Desire

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Pisces (2018)

  30.I went late to see Theo. The fact that he had other plans the night before, and I didn’t know what they were, made me feel insecure. Instead I spent extra time cuddling with Dominic, the dog’s head draped over my arm so that his neck fit snug like a warm puzzle piece. I pretended that I preferred to be with the dog and could take or leave seeing the swimmer entirely. But I was playing a game: I knew that Theo was not mine alone. I mean, he said he didn’t have a girlfriend, but he was so beautiful. Of course there were other women. Everything I saw in him that I liked was available for others to see. But the way he treated me, with such reverence, made me feel like he held me above all others or anything else. If there were a gaggle of younger girls, I was his special older woman. Still, I couldn’t help but play a little bit of a game just to make him wonder. He was waiting for me when I got to the rocks. He was still in the water and was holding on to a rock, his chin resting on it. I sat down on the rock and leaned forward. With my hand, I lifted up his face to mine, kissed him wetly, our tongues in each other’s mouths. He moaned in my mouth and the moaning set off shudders inside me. I realized for the first time that he didn’t just like me or think I was pretty, but that he wanted me. In a flash I felt myself get wet inside. “I just want to take off your fucking wet suit,” I said. He looked me in the eyes. “Lie down,” he said. “With your legs over the rock.” I lay down. He took off my flip-flops and began kissing my feet, sucking my toes. “Oh my God.” I laughed. “Aren’t they sandy? Sorry if they taste weird!”

• From The Pisces (2018)

  The swimmer leaned on the rock with his arms. They were thick and meaty—not cut like a bodybuilder’s, but you could see the muscles underneath what looked like a layer of baby chub. They reminded me of eating a piece of fish with thick skin and a small layer of fat, strong and also soft, very white. I wanted to bite them. His chest was hairless, and I noticed that the color of his nipples matched perfectly his lips, like pencil erasers. He looked like he was twenty-one, at most. If this was death then death was hot. “Doesn’t it scare you to be night-swimming? Isn’t the water freezing?” I asked. “I’ve got a wet suit on my lower half,” he said. “But no, it doesn’t scare me. I like the way the splashes look in the moonlight and I like having the ocean to myself. Well, almost to myself.” “Yeah, it’s nice out here,” I said. The wine was wearing off. I suddenly felt exhausted. His teeth were shiny white, but not like an actor’s. They didn’t look bleached or fake. They were practically iridescent, like the inside of a shell. There was something almost feminine about him, pretty, but his jaw was well defined. These surfer boys. I always forgot that they were real. I mean, I knew that they existed. I knew they were alive. But it really seemed to me that the surfing was a costume, like they were only pretending to be so enamored of it. How could anyone be that devoted to something so lacking a destination? Just wave after wave, over and over. I wished someone were that enamored of me. But their love for surfing was real. It was a fact. They really loved surfing as much as they appeared to love it. This one didn’t have a board, though. This wasn’t a surfer. This was a swimmer. “What’s your name?” he asked. “Lucy.” I felt old. “Nice to meet you, Lucy,” he said. “I’m Theo.” When he said his name, his hotness increased. He was real, there in the water, real in a way that I wasn’t. He was swimming and wet and I was—what was I doing? I thought of all my books, the ones waiting for me in piles back in my parching Phoenix apartment, collecting dust. I thought of the university library. I imagined the library growing and growing, the books piling up on the edge of this ocean. One wave could destroy them all. They were so dry, like they were actually made of dust. My skin, too, felt like an old book: powdery parchment etched with lines that supposedly contained knowledge, but when you looked closer they were only empty scribbles. Not the right kind of knowledge. If you put me in the water, I too would dissolve. I was sure of it. “Do you always swim at night?” “Yes,” he said. “The waves are more intense but it makes you stronger.”

