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.