Before Dallas, it had been almost a year since I’d fucked an anonymous man. I felt out of practice, for one thing. Then there was my approaching book launch, which was sapping my spare time and energy, and the mushrooming vacuum of normalcy on the hookup apps, and, perhaps most distractingly, my reluctance to really lean into what I’ve been calling “twink MILF,” a brand increasingly foisted on me by a certain kind of bro who doesn’t know what to do with an older fem other than be mothered1. (“Wow, 37! I love cougars 😏,” a guy one presidential term my junior recently told me.)

Still, there remain in the world men who are older than even I who can also use a smartphone unassisted, so when Dallas showed up on my grid I replied to his messages. There was a little sexting, but nothing very involved at first. I certainly liked looking at him, with his massive head—its Bardemesque proportions smooth and light brown, as if sanded from teak—his barrel chest, heavy arms, and tautly extrusive weightlifter’s belly. On bathroom breaks and in checkout lines, I delicately fished for the catch, but he never messaged me anything blockable. Perhaps his secret problem could only be discovered in person: bad dick, medieval hygiene, apartment littered with dead cats, etc. Although Dallas was exclusively interested in fem transsexuals and CDs, he didn’t behave like it, if you know what I mean, which I found suspicious.

But after a few weeks of idle chitchat, Dallas wasn’t waving any flags redder than “ambiguously hetero.” More importantly, he was flying a green one at full mast: he wanted to be very clear about what we would do together. Not as jerkoff fodder, or because he was seeking a laundry list of what he could expect from me (and therefore require of me, once we were all alone). He pursued my yeses and nos in a careful, curious way, the mark of a man who has had a lot of sex with damaged feminine people and understands that if he wants to keep doing so, he’d better learn how to put them at ease. And so it was decided.

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I peed before I left, but on the train I realized I had to pee again, because of course I did. Well, I thought, I would simply wait until I got to his condo. Standing with my back to the car door, I practiced asking Dallas if I could use his bathroom, to which he would surely say, Yes, of course, right this way. But what if he jumped me at the threshold (not violently but eagerly, as sometimes happens), and I had to interrupt—creating an inauspicious test of the limits of his indulgence? What if he said, Sure, you can use the bathroom but only on the condition that you let me watch, and I said no—creating another test, another opportunity for a line to be crossed? I realized I was working myself up, but as the express shuddered down the length of Manhattan, the inexplicable pressure in my bladder got exponentially worse. Doubt that I could even make it to Dallas’s crept in. His messages weren’t helping. He was anxious to know when and where I was along the way to his place, which would have been my elusive red flag if I didn’t know that bottoms be flaking!

How to describe the urgent need to urinate? Aching crotch, heaving groin, stabbing surfeit? Squeezing the handrail until my knuckles burned, I tried to ignore it. When that didn’t work, I devoted my attention to the sensation, as if full-body awareness would lessen my discomfort, which didn’t work, either. My chest prickled, my palms clammed, my eyes darted around the train car, as if searching for signs of danger. Well, I thought, I would simply get off at Union Square and storm the Whole Foods. But the notion of hiking aboveground to gamble on secret door codes sounded harder and more humiliating than just dropping trou in a corner of the station, an option that I was, by now, seriously considering.

Then I remembered the Union Square bathroom, right off the L platform. I’ve seen it several times a week for years, always with a spiritual headshake, an internal tsk—just imagine the horrors in there! But one time, not too long ago, I witnessed a mother and her small child come out of the women’s and they had both seemed just fine. It is a very busy metropolitan train station, after all, with not just commuters but buskers belting “The Greatest Love of All” and homeless people pleading for mercy and fed up MTA employees glowering from their glass boxes. Surely there was at least one functioning pot to piss in?

At that point, I had no choice. When we reached 14th Street, I debarked and raced upstairs, my knees rubbing, my bag slung protectively over my abdomen. I couldn’t remember exactly where the bathroom was, at first, and was suppressing yet another spike of panic—had I imagined a train station bathroom, a Narnian liminal space for cruisers and users?—when I finally oriented myself. There it was, the door to the women’s wide open, its facilities hidden around a tiled corner. I pulled my hoodie over my headphones so no one could see my face or hair and charged through the door. It was a gamble, being what I am, but there was no way in hell I was going in the other one.

Below the lower lip of the first stall, a faux fur jacket was splayed on the floor. Next to it, a pair of feet were moving in a way that struck me as untraditional for bathroom business. Whatever! I took the adjacent stall and squatted ecstatically over the seat, only to discover that my water pressure was so high that only a few drops could escape at a time. I fought to relax, trying to picture every sphincter and muscle in my groin in a state of red-and-pink repose. I knew that all of this was real but also psychosomatic, that my tension and paranoia and racing heart were all symptoms of my fear of men—of Dallas, the unknown quantity—which over the years I’ve sublimated into my neurotic terror of sex-produced UTIs, a condition that for me manifests as a constant and irrepressible urge to pee, an anxiety which of course can’t be disentangled from my healthy transsexual fear of public restrooms, which of course can’t be cloven from my rage over America’s privatization of public space. I hate it here, I thought, my belly cramping as the stall next to mine mysteriously rattled and moaned.

