“Love Hurts” by Brittany Newell was selected by the editors at Joyland magazine as a finalist in the 2022 Open Border Fiction Prize.

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It was both a good and bad thing that Bo visited me during the quarantine. On the one hand, I had plenty of time to entertain him. Only my most devoted regular, a cross-dresser name Martin/Martine, was keeping his bimonthly sessions with me. All my other clients had dropped off, the pain-sluts and rubber-lovers and dudes into piss, each calling the dungeon at last minute to cancel and make plans for cam sessions that invariably fell through. Sorry, they wrote me on Skype later that night in rushed, misspelled messages. Wife’s home. Try tomorrow?

In truth I was happy to have Bo around. I’d gotten a little bored with all my free time. I liked having a schedule, people who needed me, who came bearing gifts. I had a whole drawer in my bedroom dedicated to clients’ gifts—teddy bears, plastic roses, CBD lube. Without my clients and schedule and daily jaunts to the dungeon, I’d started to feel like I didn’t exist. This is a feeling that has haunted me for the whole of my adult life. In the weeks before Bo’s arrival I paced my apartment and tried to think of something to do that day, something to anchor me to the real world.

When I first moved to San Francisco at 18, I quickly came to the conclusion that if I wasn’t in love, I needed a job to keep myself fully occupied. This is why I took the series of job that I did: a waitress at 19, stripper at 21, bartender at 23, dominatrix at 26. Looking back on it now, my career seems like a natural progression from most shackled to least. As a server in a busy clam shack on the pier, I learned about the multidimensionality of pain. I watched the cooks dismember fresh lobsters while singing along to  the  radios  they  weren’t  supposed  to  have,  sometimes  using  the  claws  to  snap  at  waitresses’  hems. Tourists and perverts paid $75 to chow down on each buttery corpse. Little did they know what went on in the broom closets…I promptly found my first SF boyfriend, a dishwasher/skater named Rocko, and made the mistake of shitting where I, and others, ate. Waitressing prepped me for sex work: I learned how to know what my guests wanted before they knew it themselves, an essential skill for a domme. I flirted  with  seniors  and  did  silly  voices  for  kids  (dancing  for  our  dinner,  we  waitresses  joked)  until  I literally started to dance for my dinner at the most run-down strip club in North Beach.

Oh, Edna’s. I suppose I could’ve auditioned for one of the swanky clubs, a place with steak specials and crushed velvet seats, nine-foot women and celebrity guests who made us sign NDAs, but the transparency of Edna’s appealed to me. It was not a sexy, festive joint. Those who stepped into Edna’s wore their hunger like a fedora, flashy and sad. Men didn’t come here to celebrate promotions or blow off steam with their pals; they came here to publicly sulk, lick wounds, and sample death (which, in my opinion, tastes like marshmallow liqueur). They always came alone, in long coats and beanies they refused to take off. They posted up at the bar and drank heavily, steadily, until the girls above and around them were little more than radiant blurs, our long limbs smeared like honey mustard across the countertop. We knew enough to respond to any name the guests called.

“Marge!” someone whimpered and Destiny leaned down, gentle as a phlebotomist, to collect her tip.

Just as the men didn’t pay attention to us, we didn’t pay any attention to them. The girls were as hungry as the guests, which levelled the playing field. We danced for ourselves, resulting in Edna’s famously eclectic playlist: Slowdive, Bob Marley, Madama Butterfly. Every Thursday and Sunday at 4:30pm I took the bus from Geary to Chinatown and then into North Beach, where I stood on the Lysol- streaked bartop and worked out my romantic problems in a lime-green fishnet dress. I picked classical music so that I could think more clearly: Camille Saint-Saens usually got me a $50. To this day, dancing is the best way to sort out my thoughts. At 21, I was happy. I thought I’d dance at Edna’s until the day I died, breaking my hip on the club’s uneven floor. I chose to dance with my real name, a risky move in the stripper world. But I knew that I’d be so absorbed in my thoughts that I’d never be able to respond to any name besides mine. I couldn’t adapt to Lacey or Angel. When a man at the bar shouted, “Hannah!”, I knew to stop twirling and look over my shoulder, pressing pause on my memories of men being mean to me and moments at dawn when, asleep, they looked kind.