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Patriarch von Constantinopel. Sein Leben, seine Schriften und das griechische Schisma. Regensburg, 1867–69, 3 vols. (The Monumenta mentioned above forms part of the third vol.) Cf. Du Pin, VII., 105–110; Ceillier, XII., 719–734. Photius was born in Constantinople in the first decade of the ninth century. He belonged to a rich and distinguished family. He had an insatiable thirst for learning, and included theology among his studies, but he was not originally a theologian. Rather he was a courtier and a diplomate. When Bardas chose him to succeed Ignatius as Patriarch of Constantinople he was captain of the Emperor’s body-guard. Gregory of Syracuse, a bitter enemy of Ignatius, in five days hurried him through the five orders of monk, lector, sub-deacon, deacon, and presbyter, and on the sixth consecrated him patriarch. He died an exile in an Armenian monastery, 891. As the history of Photius after his elevation to the patriarchate has been already treated,911 this section will be confined to a brief recital of his services to literature, sacred and secular.912 The greatest of these was his so-called Library,913 which is a unique work, being nothing less than notices, critiques and extracts of two hundred and eighty works of the most diverse kinds, which he had read. Of the authors quoted about eighty are known to us only through this work. The Library was the response to the wish of his brother Tarasius, and was composed while Photius was a layman. The majority of the works mentioned are theological, the rest are grammatical, lexical, rhetorical, imaginative, historical, philosophical, scientific and medical. No poets are mentioned or quoted, except the authors of three or four metrical paraphrases of portions of Scripture. The works are all in Greek, either as originals or, as in the case of a few, in Greek translations. Gregory the Great and Cassian are the only Latin ecclesiastical writers with whom Photius betrays any intimate acquaintance. As far as profane literature is concerned, the Library makes the best exhibit in history, and the poorest in grammar. Romances are mentioned, also miscellanies. In the religious part of his work Chrysostom and Athanasius are most prominent. Of the now lost works mentioned by Photius the most important is by an anonymous Constantinopolitan author of the first half of the seventh century, who in fifteen books presented testimonies in favor of Christianity by different Greek, Persian, Thracian, Egyptian, Babylonian, Chaldean and Jewish scholars. Unique and invaluable as the Library is, it has been criticized because more attention is given to some minor works than to other important ones; the criticisms are not always fair or worthy; the works spoken of are really few, while a much larger anthology might have been made; and again there is no order or method in the selection.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  As much as I wanted to be female, I was taught to believe that this was not a realistic possibility for me. For this reason, I began to channel my female inclinations into fantasies or role-playing, in which I’d imagine I’d turned into a girl somehow. The fact that these fantasies always began with me being a boy (rather than simply imagining myself as a girl from the start) is indicative of how illegitimate I felt my own desires to be female were. I was convinced that I could never attain actual femaleness; in my mind, the best that I could hope for was merely pretending to be female or being “turned into” a girl.After a year or two of imagining myself becoming a girl (typically a rather tomboyish one who went off on adventures and such), I started experimenting with conventional femininity. This was due both to me wanting to explore my own feminine inclinations and to the fact that (like most people) I was taught to believe that femininity was an intrinsic part of being female. My growing fascination with femininity was also very much intertwined with my growing attraction to women. As a teenager who was dealing with sexual attraction for the first time, I found it hard not to conflate my desire to be female with my sexual attraction for women. And in this respect, feminine accoutrements—whether clothing, cosmetics, or other accessories—became highly symbolic of both.In chapter 14, “Trans-Sexualization,” I explained that trans people who have not transitioned, and who therefore are unable to take their own physical sex for granted, often experience sexual arousal in association with their own cross-gendered thoughts and expressions. While this is true for virtually all trans people, there are a couple of factors specific to crossdressers that intensify this phenomenon. First, testosterone, which significantly boosts one’s sex drive across the board, undoubtedly plays some role in amplifying cross-gendered sexual arousal for those who are hormonally male. Second, we live in a culture in which women are frequently viewed as sexual objects, and much of women’s clothing emphasizes and exaggerates women’s sexuality. For crossdressers, there is no way of getting around the cultural eroticism that surrounds “women’s” clothing.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I’m more than a little delighted when he shoos them out of the house and closes the door behind them. I’m making progress: a dog in the room to a dog outside the room to dogs outside the house. He takes me through the house, a combination of a bachelor pad and a family home, as if it can’t quite decide what it wants to be, and that is probably true depending on who is inhabiting it at any given moment. His bedroom is in an open lofty area with a king-size bed, its plain brown comforter covered in dog hair. We stand near the bed, quiet now that the house tour is over. He kisses me as I pull my shirt over my head and kick off my shorts so that I am standing in my lingerie. He unbuttons his shirt and I am intrigued by how taut and muscular his arms, shoulders and chest are. I’ve never been with a man so brawny and hairless and I love the way his skin feels, smooth and warm. He presses himself against me until I back up and sit on the edge of the bed. Apologizing that he wasn’t expecting company today, he pulls back the hair-covered blanket to expose sheets that look rumpled but clean enough if I’m not being fussy, which right now, I’m definitely not. I take note that this is the third man in a matter of weeks who has excused the conditions of his home because he wasn’t anticipating having a guest over. I seem to push ahead even as my dates are ready to kiss and say goodbye; it’s never enough for me. He climbs on top of me, stroking my body and working his way down until his mouth is between my legs. Then he looks up at me, a boyish grin lighting up his face. “You take good care of yourself,” he says. At this I smile: I do take care of myself. If there’s one benefit to the swell of anger raging inside of me, it’s that I work out like I’m on fire and sweat is the only thing that can douse it. The more rage I get out through heavy exercise, the less likely I am to expel it later through ugly, impassioned text missives to Michael. When he bought me my own Peloton bike a year earlier, he could not have known how much it would actually come to help him too. #4 reaches for a condom that he must have placed discreetly under a pillow at some point, and I watch him unfurl it onto his penis. I feel decidedly awkward during this part of a sexual encounter – am I supposed to help with the condom or watch him put it on or avert my eyes?

