Personal

Story Time: My First Date With My Sir

Kate Sloan

It wasn’t even supposed to happen. My next trip to New York wasn’t booked until February, and that seemed eons away. When the cute nerd from New York slid into my DMs after some back-and-forth flirty tweets and asked if I’d ever want to “meet a Twitter admirer in person over coffee or something,” I thought it’d either happen months from then or not at all. But it was a nice fantasy, for a moment. “Eee, a Twitter dude is flirting with me,” I texted my best friend, and I kind of thought that’d be the end of it.

But then pieces fell into place – it’s a long story involving a sugar daddy, a plane ticket, and an unexpected break-up – and I found myself going to New York in mid-December instead. By that time I had almost forgotten about the cute boy in my DMs, until one night when I pondered the trip ahead and made an impulsive decision. “Hi! I’m gonna be in NY from Tuesday to Friday next week,” I tapped out. “My schedule’s a little packed and it’s kind of a last-minute trip, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to squeeze in coffee with you, but I’d like to if we can make it work!”

“Hi! I’d like that too,” he wrote back, and we picked a time and place.

The day came. I wasn’t thinking about our date much. I wasn’t even sure it was a date. I had plans for later that day to get on a train to Long Island and go do a pre-negotiated knifeplay scene with a beau, so this coffee with my “Twitter admirer” was just a fun diversion to fill the remaining time until then. My only expectations were good espresso and maybe good conversation. That’s how you should go into every date, really: expecting nothing, so if anything the slightest bit lovely happens, it’ll be an unforeseen treat.

I walked into Culture Espresso on 38th at the appointed time and spotted him immediately: this blue-eyed boy in a blue button-down in front of blue floral wallpaper. He was a vision from the first. I wasn’t expecting that, somehow, even though his big blue eyes in his Twitter avatar were half the reason I’d tweet-flirted with him in the first place. He was cute in the way that usually makes me write someone off, like: There’s no way he’d be interested in me. But he was. He’d asked me out. I didn’t know what to make of that.

“Hi! Can I buy you a coffee?” he asked, bright and extroverted. I declined, wanting to buy my own drink, because paying my own way on a date makes me feel strong and independent and like I don’t owe anyone anything. He told me later this threw him for a loop, made him wonder if I was indeed viewing this as a date – but he recovered well.

I sat down with my latte and we asked each other about our work, our non-monogamy situations, our favorite musicals. (His was Sweeney Todd. I was immediately more interested in him. And I was already pretty interested in him.) I told him about a story I was working on at the time, about unrealistic sexual expectations; when I said “Lots of guys think they can make a woman come from PIV alone,” he rolled his eyes exaggeratedly and that was the first moment I thought, Yeah, I’d like to fuck this person.

“Do people ever make false assumptions about you because you’re poly?” I asked at some point, fascinated. He’d been non-monogamous for years longer than I had, so I went into journalist mode, probing him for wisdom. He pondered that and said, “Totally. People often assume I’m not serious about the people I date. But I’m very serious about the people I date.” A shiver went through me, a quiet premonition that maybe he could be serious like that about me someday. It wasn’t a “chill” thing to say on a first date, but I’m the least chill person I know, so I wasn’t put off – just intrigued.

At one point, he asked me, “Do you think kink is an orientation?” and I brightened even further at the sex-nerdiness of the question. “I think it is for some people. I think it is for me,” I told him. “I’m a submissively oriented person, and I tend to be attracted to dominant, masculine folks, regardless of gender.” His face remained carefully neutral. I wondered if his ears had perked up, somewhere in there, but I wasn’t sure.

We made each other laugh. We shared a chocolate chip cookie. We traded phones to look at each other’s podcasts. He stared into my eyes with such intensity and depth that sometimes I lost my train of thought completely and could only spout excuses: “I’m sorry, you’re just really, really cute.” He smiled opaquely, politely; I couldn’t tell how he was feeling, only knew how I was feeling. I was feeling a lot.

After about an hour, he asked, “Have you eaten? Do you want to go somewhere else?”

I looked out the window at the bitter wintry urban landscape and mused, “If it were summer, I’d say we should go make out in an alley, but it’s pretty cold out there, so.” I have no idea what possessed me to say this. This is the type of line I might bust out if I was 110% certain someone wanted to kiss me, but in this case I wasn’t. I wanted to gauge his interest, and didn’t have much to lose – we didn’t even live in the same city, after all.

This dare of sorts worked as well as I could’ve hoped, however. “That’s a solvable problem,” he said, without missing a beat, and pulled out his phone.