I remember all of my coworkers well: Misty, Bliss, Venus, all those sweet, cryptic names. The girls were incredibly beautiful there, the hottest of any club in the city, which only added to Edna’s funereal vibes. We knew that our beauty was wasted on this crowd, these men too absorbed in their failures to even get hard, and they knew it too, which is why they tipped big. I couldn’t have named it then, moving my hips to Puccini, but this was my first taste of male masochism. Men came to Edna’s to see, in our flesh, all the things they had fumbled. The management embraced the bad vibes, eventually putting up a neon sign behind the bar that read: ONLY THE BROKEN-HEARTED NEED APPLY. Another in the bathroom, stained with God-knows-what: LOVE HURTS.

It would have been fun to take Bo down to Edna’s. That was the downside to him visiting SF during COVID: I couldn’t take him out on the town. I’m sure he would’ve loved to go dancing with me, to be on my arms as we hit up the bars. I can so easily picture him on the wall at The Stud, his black eyes wide with confusion and awe as strangers put money in the go-go dancers’ jock straps; in the smoking area, he would surely regale me with questions. Are the go-go dancers human too? Is it normal to kiss with your eyes open or closed? I can only imagine what he might’ve said about Powerhouse or the gay saunas my friends were semi-addicted to before COVID shut everything down. I would’ve loved his hot take on a dark room.

It was a gray October day when Bo showed up at my place. I was living in a shabby pink Victorian on McAllister and Divisadero, pretending to be a friend of a friend of a friend to keep the cheap lease. We’d been in quarantine for the past seven months, politely going crazy. I think I was baking that morning, one of many hobbies I tried to adopt when it became clear that parties and BDSM were on hold. I was about to pop down to the store for some butternut squash when I found Bo sitting cross-legged on the vintage fainting couch my room-mate Gregor had scored, years ago, off the curb. He wore a black Nike sweatsuit and Giants cap pulled so low I couldn’t see his eyes. His white sneakers were immaculate. It was clearly the disguise of someone trying to look normal.

“Hello?” I said. I thought maybe he was here for Gregor, an inexhaustible slut whose many Grindr hook-ups loitered in our living room before and after sex. I often struck up conversations with them while Gregor hogged the shower. COVID hadn’t slowed him down; in fact, on leave from his tech job, all Gregor did now was cruise different sex apps and try to scam UberEats. “Can I help you with something?”

The person stood up, excited. He didn’t look like Gregor’s type: he was freakishly thin, with long, veiny limbs and white-blonde hair buzzed close to the scalp, half-vampire, half-bike messenger, 6’8” at the least. “You certainly can,” he said. “I’m Boeing, like the aircraft. But please call me Bo.” Contrary to his lanky build, his voice was priestly and deep. Perhaps that’s why I trusted him. I liked his voice and lack of shyness.

He began to explain. He was in San Francisco for only two weeks. After that, a tight schedule: Dallas, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, Dubai. He was here to gather data. “I’d like to observe you,” he said. “I’m very much interested in what makes you happy.” He made startlingly direct eye contact, the sort rarely witnessed outside of kink clubs. “We already know quite a lot about what makes you humans feel bad. Tsunamis, infidelity, diarrhea, etc. That branch of knowledge is thoroughly covered. I’d rather investigate the other end of the spectrum.” He brandished what looked like a student ID card; in the little picture of his face, his pupils were blown out. “That’s my area of interest. Health and Well-being.”

“Are you, like, a foreign exchange student?”

He opened his mouth as if to laugh. “Ha,” he said, like a woman’s name, close to mine. “Ha. Ha. Ha. Something like that.” He pulled a notebook from his pocket and scribbled in it. I noticed the webbing between his fingers then, a slimy opal hue. “Laughing is fun, right? You like to laugh?”

“Well, yes,” I said, feeling spotlit. “Sometimes I do.”

“Just as I surmised!” He pocketed the notebook. “You’re the perfect specimen for my study.” “Look,” I said. “I don’t want to be rude but I’m not really sure how to help you.”

“It’s simple,” he said. He put his hands on his hips like a child. “I want to see and experience your favorite things. I want you to show me what makes you feel good.”

I couldn’t think how to reject to such an innocent scheme. “Do you have any limits?”

