Author: Kate Sloan

Hypnowink: That Time I Got Tranced Accidentally

Kate Sloan

As I’ve mentioned before, my Sir is into hypnokink. The first time he ever tranced me was an accident, and practically as soon as it happened, I thought, That’d make a great story to tell at Tell Me Something Good!

So I was excited when I got called up to close out the show at the Playground Conference edition of TMSG. I knew my story would be one of the weirder ones told that night, especially since it didn’t actually contain any sex, but I was excited to tell it to a room full of sex nerds anyhow.

Here’s an audio file of me telling the story, and a transcription of what I said. Enjoy!

Content note: hypnosis, winking, and long-distance D/s.

Okay, so, I have a new long-distance partner. He’s my boyfriend; he’s my Sir. And one of the things that’s interesting and new to me about that is finding ways to bridge the gap, intimacy-wise, so we’ve spent many many hours on the phone together.

And one of the things that he does for me that makes me feel closer to him is he sends me videos of him winking, because I have a winking kink. I’m the only person I’ve ever met who has that. There’s fewer than 50 of them on Fetlife. We call each other “winksters.” Or, I do.

So, first of all, don’t come up to me and wink at me, ’cause it actually is a sexual thing for me and gives me weird non-consent-y feelings when strangers wink at me, so don’t do that. Ask first! You know.

But so, my partner would send me videos of him winking. He has a really good wink. He’ll optimize it to my preferences. It’s very nice.

So, one night I had done something that was kind of scary and difficult, and I wanted to watch a video of him winking as a reward, and I was going through all the videos that he’s sent me of him winking. We were on the phone. This was fairly early in our relationship, so he was like, “How many of those videos have I sent you?” and I counted and there was four. There’s many more now! There’s an archive of winks.

And when I told him there was four, I was like: What if I open them all up in QuickTime, and tile them all next to each other, and loop them all, so there’s just this chorus of winking angels in perpetuity? Just, like, asynchronous winking forever.

When he winks at me, I have this giggle reaction, and he’s listening to me on the phone watching these looping winks for like half an hour, and I’m just like: “The great thing about this is, this is useless to anyone but us. Like, no one else would appreciate this. There’s nothing else you could do with this. I could maybe set it as my screensaver. I could maybe watch it after a hard day. You could strap me down and I could watch it until I couldn’t take it anymore.”

And then I said something which, as soon as I said it, I was like, “Oh! He likes this!” I was like, “You could hypnotize me using these winks.” ‘Cause I should mention that my partner’s biggest kink is hypnosis, and he’s very good at it. He’s usually a top; sometimes he switches. So we had been negotiating some hypno stuff we wanted to do the next time we saw each other in person, so I had said I was down to do it, but we had not done any of it yet, and I was really excited.

So he got really excited when I said that, and he was like, “Yeah, I could tell you that with every wink, you were going a little bit deeper into trance for me, so if you didn’t drop on the first wink, you would drop really hard on the second one, and if you didn’t drop on the second one, you would drop on the third one, and eventually, one of their eyes would close and your eyes would fall closed, and you’d be in a nice, warm, relaxing trance for me.” And I realized that I had fallen into trance. Whoops!

This had never happened to me before, so I didn’t know what that would feel like, but my entire body felt really heavy, and I felt really focused and warm, and my eyes fell closed. And we were on the phone, so he couldn’t see me, so I needed to communicate this to him. So I was like, “Uh, Sir, something’s happening! Something’s happening to me, Sir.” And he, fortunately, is experienced and he knew what that meant. We hadn’t negotiated how long I would stay under, ’cause this was an accident, but he wanted to leave me under for a few seconds so I would get a sense of it, and then bring me out. So he told me about how nice and relaxing it is to not have to move your body, and to just focus on his words. And then he said, “I’m gonna count to five, and when I count to five, you’re gonna feel awake, alert, and totally normal.”

He counted up to five, and he said, “Hi, little one!” and I said, “Hi, Sir!” and he said, “How do you feel?” and I said, “I feel really good!”

