My friend sent me an Instagram message asking me to say hi on WhatsApp because she had something to show me. That was already an unusual amount of procedure for two people who normally talk about everything.
We’re both 25, she’s a woman, I’m a man, and our friendship has never involved much editing before we speak. Sex is a perfectly ordinary subject between us. We can talk about it without wrapping the conversation in apologies or pretending we’ve never heard of it.
So it wasn’t the possibility of a sexual topic that surprised me. It was the slightly formal invitation to move to another app. For once, I had advance notice that something was coming, along with absolutely no useful idea of what it was.
I messaged her on WhatsApp. She sent a photo I could view once.
It showed her bare upper body. The thing she wanted to show me, as I understood it, was a hickey near the place where her upper arm meets her shoulder. There was the subject of the photo, and then there was rather more photo than I’d expected.
For a moment, I was confused. We were comfortable talking about sex, but receiving that picture felt different from having another frank conversation. One was familiar territory. The other had just arrived on my phone with a one-view limit.
I kept coming back to the gap between the apparent purpose and what she’d actually sent. If the point was the hickey, why show her whole upper body? I couldn’t tell whether she was simply that comfortable with me or whether she wanted me to see her sexually. The photo made the second possibility hard to ignore; it didn’t tell me which one she meant.
And that was where my mind went: friends with benefits. Was she taking a first step toward us having sex while staying friends? Until then, talking freely had been something we did. I was now wondering whether she was suggesting something we might do.
The hickey itself wasn’t an invitation. Neither was our ability to discuss anything. What caught me off guard was getting such a revealing picture from someone I already knew in a different way. I had one disappearing image and a fairly substantial question about what kind of friendship we were having.
I didn’t leave that interpretation entirely inside my head. I replied that I thought this was turning into a friends-with-benefits relationship.
Her photo was set to disappear. My response was considerably less subtle.
