Before this, Gene was just a stand-up I knew, a good one, he had headlined a show in a bookstore that I’d featured for once or twice. He was a storyteller type with a close, sharp eye, almost literary, but he wasn’t afraid to get silly, make an ugly face, pivot hard from smart to slapstick. He was gay but he didn’t talk about it—not in a repressed way, in fact he sort of oozed gayness so much already that waiting for him to directly acknowledge it in his act added to the dramatic tension, heightening the stakes of the set, as in, was he finally going to talk about butt sex? Or was he just going to reference a Pasolini film again? I’ll admit I assumed this intentionality extended to the bedroom as well.

Gene had been doing stand-up for ten years; I was only two years in. He found me on Tinder and we matched in a way I’d thought friendly.  I could never bring myself to swipe left on a colleague—not that I’d seen many comedians on gay guy Tinder. I didn’t know enough comedians, or not enough comedians were gay. What surprised me was Gene’s message, something good-natured and droll about the slim pickings on the app, then a little stand-up shop talk, then telling me I was handsome (why do cis men on dating apps always tell trans men they are handsome? Who put them up to this?), then asking for my phone number, then making a plan to meet.

I was new to stand-up and new to men. My girlfriend was April, a trans woman who was tall and black-haired and having more sex than me. Polyamory worked for April, always had. But it hadn’t gone well for me until April showed up. I was baby-faced and short, which I couldn’t stop talking about, in my act and on first dates. I thought if I kept talking about how short I was, I could somehow exorcize the shortness from me, or at least prove I had some sort of handle on the situation, that I knew about my shortness, had no illusions, that I may be short and trans but I am still on planet Earth. Onstage, my short jokes rarely failed. On dates, cis girls loved them.

I tried to talk to April about being short on our first date and she looked at me blankly and said, “Who cares, everyone’s shorter than me. Or do you have a problem with my height?”

I apologized. I had not meant to make April feel self-conscious about her height. It’s all relative, of course, and I already loved her bigness! Briefly I imagined my falling asleep on her breasts and her long black hair flowing around us both like water.

“You hang out with cis people too much,” April said with a smile. I guess I’d amused her. Plus she’d said she had a thing for trans guys. In fact it was a new trans guy in her life that prompted me to go on Tinder in the first place. She’d met Hank at her boxing gym. So they were fucking and boxing together. I was still the primary—we lived together, she loved stand-up comedy, she told me my jokes were funnier than Hank’s, and between her and I Hank took himself a little too seriously, but he was great in the bedroom and in the ring, her form in both had mightily improved (I did not notice this alleged improvement in the bedroom, because I am mostly vanilla, and Hank and April both are into, like, breath play).

The day I started talking to Gene I was swiping through Tinder a little speedier than most, because April had already left for a weekend-long date with Hank in which they were going to “fuck and box until they passed out.” Not like April hadn’t spent the night with dates before but since shacking up together 8 months ago I had not even ventured out to meet anyone else. Plus April’s other dates had not been as buff as Hank, Local Transgender Boxing Champion.

Once I’d made the plan with Gene, I texted April to let her know. She instantly sent back a string of eggplant emojis with some black hearts peppered in, followed by Get fucked, sweetheart! I responded with a single cool face emoji and an unpunctuated love you before returning my focus to Gene.

At 9pm I’d go to his house. It was October in Seattle, a Wednesday. Just cold enough to merit a sweater—I chose my vintage red crewneck with the happy terrier on the front and a wagging dog ass on the back. 501 Levis, as usual. Banana Republic boxer briefs I’d gifted myself for Hanukkah last year. Once my date outfit was assembled, I set it on the toilet and took off my day clothes (plain blue tee shirt, more frayed pair of 501 Levis, frayed Old Navy boxers stolen from younger brother’s drawer as a child) and got into the shower. I looked at my bush for a while. To shave or not to shave? I hadn’t done it in years, but I’d recently watched a porn with a trans guy in it who was all-the-way-shaved and his dick looked so robust and prominent relative to mine, which never poked out enough from the hair without April needing to fish around with her fingers before pulling it into her mouth. Problem was porn guy was hairless, and I skewed otter-like, a ton of fur on my stomach. Would it be weird to have just one little triangle of flesh completely smooth? I considered this, but then I considered Gene, this guy I barely knew but maybe wanted to know more, fishing fingers through my pubic hair trying to find my relatively small dick and could not bear the possibility. I shook my head hard to clear the mental image then went to work.

