Lovers Inventory

This is a true, and a vastly abbreviated, account of some of the lovers who shaped me. I am nearing forty, and there have been dozens. l have never been beautiful, though my face and body are proportionate enough. My great strengths as a prospective lover are confidence and shamelessness, and I am open-minded about people of all sorts. I have reveled in the privilege of hundreds of consensual experiences within a magnificent realm of sex and humanity, with miraculously few regrets. I am happily partnered, ravenously horny, and mostly at peace.

It began innocently, with typical teenage gropes, then a long thin dick sliding easily into my throat. Six months faking a hundred orgasms against scruff and probing tongue, and one single real one, riding his leg in a sleeping bag, friend half-asleep beside us, post-prom camping trip in a suburban backyard. Finally ready, only at the notion of using, of being secretly observed, I rode silent waves atop him in that tent, pulsing pleasure and despair. What is wrong with me, I thought, that I want to be watched, up on top, that I can't get there by an earnest tongue. Maybe it was all those months humping pillows with a child's water torpedo inside of me and my hand in my mouth, willing the world not to walk in the lockless door. Thinking about the girl with the braids who had gifted me the rubber toy, what she looked like nude, coming on two fingers, cheeks dark and pitted.

Later there were weekends of clumsy dancing, exchanging I love yous with a family friend years my senior. Clutching his tiny member, he gagged, spat, would not eat me out. Even at 18, I knew I had to seek someone who would smile and lick me without expectations. In a guest bed over winter break, I told him I'd gone and fucked my upstairs neighbor. "I gave you my heart and you broke it," he said. I cried, and did not miss that sweaty weight on my chest.

The upstairs neighbor was a warm, wonderful friend, with killer cross-country thighs and a hairy gut, a crass-talking Phish-head with a Jew-fro who told me everything and once farted while he fucked me from behind. That still makes me laugh, his loud arrival, his damp, sheepish apology. My bulimic roommate entering angrily hours later, throwing open the windows. We high fived, cuddled, snickered in our dorm beds, he called me unsexy names: bitch, douchebag, asshole, ho. "Yeah, you like it," he said a lot. And fuck yes, I did, though I stopped fucking him when he didn't want to hear me say so.

Then another, softer man, a long-haired reed player, slid into me delicately, like he was bringing a sax to his lips. Went down on me, delicately, then said it took too long. After that, a Florida frat boy with a bottom bunk and a sex positions poster, who shaved his balls raw and wished aloud that I had a tan. Next, a thin, religious flautist who cried in my bed, pleaded with me to agree that we were both wrong for fucking outside a relationship. "Making love without being boyfriend and girlfriend," was how he put it. I laughed and kicked him out and turned over to hump my plush bear.

Not a day later I fell into bed with a friend who made me feel like a god sucking his cock, worshipped my then-perky B cups for a full fifteen minutes. 20 years later I still think about his mouth there, lapping underneath my nipples til I soaked through my jeans.

After that, my first taste of love, two years with a quiet, controlling man who wanted to please me and choke me and weave me hammocks and come on my face. We were well-matched intellectuals who could not fathom each other's social choices. I ended it, but he responded as if he had. "It would never work," he said gently. "You want everyone in your kitchen and I want only you in mine." That last winter we spent together, the choking would arouse then scare us both into retreat, petting and kissing sweetly until I let him blind me with his semen. I came on his leg and then flew off to physics lectures with streaming eyes and smudges on my cheeks.

To assuage that heartbreak I sat cross-legged in a Japanese restaurant and went home with a man whose inability to get hard was like another person in the room. Cursing at his lovely limp noodle draped along a thigh, he couldn't comprehend that I liked a soft dick, too, its cascading rolls, its innocent expression, its wrinkled foreskin. I picked it up by its scruff like a mama bear, growled to hear his sweet laugh. Told him honestly that it didn't matter, that I didn't want to sleep there, walked home singing, never saw him again.

Next came a short, stocky tuba player, with a sublimely perfect penis whose curves fit my pussy like a nitrile glove. Never before had I understood fucking as the endgame. Despite this, we mostly watched Freaks and Geeks and traded massages for blow jobs at two in the afternoon. When he got bored trying to make me come, a wise, neurodivergent friend I'd met studying abroad said “you know, you don’t have to do this anymore.” So I took her home instead, stroked her brown cloud of hair and rubbed her clit til she shivered, straddled her hips and moaned. I can perfectly imagine the sweet sound of her arrival, the soft, far-apart breasts like my own, the feel of her round, wet lips, above and below, though we never spoke of it afterwards.

And then, a two-year, transformative introduction to polyamory, to fluidity, to the rules and joys and communities of BDSM. Unselfconsciously five foot two, serious, anxious, adventurous, a linguist and a barista, long-haired, enye in his name. Pansexual, gender questioning, hung like an animal, attracted to and by all manner of humans. We didn't fuck much but had sex like the poets we were, trying every form of pleasure and pain we could think to try with our bodies and others. Rope and piss and needles; orgies, dress-up, top and bottom, phone sex and breath play. He jerked off that massive cock four to five times a day when given the chance, long foreskin barely breaching the tip as he gripped and stroked. Loved for me to talk dirty and ride his leg as he came, then take a long shower side by side.

