This Meaningful Sex: Part One

 

Thanksgiving was so much lovelier than I could’ve hoped for. Talking to my sister about the fancy garden break-off gave me some much needed perspective, as did just getting the heck out of town. Today, I made some gentle moves toward Whoever Is Next, but longing for This Charming Man is making me so blue. So I’m typing to lo-fi and disentangling the lost-love feelings.

Conventional thought says that hot sex can be distracting from seeing someone for who they really are, can keep us from powering along to better matches and more-fulfilled expectations. That’s certainly true in this case, but I think the opposite is also true.

Sometimes, I think, bodies know how to love in ways that hearts and minds can’t translate, aren’t ready to see, or just can’t fit into the rest of day-to-day life. Knowing who This Charming Man and I really are, the fact that we connected in ANY way, let alone a (to me at least) spiritually meaningful way, is a MIRACLE. It was a miracle created by the wisdom of bodies. (Okay, yes, also by the wisdom or post-quar horniness, and the not-wisdom-but-welcome break I took from screening for politics.)

The first time I felt him inside me, after ropes and so much other cuteness on our daytime second date, the FIT of him was uncanny. I do partly mean the physical fit—if I could write symphonies to his long, friendly, and eternally hard dick I would. But there was also, I felt, an emotional sliding-together. A rightness. A made-for-each-other. (Wait, is this how women who are used to PIV sex more than I am feel all the time? Is this swirl of attachments and emotions and chemicals something most people just know how to navigate?)

Even (especially) as he pulled my hair and I bit and twisted and sucked his nipples, I felt drawn into his heart, into tenderness and sweet team effort. Every kiss and touch and graze and handhold felt like a recognition, a welcoming home. You were made for me. We were assembled out of stardust and Hentai and playlists and national emergencies to care for each other in those hours, in those weeks.

Yes I know. Oxytocin is strong stuff. But so is love and fate and wet, slippery magnetism.

He was exceedingly PRESENT. He felt both entirely in service of my pleasure and SO turned on. Miracle, miracle, miracle. On our handful of nights together, whole albums went by, looped around once, twice. Long playlists weren’t long enough, the music only sometimes had to be tended to while we played, so easily.

Knotty Thursday: Simple Handles (There’s a Danger in Getting a Deep Need Met)

One of my favorite moments with This Charming Man was when, on our second-to-last date, I tenderly showed him how he could do a girth hitch around each of my upper thighs to use as handles.

Once the handles were on and cinched tight, he told me to get to the edge of the bed. I lay parallel to the headboard, knees in the air. He stayed standing, held onto my ass and thrust in, then regained the handles. I was always (and still am, writing this) soaking wet for him, the gushingest I’ve ever been for anyone, and that is REALLY saying something. Everything in me flowed out to him, to his smell, his charm, his humor, his beauty, and ohyeah the ropes. In all my years of adventures, I’ve never been as turned on as I was for This Charming Man.

I’m afraid I’ll never feel attraction that powerful again.

He tugged the ropes from side to side and then APART, pulling me open, wider and closer. Open, open, open, pussy, heart, and soul.

“You make me feel so good.” I heaved and sighed and huffed.

“I’m glad. You deserve it.” It’s kind of a miracle that I didn’t cry for him until our last day. His words threaded up inside me, stitched me up, gauzed up wounds with a peace I didn’t know was possible.

That’s a lot to put on one young man who has a lot of other stuff going on. I try now (though I certainly didn’t see it this way in the moment) to understand it was just dom stuff. I didn’t and don’t know where to go with all that fulfillment, all that healing, all that emotion. I don’t know how to take it to heart now that he’s gone, but I hope I can before too long. I don’t know what any of it felt like from his perspective, I wish I could. Either way, that bliss, that comfort, that rest, is mine and I hope it doesn’t always hurt so bad to think about it.

Anyway, we came together beautifully, and if I hadn’t already fallen for him like four dates ago, I was certainly a goner now.

Afterwards, when he was up taking off the condom and I was laying back tangled in the comforter, feeling ravished and adored, this thing happened. I think he said a thing. It was the second or third time I thought I heard him say it, probably a dick-drunk trick of the ears:

“I love you.”