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I asked Theo. “Maybe if he just comes out and meets you.” “The problem is that if he attacks I can’t get away.” “He won’t attack,” I said. But I had never seen Dominic this irate and I wasn’t sure. When we imagine a situation—when our hearts decide this must happen—we will go to any lengths to make the fantasy happen. In my fantasy there was no barking. There was only me and Theo on the soft sheets and a universe of silence. “Wait one second,” I said. “I’ll be right back.” I remembered I had seen some doggy tranquilizers in one of the kitchen cabinets for things like airplane flights. I got two pills and hid them in a treat, then went into the pantry and stuffed it into Dominic’s frothing mouth. Two was double the dose. Was I awful? Would I be punished? Next I turned on some music, something ambient of my sister’s, a soft electronic yoga chant meant to soothe the most stressed-out human or animal. “He should be quiet soon,” I said, coming out the side door. Then I realized that Theo was still in the wagon. “Oh God,” I said. “I’m sorry, let me help you out of there.” He smiled nervously as I pulled the wagon into the house. In my visions, Theo would be able to go anywhere on his own. He would be part Paralympic champion and part giant snail, easily gliding from room to room and up the stairs. But there really was no way of getting him up there. “Maybe we can relax on the sofa,” I said, pointing. My sister’s sofa was white and I felt nervous about getting it covered in kelp, sand, the sheen of sea dirt that accrued and attached itself to Theo’s tail. I was covered in the beach and ocean salt too. I took the blanket off of him and laid it on the sofa. He flipped himself onto the floor and began to drag himself over. I felt proud of him that he was unashamed to do this in my presence, to let me see him so vulnerable. It was adorable—him flopping around out of water, trying to be strong for me, arms straining. Who was this magic creature in my sister’s home? How had this even happened? He hoisted himself onto the sofa and lay down on his back. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the big flat-screen TV. “It’s a television,” I said. “It projects images and sound. But right now it’s off. It’s sleeping.” “Do you enjoy it?” “Not really,” I said. “Come over here,” he said. I got on top of him. We kissed each other with open mouths, sucking at each other like we were eating mussels. Then we kissed slow and gentle. I noticed that Dominic had stopped barking. How long could Theo stay with me?

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I take off my sandals and dangle them from my fingers as I try to gracefully make my way over shells and shallow pools of water to the bar, which is shut down for the night. As I approach, I hear a long whistle come from the direction of a stretch of empty chairs on the beach. I amble over, feigning casualness as best I can. The chairs are more like round beds, half covered by a canopy, and it’s not until I get to the second one that I see Blaze tucked inside of it. “Hey beautiful,” he says quietly. I say hello shyly, still clutching my sandals in one hand and holding up the hem of my maxi dress in the other. I didn’t really expect him to be here and am surprised and nervous. He gestures to the enclosed seat. I drop my sandals and climb in, asking how he got to the beach since I can’t picture him in a car, which seems too ordinary for him. He takes a long inhale of the joint he is holding and passes it to me, but I shake my head. Now that I’m trying to see him as a real person and not just the demi-god of my dreams, I’m curious too to know his real name. He makes me promise that I won’t laugh at it. “Ephraim,” he says. “A Biblical name. Does anyone still call you that?” I ask. “My mother,” he says. “And how did you come to be known as Blaze?” I say. “How do you think, Mama?” he says laughing and before I can answer his lips are on mine, so soft and pillowy that I want to bite them. His breath is a combination of cigarettes and weed, and I can smell cologne on his skin, which I find touching – an indication that he put himself together for me. He lies me back and looks meaningfully at me as he pulls my dress down and throws it to the side, so that I am lying naked except for a pale pink thong, which he also pulls down and throws to the side of the chair. I watch him closely but don’t speak. He tells me that he’s been watching me for a long time and then his lips are all over my body, working their way from my nipples down my torso, resting on my still-hairless pubic triangle. “Mama, you have fat pussy lips!” he says, laughing. “I don’t know how to take that. Is that a compliment or an insult?” I ask. “I have no insults for you,” he says, burrowing his face between my legs.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  After a few minutes he turns up a dirt road and parks in front of a small weathered farmhouse. I get out of my car and hear a cacophony of honking noises – ducks! He assures me they’ll settle down but I don’t care, I’m thoroughly charmed by the whole scene. When he opens the screen door after crossing a ramshackle porch filled with rubber boots and gardening tools, two cats and a chocolate Labrador come running to greet us. He looks down at my feet and asks if I have a more practical pair of shoes in my car to take the dog for a walk. I do not, so he reaches for my hand to guide me as we walk up a damp grassy path behind the dog. It is serene under the inky black sky, but impossible to see more than a foot ahead and we are walking with purpose to keep up with the dog, wet grass tickling my feet while my delicate sandals rebel against the pastoral conditions. Terrified that even with him protectively clutching my hand I am merely steps away from wiping out, I’m doing everything I can to simultaneously secure my footing, casually swat away mosquitoes and reassure him this is a lovely walk and of course I am loving every second of my time outdoors! My relief when we are back inside and I can kick off my ridiculous heels is so great that one might have thought I was returning from a ten-mile hike in the depths of the jungle. Settling into a cane-backed rocking chair to wait while he feeds his cats, I take in the living room, which, like the house, is unpretentious and charming, simply furnished with a stack of astronomy magazines and copies of The New York Review of Books on the coffee table. Soon he is back, wasting no words while he sinks down to his knees next to the rocking chair, kissing me gently and then with increasing urgency. He asks if I want to go upstairs and then we are on the rickety staircase with him holding out a hand behind him for me to hold as we head to his bedroom. The windows are open and it sounds like pouring rain outside, but he says it is the river rushing by, one on his property that I could not see in the dark. It’s hard for me to imagine a more romantic spot than the one I am standing in. I have a flash of the hugely bestselling book The Bridges of Madison County : at the time I read it I thought it was absurd, the idea of a lonely housewife on a farm having a brief affair with a stranger she stays in love with forever and never sees again, but now it comes back to me and makes sense.