I did feel really good. And what I felt, too, was that I never had known what this winking kink was supposed to be. Like, I never really knew how to play with it. It was sort of awkward, like, “Do you just wink at me during sex? I don’t really know how to use this…” It was like our two kinks had come together and made this cute little scene that neither of us had ever known could exist because we didn’t know that the other person existed and had these interesting kinks.

And the other thing I felt was that I really wanted him to trance me again a whole bunch, which he has done a whole bunch since then, and it’s really nice!

Little Girl Blue

Kate Sloan

We met on an app with a blue icon. It seems too saccharine to say, too obvious to point out, but there it is. I saw him first as a blue-eyed boy in my Twitter DMs.

“Is to be in love with blue, then, to be in love with a disturbance? Or is the love itself the disturbance?” -Maggie Nelson, Bluets

Five minutes before our planned first date (that neither of us was sure was a date) in a midtown coffee shop, he DMed me, “Just got here and snagged us a table! Wearing a blue button-down shirt.” I knew immediately that I was doomed.

A blue-eyed boy in a blue button-down is a crush catastrophe waiting to happen. A periwinkle-edged bomb threatening to spark into smithereens. I wasn’t nervous, until the moment I read that message at the 5th Avenue intersection and preemptive desire bloomed in my belly.

My smile was too big when I walked through the door. His shirt was as promised; his eyes were so blue. He kept staring at me hard as I spun stories for him, like he was trying to X-ray through my irises straight to my corneas. “I feel like you’re really listening to me,” I said, breathless, the third time his gaze passed through me so razor-sharp that I lost my train of thought mid-sentence.

“I am,” he said, brow furrowed, like: of fucking course I am. I wanted to kiss him already. I knew all that blue would doom me.

“So what would it be a symptom of, to start seeing colors – or, more oddly, just one color – more acutely? Mania? Monomania? Hypomania? Shock? Love? Grief?”

Two days after I got back from the New York trip when I met him, he texted me: “Oh, by the way, keep an eye on the mail tomorrow.”

Hunched over my laptop in a café window and already caffeine-hyped as hell, I breathed slow to try to still my heart. But I couldn’t keep myself from tapping out: “…??? The physical mail?”

He wrote, “Yeah.” I wrote, “……?????” He was, as usual, calm. I was, as usual, very not.

The next day, I waited by the door with a cup of tea, thrilling, swooning, wondering. When the package arrived, I clawed it from the box with an agitated grin, then tore it open unthinkingly. A copy of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets fell into my lap, and I made a sound like a mama lion protecting her cub.

Bluets had been on my Amazon wishlist since the month previous, when Rachel Syme – whose writing I adore – had recommended it. She called it “the very best book about a color and a breakup and obsession and melancholy and rare facts about pigmentation,” so, obviously, I wanted to read it. And now, as I opened it up, a gift note fell out with this impossibly handsome boy’s name inked under the Amazon letterhead. “Kate, I love this book, and when I saw it on your wishlist, I didn’t want anyone else to get it for you first,” he’d written. “I hope you love it too.” I bit my lip hard and wondered – anxiously, irrationally – if this meant he maybe, kinda, sorta, possibly liked me.

“Did you open it?” he asked me via text, and I spilled thank-yous and exclamations onto him. But he merely replied, “Did you ask first?” No. No, I had not.

“You know better. I’ll probably have to punish you,” he wrote. I could almost see the devious, teasing smile emanating from his punctuation. “You should bring it to New York after you’ve read it, and I’ll hit you with it. That’ll be your punishment for getting a little too excited and opening it without asking first.”

I choked on my tea. “Okay, Sir,” I said. “I can do that.” And I did.

“Some things do change, however. A membrane can simply rip off your life, like a skin of congealed paint torn off the top of a can.”