It could have been “how are you?” or any other set of syllables. I left it there because I couldn’t have heard what I thought I’d heard. This is the part (one of the parts) where I feel truly crazy, this shimmering hallucination of my dearest wish. He can’t have said it, not on the third date or the sixth, not in the afterglow or the throes. If he did, maybe it was a trick, maybe a spellish part of the charming. Or maybe it was real.

 

Seventh Date Tears, Part Three

 

To get to the rest of this hard, hard day, I have to backtrack to the date before it. The Failed Fancy Garden Date was on a Friday, and the Monday before we’d had (my favorite) a make-out-in-front-of-Gilmore-Girls-then-have-all-the-beautiful-sex date. Our connection that night felt so thorough and deep (Ha, yep, that too, but for now I’m parsing out the emotions.) that I couldn’t think how I was going to shift into casual mode for The Lovely Guy’s already planned Friday night visit. Awash in satisfaction, peace, and a little bit of the Relationship Escalator, I decided it was time to let The Lovely Guy go.

The Lovely Guy and I had a sweet and kind text exchange, and he told me to reach out again if I ever felt the need.

This Charming Man hadn’t asked me to be monogamous, but I wanted to give him my whole self. I was ready to sink into lovely-dovey mode like a warm bath. I had well and truly fallen for him and I was doing the move-too-fast thing. It made me happy and also freaked me the fuck out.

Anyway, back to the Friday of the garden date. When This Charming Man left to go home and plan for his D&D game that night, I had time for a little nap before work. But instead of napping, I texted The Lovely Guy and asked if he happened to be free that night, and he was. He showed up fresh from work with a big bottle of my favorite pink wine.

The Lovely Guy really came through as a friend that night. He advocated hard for me to keep going with This Charming Man, explaining the cultural differences between me and both of them, shedding welcome light on some of my white lady blind spots. Plus, after the moderate tangles of the afternoon, it felt really nice to be talking to a cute liberal. Really, there’s enough to disagree about here on the left.

I sent The Lovely Guy off early even though he was so cute and smelled so good. Neither he nor I wanted to make things more complicated or confusing with This Charming Man.

When I woke up the next day, it’s possible that TCM was already all the way gone from me. His like-clockwork “good morning” (Which we’d sometimes followed by talking about what we’d dreamed. Ohhhhhhhhhh OMG I miss him.) was noticeably absent.

Either way, I knew I had to let This Charming Man go. I wrote a way-too-long breakup text. I used the word love, which I meant. It sucked. I cried all day. I watched The Starling, and then Birdbox, and then A Quiet Place, all scratching the itch of my lost and fighty mind.

I know dealbreakers are real. I know you should never start a relationship hoping that something deep about the other person will change. That Friday, in that great garden tangle, we’d both been trying to fix each other, and that is fundamentally unkind. Still, it feels like a great failure on my part, to have found such a beautiful connection and then let it fall so thoroughly apart.

I wish, wish, WISH there was something I could’ve done—not panicked, slowed down, asked the right questions, let him know I heard him. I wish it didn’t have to end the way it did. I wish it didn’t have to end at all.

Seventh Date Tears, Part Two

I miss him so badly all the time. I still, nine days later, can’t believe such a pretty date could go so, so wrong. By the time we were just starting our walk through the fancy gardens, he was correcting everything I said, taking up for anyone and anything I had a problem with—my disinformationy unvaccinated brother, Thanksgiving, Ronald Reagan, he took their side.

As we hugged and tried to reconnect in a quiet little vined alcove, he started in about how “Democrat” and “Republican” are just labels that divide us, how people like me on the left are just as responsible for the “discord.”

“You have to put “Moderate” on your dating profiles, I could have just swiped left!” I said in defeat and exasperation. I’m really, really glad, even in the midst of this annoying story, that I didn’t swipe left.

There was a moment, before I turned back up the path to go home. The alleé of pines and fall trees was decorated for Christmas, and even in the bright noon light, a cascade of blue lights lit up over the oranges, reds, and browns of the trees. He held my hand there, tried to keep me still. He tried to briefly to hold me by the wrists, but I was already fleeing.

(“Why don’t you just MARRY the moment?” I asked toward the end of the day. “I would love to, but it’s already past.” I guess that was the last time he made me laugh.)

