He's been on the other, non-business end of toys that would make most people go pale just looking at them. Ford's desire to push himself is more than abundantly clear on the nights they're feeling more playfully kinky than usual.

"...most of the time."

Larry lifts up an arm to hold his upper arm horizontal as he points down to his crotch.

"Won't be winning any awards for taking this bad boy--but he still drives you crazy! Hehehe."

Yeah. This is some nice levity. Ford laughs along, glad to have deflected the conversation back onto himself rather than away. Somehow, for once, that feels safer.

"No, that's true. In that case the accomplishment comes more from the way that you react." More specifically, the consistent positive feedback. He thrives on it and that, too, he probably wears on his sleeve more than he really intends. "There's more than one way to measure a job well done."

It's not purely that, of course. There's a deeper layer there. But he doesn't entirely know how to say 'I crave those moments where I can turn my brain off and stop thinking about anything except what's immediately happening, and when I don't have a partner to focus on, something huge up my ass is the next best thing'. He got a little close to it a long time ago when he said that he liked to be fucked hard enough to forget his times table, but that can be played off as a joke. Nothing serious. Certainly not indicative of anything deeper.

How he reacts? Huh, that's an interesting perspective! Larry dwells on it for a moment, twisting his chair this way and that with an idle foot. It makes a lot of sense, actually! That's what Larry gets out of sex, that's for sure: the companionship, the intimacy, the shared moment. Anything touching his dick feels good, but it's close, passionate sex that he wants the most.

It doesn't really come as much of a surprise. They frequently fall on the same wavelength unintentionally, and this just happens to be one of them.

"Good to know!" he chirps contentedly. This is all the information he wanted, right? "I'll keep it in mind," he says, turning back to his computer and finally getting to play some of that game.

A couple days later, it's too hot to have the windows open. Everything's shut up tight and the air conditioner is chugging to try to keep things comfortable, but it also means that it's blowing directly on Larry while he works...and that's why he's swaddled himself in blankets despite it being near 100 outside.

He's so close. He's so close to release. Just these handful of bugs left and he can release it into the world and they can start making money off of it. He's equal parts impatient and overly cautious. It kind of sucks having to be your own client.

Larry yawns as he waits for yet another progress bar to fill, the conversation from a few days ago nowhere near his brain in this moment.

Now long-done with thumbnailing, Ford should be working on the pages proper so they have something other than just the one comic to entice new readers in. He isn't. It isn't that it's too hot to get anything done. It's that he's been preoccupied working on something else, something that's been taking a lot more of his brainpower than drawing human-on-harpy sex.

He doesn't always know the best way to address an issue. In fact he's at the point where he expects that his first instinct for solving a problem is just as likely to get him in trouble. He's also learned that with Larry, it pays to to follow that first instinct because 'absurd and inadvisable' is sort of the name of the game where they're both concerned. When he sees that Larry's a point where his progress is at the mercy of a progress bar, he senses it's his opportunity to butt in.

"Do you have a moment to look something over for me?"

He plops a stack of papers onto the desk before Larry can actually answer. The top paper in the stack seems to be a title page, but this isn't a script for another comic to add to the library. Instead the page reads:

On Digital Anal Insertion, in Defense of Allowing One's Boyfriend to Give a Practical Demonstration
Dr. Stanford F. Pines, PhD¹²

Larry is more than happy to have a distraction from watching a loading bar. He pops up in his seat when Ford approaches.

"Yea--oh!"

He gives the packet of papers a surprised stare as it practically instantly manifests before him. "Is this something you want to publish?" he asks, as he leans over to pick it up--without having read the title yet.

When he does, he gives it a thoughtful pause.

"Hmm..."

He starts carefully reading through it.

For most of it, he has no idea that Ford is referring to Larry as the "case study" for "previous negative experiences" until enough of the little details add up in his mind about three-quarters of the way through. He continues through it, because heck, he's come this far already...and he does get a kick out of all of these graphs and figures that are, when not informative, hilarious and cheeky.

When he finishes reading it, Larry closes the packet of papers and puts them back on his desk. He looks up at Ford with a smile on his face.

"Well, it seems like you have a pretty solid foundation. Buuuuut... I think you need more, eh, scientific and quantifiable evidence to support your claim."

He giggles.

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by the way we probably should have put a CW here for uhhh talk of nonconsent

OH YEAH UHHH OOPS

cw trans stuff. look man if anyone's stalking this thread viewer discretion is advised from hereon

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