First, I cut the bulk of the hair off with a pair of scissors April kept in the bottom cabinet drawer for trimming her bangs. Then I started with the razor. It was hard to get in close to my dick and in between all the little vulva folds. I heard, muted by the sound of the running water, my phone’s cheerful ping. Once I’d done what I could with the razor I ran one finger softly over my dick—the sensation was incredible. So immediate! So sensitive! I could not believe I hadn’t shaved my bush before. Tonight, I was going to have the best orgasm of my life.

I finished up in the shower and checked my phone. Gene was responding to my question about whether he was a top or bottom: vers as all get-out. What about you? Any sexual fantasies that might color our evening?

I stared at my phone for a long time. With April I like lots of kissing and hand-stuff under the covers. Probably the wildest I get is 69, which we don’t do that often because April says she finds it distracting, that there’s “too much going on at once.” She likes me to be more of the top but ever since I started liking men I’ve wanted to bottom. April will P-in-V fuck me sometimes but it’s not really our thing, when I’m with women I gotta be the big man or something feels off. When I explained this to April, she said she understood, we left it at that.

April. It was hard to want to hang out with anyone else. Though there was one sexual fantasy April could not provide.

When I got on T I started thinking about men. Hair on pecs, veiny dicks, all of that shit. So I started kissing men, random men, whoever was around. And I found that kissing random men was like licking the underside of a slug. Smelling random men was like smelling old onions—old. Touching random men’s faces was like touching blubber crud with pointy hairs sticking out. And this was nothing to say of how they touched me: hungry, but also tentative, like they were experimenting with a fragile tomboy who had lost her way. My encounters were not erotic; I’d never made it to full on, P-in-V sex with a cis man. But still, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, nothing could poison my fantasies—Exploring the body of the man, a man I could trust, who trusted me enough to let me touch him how I wanted. To not have to feel him feeling my body, just feel him. Ideally, he’d be flat on a bed, tied up and hard as a rock as I ran my fingers down his chest, his stomach, his legs, his feet. I’d bite his neck, tickle him. Make a fist around his cock. Ease my pussy down onto his rock-hard cock and feel him filling me up.

To Gene I just said I am interested in tying somebody up. Gene responded with 🙂 maybe we can work up to that. Which implied multiple hookups! Exciting, but also, I thought, hold your horses, Gene—I didn’t even know what he smelled like yet.

I got in my car around 8:30 pm, too early, but after the shower I was just waiting around in my house anyway. I had decided against eating dinner because I was too nervous to be hungry and weren’t you not supposed to eat before anal if you were bottoming? I’d never done anal nor did I specifically want to, but if Gene wanted to, I’d probably oblige, I was curious enough about the experience and besides, in the bedroom I aim to please. Gene hadn’t mentioned anal but I just assumed cis men don’t pre-ask about these things. So I sat in a nearby Walgreens parking lot for a good fifteen minutes, the one just off 54^th Ave, and got my head right. This is going to be fun. April is out having fun right now. You and April have fun separately and together. You are doing this because you want to have fun. Sex is a leisure activity.

I put the car in gear and drove the six blocks to Gene’s place.

He lived in the top unit of a small apartment complex. The only way up was the outdoor stairs. I climbed. The sky was black and the street was quiet. When I arrived at the red wooden door that was his, I moved to knock, but the door flew open first. Standing there, with a plastic recycling bin full of dirty laundry, was Lauren Gray. She was in the middle of talking to someone.

When Lauren Gray saw me, she squealed.

“Welcome, Eli!” Lauren cried. “Come on in.” It was the first time I had heard her use my name. Lauren Gray was not just a legendary local stand-up but also a prolific producer; her latest weekly show, Cat Dads, was one of the most popular in the city and often sold out, even during summer when the weather was perfect and the show got moved to the basement of the Rendezvous so the monthly swingers mixers and private wedding parties could rent out the upstairs. I’d been going to Cat Dads before I started stand-up myself, when I still went to local shows for fun and had to pay for tickets—that’s how good Cat Dads was.

“Hello Elijah,” Gene said stiffly, somewhere behind Lauren. It was the straightest I had ever heard him sound.

“Hi!” I said, too friendly. “I didn’t know you all lived together.”

“We’re your regular dirty comic house. Britt’s got the room upstairs, Nicky’s across from Gene.”

“Hmm!” I said, smiling with closed lips. Nicky and Britt were two other straight Seattle big shots who I’d also met at shows, who would also be loosely aware I existed. But Gene had mentioned none of this to me.