There is an app called Breather, where you can rent nearby office spaces by the hour for meetings, presentations, and work sessions. Not for makeouts, you understand. That is explicitly against the terms of service. But we are rebels.

As he explained his plan to me, he scrolled through the available spaces, picked one, and showed it to me. He titled our reservation “Important Meeting” and leaned across the table and into my personal space to show me the briefcase emoji he had included. I wanted to kiss him right there, but knew it would be better to wait.

We trekked out into the cold and he led me down blustery city streets toward our “meeting” space. “Your shoes are so shiny,” I commented mindlessly, having no idea I was foreshadowing sext-a-thons about shining and licking his boots that would come weeks later. “Thanks,” he replied with a roguish smile. I wanted him to take my hand and lead me where we were going. I was vaguely aware I was following a near-stranger through the streets of a city I barely knew, and that maybe this was ill-advised, but I wanted the warm kisses I was pretty sure awaited me at the end of this chilly journey.

When we got to the building, he greeted the receptionist with more charismatic confidence than I have ever had in my life. As we rode the elevator to the 10th floor, I asked him, “They 100% know what we’re doing here, right?” and he said, “Oh yeah, totally.” I wanted him to push me against the elevator wall and kiss me hard. I wanted some tangible sign he wanted me as much as I wanted him in that moment. I would have to wait.

We were slightly early for our booked timeslot, and someone else was still using the room, so we waited outside. I leaned against the wall and focused on his beautiful face, to the exclusion of all else. “I’m trying to figure out what celebrity you remind me of,” I murmured. He smiled and stared into my soul with those deep blue eyes. Later I would realize it was Cillian Murphy he reminded me of. Um, the boy is very fucking good-looking. Have I mentioned?

When the room freed up, we walked in and took a look around. Ample natural light flowed in the windows. We plugged in our phones. I took some pictures. We busied ourselves with these things for the minute it took us to gather our courage to do what we had come there to do.

I was mid-sentence the first time he kissed me. Neither of us remember what I was saying. He just walked up to me in the middle of that minimalist room, put his hands on my waist, and pulled me toward him. It knocked the words out of me. Our faces were still cold from the winter wind and our noses were running a little and I wanted more of him, more, more, more.

So I told him to sit on the plush grey couch on the far wall, and I straddled him. I like this position for enthusiastic makeouts because, as per Gala Darling, “this way they are [consensually] TRAPPED and can’t escape until my lips are satisfied! I am sneaky like that.”

I leaned into him for long, hot kisses, feeling his body pinned beneath me and his big warm hands traversing my hips and my thighs and my ass. It occurred to me suddenly that I was tugging on his hair without having asked first, and that might be a problem for when he headed back into work after our date; I leaned back and said, “I’m messing up your hair; is that okay?” and he shot back, with a wry smirk, “As long as you put it back after.” We kissed some more and I felt his tongue slide against mine as his stubble scraped my chin.

In a sudden shift of power, he grabbed my wrists and grasped them together behind my back, so I was writhing above him but in a much more submissive manner than I had been a moment before. “Are you a little dommy?” I asked, tentatively, having theretofore assumed he was on the vanilla side of the spectrum. “I’m a switch,” he responded, with the well-worn ease of an actual kinkster, and excitement sparked inside me even further. “I think I want you on top of me,” I breathed.

We shifted; I laid on my back on that beautifully-lit sofa and he climbed on top of me, staking out a spot between my legs with no tact or pretense whatsoever, just pushing my thighs apart with his slim hips. He ground into me through our layers of clothing and kissed me roughly, animalistically, all-consumingly. “You can bite me, if you want,” I offered, shyly, and showed him where. He bit me hard until I moaned, and made me take it. “Good girl,” he purred against my mouth, and I laughed and said, “You’ve done your research!” He flashed me that disarming grin and said, “Maybe,” before giving me his lips again.

Suddenly, we heard what sounded like urgent knocking at the door. He bolted and, in a moment, was sitting on the opposite side of the couch, smoothing his hair and attempting to regulate his breathing, like a dishevelled businessman whose boss just walked in on him with his secretary. After all, making out in a Breather is against the terms of service. A few moments’ hard listening sufficiently convinced us it was just some construction workers hammering across the hall. When he crawled back over to me and took my face in his hands again, I managed to mumble between kisses, “It makes sense, because you make my heart… hammer.” He laughed. I was so, so happy that he laughed.

He wrapped his arms around me and dipped me in a deep kiss, and for a terrifying moment, I thought I was going to fall. “Don’t drop me!” I squeaked, and he held me firmly and said, “I won’t. I promise. I’ve got you.” It felt good to hear that then; it felt even better to hear it weeks later, when, on difficult days, he would text me things like, “Remember our first date when I told you ‘I’ve got you’? I meant it then. I mean it now.”