I started missing him as soon as I turned away from those daytime Christmas lights. We talked/fought all the way back to the city. On our (dear, dear) third date, we’d watched Gremlins 2, and now we were breaking all of our own Gremlin rules. Instead of “don’t feed them after midnight” it was more like, don’t talk about Dave Chappelle, vaccine-deniers, Russian disinformation campaigns. I felt the kind of crazy I felt before I estranged from my mom, the kind of scary detachment that comes from living in separated realities. The gaslight feeling.

I took him home with me anyway, I wasn’t ready to let him go, I’m still not, even though I guess I have. We’d missed our garden lunch so we had peanut butter and honey sandwiches. We sat close on the couch and my queenly fat cat crawled into his lap. The three of us sat there, beautifully captured in time.

I was still kissing This Charming Man, but I wasn’t reaching him. I asked him to come up to bed and hold me, and he did, off-to-the-side and chaste. As soon as we were there, more tears came, so many tears came, brokenhearted tears, all-the-topics tears. Grief and loss and shame and fear and loneliness and love.

He did this thing that I can’t quite get my head around, that I love so much and maybe shouldn’t. I was apologizing for crying, trying to stuff my face into the pillows. I kept saying “This SO isn’t cute.” But he restrained my hands away from my face, stayed above me, and just kind of witnessed the tears. It was (maybe creepy, I don’t really care) an act of love.

“I’m still here,” he kept saying, but he wasn’t, not really, or I wasn’t. We were both trying hard for it not to be over, but the day was broken, it just was.

 

Knotty Thursday: Untangling Break

To post this picture from a couple of weeks ago, I cropped out the most beautiful, the silliest, the most unrestrainedly (ha) joyful smile. I'm deep in heartbreaktown for the foreseeable future, only seeing  (FWB) The Lovely Guy and giving the rest of dating a well-earned break. Not for long, I hope!

The lesson here, or one of them, is not to go another five years before I find someone to tie and be tied by. I guess I can't really control that, but I think it's really, really important to keep looking. The rope part of love isn't the only part, of course, but it's vital to me and I want to keep honoring it. Thanks for being there, dears, to keep me accountable!

It's gonna take me a while before I can write about the emotions and sensations of all the intimacies of my time with This Charming Man without just crying and wanting to call him, but I'll start here. The moment on our first date when I realized he was game to work on knots with me, such a breath of fulfillment filled me up, an anticipation and joy that I hadn't realized was missing. As we learned and practiced together, it was more than just the warm, deliberate touch that meant so much to me. I loved the pressure, the attention, the patient steps so much, but there was also a deep, deep sense of being cared for. It's hard to know for sure, but I think it was mutual and real, at least in those moments.

I don't think you're reading this, TCM, but if you are, thank you. I love you. Maybe everything means more to me than it should, but who needs should statements?

Seventh Date Tears, Part One

 

As I picked up coffee and scones for our mini-road-trip date, I yammered through the pickup window to the barista about how nervous I was. (I had also been panicky for a day or so about unrelated things, I maybe should have scaled back or postponed this big-step date!) This Charming Man is already gone and I’d only just learned how he takes his coffee. I am absolutely devastated and having the HARDEST time not just calling him up and saying “PLEASE.” Please what, I don’t know. Just please.

When I picked him up, we happily kissed hello but it was a little like having one feral cat in the passenger seat and another in the driver’s seat. He had the energy of one of those Garfield toys they used to suction-cup to car windows in the Eighties, just absolutely ready to escape. I wish I would have paused and asked him why he was so jangled. He second-guessed my driving (he doesn’t drive) and kept listing off accidents he had seen around home. I gave him the AMAZING lemon poppyseed scones I’d brought because! Special occasion! And he said “I thought we were going to eat.” Right or wrong, my jangled brain registered that as food-shaming. Whatever it was, I would have liked it to be a “thank you.”