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  He peeled my underpants down my legs. “And your vagina is so gorgeous. I just want to put my face in it all the time and live there.” “You should,” I said nervously, and giggled. I watched the top of his head as he ate me. Even though he had said before that he wanted to eat me all night I still felt nervous about how long it might take me to come. I made moaning sounds. My clit felt good but my mind stayed disconnected. I wanted him in me, wanted to fuck him, face-to-face. As if he knew how I was feeling, he put a finger inside me. I gasped. “I want your cock so bad,” I whined. “How much?” he said with his face still buried in my pussy. “So bad,” I said. I could see that he was stroking himself as he ate me. I could feel his cock, hard against my shin. “Give me your cock please,” I said. “Please can I have it?” He climbed back on me so his face was over my face and his chest on my chest, his cock nestled between my thighs, resting on my wet clit and lips. “I’m on the pill,” I said. “We don’t need to use anything.” Then I started laughing at the absurdity of everything. Was I really talking about birth control with a merman? It was true that I was on the pill, sort of. I wasn’t great about taking it. Sometimes I would forget for days at a time. Occasionally I would just go off it for a month. Jamie knew this, but in all our years together I never got knocked up. He would always pull out and come on my belly. He feared me getting pregnant, how that would impinge on his freedom—the emotional fallout from an abortion, or worse yet, a baby. He was afraid, but not enough to wear a condom. I couldn’t remember if I had taken my pill the day before, but could a merman really impregnate me? Would the child have legs or a tail? Perhaps it would have legs and a tail, or multiple legs, like an octopus. I couldn’t imagine Theo was riddled with disease either, considering he spent his life in saltwater. He was like a saline boy. I didn’t know how many others he had fucked, and now I didn’t really care. Let him give me his diseases, I thought. Let him give me some strange sea syphilis or whatever. I want it. I don’t care. Looking into my eyes, he rubbed the crease of my pussy with his cock. Then he slid his cock into me, so slowly. I gasped, he moaned, and I wanted to eat his moan. He was inside me.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  He was the co-op board president and Michael and I had to be interviewed by him to be allowed to buy in the building. We were in our late 20s and had scraped together every dollar we could find to purchase a lofty studio. The building had an elevator and a doorman, and the dishwasher, washer/dryer, and bathroom faucet in which hot and cold water mixed together in one glorious tap so that we would no longer have to choose between icy cold or scalding hot water made me feel that adulthood was finally within our reach. This man was all that was standing between our faking being adults and our actually becoming them. He turned out to be kind and welcoming and we were surprised by how readily he had ushered us into the building and our new state of maturity. Over the ensuing years, we often ran into him and his wife; perhaps because he had unwittingly played such a large role in this milestone moment, I had always felt indebted and even deferential to him. Leslie tells me that he just moved out of his family’s apartment into his own place, and I suggest she drop it into conversation with him that I happen to be single now too. “You sure?” she says. “Seems like he has his hands full right now.” I snort and say, “Oh please, who doesn’t? If I use that as criteria, everyone will be off limits and I’ll definitely be untouchable. Ask your brother to mention it to him, see if it piques his interest.” A few days later, she calls me back, her voice breathless with excitement, to tell me that Alan jumped enthusiastically on the news of my being single and said he will not only call me, he wants to take me out for dinner. “OK, so pass along my number. I mean, he’s cute and nice, right?” “Yes, very cute, fit, nice, and an amazing cook. You can give him any random ingredients and he could make something delicious out of it,” she says. That’s all I need to know: nothing is as tantalizing as the idea of dating a man who cooks for me. He wastes no time, texting me that night so we can set up a time to talk after I get Georgia to sleep. We talk about how odd it is to find ourselves single and living alone, about our kids and what the impact of our marriage dissolutions has been on them. His voice is deep and sonorous and, now that I’m allowed to think of him this way, sexy. We make a date for dinner on Saturday, on the late side as I will be volunteering all day at Georgia’s school Halloween fair.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  Later, I ask Hudson if he can bear to be with me and Michael so that we can all go away to the Caribbean together, reassuring him that no matter what he prefers my feelings will not be hurt. He does not hesitate in saying he wants me there, that he doesn’t want to go on vacation without me. #6 is both amused by and wary of my upcoming family holiday, wryly suggesting that perhaps Michael and I will reunite. I tease him for being jealous, but he insists that the timing and location suggest an ulterior motive. “Oh please, he wants me back as little as I want him back. He knows the kids will be disappointed if I’m not there and he’s in love with the notion of our being an ultramodern family. He’s too transparent to hide something like that and anyway, I’ve got bigger fish to fry. All the years we’ve been going to this place, I’ve been obsessed with the man on the beach who sells fruit and weed to tourists. He’s gorgeous – Rasta hair down his back, mahogany brown skin, perfectly defined muscles and an accent that could bring you to your