He clapped his hands together. “Limits?” His sleeves drooped a bit and I noted the marshmallowy translucence of his hands and wrists. I also noted, with some surprise, a series of black geometric tattoos ringing both of his forearms. For some reason this soothed me, bringing to mind several ex-lovers, back when every straight man in San Francisco had tribal tattoos and a beard. They drank beer and played bass in indistinguishable bands. If you were a woman with daddy issues, San Francisco was heaven. In the last eight years things had softened: now all the available men had fleece jackets, gym memberships, reusable totes. They smelled of Dove soap, not Crisco. One found love at the farmer’s market, not the sex club.. Bo, somehow both willowy and militant in his brand-new tracksuit, would stand out in either setting. He smiled at me. “I didn’t come all this way to have limits. Lay it on me.” He paused a beat too long. “Mama.”

“Jesus,” I said, shaking my head. Against my better judgment, I liked him. “How did you find me?” “Skype,” he said, shrugging. When he didn’t explain further, I told him to come with me down to the store.

I was surprised to discover how much I liked having him with me. Our first week together was nothing but fun: it reminded me of entertaining my cousins when they stayed with me during spring break. I felt a moral obligation to make sure he had a good time. I treated every day like it was his birthday, a concept with which he was unfamiliar. Much of our affair revolved around eating. We made spaghetti, enchiladas, Funfetti cupcakes in silicon cups. We ordered in buffalo wings, udon, seafood pancakes, rice balls. We drove to the Chik-Fil-A in Sunnydale, took BART to the best Filipino restaurant in all of Daly City for Styrofoam to-go boxes sagging with food, woke up before noon to get a McMuffin. I had to tell him not to eat the little green plastic grass that came with our supermarket sushi.

“Oopsie daisy,” he said, then pocketed it. “I think I’d like to tape this to my bedroom wall.”

We awoke from food-induced naps around midnight and made elaborate sundaes with Haribo and limited edition M&Ms. We drank ginger ale and Gatorade (yellow) because they reminded me of being sick as a child. “My mother and I would watch daytime TV while she braided my hair,” I told Bo. “I think she liked having the company.”

“How interesting,” he said, wiping his hands on a napkin. “Would you like me to try?” He gestured to my hair, which hung long and wet down my back. We were eating fried chicken at my cramped kitchen table, our bare knees touching. Our knees often touched, as did our elbows and wrists, due to the unnatural length of his limbs. Each time it happened, I experienced a tiny electrical zap.

“No thanks,” I said. “Maybe some other time.”

He claimed not to mind that most normal things, like nice eat-in restaurants and bars, were shuttered due to the virus. “I’ve been to bars before,” he assured me. “Other humans have taken me to parties. I think I get the gist.”

“You haven’t been to my bars,” I snapped, suddenly defensive. “My friends are beautiful. My friends are amazing. You haven’t met them.”

He nodded. “Of course. How insensitive of me.”

“It’s fine,” I said, softening. “Are you hungry? Let’s get pho.”

We went on long walks through the city, using an old dog-eared book that a lover had lent me called Stairway Walks of San Francisco. We trawled Corona Heights and Russian Hill, gasping each time we uncovered a staircase. Our pleasures were so chaste. We went to the beach despite the chill breeze, laden down with a picnic, then popped by the Salvation Army to try on hats. He stood guard while I looked in the mirror. “What a poetical name,” he remarked, pointing to the store’s big red sign. I had to admit, I’d never noticed before.

In the mornings we laid in bed until noon and watched TV on my laptop. He didn’t understand why Seinfeld was funny so he laughed when I laughed. I felt him studying my face, his eyes squinted and his mouth ajar, like I was a dense religious text. He made me feel famous, his concentration was so pure. When I asked if he’d ever seen the X-Files, his face clouded over. “We don’t speak of the X-Files where I come from,” he whispered. “Do you understand me?” I apologized and put on Friends.

One night I attempted to get him into The Bachelor.

“It’s trash,” I explained. “Yet also a critical cultural document. If you really want to understand planet Earth , you need to start here. This show is a disciplinary exercise in codes and norms. Everyone on the show is a drag queen and they don’t even know it. The girls with their push-up bras and tasteful blonde highlights, the Bachelor with his six-pack and scruff. Everyone is basic, yet turbo-charged.”