His hand kept grazing my ass like he wanted to hit me, but he bit his lip and looked past me at the paper-thin walls through which spankings could probably be heard. “I wish we could be louder right now,” he growled ruefully, and I said, “You know what’s quieter than slapping? Punching…” And that is how I ended up stretched over his lap with my ass in the air.

He pounded his fist against my ass, over and over, making me mewl and moan into the arm of the sofa. I writhed against his hard cock, both of us still fully clothed, deliciously so. He volleyed a steady stream of affirming dirty-talk about what a good girl I was, how well I was taking the pain, how much he liked the noises I was making. “You’re so hot like this,” he said, and I still couldn’t believe he really thought so.

“Is this okay?” he asked at some point, and I melted even further and made happy, positive noises. “So then I guess this is probably okay too?” he added, as his fingertips dipped between my thighs and found my clit through my leggings and underwear. As he circled it and made me moan, he commented on how wet and hot I was, and it seemed ridiculous he could feel that through all those layers – and yet I believed it. This boy had rendered me a puddle of arousal and submission, seemingly without even trying.

We didn’t go any further than that. I’d wondered if we might, but somewhere amid all those blurry kisses, he told me he had to get back to work. People would be wondering where he’d gone. It’s not often someone just disappears on their lunch break. And I had to be getting to my train.

We gathered our things, walked down the hall, and got back into the elevator. This time, he did kiss me. He pressed me into the wall and I could feel every contour of that warm, lanky body I longed to see more of. As he snaked a thigh between mine, I worried I’d get his jeans wet. I was that unraveled, that shocked into my body.

The elevator stopped and some strangers got on, some well-to-do businessmen talking about taxes or sports or god knows what, and we jumped apart and stood silently side-by-side, our hearts thumping, our molecules mingling. We reached the ground floor and stumbled out into the harsh winter sunshine together, dazzled, disoriented. “Will you walk me to where I’m going?” I asked. Google Maps could’ve helped me, but I wanted more of this boy. Just a few minutes more. Or whatever I could get.

He said yes. We weaved through city streets together looking for the store where my best friend Bex works; he was going to drop me off there so Bex could walk me to my train. “I feel weird,” I commented, all light-headed and foggy, and I realized as we talked that I was in subspace. It’s unusual for me to lapse into that space from such a short and, frankly, non-naked interaction – but he had made me so submissive and turned on that it made sense. He didn’t hold my hand as we walked, but he told me later that he wished he had; he was just shaken up and worried about me and worried about how long he’d been gone from work.

We got to the store and paused outside. “I’ll let you know when I’m coming back in February and maybe we can hang out,” I said, trying too hard to seem chill and unaffected.

“Yeah! Totally,” he replied, internally breathless but externally calm. We kissed goodbye, smiled at each other, and I went into the store, wanting to watch him stride off into his city but worried that’d seem uncool of me.

I didn’t think I’d see him again, honestly. I didn’t think he liked me enough to stay in touch. I didn’t think he wanted more from me than just that one weird almost-hookup in a Breather. But I’m chronically insecure about such things; he was showing interest, I just didn’t see it, didn’t believe it.

That afternoon he texted me a screenshot of the Breather receipt, captioned “for your records.” The following morning, I texted him, “Still thinking about those extremely good kisses,” and he replied, a mere eleven seconds later, “I was literally just thinking the same thing.” The next night, we sexted for the first time, while I was curled up on Bex’s living room sofa. The morning after that, he sent me a blisteringly hot selfie while I was waiting in a TSA line at the airport. The next day, when I was back in Toronto, he told me, “I’m really enjoying playing with you and getting to know you. I hope you know that.” I still didn’t quite believe he wanted me.

We’ve been dating for three months now and I still don’t quite believe it. But I’m happy about it nonetheless. I’m happy I answered that DM, happy I went on that coffee date, happy I kissed that boy in that Breather. I’m happy about it every day.

Introducing… My New Tattoo!

Kate Sloan

Kate in a pink shirt, showing off an upper arm tattoo that says "Do No Harm, But Take No Shit" and has pink tulips, blue daisies, and white roses

I’ve gotten enough tattoos now to know whether an idea for new ink is right when it hits me. My red heart felt singularly perfect when it occurred to me, and felt ever moreso with each passing day before my appointment. My pink “good girl” bows made me vibrate with excitement when I first pictured them, and I’ve continued to love them every day I’ve had them. My “this too shall pass” wrist tattoos were more impulsive, but I’d loved that phrase for a long, long time and knew with certainty that I wanted it on my body.