“Nick and Britt aren’t home,” Gene cut in quickly. “Should we go to my room?”

“Why, yes!” I said. I couldn’t stop grinning. If I stopped grinning I might make a different face. This was not how I’d intended to make contact with the producer of the most coveted gig in the city. I wanted to meet her at a show, I wanted her to see my set, I wanted her to see me as a colleague. Not as Gene’s latest boy-toy–Was I Gene’s latest boy-toy? Or might I belong to some other boy-type-category? How much did Gene fuck, anyway? How many boy-toys did he have in rotation?

“Good to see you, Eli!” Lauren Gray called out as she descended down the stairs with the recycling bin full of clothes. She left the door open behind her; I followed Gene past the bathroom and Nicky’s room into Gene’s. He shut his door and said, “Make yourself at home.”

Gene’s room was reasonably messy, not so bad that you couldn’t see the floor but there were individual socks strewn about the room. Closet open, some shirts hung up. Plain blue sheets, lumpy pillows, a Bluetooth speaker on the windowsill next to the bed. Light came from an overhead lamp on the desk, cluttered with papers, a laptop, dirty mugs, pens, a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos with a rubber band around it, a stress ball shaped like a brain. A poster for an excellent graphic novel on the wall, next to his bed.

“I love Grand Theft Horse,” I said. Gene did not respond. He was opening up an Altoids tin and picking out a mint that looked too large to be an Altoid. Then he angled the tin towards me. I noticed then that some of the oversized mints were precisely cut in half, as if by a pill-cutter.

“Would you like a weed mint?” Gene asked. “You probably only need half. Most people only need half.”

I hesitated. I liked smoking weed but found edibles unpredictable. Impossible to tell how strong they are when you don’t make them yourself, when someone just hands them to you, not unlike how Gene was handing me this mystery mint now.

To be safe, I took half.

“Fun, fun!” Gene said, then went to sit on the bed. He smiled at me, face expectant and open. Me taking the edible had clearly relaxed him.

I knew then that if I sat on the bed, the talking would stop. I thought briefly of April on her date, then April at home, how safe and easy it felt with her. I pretended to look around the room.

“Can I take off my sweater?” I said.

“Please do,” said Gene.

This night with Gene was part of that safety and easiness with April, I decided, both of us having separate lives, separate loves, separate fucks. Coming together after a long day of coming separately. Ha ha ha. I’d say that to April when she got home.

I took off my sweater and sat on the bed. Gene’s eyes narrowed. He looked at me and half-whined, half-grunted. Then he lunged.

There was a fleshiness to Gene I did not anticipate. Mainly in the face, something about the way the skin and meat worked together along the stubble-pocked jaw. I had gotten used to burrowing into April’s sharp angles, but with Gene there was nowhere to burrow, nowhere to hide. I dragged my nose along his neck. He gasped, which I liked; I felt the base of my clit-dick broaden. We fell back onto the bed, me on top of him. There was music playing but I did not recognize the song; something shimmering and flat, Passion Pit-adjacent.

I scooted my cunt back to Gene’s dick. I couldn’t feel anything through the thick seat of my jeans. He wanted more tongue. I obliged for a minute but was looking for a way out, the tonguing was not what I was here for. Instinctively, I kissed down his right cheek to the center of his neck. I bit.

“Woah, woah,” Gene said, lifting his hands from my back and letting them hover above us. “Can we not do biting?” I felt a flash of shame. It was a move I used so often with April I had not even considered asking for consent. Worse than that was Gene’s boundary-as-question, that he did not even feel confident enough to plainly tell me to stop, that it had to be reframed as a choice we had made together and therefore a blameless pivot away, when what had actually happened was I had taken liberties where I should not have.

“Of course,” I said, effusive. “I’m so sorry.”

“No, no!” he said quickly. Then he pulled my face back into his. He kissed me so hard he forced my lips open, in a way, to accommodate the mass of his tongue, as if he were desperate to lick the moment back into submission. From somewhere else in the house, I could hear the clanging of pans, every other word of a glossy-voiced podcaster, Lauren Gray’s conspicuously loud laugh: she’s making dinner, I thought, I hear Lauren Gray making dinner..

“What is this, Passion Pit?” I asked, gesturing to the speakers.

“No, Empire of The Sun.”

“Turn it up, I love it.”

“You got it, stud.” Gene turned up the music and winked.

