A couple months ago, I polled my Twitter followers for their thoughts on the concept of the “soulmate.” Being a largely non-monogamous bunch, many of them posited that it’s likely incorrect and even harmful to imagine there is only one person each of us is “meant to” “end up” with. When I was a kid, I swallowed Disney ideology hook, line, and sinker, and genuinely believed there was a fateful person out there, wandering the earth, looking for me as I looked for them – which seemed cosmically unfair, because statistically that person probably lived on another continent and maybe didn’t even speak English.

But at some point during my tumultuous teen years, I saw the movie Kissing Jessica Stein, and in addition to validating my burgeoning bisexuality, it gave me the gift of this line: “I don’t even believe [in soulmates] anymore. I don’t believe there’s just one person [for each of us]. I think there are, like, seven.”

This is a heartening concept even if you’re not polyamorous. It’s a comfort to know you could lose one soulmate – through death, distance, negligence, or any other trouble that can befall a relationship – and not have to give up on deep love forever. Plus, if we all have seven soulmates, then probably at least one of them lives within reach and speaks your language.

The most common quality my Twitter followers ascribed to a soulmate (or “great love,” if you want to be less woo-woo and more poly-inclusive) is that the two of you just “get” each other. You “click.” I’ve reflected a lot on this feeling each of the few times I’ve truly encountered it (which have been, it’s worth noting, mostly in platonic relationships and not romantic ones), and the oddest thing to me about how it touches my own life is that 3 of my 4 “great loves” were born and raised in the U.S., a country I didn’t set foot in until I was nine years old. Knowing what I know about social psychology, it seems strange that I would feel so deeply connected to people who don’t share many of my cultural touchstones, social identities, or formative experiences. But I suppose that just reinforces the apparently soul-deep link I had (and still have) with these people – we could come from starkly different backgrounds and still click into place like magnets as soon as we crossed paths.

Content note: This essay talks about knife play (including surface-level non-bleeding cuts on the skin) and fear play.

This morning I woke up with shallow red marks criss-crossing over portions of my skin. They congregate on my arms, my thighs, my chest. They were given to me last night by someone I love, wielding a massive, heavy knife.

My interest in knife play phased into existence about 2 years ago. Maybe I’d been watching too much American Horror Story, but I’d begun to eroticize wild-eyed men wielding weapons and glamorous women who could cut you in two. The therapist I saw when I was in university – who I’m no longer seeing – would have a field day with this information, because she helped me work through recurrent nightmare-visions that I was being stalked by armed men in my own home. Prevailing anxieties crept into my mind from all angles at that time and one of their manifestations was this unfounded (?) fear of steeled invaders. For weeks-long stretches, I slept on my family’s living room couch instead of in my own bed, longing to feel centered in safety, convinced somehow that the middle of the house was more secure than its edges. I kept the light on and stopped watching horror movies and cuddled my cat close to my chest. With these measures (and therapy) to help me, I eventually set those petrifying visions aside. So it was odd when they came roaring back years later as – of all things – sexual fantasies.

Two things happened in late 2017 that contributed to a boost in my book consumption: I bought a Kindle Oasis (while drunk at 1 a.m., might I add), and I moved into an apartment where, for the first time in my life, I didn’t have a TV. I stopped whiling away fruitless hours in front of old Simpsons reruns and bad ‘90s rom-coms (well, mostly), and started devouring books again the way I did when I was a nerdy, overachieving third-grader. Ah, bliss.

Being a sex writer, I tend to apply a sexuality lens to almost anything I read: “Okay, that’s interesting, but what does it say about how humans fuck?!” For that reason, I found these 5 excellent books sexually illuminating in one way or another, even if that wasn’t strictly their aim…

High Heel by Summer Brennan

This is ostensibly a book about shoes, but really it’s a book about gender, history, beauty, morality, and fairy tales. Each page made me want to either never wear heels again or wear them every day from here to eternity. More to the point, this book made me think more critically about my own self-presentation, the places where it cleaves to what’s expected of me and the places where it noticeably, deliberately doesn’t. I think this short tome would be a revelation for anyone with a gender and a pair of feet. And probably even people without those things, too.

I’m scared beyond reason of getting a tattoo I later regret. Every piece of art I’ve had inked on me – four so far – came after weeks or months of pondering the design, the meaning, the long-term ramifications. I diligently googled my chosen phrases and symbols to make sure they didn’t have some secret, sinister connotation. If I was going to welcome a piece of work onto my skin, I wanted it to be something I could be proud of, and uplifted by, forever.