And when I saw Tender Ghost’s “Do No Harm” patch, I immediately thought: I want that tattooed on me.

It took me over a year to finally get around to it, which is good. You should think something over before you put it on your body, or at least, I prefer to. In the interim, I emailed the artist to get permission (they said, “Yes, that is no problem! Just so you are aware, I do not own the phrase but I did create the designs”), bought the patch, and displayed it prominently on my desk so I would have to stare at it every day. I continued to love it. I continued to want it on my body.

What clinched it was when I remembered a song I wrote in 2008 called “Flowers.” The song and the patch’s slogan touch on a similar theme: caring about how you make people feel, but trying to balance that care with your own self-preservation. It’s an important notion to me – figuring out how to be good to others while also being good to oneself. I think that’s one of the major things we have to learn in this life, and it’s something I’m always working on. As with all my other tattoos, I wanted this one to serve as a reminder of something that matters to me.

So I emailed Laura Blaney, who did my thigh tattoos, to set up a consultation. One of her specialties as an artist is gorgeous, realistic flowers, so I knew she’d be a good choice for this tender-hearted floral tattoo. I showed her the patch, and told her I wanted the flowers in the middle to be white roses, pink tulips, and blue daisies – the specific blooms referenced in that 2008 song of mine. (The song and lyrics are below, if you’d like to listen/read!)

Laura drew up a couple different designs, I picked my fave on the day of, she showed me some different blues and pinks for me to choose from, we laid down the stencil in the spot I wanted it, and then she got to work. I read a kinky novel throughout the ~2.5-hour-long inking session, blissed out and floating in my own world. The pain was enough to trigger a subspacey endorphin rush but not so bad that I couldn’t take it. Getting tattooed is a trip!

I’m really thrilled with the result; it is exactly what I wanted. I was nervous at first about getting such a big tattoo in such a visible place, but it’s so gorgeous that all I want to do is show it off. Many thanks to Laura for doing such lovely work, and to Grace at Tender Ghost for making such inspirational art!

“Flowers”

you’re looking sad
to think that I had
the chance to cheer you up

you dance like a bat out of hell
and I know you too well now
to let that go

so I’m going out to find you some flowers
I’m going out to find you some flowers
I’m going out to find you some flowers
white white white white white white white white roses

you’re happier, maybe
but it’s not my fault
and I find myself wishing you’d hold me responsible

all of this time, you were always alone
but I’m here now, I’m here now, I’m here
I’m here now, I’m here now, I’m here

and I’m going out to find you some flowers
I’m going out to find you some flowers
I’m going out to find you some flowers
pink pink pink pink pink pink pink pink tulips

you’ve gotten too serious; I see it too
you’re wounded and hoping I’m thinking of you
of course I am, always am, now I am lately
dreaming of days with you where it’s shady

and I’m going out to find you some flowers
I’m going out to find you some flowers
I’m going out to find you some flowers
blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue daisies

the stems and the petals remind you of me
the stems and the petals remind you of me
the stems and the petals remind you of me
see you tomorrow under the tree

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.”

Magnet

Kate Sloan

Though I’ve had seemingly infinite crushes in my short, limerence-loaded life, few of them were magnetic in the way often described in pop songs. Usually my physical attractions are clipped onto the sides of more romantic lures; it’s rare for that sexual pull to exist loudly and fully as its own boisterous thing.

But three times in my life, I have met a magnet. I hope I meet many more.

“I wanna touch your knee, but very casually. I’m gonna get so near you, so I can hear you, silently sitting very, very close.”

The cute boy in my improv class is ruining my entire academic year.

His open face and unreserved grin, his sloping shoulders and sharp collarbones, his long fingers and strong arms, his tall stature, his dirty sneakers, his tight jeans, his barking laugh. I can’t handle any of it. I can handle exactly none of it.

He is very fucking distracting, in a molecular and neurological way I’ve never quite experienced before. One day I’m journaling before class begins and find my pen wandering off the page as my eyes drift toward him. He’s not even doing anything important, just goofing off with the other boys using props lying around in the classroom, but my gaze stays affixed to his form. I feel like a fucking creep. I am a fucking creep. I don’t know what to do about it.

Another day, I’m talking to some friends in the hallway, and suddenly he walks by. I absorb a cloud of his teenage-boy cologne through deep inhalations and lose my words completely. “Kate?” a pal asks me. “Kate, you just trailed off mid-sentence. What were you saying?” I can’t fucking remember what I was saying. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is the way his shoulderblades look, pressing sharply through the lines of his sweater as he saunters down the hall. Fuck.

