A very good friend of mine, someone I’ve known for most of my life, is in town. While he’s like a brother, he has no clue about my….lifestyle.

When he and I are together we tend to be very silly and to those who aren’t in on our jokes, we can probably come across as total buffoons.

Tonight was no exception.

Since we’re both on tight budgets, we decided to paint the town red by going for long walks and stopping in coffee shops to fuel up on caffeine.

We were standing in line for the bathroom at Starbucks. He was behind me in line and doing something silly with..well I can’t even remember what the hell we were doing. Maybe we were talking about our favorite Bill Hicks moments or doing fake spit-takes with our coffee cups or…fuck I don’t know. All I knew is that we were brothers once again and it felt damn good. I had missed these moments with my friend and we were making up for lost time.

All of a sudden, I froze.

Holy fuck.

Standing right behind my friend was a well-known person in our little BDSM world.

No, I’m not going to name-drop.

Now I’m not egotistical to think this person would have any clue who I am, but I know we’ve met a few times and exchanged pleasantries. Under any normal circumstances I would have said “Hi, blah blah blah nice to see you again and blah blah….” But with my friend there, I had hoped they wouldn’t recognize me. What if this person said “Hey aren’t you the guy that translated ASL for my class at….” then revealing to my bestest buddy that I’m into “….”.

Now I realize that they’re probably not the type to just blurt out stuff like that, it was still something that made me paranoid.

My friend asked me why I stopped goofing around and I just told him to shut up and I’d tell him later. He looked at me and said “You’ve never NOT wanted to goof off. What’s wrong?”

I looked at him in a way that I hoped would make him just drop it but he didn’t.

I ran into the bathroom and did what I needed to do. The bathroom was filthy and I didn’t linger. My friend ran in quickly and I wanted to say something to my fellow kinkster, apologizing for my friends behavior but he came out before I could say something he came back out and started joking to this person about the filthiness of the bathroom. Sure I knew he was just trying to be charming but I’m pretty sure he came across as someone on an hour pass from the mental ward.

I dragged him away as we all parted ways.

“You have no idea who you were just goofing around with do you?”, I asked.

“Them? No, who was that? Is that why you were acting so weird and trying to get me to shut up?”

“Just a friend of a friend”, I said.

While all night I had wished Sade had been with us as well, I then realized Sade would have been recognized….and possibly had been called this name that my buddy had never heard before.

So that’s why I’ve been saying “Fuck, that was close” for the last few hours….and why I’m still a bit embarrassed.

Thankfully I’m not that well known.