knees. If you want to be jealous about something, this is your target,” I say. “And this is your prey?” he asks. “For years I’ve been innocently flirting with him but now I can do whatever I want. I mean, why not? Daisy and I used to walk down to the beach together to talk to him and then argue later if he was paying more attention to her or to me,” I say. “Back on the LLT,” he says. “Listen, who am I kidding? He’s probably fifteen years younger than me and he sees gorgeous barely dressed women all day long, he’s not going to look twice at me. It’s certainly fun to fantasize though.” I tell my friends and they agree, why not try? It seems outlandish, but it’s a good diversion – and anyway, haven’t I proven that my formerly staid life has indeed become outlandish? Some of them suggest it would be karmic payback, but I’m not interested in revenge. I am hurt, but what I want from Michael is continued acknowledgement of how deeply he’s wounded me, not vengeance. I don’t want to get back at him, but I do want to experience aspects of life that have been unavailable to me up to this point, like Blaze, the current object of my fantasies. Frugal as I am, I am prepared to shell out big bucks for new bikinis that will help in my hunt. I ask my friend Jen for help. We meet at a bathing suit boutique and carry dozens of options into the fitting room, treating this like a broad science experiment.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  I was convinced that I could never attain actual femaleness; in my mind, the best that I could hope for was merely pretending to be female or being “turned into” a girl. After a year or two of imagining myself becoming a girl (typically a rather tomboyish one who went off on adventures and such), I started experimenting with conventional femininity. This was due both to me wanting to explore my own feminine inclinations and to the fact that (like most people) I was taught to believe that femininity was an intrinsic part of being female. My growing fascination with femininity was also very much intertwined with my growing attraction to women. As a teenager who was dealing with sexual attraction for the first time, I found it hard not to conflate my desire to be female with my sexual attraction for women. And in this respect, feminine accoutrements—whether clothing, cosmetics, or other accessories—became highly symbolic of both. In chapter 14 , “Trans-Sexualization,” I explained that trans people who have not transitioned, and who therefore are unable to take their own physical sex for granted, often experience sexual arousal in association with their own cross-gendered thoughts and expressions. While this is true for virtually all trans people, there are a couple of factors specific to crossdressers that intensify this phenomenon. First, testosterone, which significantly boosts one’s sex drive across the board, undoubtedly plays some role in amplifying cross-gendered sexual arousal for those who are hormonally male. Second, we live in a culture in which women are frequently viewed as sexual objects, and much of women’s clothing emphasizes and exaggerates women’s sexuality. For crossdressers, there is no way of getting around the cultural eroticism that surrounds “women’s” clothing. Many crossdressers, particularly early in their crossdressing, become particularly interested in the most highly sexual articles of feminine clothing precisely because of the symbolism associated with them. Unfortunately, I have heard women criticize, even ridicule, this tendency among crossdressers, sometimes even suggesting that a crossdresser who covers their own body in hyperfeminine or hypersexual articles of clothing somehow sexualizes womanhood as a whole. Such criticism seems to purposefully ignore the fact that many teenage girls similarly tend to dress in sexually provocative or revealing ways when they hit puberty and begin to explore the cultural meanings associated with adult female sexuality. Both teenage girls and crossdressers are exposed to many of the same cultural messages about femininity and female sexuality (albeit from rather different vantage points) and thus both are drawn to experiment with hyperfeminine and hypersexual clothing as a way of literally “trying on” the symbolic meanings associated with adult female sexuality. And most crossdressers, like most cissexual women, eventually move beyond their “teenage girl phase” (as some crossdressers refer to it) and come to recognize sexually provocative clothing as but one of the many options available to them, but not necessarily one that they wish to indulge in every day.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  “Slower,” I said, to give myself time to get into it. He teased me over my underpants for a second. Then he put his fingers inside and started fingering me. My lips kept getting caught and rubbing against his fingers in an irritated way. I felt like they were puffing up like balloons. I kept trying to ask him questions. I wanted to hear that he wanted me. “What do you think of the lingerie?” “Hot, baby.” “The garters?” “So sexy.” I guess he could feel that I wasn’t super wet, because he got down on his knees in front of the sink where I was spread-eagle, pushed the undies to the side, and started to lick my clit. I moaned some more, not altogether fake, because I enjoyed hearing myself. But fake in the sense that I knew I was suddenly too self-conscious to be aroused. I slid down off the sink and got down on my knees. Then I unzipped his pants and started to suck his dick. His dick was long and skinny. I felt like it could stab me. Usually I very much enjoy dick sucking and I’m pretty intuitive at it. I like to lick it first and tease it—really prepare the dick before I suck. But he was impatient. He grabbed the back of my hair and pushed my head closer to his body, as I’ve seen people do in porn. I gagged a little on his dick, pulled back, then continued, my mouth super wet. He moaned and it was hot. Just hearing the moan come up from the depth of his belly, looking up and seeing that jaw I liked, made me feel wetter. My juices stung my irritated labia. He grabbed the back of my hair and pushed his dick into the back of my throat again, then palmed my forehead away. “Get up here,” he said. My bra and underwear were still on when he hoisted me by the waist back up onto the sink. Then he ripped open a condom wrapper with his teeth and fumbled to put it on. He pulled off my underwear and spread my legs. I gasped when he put his cock in and began to thrust. It felt good, but also too much, like he was hitting a wall in the back of my vagina. Like a muscle ache. My thighs were chafing on the counter. My back banged against the faucet and I kept getting caught on the sink bowl.