I read Bluets slowly, savoring it, because every sentence was so packed with meaning and pain that I had to pause several times a page just to breathe and think. It is a book about Maggie Nelson’s obsession with the color blue, during her recovery from a break-up, and it resonated deeply with me. I’d had inexplicable obsessions of my own, in the months since the recent break-up that had speared through my heart.

One day, Sir – I was calling him Sir by then – sent me to a local coffee shop he’d chosen for me because I needed caffeine and food and felt overwhelmed by the world. I sat on a church pew in the sunny café, sipping a latte, munching the specific croissant he’d told me to get, and paging through Bluets with biblical reverence.

“This book is like if Didion was a philosopher,” I texted him, and he replied, “God, you’re brilliant. Fuck. I need you.” I blushed a little and slid further down into my seat, made smaller by his words, made heavier and more meaningful by Maggie Nelson’s.

Twenty minutes and several pages later, I texted him, “lol I’m getting too emotional, I think I should go back to bed,” and he responded, “Welp, saw that coming.” He knew my heart so well already. I trudged through the snow, tears spilling down my cheeks for no reason except that I was so happy about my new relationship and the safety and fulfilment I felt therein, there was nowhere else for my feelings to leak but up and out. I cried in my building’s lobby. I cried in the elevator. I cried in the hallway. I cried as I unlocked the door and weaved toward my bedroom and collapsed onto my big, blue bed.

“Thank you for not thinking my feelings are excessive,” I texted Sir, tears splashing on my touchscreen.

“I am not at all worried about your feelings being excessive,” he replied immediately. “Not even 1%. Not at all.” I cried some more. My periwinkle pillowcases turned navy, in broad, damp patches.

“Eventually I confess to a friend some details about my weeping – its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair.”

One day I asked him if he’d like to pick the hex code that would represent him in my sex spreadsheet, and he was exactly as excited about it as I’d hoped he would be.

Nine minutes elapsed. I could hear him thinking and Googling and eye-dropper’ing from 500 miles away. I read a few pages of Bluets in the interim. My phone beeped. “Can you see how #5FC2EA would look for me, baby? It’s from the cover of Bluets, so I think it fits.”

Weeks later, we laid in a hotel bed side-by-side after sex and I pulled up my spreadsheet on my computer. Just a couple of naked nerds. I opened the custom colors menu in Google Sheets. I sleuthed out the hex code in my messages app. I typed it carefully into my browser. I applied it to the cells bearing Sir’s name. As those rows flooded with brilliant blue, we both moaned.

“It’s perfect,” he said, awed.

“Yeah. It is.”

“One of the men asks, Why blue? People ask me this question often. I never know how to respond. We don’t get to choose what or whom we love, I want to say. We just don’t get to choose.”

We were only on our second date when we discussed him collaring me, but by that point we’d talked on the phone for dozens of hours, so it only felt a little ridiculous.

“It has to be blue, right? There are some blue chainmaille collars on Etsy that I like, with heart-shaped padlocks, and there’s Tarina Tarantino heart necklaces,” I rambled over tortelloni at a stunning, stately restaurant he’d taken me to. “Or, the company that makes my turquoise collar also makes a royal blue one.”

“I know,” he said, immediately, piercing my hazel eyes with his blue ones like pinning a bug to a corkboard. “I know that.” Gooseflesh overtook my whole body as I indulged in imagining why he knew that: him trawling the L’Amour-Propre website late at night, face bathed in laptop light, breath catching as his eyes fixed on that electric blue.

Weeks later, we revisited the conversation. It became clear there was no other collar for us. “It’s just… perfect,” I murmured, peering at it in my browser in Toronto while he eyed it from his in New York. “Yeah,” he replied. I heard the pivotal click of “Add to Cart.”

“And so I fell in love with a color – in this case, the color blue – as if falling under a spell, a spell I fought to stay under and get out from under, in turns.”

One afternoon in February, we checked into a Brooklyn hotel. Cool blue sunlight streamed in the big windows and lit up the white queen-sized bed that would house our passion for two days to come. I still felt breathless around him, plagued with stage-fright, terrified I’d fuck something up.