It took a little longer than expected, but I eventually got it all out. As I trotted back downstairs, my mood skyrocketed. I’m safe, I reminded myself (something that therapists are always telling me to do), and I’m entering a situation that is also reasonably safe, because I can trust myself to determine that Dallas is normal (choosing to ignore, for the moment, the lapses in this ability that led to my year off from fucking anonymous men in the first place.)

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Dallas looked exactly like his photos. Hoping I looked like mine, I hugged him, then followed him past a display of four or five electric guitars, a gargantuan sectional couch, and an elephantine entertainment system with an Employee of the Month placard perched on top. In the bedroom awaited a delicious king-size bed (but of course—he must have had 100 pounds on me). His chest and nipples were hard, but his mouth was soft, maybe too soft, perhaps because it was so big relative to mine. While he was decisive in his movements, moving my body with the ease that I do my phone, he was gentle; he choked me only briefly, as if to demonstrate that he could, like a flight attendant holding the oxygen mask to her face before takeoff. Like his face, his cock was exactly as it was in his photos: thick, uncut, not too long. It fit perfectly down my throat, by which I mean that it was big enough to make my eyes water and my nose run. Gag, drool, spit—a crowd pleaser.

After a while, he picked me up and placed me on the bed. He sucked too hard on my clit, but when I told him so, he modulated his technique. This made me happy, which is not the same thing as aroused, but not so different, either; I don’t like receiving head, but I let guys do it because it’s easier than having a conversation about it. Having overcome something together, after a few minutes I felt sturdy enough to tell him I was done. He raced for the condom, put it on, and pressed it in. So tight, he said. His cock felt good. I suddenly remembered that I can get pregnant, that I require condoms with men not just for chlamydia and all that—which I got sick of dealing with, and anyway I’m terrified of overusing antibiotics—but because I’m not on birth control and don’t want to be. As I was imagining our big-headed baby, Dallas did what they all do and threw my legs over his ox-like shoulders to penetrate deeper, harder, faster. It hurt. (What must it feel like to be so big and male and top? It’s probably like snorting a line of coke every time you recall that you can pull your lover apart like fresh monkey bread.)

I just laid there, freeing myself from the responsibility of verbal communication, awaiting my body’s choices with something like excitement. Here is what it did for Dallas: it braced itself against the mattress. It squirmed on the sheets. It threw back its head. It closed its eyes. It used its hands to push away his over-developed pectorals. It emitted the enigmatically porny noises that men decide to recognize or not.

Dallas’s thrusts suddenly changed, becoming so small and slow that he could barely have been said to be fucking me. He turned his face, which was pressed against mine, so he could feel my tears on his own cheeks, as if the water were a seam connecting us. Very slow, very shallow, one calloused hand cradling my neck. My movements had changed, too, but only in degree. It felt good to struggle against a big, strong man who did not want to harm me. My shoulders fell back to the mattress and my legs relaxed. He sped up again without going as deep, and that felt good, too. I noticed my fingers, which could feel his rocky shoulders and bristly arms. I moved them downward, and now his ass was under my palms, strong muscle under slightly sagging skin; my body, too, was soft and athletic, disintegrating against time, only a few decades behind him.

After a while, Dallas flipped me over. I waited tensely on all fours, a little apprehensive of the force he could generate on his knees. But after just a few strokes, he told me to lie on my belly and close my legs. I knew this was a signal that he wanted to finish, and I, too, was ready to go home, but this vaguely irritated me. In my experience, this is a favored position among chasers who prefer someone with a different anatomy from mine because it both tightens the hole, so it’s easier to cum (damn those condoms, the foe of middle-aged fuckers everywhere!), and obscures the fact that I have a vagina. Or so I think.

I didn’t realize that Dallas had finished until he pulled away laughing, listing like a sailing ship, to land on his back beside me. He stroked his softening cock through the condom, a little custard puddled in the hollow tip, but I told him I had to go. Still, for a few minutes we laid beside each other. Catching our breath, we complimented each other’s bodies and discussed the importance of a hookup’s “energy,” a topic that Dallas was passionate about. See, you get it! he exclaimed. If we’re not thinking positive, then what are we doing here? Life is too short.

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New York, come to my book launch with Torrey Peters on December 2!!! Boston, come to my reading with Gretchen Felker-Martin on December 5!!! More events to come…

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I’m way too old to be a twink and not at all in the aesthetic realm of what most people think of as MILFdom (much less equipped with children, biological or otherwise), but I’m playing the transgender card for this one.