He pointed to the screen, where The Bachelor rode a horse on the beach. “You love this man?” “No! That’s the whole point. This show accidentally reveals that love is a game that we sign up to play and that anyone can be induced to love anyone else under the right circumstances. Love is about context, not fate. It’s about infrastructure, not feelings. It’s about wanting to win, it’s about being coerced. If the name of the game were to hate him, these girls would rip him apart.”

“Oh.” Bo squinted at the half-moon of fidgety babes onscreen. The girls were lined up in their cocktail dresses, awaiting their rose, i.e. their verdict of desirability, their big gender score. “You love these women?”

I sighed. “Nevermind.”

By the end of his first week in SF I’d grown accustomed to having him sleep next to me. For practical reasons I slept in a twin bed, which almost all of my lovers had commented on and despised. Not Bo. I’m not sure he knew it was unusual for a 28-year-old woman and besides, it forced him to sleep even closer to me, his long legs and arms entangled with mine. I asked him what he did all night, knowing that he didn’t sleep. He smiled mysteriously. “I keep myself busy.”

On a blustery Sunday, I took him to my dungeon. I’d warned him not to talk to any people in the lobby of the building. “They think I’m a massage therapist,” I explained as we walked up the street. “Luckily the basement suite is sound-proofed. No one suspects me. So just be cool.”

He nodded gravely. “I am cool.”

We entered through the building’s parking garage. It felt good to be back in my dungeon, my shadowy office, my fantasy suite. It smelled faintly, as it always did, of Vaseline, toy cleaner and breakfasts cooked in the condos above us. Bo had a lot of fun touching all of my toys, the whips and paddles and ropes hung according to intensity on hooks along the wall. He opened my dildo drawer and poked at a fat one. “Funny,” he mumbled. I didn’t realize it until then, but that’s exactly what his skin felt like, springy and moist, nearly-human. I showed him the closet, bursting with maid’s dresses, bustiers, police hats. He was fascinated to learn that alien abduction was a semi-popular fetish that my clients and I acted out. His eyes widened when I explained how a typical scene might unfold: tying my sub to a table, exposing him to bright lights, inserting a finger in the belly button, telling him that tomorrow he would think all of this was a dream….

“Are you kidding?” Bo fell to the floor, still holding the dildo. He was seizing with laughter. “Forced impregnation? We would never. That’s almost offensive. Wait until I take these findings back home. No one will believe me!”

When we were done at the dungeon we walked to the wharf to look at the sea lions. “This makes you happy?” Bo asked skeptically, watching me and a cluster of tourists shiver into our coats. We crowded the salt-rotted railing, peering down at a pile of blubbery stars. The air smelled of bird shit and churros. Thanks to COVID, the pier was mostly deserted. The family to our left wore matching T-shirts (GOD IS LOVE) and gave us wary looks. I suppose we looked strange, Bo and I: him with his military posture and inhuman stare, Columbine haircut and tofurkey complexion, me with my long wett hair and floor-length fur coat. It was a gift from a client who’d claimed to have inherited it from his late mother’s estate. “You remind me of her,” he’d whispered as he knelt at my feet. “B-b-b-bossy and tall.”

“Well, yes,” I told Bo. On the platform below us, a mommy sea-lion nuzzled what was either her baby or her beau. She batted her eyelashes at the crowd as if to say, Sue me. “It’s cute.”

“Cute!” He wrote that down in his notebook. “How could I possibly forget about cute!”

We got clam chowder in bread bowls and rode the cable-car up the hill. We were the only ones on it. As we ascended the hill I told Bo to take in the view. I pointed to the Golden Gate Bridge, fringed by fog, and the smattering of sailboats dinking around in the Bay. “This view makes me feel deeply.”

“It makes you feel happy?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “It’s a mix of happy and sad. It makes me feel…old. It makes me think of all the friends I used to have here and all the things we used to do.”

I felt something cold and slick touching me: he had taken my hand. He held it in both of his hands like an overfull drink. He smiled at me and I glimpsed his split tongue. “I could be wrong but I think the word might be wistful.”

“Yes,” I said, feeling my tummy flip. I was suddenly blushing. Our knees bonked as we turned a corner. “That sounds right.”