We perform together in an improv set, and between scenes, I sit beside him in the wings. I am infinitely, uncomfortably aware of his warm thigh alongside mine. I can feel my body singing, humming, buzzing at a frequency that aches to match his. My molecules purr meltily and moonily at his. But he doesn’t even notice. I am nothing to him. I’m just some girl he kind of knows. This pull I am feeling exists only in my body and I just can’t understand how that can be true.

“I’m a magnet. And you’re a magnet. And we are pushing each other away.”

My second magnet is someone else’s boyfriend. Nothing to be done about it but feel it, and try not to feel it.

This time, at least, I am certain he’s feeling it too. We sit close together at a party, our chairs side-by-side so our eyes don’t quite meet, because that would be Too Much. Other partygoers engage us in conversation and we laugh and talk and sip our drinks, but the inches of air between us are warm and whirring. I want to get just a little closer, feel him just a little more, but I don’t. I can’t.

Flirtatiously, tipsily, I admit to him in a low tone, “I really want to make out with you, but I don’t think that’s allowed.” He smiles like the sweetest little imp and neither confirms nor denies – which is, of course, a “no.” I figured as much. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.

Once or twice, I get up from my seat, beer in hand, to totter to the bathroom. Opening the door afterward, I half-expect to see him just outside, forehead pressed to the doorjamb, mumbling, “I just had to come kiss you.” But he doesn’t. He is good. For the most part.

Past 3AM that night, when I’ve long departed the party and am half-catatonic in bed, I get a text from him: “I really wanted to make out with you tonight too.” I know he did, is the thing. It radiated off him like waves of heat. What an awful, wonderful, terrible thing.

I start avoiding parties where I know he’ll be, because resisting that magnetic pull is possible, but not pleasurable. I’m tired of torture. One evening of aching was enough.

“What is the centre between two centres of attention? Is there a centre between two centres of attention? Or only tension between two centres of attention?”

Sometimes you don’t recognize a magnet right away when you meet them. Sometimes the magnetism has to sublimate, stagnate, before it roars to life.

I meet my Sir in a Manhattan coffee shop, before I know he’s going to be my Sir, before I know he’s going to be my anything. He’s wearing a blue button-down that sets off his cornflower eyes, and the excited-but-guarded smile you flash at your Twitter crush when you’re nervous they’re not gonna like you IRL. I suppress my swooning, because we are in public, for fuck’s sake.

We’ve been talking animatedly for almost an hour before I realize the boy across from me is, indeed, a magnetic forcefield. “Would it be too intimate,” he begins, slowly, watching my eyes widen, “if we traded phones and looked at each other’s podcasts?” And then he leans across the table, ostensibly to show me his screen, but really it’s to dial that electric current up to eleven. My eyes want to slam shut as he gets that close to me, because I feel it, I feel the pull, and it’s such a rare and marvelous thing that I want to savor it in every fizzing atom of my little body.

“Love a good table-lean,” I say to him weeks later, over the phone, making fun of him for those perfect flirtations on our first date. But I know it wasn’t so much purposeful flirting as it was his desire to get closer to me. I know this because I wanted that, too.

Our second date comes after weeks of planning, sexting, flirting, and dirty-talking over the phone. I’m so nervous, I sweat through my winter coat. I’m so nervous, I swill his peppermint tea from a paper cup I’m clutching with trembling hands. I’m so nervous, I start exhibiting actual goddamn panic attack symptoms at dinner. He talks me through it all, and holds my hand, patient and forgiving and endlessly kind.

After dinner, we wait in the restaurant’s entryway for our Lyft to arrive. It’ll take us to the hotel where we’re going to fuck each other’s bodies and minds all night – but all moments until then are torture. He steps toward me and gives me a soft kiss, quick, like he’s releasing a little air from a valve so the whole machine doesn’t fucking explode. I whimper and keen and swoon forward against him, my whole body wanting the kiss to continue, but it doesn’t. Not yet.

“I feel like a magnet,” I mumble, and it has never felt more true. The heat of my skin and the knot in my gut and the twinge in my heart are all insisting: Touch this boy. But I am good, and I wait.

“Me too,” he says, the bridge of his nose pressed into mine, and then our car arrives, and we get in, and I pray for the invention of time travel solely so I can skip this goddamn car ride and be naked in bed beside this perfect boy in an instant.

I meet his eyes in the dim backseat, and I can see my smoky desire mirrored back at me. I can feel our pulses pounding in sync. I know what’s going to happen. And I know I’m going to like it.