Clearly it was time to get the dick involved. I reached down, over his pants, and caressed the lump. I thought I’d be able to grab it fast and with purpose, but once I made contact, I was confronted with the fact that this was not a toy but the genitals of another human being. Why had I thought it’d be harder, that I could enclose it in a fist? It was not that much harder than April’s after all. The dick still compelled me to be very gentle with it. Gene groaned and shivered. I didn’t mean to, but I looked at his face. His eyes were closed. I stroked the side of the lump with my finger. I could not believe he was this soft, this vulnerable. He was more vulnerable in his so-called hard cock than anywhere else.

Gene must’ve sensed that I’d slipped out of the moment, because he then pushed me away to pull off his pants. I lifted the hem of his shirt to prompt him to take that off, too. He kneeled in front of me then; he was only wearing a white speedo with red and blue stripes around the waistband. Gene’s face had changed again; it was at once self-conscious and feral, greedy but affected, like he had wanted to translate his lust into something other than it was, something less mysterious and unbridled, more focused, a force to be harnessed and wielded with style. This was the worst of it all, for me, this posturing; I wanted the animal of him. I wanted to make animals of us both. I stared at his speedo until he took it off.

His penis sprung out. Gene bared his teeth. I noticed a nondescript, silver cock ring around the base of the shaft.

I had never seen a cock ring in real life before. With a toothy grin Gene waggled his dick and I saw that the cock ring was meant to be a sort of reveal. I was meant to find the cock ring impressive or interesting. In truth, it terrified me. I could not confidently say what a cock ring did for the wearer and had even less of an idea how the wear-ee (for hadn’t it been presented to me as if it were a gift, as if it were for I the cock ring was being worn?) was supposed to interact with it. Should I tug on it? Lick it? Ignore it all together? I smiled with fake delight, made my eyes blaze with fake zeal, and decided I would go the ignoring route unless a more sensible approach made itself known to me. Probably the excited face I made would be enough recognition for Gene.

Gene waddled closer on his knees with his arms outstretched. I pressed a hand lightly on his chest and he obediently laid back on the bed so I could get my mouth on his cock. This moment, Gene’s face away and his cock so close, was everything to me. This was the closeness, slowness I wanted. So I went slow—Pushed my tongue forward and dragged its tip, exact, stiff, almost dry, along the side of the shaft. Gene made a noise like he’d sipped too-hot soup. I jerked my head up to make sure this was a sound of pleasure, but he had anticipated this, it seemed, and was already looking down at me, nodding vigorously; I returned to my work.

I put his dick in my mouth and let it rest there. I wanted to feel it thicken. Surely it was hard—it had practically jumped out of his speedo—but was this as hard as it got? I had been thinking that Gene would be halfway between April’s junk and my own dildos, but this was not even 1/4 of the way there. I cupped the balls, a thing I had seen men in porn do (why couldn’t I remember what men in porn did with cock rings?). Gene made the soup sound again.  I took my tongue to the head—Bigger soup sound. I did not make a fist but used my thumb and middle finger to try to coax his come onto my tongue. He was breathing strangely now; the soup sounds were coming faster now and in their own rhythm, like a pregnant person practicing their breathing for labor. Then Gene zipped out from under me; he was getting a condom from his desk drawer and ripping the wrapper open. I felt relieved he wasn’t fighting me on it–I had told him he’d need to wear one while we were messaging, because I had an overwhelming fear of getting pregnant, even though the chances of that happening were famously negligible, but Gene didn’t have to know that. Behind him his closet mirror reflected his hairy, bare ass. When he got the condom out he looked at me and, upon seeing I was watching, shifted his weight and did, briefly, jazz hands. That brought me back to the whole of Gene’s bedroom, beyond the alien planet of his bed. Gene was standing in the center of his room, naked, putting on a condom. Gene from stand-up, stand-up comedian Gene. I was not high; I was a little thirsty. The music was still on; in fact, a new song had started. This was rap, something Top 40 and familiar. It wasn’t until Gene got the condom on and pushed me onto my hands and knees that I registered the lyrics.

Rack city, bitch, rack rack city bitch. Ten ten ten twenty on yo titties bitch.

“Yes, yes,” Gene said behind me. He was adjusting my ass with his hands. I stifled a gasp. There was something racist about a white guy getting enthusiastically fucked by another white guy with Rack City by Tyga in the background, but I didn’t know how to explain it in the moment. Still I couldn’t just get fucked to this song and not say anything, I at least had to try, for my own conscience’s sake. Technically—arguably—in some circles—I was about to lose my virginity.