This is also why I’ve never allowed a romantic partner to attend any of my tattoo appointments. Oh, they have asked. Two of my most serious ex-boyfriends – a tall, goofy-grinned man with shaggy ginger hair, and a short goth with a great laugh – had more tattoos than I could ever dream of wanting, and offered to accompany me to my inking sessions so they could share in that experience we both knew so well. I politely declined, not entirely explaining that I couldn’t sew a beau into my memory of a particular tattoo, because the ink would be forever, and the relationships would not.

I knew the evil way mementos associated with sad memories can suck the sparkle from your smile every time you look at them. I’d once kept a dime on my bedroom floor for over a year because someone I loved had dropped it there, and while the sight of it initially brightened my days, by the end of that period I had come to loathe it. It reminded me too much of not being loved back, of being abandoned – but it nonetheless took a lot of time and emotional energy for me to eventually decide to pick it up and put it away. With tattoos, you can’t even do that – you have to look at them forever, or spend gobs of cash having them removed or covered up. To me, it didn’t seem worth the risk to ink something on my skin that could be eternally associated with someone who’d broken my heart, or who I’d ultimately come to loathe. (I had not yet truly conceived of a relationship ending in any way other than these – or of a relationship never ending at all.)

But the truth is, every one of my tattoos reminds me of the people I was dating and/or fucking at the time that I got them, despite the care I took to make sure this wouldn’t happen. The red heart on my belly summons the memory of the boy who gingerly peeled my underwear off the day after, marveling softly at the needle-wounded flesh. The pink “good girl” bows on my thighs make me think of the dominant boy who encouraged me to get them, pinning me to his mattress on the floor and whispering, “You’re a good girl, and soon everyone will know it.” My “this too shall pass” wrist tattoos take me back to the morning I got them, and the then-boyfriend who ignored my excited “Check out my new tats!” texts for hours. The flowers on my right arm, and their accompanying slogan “Do no harm but take no shit,” remind me of Matt, with whom I’d just fallen hopelessly in love when I went to my appointment. The details of that day are carved into my memory the way so many days are when you’re awash with romantic hormones: I remember I took a picture of a blue wall because the shade reminded me of Matt, lovesick as I was, and that the owner of the tattoo shop asked me if my “pun slut” pin stood for “punishment slut” and I blushed because I wanted to be, and was, Matt’s punishment slut.

The pain seeps through my body like a basement flood, creeping along carpets and baseboards until the whole mess is cold and ruined. I’ve had this chronic pain disorder – as-yet undiagnosed, though many of my doctors have ideas – for about four years now, and it just grows steadily worse. I am tired, and scared, and getting older.

The pain is like the deepest part of the sensation of stubbing your toe or crashing your shin against something hard: that bone-adjacent, sickening throb that feels like it’s radiating from inside your body. It shows up in my hands, wrists, ankles, calves, knees, hips… wherever it pleases. Sometimes it seems to spread to my brain, which gets foggy and slow on high pain days, like my CPU is being throttled by just handling all that input. Even now, writing this newsletter is a glacial process of stop-and-start, tapping out a word or two, pausing, having a thought, forgetting it, and trying to keep going.

But this is supposed to be a newsletter about sex and kink and relationships, not boring stuff like body aches, which brings me to BDSM’s role in my pain management.

If you’re familiar with my work, you might expect me to say something here about how good pain helps offset bad pain; how the endorphins released during a solid spanking can calm down my nervous system and push out all those ugly sensations. This is, to some extent, true, but it presupposes I’m well enough to get hit in the first place. Holding myself up on my hands and knees, or even flipping over onto my front, can be a frustrating and agonizing process when my body hurts this badly. No, I’m not anticipating a beating today; I don’t even want one.

Content note: This essay mentions rape and mass murder.

I have filled my head with useless information about “incels” – involuntary celibates, a movement of (mostly) young men who, in the dank depths of the internet, work and rework their sexual rejections into cause for venomous misogyny. I have read voraciously about their ideology, which they call “the red pill”; it frames women as the privileged oppressor in the sexual economy, leaving men of subpar attractiveness with the short end of the stick. I have combed through their message boards until 4 a.m., greedily gulping down their poisoned logic – because, in some ways, it makes me feel safer to do so.

