> I have two lesbian friends. Real ones.

I have two lesbian friends. Real ones. Not the Instagram kind who make out at parties for male attention and then go home to their boyfriends. Actual carpet-munchers who share a one-bedroom, a dog that hates men, and a mutual disdain for my entire existence that somehow still qualifies as affection.

My birthday rolls around. I am sitting there like an idiot, half-hoping someone will acknowledge I was born. These two show up with a box, all smiles, matching flannels, the whole lesbian starter pack. They hand it over and say they got me something special.

I open it. A watch. Not even a cool watch. Some mid-tier Casio looking thing with a metal band that will turn my wrist green in three days. They look so proud. I say thank you. I smile. I put it on.

Then it hits me.

A week earlier we were drinking at their place. I was deep in the bottle and I said, completely deadpan, that for my birthday I wanted to watch.

That was it. "I want to watch."

I meant them. I meant the whole production. The scissoring, the strap-on logistics, the hair-pulling, the wet sounds, the girl-on-girl industrial complex playing out two feet from my face while I sat in the corner like a degenerate court painter. I wanted front-row seats to the lesbian Olympics. I wanted to study the technique. I wanted to leave with notes.

They bought me a fuqing Timex.

I wore it for three days out of spite. Every time I checked the time I thought about what I had actually requested. 3:47. Still not watching two women destroy each other. 6:12. Still just a guy with a watch and an empty imagination. 9:03. Still wondering if they really misunderstood or if they understood perfectly and this was the most polite "absolutely not, you disgusting straight man" in gift form.

I texted one of them. "Hey so when I said I wanted to watch..."

She replied with a laughing emoji and "we know."

They knew.

They sat there, looked at each other, decided the kindest possible answer to my request to spectate their sex life was a twenty-dollar digital watch that beeps every hour. That beep is the sound of my dignity dying on a loop.

I still have the watch. I keep it in a drawer. Sometimes I take it out and look at it the way a man looks at the one that got away. Except the one that got away is two lesbians fuqing while I sit there holding a Casio like a participation trophy for being a pervert who got friendzoned by the entire rainbow.

Next year I am saying it with diagrams.