We were going to eat. When he asked me out for Friday-day, I’d gotten up the courage to invite him to have lunch with me at my favorite fancy garden, about an hour away. I wanted to hold hands with him, kiss against trees, and try not to take too many pictures so I could pay good attention to him. This garden is my happy place, and I’ve only ever taken one other date there. (https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2015/09/in-which-i-realize-how-lucky-i-am-to.html?zx=fec1588cfc2887d4)

This Charming Man, with maybe the exception of this particular day, is PRESENT AS FUCK. It’s what made sex with him, most things with him, so dazzling, so seemingly almost loving, right from the start. Somewhere in ouroff-kilter start-of-the-trip conversation, he said a thing he’d said before, that hadn’t sounded so alarming before I’d fallen for him. In order to give his full attention to The Moment, he doesn’t think of people when they are not there. (“Have you heard of mindfulness?” was the start of this conversation.) I said it didn’t seem like he wasn’t thinking of me because of what an attentive texter her was, but he insisted. And I started to cry. And he second-guessed my driving some more.

I know my heart tends to go too fast, but I thought I was doing better this time!

I kind of wish I’d turned the car around at this point, just gotten us home from this already somehow painful day, but I didn’t want to let him go. I tried to tell him what was the matter, that I’d been going about my own life daydreaming about him. Part of me was with him when he was working or running his D&D games or just doing whatever, but he claimed not to think of me at all. Or, in fairness, anyone else when they weren’t around.

I don’t know why, after a brief break to cry in a Kohls’ parking lot, I still kept driving toward the flowers.

Knotty Thursday: Braided Cuff

 

This one felt a little uncomfortable, I might have to do it a little looser next time. Don't know when I'll get to try it on This Charming Man but soon I hope!!!

Here's the video I'll be using for the next couple of weeks:

Lo-Fi and Rope Highs (How It’s Going)

I can’t make myself write the play-by-play of sex with This Charming Man, as hot as those paragraphs would be. I’m still disentangling my feelings about him, mainly the feeling of being startled (and, because I’m me, a little alarmed) about how connected and grounded I feel when we’re together. Our bodies and our learning curves fit together like the pretty knots, unraveling and being re-tied. Just like it was on our first date, the other main feeling is laughing-while-kissing.

Last Thursday was our fifth date (though the fourth was more of a get-over-here) and I was ready to relax into almost-always coziness at home, so I invited him to come over and paint. But he had a real out-in-the-world date in mind, at a beer garden/barbeque that’s between our two neighbs. Just a simple little while of snacks, cocktails, and running into casual acquaintances of his, but it meant a lot. To get cute for him, to feel his proprietary arm casually draped around me, to make out in front of strangers and probably be a little nauseating. A perfectly ordinary dream come true—not sure if it’s a big deal because of post-quarantine or because my dates have been casual and couch/bed-specific for a while…probably both.

After I took him home for ropes and snuggles, (and before more snuggles) we stayed up all night talking. I kept checking to see if he wanted to go home, and he kept not wanting to go home. At one point, I turned my face away to spoon, and he said I “went away.” I was right there!

I asked him, at like three or four in the morning, what he wanted us to be. He volleyed the question back to me and I admitted that I saw him as boyfriend material, but I didn’t want him to feel constrained. Kind of a cop-out. Can I get Rory Gilmore in here to do this part for me? Anyway, I kept yammering: “Romantic, not casual. Not just friends, but also friends.”

“Friends with ropes?” he joked but then sort of sighed/settled in, saying “Romantic. Yes. Definitely.”

So Friday night while he was running one of his two D&D games, I was sitting here so tired writing a first draft of this post in my notebook, with candles lit and a very him lo-fi mix playing, (Extremely unsurprising take—it’s also so good for typing!) feeling dizzy and off-balance unsure of how to make whatever next plans. (We asked each other out/in for two separate dates the next day, is how.)

But. His eyes shining when he watched me “come like a Good Girl.” His arms submitting to my ropes. The way my throat often hurts from too much laughing/moaning/forgetting to drink water. His heart. Yikes.

There of course are still things that make me feel hesitant about him, about the combination of us, but I’m glad to spend occasional moments just going with it, just feeling quiet and still.

Knotty Thursday: Laddering

So easy and cozy! I left them on for the rest of my morning routine! :D

Although I wish he would use varied sizes of mannequin and give rope lengths for non-skinny bodies, Rory's Brainworks has been superhelpful for keeping me on track:

So There’s This Charming Man, Part Two

 

The day after our first date/first kisses/spontaneous rope-ordering, he texted to tell me he was out for coffee and looking for books on Shibari. (!!!) “My new hobby” is how he put it. I tried not to get toooooo excited—after all, The Lovely Guy had made noises about learning to make a mojito for me and a bottle of white rum is sitting lonely in my cabinet waiting for me to learn mojitos for myself. Guys get excited and they say stuff. It’s cute!