Incels are not always, but notably are sometimes, mass murderers. Two such attacks have taken place in my own city: a van ramming into pedestrians, killing 8 of them, as part of an “incel rebellion,” and a terrifying shooting on a high-traffic street that led to the death of two girls, both not even old enough to be considered women. So my efforts to understand incels’ twisted thought processes are, in part, an attempt at self-defense. Some part of me believes that if I know my way around their philosophical hedge maze, I can scythe my way out, should I ever need to. I don’t know quite what that would look like or what it would accomplish, but it’s comforting to imagine.

My partner came out as non-binary this week and so I am incensed afresh by people who refuse to use their loved ones’ new pronouns.

There are lots of ways to refuse to do this. There’s the outright refusal of people who deny singular they/them pronouns are a thing in English (false), or who deny that anything or anyone outside the gender binary should exist (also false). But there is also the more subtle refusal of people who “have a hard time” with pronoun changes, and who use the supposed difficulty of the task as an excuse to continually misgender people they claim to care about.

Regardless of your reasons for getting someone’s pronouns or other gender descriptors wrong, it is still a hurtful and inconsiderate thing to do. So I’m writing this as a cis person to give you the advice I wish someone had given me, when I met my first trans friend and had to whip my mealy mouth into submission and drill “ze/hir” pronouns into my lexicon:

PRACTICE. Really. Practice using your loved one’s new pronouns. It’s very simple.

My new apartment is cheerful, bright, and beautiful. It’s not at all spacious, but it fits my must-haves. Moving was a hassle, as it always is, but now it’s done and I’m settled. I’m further downtown than before, and the city greets me each morning through my massive window. Hello, Toronto, my love.

I fortunately had the foresight, when I moved, to tuck away some items I’d need for my first few days, if I couldn’t or didn’t unpack everything right away: some changes of clothes, some toiletries, my electronics and chargers. And yes, sex toys were among those essentials – but only a couple. For a sex toy reviewer who’s used to having a wide palette of colors to play with, it was jarring to have just a few shades to use for a while.

(If you’re wondering why I didn’t just unpack immediately, well, me and my depression and chronic pain will have a bit of a chuckle about that.)

The two trusty friends that stayed on my nightstand during those first few days of rebuilding were my Eroscillator and Star Delight, and they were certainly up to the task. It was fun listening to my partner spinning various different phone-sex stories about cocks and mouths and fingers to accompany my usage of these toys; I am lucky to be dating someone so resourceful. What I noticed mostly, though, was how much these two sex toys made my new space feel immediately like home – moreso than my furniture, my bedding, my posters. They made this unfamiliar new locale into a site of familiar pleasure and decompression. They brought sunshine into my mind the same way my big, wide window brought it into my room.

I am typing this on my phone from the laundry room of my new building, because I have a confession: this is the first time I’ve ever done laundry anywhere that isn’t my parents’ house, even though I moved out of their home nearly two years ago.

Naturally, I meant to start doing laundry in the basement of my old building. But the thought of going someplace new, learning a new set of protocols and rules, brought my anxiety to a zenith, as it often does. The same forces were exacted which also prevent me far too often from visiting cafés I’ve never been to before or attending shows that are new to me: how will I navigate them, and what will people think if I navigate them badly? And so weeks passed, and then months, and then more than a year, with me curtly avoiding the laundry room and instead trundling my clothes and sheets back and forth across the city every week or two to wash them in my parents’ machine.

This week I was lucky enough to move in with an anxiety-savvy roommate who asked me, without being clued in to any of this, if I’d like her to show me the laundry room. She took me there, pointed out the card-loading machine and the tricky washers and the best dryers, and my heart felt soothed. This was all I’d needed all along and I hadn’t known how to ask for it. Doing my first load of laundry here today has filled me with a familiar sense of power: the feeling of overcoming a fear, of stepping an old neurosis and saying, “No more.”

I am well used to this feeling, because in the year and a half I’ve been dating my partner, he has ushered me through many such growth experiences, using the magic of kink. I have attended new improv shows by myself at his behest; I have worn things that felt to me overly loud and attention-grabbing; I have spoken and sang on stages even as my knees knocked together from fright. I was brave before I ever met him, but he’s made me braver, because when he instructs me to make a leap, I know two things: I want to do it, and I’m capable of doing it. I will do it for him.