“This is Rack City,” I said, as if the chorus of the song had not just made it abundantly clear.

“This is my fuck playlist,” Gene said. Without further comment Gene shoved his fat short cock inside my cunt. 

I tried to feel something novel but could not. He shoved it in fast, kept shoving, to the rhythm of Rack City, which was so utterly predictable I did not even feel moved to laugh, let alone protest. It was a hard, dry fuck—Gene had not thought to use lube, and I had not thought to ask, each of us assuming our approach to fucking was the obvious way, him of course not knowing that my cunt had atrophied considerably on testosterone and that I could not even begin to enjoy stimulation of any kind without proper lubrication, which April was always good about. But Gene had been ready to fuck so fast and I had been so absorbed in the revelation of Rack City that I hadn’t had time to request it. I imagined what I looked like if someone were watching from a bird’s eye view, Gene fucking me robotically at warp speed and me soundlessly taking it, the two of us fucking like soulless machines. Then I tried to imagine the scene at half-speed, without the music, but the pinch and chafe of the actual conditions of the fuck made it impossible to get wet at all. Fortunately, Gene came quickly; unfortunately he grabbed another condom from his desk drawer, opened it, and set it on the desk, I presumed for easy access, then started sloppily kissing my lips again.

All hope of getting off I had abandoned. To my horror Gene pushed his hands between my legs and started pressing my dick like a button, like it was a clit and he was a man and I was a woman and there was nothing more to it than that. The button-pressing hurt considerably more without the usual buffer of my bush. Rack City was ending and a song by MGMT was coming on, what was it? Oh, god, Electric Feel. I had put this song on a mix CD for my first girlfriend, back in my sophomore year of high school, back when I had just come out as a lesbian and would often, proudly proclaim I could never love a man. So far that had held true but not for the reasons I’d thought. Did April love Hank? No, she would have told me. But she could love Hank. We were allowed to say that word to other partners, love. We hadn’t loved any other partners since we’d been together. But she could. She could be telling Hank she loved him right now.

Now I was getting high. Right? Now, now, now. Now Gene was grabbing the condom and positioning himself behind me, again. Why had I taken an edible right before having sex, when I knew edibles took me at least 30 minutes to metabolize, when I knew this would likely all be over in 10-15 at most? Fantasy. Like maybe Gene and me would make a night of it. We would fuck slow and for hours; it was a Wednesday, we were comics, where did either of us have to be tomorrow? We would try stuff out. We would try each other on in all different ways and all different positions. We would talk and riff and meander intuitively like one of Gene’s best stand-up sets. We’d talk about Pasolini; he’d show me a thing or two about how to fuck like a fag. But I did not actually know Gene. I did not know how to work this room, maybe any room–and Gene did. Gene knew how to work a room. Gene was great at crowd work; Gene both owned and knew how to use a cock ring. Gene knew how to fuck a short trans comedy baby from behind to Rack City, then again to Electric Feel. 

Gene’s dick went in me again. I saw my red sweater with the terrier on it balled up across from me on the bed. Its waggling ass. I waggled my ass, too, like a dog, which Gene liked. He yelled, actually, “Yes!” loudly and clearly, like he was calling out to someone much farther away. His thrusting hurt more and more, but I waggled on until he slammed into my cunt one last time. He must’ve been coming but I couldn’t feel anything different happening inside me except maybe the beginnings of a UTI.

Gene pulled the condom of his dick and threw it on the floor, then laid down on his pillow. He surprised me by pulling me into his arms and holding me there in his bed. My head was on his chest. He kissed my forehead and whispered, “Wow.” Then he turned off the fuck playlist. I continued to say nothing but pressed in closer to him. I was interested in this moment, whatever it was. I wanted more of it, to crawl inside it, in spite of Rack City, in spite of all of it. I tried to make eye contact with Gene then, see what that would do, but when I pulled my head back to look into his face, he understood it as me pulling away and quickly got out of bed.

“That was fun,” he said, still not making eye contact. “Do you need a towel?”

“Sure,” I said. 

“Great. Let me put on my pants… Well, hang on.” He then turned his back from me, still naked on the bed, while he tried to remove his cock ring. But of course I could still see it in the reflection of the closet door mirror.

“This is new,” he said over his shoulder as he continued to fidget with the ring; he seemed to be having some trouble taking it off. “Ordered it online for a guy last year but then we broke up while it was in the mail.”