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  After his drink and my toast we decided to take a walk. I wondered if this would be the make-out walk, since he had pretty much ignored that line of my Tinder bio and gone straight to the idea of fucking. Downtown L.A. wasn’t pretty, but it was sexy in the dark—all empty space, cooling air, and warehouses. Sexy dirt. He pointed across the street at a neon blue lit sign and said, “That’s my office.” The sign said GO ALL NIGHT. I thought the sign was stupid, but somehow, in the context of his jaw, it seemed hot. The jaw knew what it was doing, and so the sign did too. The jaw, and now the sign over this cool and modern office, made him seem like he had something creative and successful going on in his life. I wished he would just kiss me and wondered why he wasn’t doing anything. I felt ashamed. Maybe he didn’t think I was cute. Then the shame turned to anger, and I poked him in the chest. Then I pushed him into a wall. I don’t know whether I was trying to get him to kiss me or to wrestle him. But he didn’t seem to notice. He was too wrapped up in telling me about his new “health goth”–style fitness client. He was designing their online catalog, only the catalog wouldn’t be like a regular catalog. It would be a space that had 3-D printing elements and holographic models. Finally I said to him, “Can I kiss you?” “Yeah,” he said. He pulled me to him gently and we kissed in a really sweet way, very soft. That was kind of confusing. He kissed me like someone who definitely didn’t have a girlfriend. Like it was more of a loving kiss than a lusty kiss. Or maybe it wasn’t loving, but just dispassionate. Then he stopped, looked at me, and started talking about the project again. “Shhhhhh,” I said. I kissed him again. I felt strangely high. I was still a little drunk, but there was definitely something narcotic about kissing him—just being around him—that made me feel like I wanted to keep doing it over and over. I traced his jaw with my hand and let out a little sigh. He stopped kissing me and said, “So where did you park?” I told him that I took an Uber, and I would take one back. “I’m going to get a car now. Maybe we can kiss until it gets here?” I got higher and higher off the kisses. I just needed more and more of them. I felt that if I stopped getting them I would not be okay, but while I was close to his face everything was humming. I might have been looking at him funny. Maybe too lovingly? Could he smell my strange attachment already? What the fuck was wrong with me?

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  If I’m being honest, it wasn’t Michael’s fault that our sex life had become humdrum and monotonous – he was a passionate lover; had I even slightly reciprocated his desire, he would have been thrilled. Whether I was no longer attracted to him or whether I was no longer attracted to myself when I was with him, I can’t determine. The only thing I’m certain of now is that there is something inside of me stirring – not just sexual arousal but sexual curiosity too. I have always gagged giving blow jobs. Maybe I like them now? I was always fairly quiet in bed. Maybe I’m ready to make some noise? The possibilities seem vast and wondrous, presenting me with something I haven’t felt for years: desire. Jack asks me to lie to him and tell him I will stay all night. “I can’t stay,” I say. “I have to go home.” “I know,’ he says. “That’s why I said lie to me.” So I do, I say I won’t leave his side all night, and the loneliness behind his request fills me with deep sadness but also tenderness for the way he has been unguarded with me. He makes me laugh by relaying that when I left the bar earlier to wait outside for him, Don expressed surprise that I had left because he was sure Jack was going to ‘get lucky’ with me, so our ruse was successful and my reputation intact. He tells me he thinks I am beautiful, sexy and fierce and even though he sees my raw and open wound, he feels sure I will be more than OK someday. This is the only moment in which my breath catches. That this man, who is a stranger to me, and yet has now seen me intimately in a way no one but my husband has, should show me compassion and express confidence in me injects me with a dose of optimism I hadn’t realized I desperately needed. I thought I had been doing an excellent job of playacting the happy-go-lucky, freewheeling, soon-to-be divorcée, but he saw through those superficial layers to my core where grief resides, yet wasn’t scared away. It’s well after midnight and we are both starting to nod off as we lie entwined. I whisper that I have to go home and ask if he will walk me to my car, which is several blocks away in this now-deserted town. We dress in silence and it feels like our protective armor goes back on, thicker with each article of clothing we don. I wonder if sex with men who aren’t Michael will always feel this profoundly intimate, or if Jack and I have simply been fortunate to have found kindred spirits in one another: to have really seen each other even knowing this would be a one-night stand. As we leave the hotel, a heavy rain starts to fall and he asks if he should run back upstairs for an umbrella.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  The desire I have now to be touched – not just sexually, but any kind of physical connection – is potent and primal and proving wrong everything I thought I understood about myself and my physical needs. If I crave being touched, hugged and held, and if my sexual desires and curiosity are endlessly piqued, why wasn’t that a part of my life with the man I shared my bed with for 27 years? I allow myself a few minutes to soak up this feeling of warmth and then, much as I hate to extricate myself, tell him I have to go home as I know Hudson is probably wondering where I am. He tells me to stay put, that he will get something with which I can clean myself. He returns a minute later with a warm washcloth and when I reach for it, he says, “No, let me.” He gently cleans between my legs, taking care to clean my bikini line and between my lips. I am struck by how tender he is and by how intimate this feels. I had always thought intercourse was the most intimate thing two people could share but I am learning that sex can be physical without being profound and that moments like this take intimacy to a decidedly new level. I am wobbly going down the stairs and have to reach for the bannister to steady myself. In