• I’ve never had such a passionate love affair with someone’s voice before. His voice is the main way I experience him – phone dates, phone giggles, phone sex – and it’s one of my favorite things about him. I fell in love with him via his voice, first and foremost. It’s the tether that connects us, more than touch or sight, and it’s often enough.

• I get butterflies each and every time I see him, which I gather is a feat, a year and a half in. Our chemistry has never faded into stasis; it doesn’t get a chance to. I am still nervous whenever I wait for him at the airport; my heart still pounds when I drag my suitcase toward a hotel where I know he will be. All my life I have been afraid of what happens to love once the sparkle scrapes off, but we are still sparkly, still strong.

• I love New York and he loves Toronto. It’s clear how poly we both are: we can love more than one city at once. My own apartment is home, but so is anywhere he’s holding me. Home is movable, mutable. Portable.

• I was once accused, by a probably-asexual ex, of being too sex-focused. (I mean, he was the one who knowingly chose to date a sex blogger, but okay.) This proclamation hit me where it hurt, and made me worry forevermore that I was too much of a horndog to sustain any meaningful connections. But here I am, deeply loved by someone whose genitals I haven’t been within 500 miles of in weeks. Sex is important to me, but it isn’t everything. I’ve always known that, and now I know it even more.

It’s Pride month, and fittingly, I got a text the other day from the person I half-jokingly credit with making me queer. We’re in touch semi-regularly, so this was no earthshattering communiqué, but it made me smile nonetheless. They wanted to let me know they’d brought me up recently in a conversation about “first serious crushes.” My phone screen cast a glow on my face as I read the text, but I was also glowing inside – who doesn’t feel flattered by being someone’s first serious crush?

Admittedly, I was also glowing because this person was my first serious crush, too – my first, at least, on someone attainable, someone I could conceivably kiss (and did). It’s been 12 years and they still sit gilded in my heart like a bust on a mantel: immortalized in lust, limerence, and the lyrics of the many, many songs I wrote about them, before, during, and after our flash-in-the-pan fling.

This person had been on my mind even before they texted me, because it’s Pride month and I’ve been thinking about my queer crushes. The girls whose strong fingers and tanned forearms I’ve stared at across lecture halls; the enbies whose boots and swagger I’ve eyed in bars and cafés. The girl who fingerfucked me in the alley behind a pizzeria, the girl who blushed when I told her I’d like to flog her, the enby who took me over their lap after a tense game of Scrabble. The queer sex in closets, in sex clubs, in my imagination. These thoughts cloud my mind with societally-unsanctioned ardor.

I’ve been thinking lately, too, about how even my relationships with men have sometimes felt queer to me – because I’m queer, and my attractions are. Almost every man I’ve ever dated has felt disconnected from his masculinity and attached, instead, to something softer and less defined. Some have confessed they’d like to be born again as women, born into a better fit; others have enjoyed toying with feminine names, pronouns, and clothes sometimes, just to try, just to see. I went out with an old beau recently, and when I mentioned I’m most often drawn to masculine people, he scoffed – all broad shoulders, bulky beard, and beer in tow – and said, “I’m not exactly masculine.” I hadn’t seen that before, but I saw it now: a softness, a low-grade flamboyance, a genderlessness under the outward trappings. I felt such tender fondness for him, as I always do when someone slips into my heart who strays from the beaten path. I take pleasure in seeing everyone’s nuances instead of flattening them into a monolith, dim and small.

I mentioned to my partner recently that I’d been having some “1950s housewife feelings,” i.e. that I wanted to bring him a drink and suck his cock at the end of a long work day, after his return to an abode I’d made sparkle. He wanted more details, so I wrote this…

A lot of the pushback against the heteronormative ‘50s nuclear family lifestyle, rightfully so, is about the servitude the woman offers the man, focusing so much of her effort and energy on making him happy. It’s seen as disempowering for her to essentially devote her days to making someone else comfortable.

Granted, I don’t want my life to revolve so singularly around a partner – but I am drawn to the idea of my partner’s comfort and happiness being a goal of mine, in a domestic setting and in a ritualized way. Rituals and routines have always comforted me because they give me something to cling to when everything else is in chaos. So much of life is full of unclear goals – your manager may not tell you what they want from you, your customers may not know what they need, your parents may not articulate the ways in which you disappoint them – so it’s nice to imagine living in an environment where the expectations are very clear, and the rewards of meeting those expectations are known to me. This type of structure can both calm me down and turn me on.