This was the first time I had heard Gene reference another partner. “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. Could I capitalize on this admission? Could I get him back in bed? “What happened?”

“Oh you know,” Gene said quickly. “Boys will be boys.” Then—I still don’t know how this happened—the ring flew off Gene’s cock and bounced hard and loudly off the closet door mirror.

“Whoops!” Gene said, too loudly. “I’ll get that towel now.” He pulled on boxers and a t-shirt and shut the bedroom door behind. I grabbed my phone and checked my messages. Nothing from April or anyone else. It was 9:28pm. Roughly the amount of time I usually spent jerking off to porn in my room alone.

I heard Lauren Gray ask somewhere outside bedroom, “Gene-y baby. Did you punch the mirror again?”

I looked again at the mirror. Not broken anywhere, no dents. It looked pristine, actually, oddly clean as compared to the detritus on the floor. Perhaps it was a new mirror, recently replaced. Panic rose in me. Why did Gene punch his mirror? Why did Lauren think Gene might punch a mirror before, during or after having sex with me?

My cunt was throbbing, and not in a good way: Hot and sharp. I was really getting high now and only getting higher. It was time to go—Now, now, now. Go, go, go, go.

When Gene came back into the room with the towel, I was wearing all my clothes.

“Oh,” Gene said, confused. “No towel?”

“I like the feeling of your come on my leg,” I said, but my expression remained vexed, he could tell I was forcing it. Gene grinned charitably.

“Me too,” Gene said in an unsure tone, half-aware the response did not make sense. “Let me walk you out.” 

“Don’t don’t. It’s cold out,” I said. “I know the way.”

“Well,” Gene said with a big inhale. “Thanks for coming over, kid.” Then he pecked me hard on the lips, like he was a little boy stealing a kiss, and I felt a pang of longing for that mischievousness, where had that been all night? But then he flashed me that look from before, like a feral animal, if feral animals could hate themselves, and I decided whatever I had felt in that stolen kiss was not really him, or if it was really him then he was not accessible to me. Fucking me— fucking some kid—was the extent.

I rushed out of Gene’s room; Lauren Gray was eating her dinner—pasta with red sauce in a black bowl—on the couch. Storage Wars was on.

“Leaving already?” Lauren Gray said. She sounded unsure, even nervous—I had never heard Lauren Gray sound nervous before. “So nice to have you over!”

“Yeah,” I said. “I wanted to mention—I think Cat Dads is the best show in the city.”

“Awh, thanks,” Lauren said. “Your jokes are great. I need to book you some time!”

I sighed with relief. Something worthwhile out of this night. “That would be amazing.” 

“I’ll get your number from Gene,” Lauren said, smiling tentatively.

There was a long pause in which I sensed both Lauren Gray and I were deciding if we should make a joke about Gene, or my having sex with Gene, or my having sex with Gene while Lauren Gray made herself a late-night bowl of pasta marinara. But we just kept smiling strangely at each other—it occurred to me then she might be stoned, too. Why else make pasta marinara at 9:30pm on a Wednesday? —until I waved and left the apartment.

The cold air hit my face and I remembered I was still on planet Earth. Black night, quiet street, October, Wednesday. My high was really sparking now. Gene’s weed was so strong that despite not getting off/everything that had just happened I was starting to feel good. I got into my car and put on the radio but didn’t drive anywhere. KEXP was playing, I didn’t recognize the song, it had trumpets and drums and a baritone voice growling inaudibly over it all. Now this was sexy, I thought, this is what sex with men should sound like. Sex with men had had its own music in my head but instead its music had been Rack City and Electric Feel. The first time I had sex with April, I knew it would be violins and it was. With girls it was always easy like that, the music always matched up. Gene had fucked me and in a way I’d fucked him but there was no music, no conversation. Stand-up was a conversation; it was a give and take with the audience and I knew Gene could do it. So why couldn’t he be as sensitive and improvisational with me as he was with the drunk divorces in the front row? Why couldn’t I get that sweet, light part of him, too?

I decided to text April, even though I knew she wouldn’t answer, that by now she’d be busy with Hank:

Thinking of you and on my way home, I wrote. Sex was bad, but I think I got a gig out of it?

I put the car in gear and drove slowly home, my chest suddenly bursting with the most extraordinary, blissed out high I had ever known, based on nothing at all. When I got back to my apartment, I clicked around the internet until I figured out the name of the weed mints so I could buy them at a dispensary tomorrow. Then I took a shower and cleaned my mangled vulva, let the sting of soap sober me up.