the kitchen he hands me a tall glass of water, which I inhale. He laughs watching me, saying that he’s spent as well. Is there a prize for wearing this robust man out? He walks me to my car, though in truth I am practically strutting. Standing barefoot and bare-chested in the driveway, he watches me as I turn around to pull out. Right before I pull away from the house, he calls out “Wait!” and then jogs over to my open window, where he leans in to give me a boyish grin and one last kiss goodbye before I am on the road again. * I brace myself later in the day for a phone call from my mother, but it doesn’t come. By the next day, her silence is making me nervous as I know she’s building a case in her mind and soon I will get one of her famous speeches that my sister Jennifer and I call her “I’ve been thinking” sermons. Finally, two days later, the call comes. I debate not answering but I know I have to get this over with. “Hi Mom,” I say. “Listen, Laura, I’ve been thinking,” she starts. “It’s fine, you don’t have to explain yourself. I’m just worried about your dating, that this could be held against you in some way if you get divorced.” “That would be kind of ironic, no?” I ask. “I don’t know, I’m not a lawyer, I just think you should check with someone,” she says.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  There is something that makes a man look so vulnerable when he is handling himself and I think I should stay out of it altogether but maybe that’s considered rude or unfriendly? Our bodies glisten with sweat – even though the rain has cooled the air outside, it’s stuffy and close in here without air conditioning – and we slide against each other, which one could interpret as hot and sexy or just unseemly. I’m choosing to go with hot and sexy, that this is what lust looks like. He is inside me for only a few moments when we both come, but without skipping a beat, he peels off the condom, tosses it on the floor and we keep going, new condoms appearing every so often, seemingly out of thin air. He is at once aggressively manly and appealingly tender, touching me gently but insistently. There seems to be no beginning or ending to this sex, just a middle chapter that stretches on. He is six years younger than me and his virility is matched by my insatiable curiosity and thrill at being desired. Of the four men I’ve slept with since I’ve started this journey, this is the most physically satisfying sex I’ve had. He laughs with enthusiasm when I sigh deeply and tell him in a grave voice that I really love sex. He seems to know exactly how and where to touch me, and I can’t get enough of his hard, sleek body. It’s as if I’m being cracked open again and again; it’s not explosive so much as a feeling of being totally present in my body and with his. It feels good to be wanted, to want, to be appreciated, to know that I am quenching someone’s thirst, to know my body is capable of both giving and receiving, to match his vigor with my own. When we have finally expended our sexual energy, we lie wrapped around each other. As much as I am shocked to discover how much I love touching and being touched, I am surprised by how nourishing I find this part, this calm after the storm. I feel completely enveloped as our hearts return to their regular rhythms and we lie, exhausted but sated, in the aftermath of the intimacy we have shared. Why , I wonder, do I feel I could stay in this spot for hours but when I was married, instead of reveling in the physical connection, I ran from it? Within seconds of having sex, I was already rolling back to curl in a ball on my side of the bed, so relieved that this obligation could be checked off my list and I could go back in my corner to be left alone. I usually orgasmed and I enjoyed sex once I mustered up the energy, but I could take it or leave it – and the affection that came with it I recoiled from, believing myself to be a physically unaffectionate person.

• From Available: The unfiltered and empowering new memoir for women about sex, dating and divorce after 40 (2021)

  I make a note to myself: we don’t know what people have gone through or are going through or will go through, so always be kind. The next day, Jessica and I are hanging out in the second-floor lounge overlooking the lobby when we notice a large group file in. There are about fifty people and they’re all 20/30something, mostly male and casually but intentionally dressed: narrow jeans rolled up just so, cool retro T-shirts, carefully groomed hipster beards. We assess which men are the cutest and which of those are wearing wedding bands. We lean further and further over the ledge to see more clearly until a couple of them spot us and look up quizzically. In our embarrassment, we quickly duck behind the plants and laugh about how we must appear to them: two middle-aged women in yoga pants ogling the fresh blood. In truth, I would willingly throw myself at any of them, so badly do I want to be wanted. A new and essential understanding of my current status is starting to become clear to me: I’m looking for men all the time now. I want to be noticed, I want to be flirted with and touched, and there’s no limit – aside from when I’m with my kids – as to when or where that can happen. For better or for worse, I am free and very, very available. * On Friday, I say goodbye to Jessica and drive to Upstate New York, where Hudson is performing in a play at a theatre camp. I’m eager to see him and hear about his time at camp, but my heart is heavy: it’s been five months since he has spoken to Michael, with whom he had always been close – in fact, much closer than he had been with me – and there’s no way around the fact that Michael’s absence this weekend is going to be keenly felt. I feel like sloppy seconds, knowing I am not the parent Hudson would have chosen loyalty to if he had had an option. I pull into the motel parking lot, where my mother is sitting on a bench near the entrance waiting for me to arrive, watching Hasidic Jewish families bustle in and out of the kosher grocery store in the adjacent parking lot before Shabbat beckons them home. Alarmed by the squalid state of the motel, she decides she will spend the whole weekend with me as she cannot bear the idea of my spending any time in this decrepit place alone. I insist that I will be fine but she’s stalwart, her eyes fixing leerily on the man who has come to deliver a broken-down cot so that I have a place to sleep now that she will be in the bed. I feel a flutter of anxiety, knowing I will not get so much as five minutes alone this weekend and that she will be watching me like a hawk.