Heads up: this essay references suicidal ideation as part of depression.

I find myself at a crossroads. Should I pursue happiness, or should I pursue sex?

The past year has been one of the worst of my life for my mental health, for mysterious neurochemical reasons. My depression has been crushing, my anxiety has gone haywire, and I’ve spent many days too dysfunctional to even get out of bed. I started on Wellbutrin last November, and while it initially lifted my mood (and my libido), I’m no longer convinced it’s doing much of anything. The tears and fears remain. I often want to die, or at least don’t feel strongly that I should continue to live.

When my current roommate was contemplating moving in over a year ago, we had a discussion about our various living-quarters quirks, anything that might make us annoying to live with, so we could decide together whether we’d be a good fit.

“I work from home, so I’m here most of the time,” I admitted, knowing this had been a sticking point for some potential roommates in the past. “I also have a long-distance partner; he comes and stays here about one weekend a month, and I have giggly phone calls with him at night a lot. I think that’s about it.”

My future roommate nodded and told me, “I’m a loud sex-haver.” She didn’t seem ashamed, nor did I think she should have to. Working in sex media, I am well used to the sex shame most people harbor, and I don’t think it serves us.

I shrugged. “As long as you’re respectful in the times you choose to have sex, that should be fine for me.”

How many times did I say “Step on me, queen” out loud to a gif of Stephanie Beatriz or Olivia Wilde before realizing I might actually want someone to step on me? I don’t know. A lot.

My boyfriend, as ever, went into Intrepid Researcher mode when I made this proclamation. He searched on Google, KinkAcademy, and the various kink wikis, but there just wasn’t that much practical info on trampling safety or technique. Here are a few basic things we learned:

1. A carpeted surface – and/or pillows on the floor – makes the experience more comfortable for the “tramplee.” I’ll leave it to you to decide whether that’s a good thing.

2. The trampler should wear either shoes (ouch) or bare feet (less ouch) – not just socks or stockings, which are too slippery for this task.

3. As with any kink activity, care should be taken to avoid putting pressure on the kidneys, spine, and other bones. Large fleshy areas are best for stepping on: the upper thighs, the butt, and the non-bony parts of the back, for example.

4. Orient yourselves in an area where the trampler has lots of things to lean on, on all sides – banisters, cabinets, whatever – so they can keep their balance and moderate the amount of weight they’re distributing.

Why did I want to be stepped on? The typical narrative about this activity is one of humiliation and domination, being squished into the ground because you’re a lowly worm who only deserves to be under your tormentor’s feet. But I didn’t want a punitive or degrading experience; I wanted the slow, measured, meditative calm of someone gradually moving their weight from one part of my body to another. I wanted the peace of momentarily being not a very messy person but instead a very useful floor.

1.

It’s makeout o’clock. But housekeeping is in our hotel room. We grab a drink at the bar in the lobby – bad cocktails, good company – and then make another attempt. Still, our room isn’t available. “Should we make out next to the ice machine?” I joke, but his eyes go dark and he isn’t joking.

We go exploring, and find a hallway by the service elevator, deserted and clean and white. He shoves me against a painted brick wall, already growling, and kisses me hard enough to make me gasp. My body responds instantly in familiar ways: a hot drop down, a warm pooling outward.

His hands travel wherever they want, roaming, claiming, cupping my ass and squeezing my tits. Roughly, he tugs up the hem of my dress and shoves his hand down the front of my panties to find my clit. He rubs it in stunning, perfect circles until I’m woozy and my knees aren’t working so well.

Content note: This essay deals with consensual but not-entirely-wanted sex, as well as dissociation during sex.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the concept of responsive desire, as laid out by Emily Nagoski in her earthshattering book Come As You Are. This type of desire, in contrast with spontaneous sexual desire (i.e. getting randomly turned on and then wanting to fuck), involves getting turned on in response to sexual stimuli – porn, erotica, touching, kissing, what have you – and then wanting to have sex. It’s not our culture’s favorite narrative for how the so-called sex drive works, but it is fairly common.

I think a lot about how my own mostly-responsive desire affected what I affectionately refer to as my “slutty phase”: the period from about November 2015 to August 2017 when I dated and fucked many people in quick succession, mostly from Tinder or OkCupid. Most of that sex was bad, as hookups are wont to be, and I think that’s largely because neither I nor my flash-in-the-pan partners understood how my desire worked.