Were he and I lovers? It’s hard to say. Of course I was susceptible to falling in love during quarantine. I was dangerously bored; I needed something to gnaw on. And in truth everything we did together was the type of thing you would do with a new lover: talk, eat, walk in drowsy circles. Tell me everything! he cried as we digested a late lunch. Still, we didn’t touch in an actually sexual way until his very last night in SF.

We’d just returned to my place from a day out in Chinatown, dripping and spent. We’d had an early dinner of dim sum, which we ate in a dank little parklet populated by elders doing group exercises. We’d watched them boogie to no music, perfectly in sync, and wiped our fingers on the grass. An unhoused man came up to us and yelled, “The young don’t ever see it coming. Look!” Afterwards we went shopping and I bought him a new notebook to write down his findings in. In other words, a perfect day.

On the way back to my house we got caught in the fog. It soaked through our jackets and sweaters and thermals, right down to my panties. As soon as entered my bedroom, we silently, dutifully, took off our clothes. We draped them over every available surface, over the headboard and the dresser and the desk I rarely used except in sex, over my vanity mirror with its little round lightbulbs which, when shrouded by my cotton blouse, turned the room from yellow to blue.

I can’t say why but the shift in the lighting did something to me. There we were in my bedroom, naked and wet, as easy with each other as siblings. Our hair smelled of cooking oil, our fingertips dark with duck sauce. When we peeled off our pants, dozens of crumpled-up napkins fell out of our pockets, carrying with them the juice of our day. I leaned against my window and watched Bo do his stretches, bending and squatting in a way a woman never would.

“Whoo!” he was saying. “I’m not used to walking this much!”

My eyes scanned his body, landing on the glossy nodule of his groin, where his legs seamlessly joined with his pelvis. The region was smooth as a mirror, marked by nothing so much as a freckle or nub. Truth be told, it felt stranger to behold a man with no belly-button than a man with no cock. Watching him twist from side to side, I felt desire enter my system like a coin in a slot: a little clunk and suddenly I was wired, shy. We were four feet apart. If I wanted, I could reach out and touch him. He didn’t have sweat glands and yet I felt certain that I could smell his BO.

I asked him if he wanted to continue his study of things that feel good. He looked at me; I couldn’t tell if he knew what was coming. His eyes were bright and blank. “Of course,” he said, wiping his hands on his thighs. “That’s why I’m here.”

I motioned him closer and in a low, calm voice I told him what to do. “I want you to put your hands on my shoulders and push me onto the bed. Not aggressive, but firm, so that I’m sitting on the edge of the bed facing you. Then I want you to hold my chin with your left hand and hit my face with your right hand. Do that three times; on the third slap, I want you to say, You’re my baby.”

His eyes flashed with concern, a look I’d only seen once before when I jerked him back onto the sidewalk to avoid being hit by a bus. “But Hannah,” he said, his breath smelling of taro and coffee. It made my belly clench with lust, to think of all the things he’d put inside himself that afternoon. I wanted to be next. “I don’t understand.” He fumbled for his notebook, forgetting he was nude and he’d left it in his pocket. “You are not my baby. It was my understanding that only human mothers and fathers have babies. I am neither. I am, I think, a friend. We are about to engage in erotic behavior most often performed by consenting adults. How could you be my child?”

I smiled, pressing my breasts against his chest. It was flat and shiny as a serving tray. I noted that his nipples pricked up. In fact, they almost hurt me, pushy little thorns, as I rubbed against him. “Like this,” I said. “I’m not your child, I’m your baby. There’s a big difference. I like to be called baby by the people I sleep with. In fact, many people do.”

“Like your sadomasochistic clients?” “Yes. I like it too.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “What do you do with a baby? You care for it. A baby is helpless, dumb and full of love. You need to take care of it. You’re right, you’re not my mother or father. But when you hit me, you’re both.”

“Both?”

“Yes,” I said. I guided his hand to my hip. The webbing between his fingers felt like wet rolling papers. “Do you want to touch me?”

“Yes,” he said. His pupils were blown out. “I do.” I smiled. “Think of it as research.”