• From The Pisces (2018)

  I no longer argued with past scholars about their biographical projections on the texts. I wrote, instead, about Eros in the text itself and its relationship to the spaces. The verb eratai less closely meant “to love” than it did “to desire.” Yet despite the best attempts of history, time, weather, and churchmen, the desire in Sappho’s poems had survived as though it were love eternal. Perhaps desire was not so ephemeral after all. Was a feeling the only eternal thing, despite the fact that everyone said it would pass? Could you get away with academic discourse about a feeling? I was going to try. I informed the advisory committee by email of my changes. They asked me to send an outline of the project and a sample. I bullshitted an outline and sent it over to them. At the same time, it wasn’t bullshit at all, because I was already living it. The book was me. On the in-between days, after returning Theo to the ocean, I mostly hid from feeling. I stayed deep under the covers and slept. I tried to ignore the rest of the world. I was like a hungover person, biding time until she could have more alcohol. The hair of the dog alone would fix me. I was a drunk waiting only for her next drink. I felt I loved him, yet I kept my secret from him. To contain the answer as to how this would all end—to withhold that knowledge, as well as the lie that I would continue to live here alone—felt strange. I was so close to him, it was odd that I could keep a secret that might upset him. It was as though we were one person who was able to completely compartmentalize different elements of themself in different parts of their mind, and the two parts never intersected. They were not allowed to meet. When living in the illusion of our eternality (which was perhaps not an illusion if the feeling rather than the facts were to be believed), I prevented the truth from entering. Actually, it was as though the truth didn’t even knock. But when I was alone, I would wake in a panic from my daytime naps and there it would be: my impending departure. 41. That afternoon I got my period. When I saw the blood, I wept. I wondered if that was why I had been feeling so anxious and afraid. I had cramps that felt like I was being stabbed in the uterus. Usually I enjoyed getting my period, the release of it—I always had. It made me feel connected to some primal goddess energy. But today I just felt heartsick. I had only five more weeks left with Theo and now the next week would be spent bloody, unsexed. What would we do together? I supposed we could just talk. I could put his cock in my mouth. He was waiting for me when I got to the rocks.

• From Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007)

  I know that it’s common for outsiders to focus on the more sexual aspects of MTF crossdressing (just as they focus on the more sexual aspects of femaleness in general). However, I personally found that, if anything, the social, emotional, and psychological effects of being crossdressed were far more profound than the sexual ones. The truth is that gendered clothing is extraordinarily symbolic of the sex of the body that presumably lies underneath; this is why wearing the clothing associated with the other sex is an almost invariant feature of cross-gender expression and identity across cultures and throughout history. Prior to my transition, dressing up in “women’s” clothing was the closest I ever got to actually being a woman, to having my body be aligned with how I imagined it. For me, the fact that “women’s” clothing was symbolic of being female far outweighed any sexuality-related symbolism it may have had. As with many MTF spectrum folks, my crossdressing passed through a series of stages. Each was a demystification process that I began by experimenting with some aspect of femaleness/femininity that seemed unknowable and fascinating to me. Over time, my exploration and experimentation of that aspect of femaleness/femininity led to it becoming demystified; what had previously seemed out of my reach eventually became something that I was capable of, that was within my realm of possibility. The main motivating force behind my exploration of crossdressing was to make sense of my ever-present desire to be female. While this may distinguish me from other crossdressers (e.g., those who are motivated by feminine rather than female inclinations), I believe that the stages I passed through (which are described below) are shared by many crossdressers. The first stage of crossdressing I passed through was the “clothing phase.” It began with trying on individual articles of clothing one at a time (this was after a several-year period where I made due with blankets, curtains, shoelaces, and such while “pretending” to be a girl). Sometimes I would put on a pair of heels, stockings, or a dress, or dabble with cosmetics or shave my legs. Each was its own mini-transformation, where a part of my body would begin to resemble that of a woman in certain ways. After a while, I began to put it all together, to dress completely as a woman from head to toe. I looked rather ridiculous when I first began to do this, but over the course of many years, I slowly figured out what worked for me and what did not.