“I brought you something,” he said, pulling a ridiculous oversized chocolate bar from his suitcase for me, and I laughed. “And something else,” he added, and this time he produced a black leather case, which, when he opened it, contained that stunning piece of cobalt suede. Time stood still in my body, like I’d hit “pause” on my heart and lungs. Oh. Wow.

“Do you like it?” I think he said. I don’t exactly remember, because I liked it so much.

He had me kneel in front of him on the floor, and I stared out the window at the birds and cerulean sky and bare tree branches as he pushed my hair to one side and pulled the suede close against my throat. I’d known this moment would stir my emotions but I didn’t know quite how much. Now, feeling his warmth against my back and his clever fingers doing up the buckle at the nape of my neck, I blinked to spill the tears I felt welling in my eyes. I sobbed a little, a soft sound in the sunlit silence.

We went to look in the bathroom mirror together, and I cried more there, struck suddenly by the blue against my throat and the kind-hearted man standing beside me in my reflection. He held me tight and we looked at each other, at ourselves, slightly disbelieving but wanting to believe. I felt overtaken by blue, and also I didn’t feel blue at all.

“If I were today on my deathbed, I would name my love of the color blue and making love with you as two of the sweetest sensations I knew on this earth.”

Monthly Faves: Dildorks, Dresses, and Daddy

Kate Sloan

Wow, I got up to a lot of kinky shit this past month. Here were some of my favorite things in February…

Sex toys

• My partner is really into fucking me with the Njoy Eleven lately – or, more often, making me fuck myself with it while he instructs me on speed, strength, and depth over the phone. Nothing else in my collection feels quite like this toy. It’s really an astonishing piece of steel.

• Loving the purpleheart truncheon I picked up from Weal & Breech at the Playground Conference. It’s lovely and thuddy, the craftsmanship is beautiful, and I adore the included black leather wrist strap. This company’s wares are so classy and gorgeous, not to mention painful in the best way.

• I told a story at Tell Me Something Good about hypnokink (more on that next week!) and when I was selected to win a prize at the end of the night, someone suggested I choose the Ruse Hypnotize, for obvious reasons. I’ve used it a few times since then and it’s pretty good for its price point: a nice-quality silicone dildo of a satisfying shape and size, that can hit my A-spot and makes for pretty blowjobs on camera. (“Can confirm,” my boyf says.)

Fantasy fodder

• Ageplay is a new thing to my boyfriend, but he’s enjoying being my Daddy. We’ve done a few phone-sex scenes involving me being little and him teaching me a thing or two about my sexual anatomy, or his. Fuuuck, it’s so hot.

• We’ve also been talking a fair bit about bootblacking, one of those interesting kinks that came out of nowhere for me and that I can’t quite explain. I remember telling him on our first date that I liked his shiny shoes, and since then I’ve increasingly wanted to kneel in front of him, put my face/lips/tongue all over his shoes, shine ’em up, and so on. Maybe we’ll experiment with this in March when he comes to visit me.

• I’ve mentioned to my partner a couple times that I have long-time fantasies about Victorian “hysteria” treatments: having orgasms coolly administered to me by a medical professional for my own good. We did some intense in-character sexting about that this month (ain’t it nice when two improv geeks date?!) and he also mentioned wanting to strap me down and use my Zumio to extract an orgasm from me. Um, yes please.

Sexcetera

• It was neat to get to try the new Cowgirl vibrator at the Museum of Sex this month. Aside from concerns about its unnecessarily gendered name and marketing (which we discussed in-depth in a recent Dildorks episode), I enjoyed giving it a shot. My partner picked up the control panel and said “May I?” and I basically melted onto the floor. The Cowgirl is rumblier than the Sybian (at least, it’s rumblier than my 2.5-year-old memory of the Sybian) and I found it more comfortable to sit on. I think I’ll get to try it again soon at Suz’s blog relaunch party (which you should come to!).