We had threesomes, foursomes, with friends, acquaintances, strangers we met at parties, large-breasted women who melted in my mouth and beautiful gay men who entertained my presence beside them. I got naked and bruised in warehouses, joyfully sucked people off in basements. I went to a grimy swingers club with a coworker, a raven-haired young mom who hated her baby’s father with the intensity of a teen. There I ate her out while she clutched her puckered belly, gave a mean blowjob to her mean friend, watched a scene involving a cattle prod. I fucked a bandmate, a drummer and film major with soft tight curls and a curved dick that made me squirt. We were on mushrooms, pleased and surprised, came back to reality and agreed it had been a singular adventure.

The linguist introduced me to a tall, kind tech whiz, ten years my senior, who left the oven open to heat his tiny basement apartment, where he was living to save up for a CS degree and a nose surgery and a huge, steampunk chest tattoo. He called me "Petal," drove a motorcycle, and took control with luscious mind games. Set up orgies and hotel gatherings, told me what to wear and when to pee, hosted a dinner where I was cook and fluffer to a gaggle of D&D geeks. He set his lovers to impossible, idiotic tasks, then flogged us for failing. My favorite brand of discipline. I once held up a jar of pennies naked til my muscles gave out, got bruised with a thin wire across both thighs, then let him breathe lovingly for me through a CPR mask. I miss his nerdy confidence and mediocre kisses; I still watch one of the videos we shot fifteen years ago. Playing with his huge cock for hours, he would test my tolerance til I cried, then would fuck me passionately and painfully with that monster, pull out, and milk himself onto my thighs. Deep, gorgeous fun, and then I moved far away to pursue sustainable dreams.

In the new city I worked hard, stayed out nights, got genital piercings, joined a leather family for playful spankings and Sunday potlucks. No one in my professional life would ever have suspected, but at these parties I consented to the most delicious of abuses: canings that left me purple, clothespins that zippered down my spine, naked spelling bees, rules and collars and raging exhibitionism. A fat angelic domme who designed scenery at a renowned art school put me in stockings and ripped them off for her drooling crowd. A cook covered in bad tattoos licked my feet as he fucked me wearing chains. A man twice my age trussed me up into a dizzying suspension and held a Hitachi to my crotch til I begged to stop coming. A gold-clad, sculpted youth performing the Rocky Horror Picture Show took me home and begged me to spit in their face.

These were light-hearted evenings with friends. There were others, sweet and savory, friendly and frequently transformative. A muscular young woman came to my bed with a tentacle dildo and orgasmed as I rubbed her huge nipples; a football player took me to a Broadway show then impaled me standing up in my kitchen while my roommate slept; a flat-chested, freckled escort strapped on a purple dick and high-fived the elevator repairman who was filling my other holes. His girlfriend and I pretended to be littles, kissing through giggles, slinging childish names, and pinning each other under the dining table until he spanked us both or washed our mouths out with soap. "You're my favorite," he'd say to her, as I cowered in the tub. I began to wish I were somebody's favorite.

So I started looking in earnest. A sweet boy-next-door type took me to the symphony, said I looked cute in the shower, named our song, asked if I'd convert to Christianity. I wouldn't and that was our last night. An unrequited college crush became a bestselling author, brought me to a pod hotel, made me scream with his tongue til the neighbors could hear. Too vain and serious and vanilla, we remain lovers to this day, his gorgeous redheaded wife adding her curves to the mix on occasion.

There was the film editor, son of actors, for whom I fell too fast, admiring an actual Dali painting in his uptown apartment. He bought me dinner and jazz CDs, introduced me to his famous mom at a screening. On his bed, under the Dali, he rearranged my position as he pleased, spat on my asshole, moaned like he’d never leave. I asked what we were, cried at his answer, got fully ghosted, spent months trying to shake the heartbreak. Fucked someone I'd known in high school, slowly, gently, drank too much coffee, broke it off cause he didn't want kids.

I met the love of my life in my late twenties in New Orleans. We flung ourselves into a damp, magical evening with a disposable camera and a string of strong drinks, had bad hotel sex, spent two years on Chinatown buses and video calls, built a life, made two more, moved across the world. Eleven years later we are raising strong daughters, talking daily about our dreams, and muffling screams as he joyfully smashes my ear into the pillow with an open palm, pinches my nipples hard enough to draw milk, and tells me I'm his. Our bodies are starting to droop and soften and wrinkle into one another.

Since the beginning he has resigned himself to what excursions I need. The narcissistic computational neuroscientist who I longed to see at his most vulnerable. The ass-obsessed law student with whom I exchanged faceless taint shots. The full-fledged lawyer who gave me a massage in his late grandmother's apartment perched atop a warehouse full of fancy coffins. A stranger on a dating app who fed me chocolate and cock and a fake name. The breast-and-BJ-loving friend who I haven't seen in a decade but sext with, dreaming he will suck my nipples when he gets out of rehab. The vanilla author married to the curvy ginger, now expecting a baby, still the only man who can make me come with his mouth. And a long-term, gender-fluid partner to whom I send shots of my arches and visit twice yearly to get lovingly bound and degraded while their wife and son sleep peacefully in the next bedroom.

The debauchery I cling to as a mother nearing forty is a poor counter to the high-stakes boredom of office work and child-rearing and family visits. Yet I do not rue my vanishing youth: soft, wilting bodies know greater pleasure; mind games go deeper; partnership sustains. Infrequent deviance makes for a collection of sparkling gems. And carrying the delicious secrets of this series of beautiful, vulnerable humans: that will never get old.