He was, to my surprise, a meticulous lover. It felt like he was looking for something he had lost, prying me open to see where it went, double-checking every cranny with an expression of devout concentration. He stopped every so often to take notes in his notebook. Though he had no trouble hitting me and pulling my hair, he seemed to do so in slow motion. He had an interesting style of dominance, more studious than brutish. Where other men would’ve sped up and gone harder, he pulled back and observed. He inserted his fingers as far up inside of me as he possibly could, then just held them there, looking down at me with a smirk. If I moved or made a sound, he shook his head and said, “No, baby.” Time stood still as he examined my body, making little noises of interest or surprise, until he finally removed his fingers, one by one, and licked them clean. “Hm,” he said, taking notes. “Tastes like chicken.” We laughed until he made me stop with a slap across the face. “Quiet,” he said, “I’m working.”

It wasn’t until later, as I decompressed in the shower and he combed through my kitchen cupboards (something he did nightly, never growing bored of his search) that the word probe came to me. It aroused me all over again to find the perfect word for the way that he touched me, his medical gentleness, his hypnotic and taunting style of sex. I’d felt like an object, but an object he cherished, a family heirloom or T-shirt left behind by an ex.

On our last morning together, we slept late. It had been drizzly for the past few days but that Monday it was bright and clear. We rose and made breakfast, Pilsbury biscuits with gravy. Gregor politely avoided us and took his eggs to his room, sensing the romantic tension. He wanted us to have our final moment together. We got dressed in my room, he in his sweatsuit and sneakers, me in a long purple sundress printed with daisies. A dress felt dramatic; any moment in quarantine that justified drama, I took. I was already scared of returning to my dreary COVID life without Bo. Who would I play with? Who would enable my spending, my wandering, my decadent meals? He was my reason to get out of bed. He was my nightlife, my party, my source of cheap thrills. And even when we stayed in bed, he made it so fun. I’d contemplated popping down to the dungeon and bringing home one of my strap-ons for him to try on, but there was no time now. When he asked me what I’d like to do on our last day together, I said, “Let’s go to the park.”

We couldn’t really hold hands because of his webbing, so we linked arms as we walked through the Panhandle. It was about 11:00 am. I took him to a little meadow deep inside the park. Aside from us, the only people there were elders. They sat alone, on benches or blankets, formally dressed in clean sweaters and dress shoes, their faces tilted towards the sun, hands resting gently by their sides or in their lap, eyes closed. Because of them, the meadow had a prayerful feeling.

“What are they doing?” asked Bo.

“They’re sunning themselves.” I took off my jacket and spread it out on the grass. I sat down and motioned for him to follow.

“But why?”

I shook out my hair and turned my face to the sun. “Because it feels good.”

“Oh.” He sat down beside me and tried to look calm, but I could tell he didn’t get it. He kept looking around, anticipating a punchline. He was pretending for my sake. I felt his impatience like a phone alarm going off.

Feeling him fidget, a wave of sorrow washed over me. Not because he was leaving or because I missed my old life but because he really didn’t know how good this felt. Post-sex, body throbbing from use, I could think of no higher pleasure, no privilege more profound, than to lay in the sun. For some reason I thought of my mother. At some point in her life she must have felt this good too. She understood it instinctively; there was no need for words.

I didn’t know how to explain it to Bo so I didn’t say anything. I lay on my back and let the sun enter my system, slow as a drug. I wanted more than anything to get up and dance. I hadn’t been able to show Bo how good it felt to go dancing! Elders didn’t need music to dance to but I did. I thought of all those evenings at Edna’s, so many years ago. Of course men paid to see me and my friends dance; what could be more exciting than to see a beautiful girl move as if she’s alone? Mostly clunky with moments of grace, stripped of her shyness, lost in her thoughts, mouth hanging open. What a treat to see her groove to Tina Turner or Cher as she replays a date in her mind and wishes someone would call her. At 28, I felt so removed from that girl. I wanted to tip her, brush out her hair. I felt so much tenderness for her, that former version of me, what a brave and strange baby. A baby in a fishnet dress. A baby with bruised labia and glitter in her teeth. She survived on macaroni, she hated being alone.  She liked cheap thrills and feeling afraid. She gravitated towards assholes and men who played rough. She would do anything for the moment when a man called her baby. I wanted to touch her and say, Come here. Come here and sit with me with now in the sun. It doesn’t get better but it’s always been good. But of course I said nothing. I rolled away from Bo and placed my hand on my belly. It was as if he’d already left, back to Pluto or Mars or wherever he came from. It was just me and the elders now, enjoying our day. I smiled in a way that he might have called wistful and thought to myself, Love hurts.