• The Playground Conference fucking ruled. Some highlights of my time there: speaking on the opening plenary with a bunch of brilliant babes; my Sir ordering pizza and a cookie to my hotel room all the way from New York when I was too overwhelmed to figure out food for myself; Kevin Patterson shouting us out in his keynote; learning about turning fantasies into realities; recording a live Dildorks episode; spanking a couple of beauties with a bible and various other implements; seeing (and livetweeting) Bex teaching blowjobs; introverty dinners with clever cuties. So much love to the conference’s organizer Samantha Fraser, who is a total badass and deserves all the applause!

Femme stuff

• In discussing how to maintain our close but long-distance connection during the potentially distancing chaos that is a sex conference, I asked my Sir, “Would it make you feel good to choose my outfits for Playground?” He’s previously enjoyed this so I thought he’d like to do it some more, and I was right. I sent him photos of all the dresses I wanted to wear + my tentative schedule for the con, and he chose which dresses I should wear on which days. It was a cute way for me to feel connected to him even as I was hustlin’ and bustlin’ around a busy conference 500 miles from him.

• Hippo Campus is my favorite band, and their merch makes me happy. I own three of their T-shirts now, because I’m a nerd, and they’re all I want to wear on lazy, loungey days. This one, a Christmas gift from my little brother, is my fave: so soft, so snazzy!

• I have a new tattooooo! Probably gonna blog about it eventually, I’d imagine. I went back to Laura Blaney, who did my thigh tattoos; she’s fantastic. It’s colorful and punchy and lovely and I’m excited for it to heal completely so I can show it off!

Little things

Solo theatre dates, front-row centre. Drinking a “Hot Dad Bramble” with my daddy. Slow-dancing to Warm Glow. Compersion. Starburst as aftercare candy. Valentine’s flowers. Getting tied up by a sweet, funny boy who was intermittently singing me showtunes. Wearing my collar to public appearances because Sir said so. Talking to Erin at the Bed Post Podcast about hypnokink, DD/lg, etc. Seeing improv shows with friends. Exciting coffee meetings about new projects. The “Pun Slut” pin my Sir bought me (so perfect). Fancy pens. Sir listening to my radio show and live-texting me his reactions for me to read during the commercial breaks. Getting my hair done and feeling like a queen. Maple cookies. Staying hydrated. Late-night giggly phone sex.

5 Ways to Fuck Up Your Social Media Strategy As a Sex Blogger

Kate Sloan

I’ve been a sex blogger for almost six years, and here’s what I know about social media: it can make or break you, both professionally and personally. I’ve built my audience through smart usage of Twitter, Instagram, and the like, but a good social media presence has also brought many additional blessings upon me: editors at big publications have discovered me through my social feeds, I’ve been offered jobs and gigs because of my tweets, and I’ve even met several partners (past and present) on Twitter. Isn’t the internet wild?!

Here are five disastrous mistakes you can make on social media that will damage your brand and your reputation as a sex blogger, sometimes irreversibly. I have made a few of these mistakes from time to time and have learned from making them, hopefully. Do not do these things!

Treat your followers badly. One of my cardinal rules in my social media strategy is to be generally pleasant to my followers – so long as they’re not being rude, inappropriate, or wilfully ignorant (in which case I sometimes call them out on that). If someone shares your work, compliments a post you wrote, or is otherwise a good and uplifting follower, you should make them feel appreciated for that. Building a strong, supportive community on social media can be done the same way you’d do that anywhere: by being kind and welcoming.

Be sex-negative. You would think sex bloggers wouldn’t need to be schooled on the importance of sex-positivity, but some of them do. I’ve seen many bloggers shame other people’s kinks, make moral judgments about other people’s harmless sexual decisions, mock certain types of porn, or dismiss certain fantasies as “gross” even if they exist only as fantasies. There’s a debate to be had about these things, sure, but I think outright shaming people who aren’t harming anyone with their sexuality is best avoided, especially if you work in the sexual sphere. No one is going to trust you to educate them on sexuality if you’ve made them feel bad about themselves as a sexual person, even if you had no idea you were doing that when you tweeted that vaguely shamey thing.