I dated a boy two summers ago who was as introverted as anybody I’d ever met. He required long hours in the dark with his video games daily, not speaking to anyone or being spoken to. He encouraged me to be comfortable just hanging out with him in silence, doing my thing while he did his. I could have managed this if I felt safe and stable in the relationship, but I didn’t. I chattered on and on as if to tug the rope of connection between us, to assure myself it was still there.

This boy was, inexplicably, dating two other people besides me. This boy who didn’t even always want to talk to one girlfriend somehow had three of them. I understand the introvert’s “eyes bigger than your stomach” dilemma – I’ve too often packed my social calendar only to later find that the sight of it makes me sick – so I can see, theoretically, how he got himself into this situation. But I still don’t think it was a nice thing to do, knowingly spreading himself so thin across three people he must have known wanted more of him.

I told him once, in a moment of insecurity, “I’m worried that you’re going to decide you’re too socially overwhelmed and you need to break up with one of us, and I’m worried it’s going to be me.” He looked affronted – of course he’d never do that! – but then he did, unceremoniously, a few months later. I knew my own kind when I saw him, and I knew his juggling act couldn’t last.

I’ve pondered this often in the intervening years, as I attempt to build my own ideal non-monogamy landscape. There was one brief interlude where I was fucking three people on a rotating basis, but that equilibrium ended in a flash with all three relationships dramatically blowing up over the course of one week. I’ve subsequently only gone as far as to have one romantic relationship and one friend with benefits concurrently, max, and honestly? I think that might be my ideal poly situation.

I’m hilariously submissive. “Hilariously” because it took me far too long to figure out what was plainly true. My 10th-grade journal entries talk about wanting girlfriends/boyfriends/crushes to climb on top of me, hold me down, kiss me against walls, boss me around, take care of me… and yet I was still saying shit like, “I wish I had an interesting fetish, but I think I’m vanilla through and through.” Oh, Baby Kate, you have so much to learn and so far to come.

One of the major roadblocks people come up against when they’re curious about submission is: Don’t you have to enjoy cleaning/cooking/shining shoes/giving head/folding shirts/~insert other service activity here~ to be a “real” submissive? Expert opinions vary on this, but my take is a resounding “LOL, NO.”

Submission is about your attitude, your approach, your desires. If you enjoy handing over your power to someone else in sex or kink situations, you might well be submissive, even if that doesn’t manifest in the ways you’d expect or hope. Submission is a spectrum, too, as are so many parts of sexuality: there are the 24/7 domestic slaves who crawl around on all fours with a butt plug in and chain restraints around their ankles, and there are the vanillish dilettantes who enjoy a little hair-pulling from time to time, and there are a zillion different variations in between. No version of submission is less or more valid than any other, so long as they’re all carried out consensually and with awareness of the risks involved.

That said, knowing this won’t necessarily make it easier to deal when you feel like a failure – as I did this morning when my Sir asked me if I’d like to iron his shirts daily when we’re in Montreal together for a week soon. Because, guess what? I’ve never ironed anything and wouldn’t know how.

I have done the math, and so far this year, my sex life is 69.9% phone sex. (Nice.)

That number feels like it should be higher, and the only reason it isn’t is that when my partner and I are together in person, we cram sex into our schedules like a game of Tetris. Three or four times a day isn’t uncommon. But those blissful stints are a sprint, and our ritual of near-daily phone sex is more like a marathon. Except more fun, and marginally less sweaty.

Here’s the secret I wish someone had told me about phone sex before I knew fuck-all about it: Like “real” sex, it can be terribly awkward, but when you find someone whose style and desires are compatible with yours, it can be divine. I always envisioned it as a nervewracking endeavor, like a two-person improv set with no suggestion where the stakes are boners/orgasms/your relationship, but in reality it’s more relaxing than any sex I’ve ever had.

Our nightly catch-up conversations are like any you might have with a partner: casual, breezy. We talk about work and family and friends, TV and Twitter and the news. But then some flirty comment or bratty remark drops his voice to a molten register. “Oh yeah?” he says, or sometimes he just growls or purrs, provoking a reaction in me that Pavlov might find interesting. His voice is a tool with which he’s stroked me off hundreds of times and my brain and body respond with this knowledge, bone-deep, worn in.