The night before my second date with This Charming Man, I was trying to learn a tie I could NOT FOR THE LIFE OF ME remember the name of, but which had been a fave during the adventure days. And then! BFF to the rescue! And/or she and I need maybe a little more with the boundaries! Either way, she taught me the tie (using the banister, not any of my own columns) and I felt like everyone involved, past and present, must be amazing at life. BFF even looked up the name: chainstitching.

This Charming Man arrived at may apartment for brunch looking out-of-my-league stylish and SO PRETTY that I wasn’t even sure if I could touch him. (Spoiler alert, I COULD.) It felt really right and natural to have him standing tall-ly next to me in my teensy kitchen, chopping up sausage for the omelets. I really messed up the first one and tried to keep it for myself, but he gallantly took the way-less-cute omelet.

After eggs and cinnamon rolls, I set about teaching him chainstitching on his gorgeous long arms. It’s so easy and cozy and I almost immediately (for the first time in YEARS) fell into a rope haze. Deliberate, patient, and still while both tying and being tied, he seemed right there in that pretty haze with me.

There’s this thing. It can happen even with the most tentative rope time. A cinch or a tighten just ***switch*** turns every anxiety off, every defense mechanism. As he worked and reworked the steps of the tie, as he unraveled his work and started again, his hands felt so kind. Being handled with such care and attention made my whole self sunny with happiness.

Work was in like three hours, plenty of time, but I couldn’t imagine in a million years that I might ever emerge from this glittery soft head-cloud. I couldn’t imagine how we might, as he put it two more dates later, unfurl from each other. I was the most still and present I’ve been in months, years, maybe ever.

So There’s This Charming Man, Part One

I’m really struggling to write this even though it’s past time to start processing the wonderfulness that is This Charming Man. OMG I feel superstitious that I will somehow write the connection out of existence. Regular anxious and oh-my-goodness-he-is-so-cute-anxious are conspiring to keep the paragraphs from coming out.

So of course, he is beautiful, a gorgeous black man with supersweet cartoon-deer eyes.  TCM is tall, like, my head fits right next to his neck when we stand next to each other. (Oh my, I really wish it weren’t ALL THE WAY TIL THURSDAY NIGHT until I could do that!) He has the kind of skinny-strong look that up until recently would have made me assume he wouldn’t be into me. (SO glad I changed that perspective!!!) He showed up to our first date looking dapper as heck in a houndstooth jacket and the slightest hint of an artsy fauxhawk. Very low-key goth night. AND YES, he DID used to frequent our local goth night. FUCKING DREAMBOAT.

His vibe reminded me of Poly Friends’ Partner, that not-date poet from summertime. Except that This Charming Man is sillier, more freewheeling, less self-conscious. He chose an Irish dive bar for our lunch date and it was absolutely perfect, even as the bartender gently mocked me (well-deserved) for having coffee instead of beer. We ate voraciously, laughed so much. We talked about Animal Crossing for SO long despite the fact that he isn’t even playing the current iteration. And best, swooniest, we rifled around in each other’s playlists!

When I mentioned that Frank Ocean’s Pink + White is the best makeout song in the universe, he insisted on playing it over the nondescript bar music. I tried to press pause but he (eee!) gently wrestled my hand away every time I tried. I had to let the makeout song play, and we kissed. The feeling of that day is laughing while kissing, bubbling over with silly joy.

I told him about Knotty Thursdays and he was interested. We segued so easily into being knot-tying pals that I don’t even remember how it happened.

As I was settling in for my post-date/pre-work nap, he sent me such a cute picture of him cuddling with a friend’s dog while I was in the middle of ordering (us) some new ropes. At lunch he had expressed some hesitation about being wrapped up in pink ropes (a hesitation that has since evaporated) so I asked him what color he would like, and he said orange, so I ordered orange.

Who orders someone his own ropes after a first date? This moi. It was one of my better choices of ever.