Be body-negative. Likewise, making fun of people’s bodies is not cool, especially in the sex-positive pockets of the sex industry where such missteps are particularly frowned upon. This includes stuff like fat-shaming, ableism, penis size-shaming, and so on. If you’re making fun of a particular physical trait or condition, odds are, you’re hurting the feelings of someone who reads what you write. Don’t do it!

Buy fake likes and followers. People can tell when you buy artificial likes for your Facebook page or beef up your Instagram numbers with false followers. It’s not a good look. Building your audience is a slow process, but if you’ve done your research on blogging, you already know it isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. So take the time to do it properly. Your audience will trust you more as a result.

Be inauthentic. I honestly think the #1 thing that’s helped me in my social media strategy is being real. I put my actual insecurities, fears, and weirdnesses out into the world, and it establishes a feeling of camaraderie between my followers and I. And crucially, that camaraderie is real, not just something I “put on” to achieve certain professional goals. I treasure my troupe of Twitter weirdos, and the reason many of them are so invested in me and my writing is that I show them a lot of me – the real me. It’s freeing to be so open, and to be accepted in all your strangeness!

Bloggers and blog readers alike: what do you think is most important in a sex blogger’s social media strategy?

 

Heads up: this post was sponsored, and as always, all writing and opinions are my own.

How Did You Know You Were In Love?

Kate Sloan

I’m pacing around my bedroom at a manic clip, one night in January, ranting to my new beau over the phone – because I’m falling in love and I don’t know what to do.

“I want to say it, but I don’t know if we’re ready to say it,” I explain, my heartbeat skittering as fast as my words. “How do you even know if you’re really in love? Do I even want to fall in love in a long-distance relationship? How do you know if it’s too soon? How can you be sure you really mean it?”

I’ve been in love three times before and this is the first time there’s been an open dialogue about it. We’ve read the Wikipedia page for “love” together over the phone. We’ve said “I like you so much” and “I adore you” and “I treasure you” and alluded to the painful inadequacy of those phrases. We’ve lapsed into tense silences where one of us would ask, “What? What are you thinking?” and, both of us knowing the answer, the other would sullenly respond, “I can’t tell you.” “I don’t wanna say.”

Normally when I get to this juncture in a relationship, it’s a private stewing, an internal tug-of-war, an embarrassing call to action that I might or might not rise to meet. It’s never been out on the table like this before. And even now that it is, we still can’t say the thing itself. Or rather, we won’t. Not yet.

“I would rather say it to him in person,” I read to him aloud from my scribbly journal entry on the topic, “because it’s so weighty and I just think that would be the appropriate and right way to do it.”

“Yeah, it’s definitely better to do it in person,” he agrees, “because when you say that for the first time, you wanna touch each other. Real bad.”

A silence passes wherein we both imagine what that will feel like. How we will say it, and where, and then how we will touch each other, and where. I don’t have to ask him if he’s picturing it too. I know he is. And that makes me want to say it all the more.

The first time I fell in love, I was nineteen, and I knew because I simply wanted to say it. It felt natural. The same way I might tell a close friend I loved them, so too did I want to say it to my then-boyfriend. It wasn’t a sweeping passion or a roiling lust; it was a slow warmth that had gathered and grown over the two-plus months of our nascent sweet springtime romance. At first I wasn’t sure, and then at some point, I was. When I said it, in the dark in my twin-sized bed, he hugged me tight and said, “I love you too, and you’ve made me a very happy man.”

The second time was an unrequited accident. This man didn’t want me and I knew it; I knew it for an entire year or more, just like I knew I loved him. It took months and months for me to call it “love,” even to my best friend or in the confines of my journal, because love is embarrassing, messy; there is a permanency to it that makes it so much more of an emergency alarm than just calling it a crush.

But I reached a point where I felt chemically dependent on this man, mired in depression whenever he would leave and espresso-peppy when he was within reach, and that’s when I reluctantly began calling it “love.” Never to his face, never where he could hear it, but that’s what it was to me.

The third time, it built up like water in a dammed fountain. My introverted, reserved boyfriend played me hot-and-cold so thoroughly that I wasn’t sure I was allowed to feel love, wasn’t sure he’d accept my love even though he’d accepted me as his girlfriend officially. Hanging out at his apartment after lunch at his favorite ramen restaurant, I kissed him tenderly in bed, wanting intimacy, but he just wanted to play video games. I got so frustrated by him ignoring me that I announced I was leaving and did so, forgetting my ramen leftovers in his fridge.

The next day, I came back “for the food,” wounded and contrite, and cried into his chest as I mumbled, “I wanna tell you something that’s gonna make me cry even more: I love you.” He held me tighter and said, “I love you too. I’ve known that for a while. I just didn’t know if you were ready to hear it.” It was exactly the kind of backhanded, confusing comment I had come to view as normal in that relationship. Knowing me, I probably made some kind of “ramen-tic” pun.

When my current beau first told me he might be falling in love – by invoking late-night Google searches and Wikipedia trawls – I wasn’t sure how I felt on that front. “I feel like I should have more to say about this,” I wrote after relaying the episode to my journal. “Do I want to fall in love again so soon after getting my heart broken? Do I even feel like it could happen with this boy? (…Yes.) Do I feel safe getting to that point with a long-distance person who already has other partners? (…Maybe.)”

But for all my hemming and hawing about being unsure, certainty whammed me over the head in the coming week. I’m a linguistically-minded person: I organize my thoughts and feelings by articulating them in words, as you may have noticed. So although I’d agonized about how to know love when you see it, ultimately I recognized it by what I wanted to say, and how often I wanted to say it. The words “I love you” stagnated in my throat when we talked on the phone, and buzzed in my fingers when I texted him. Maybe it’s simplistic to suggest, “I think I love you, therefore I do,” but I don’t know of a better barometer. There is no scientific test for love (well… romantic psychology researchers like Helen Fisher might disagree, actually) so for now, I know it’s true when it feels true and I want to say it. That’s good enough for me.

We finally say it on our third date. That sounds ridiculous, unless you know how many hours we spent on the phone between each in-person rendezvous. Long phone calls stretched four or six or eight hours into the night, entire emotional journeys of their own, with laughs and tears and phone sex and warm cuddly mumbles. We fast-tracked our relationship on those phone calls. We rushed toward love, exhilarating and good.

Our third date is a mottled mess of feelings: a tender kiss in the lobby of the Wythe Hotel, a collaring and sweet sex in our second-floor room, Italian food and philosophical discussions at Leuca, and hours of dancing to my favorite band at Brooklyn Steel. We cuddle in the Lyft back to our hotel late at night, and as we pull up, he says, “Can I show you the roof?” I nod, he takes my hand, and we get in the elevator to The Ides.

The bar is dim and ornate, like so many places he’s taken me, with a stunning view of the big beautiful city where I met this boy I think I love. We cuddle up in a corner booth, and he orders me a drink like he always does, and it feels so comfortable and cozy, like we do this every day. But we don’t, and that uncommonness feels cozy too.

At some point he goes silent and presses a kiss against my shoulder. “I wanna tell you something, but I’m scared,” he says. I didn’t see it coming, and also I did. I smile and hold him tighter because I want him to feel supported in this brave thing he is doing. I want him to land safely on cushions when he makes this leap. “Kate…” he says, slowly. I listen harder. “Kate, I love you.”

I say, “I know,” because I do; I can feel it radiating off him, have felt it over the phone and via text and just generally in my periphery, the sensation of being loved, the sensation of loving. I press even more of my body tight against his in that little booth and tell him, “I love you too.” We kiss and we touch and we laugh about how long this took us and how perfect it turned out to be.

The candle on our table casts a glow on his face that is as golden, precious, and ephemeral as this love I hope will last a long, long time.