Day 1

Their sharp eyeliner catches my eye. They look young, too young, and I’m old among this crew, too old. My upbringing in organizing spaces tells me to never hit on someone until I’ve known them for a while, at least six months, until they can build relationships outside romantic dynamics, until they can decide whether they really want to be in that space. But, I’ve also learned that having a little sparkle of a crush can make any situation better. So this Black femme, who I’d never seen before in my small town, became the person I daydreamed about during the bike ride for Gaza.

This is the romance of collective liberation: queer Black, Indigenous, People of Color on bikes, smiling ear to ear, drenched in the sunshine of the far north turning towards summer, chanting “Down Down with Occupation, UP UP with Liberation,” reminding ourselves that there are more people who want a Free Palestine than who want to maintain the zionist entity, that it is through the intimacy of building the world we want to live in that we learn we are not alone.

Towards the end of the ride, I ask the femme-with-the-sharp-eyeliner’s name. They tell me while huffing and puffing up a hill, and I tell them mine. I ask how they heard about this, and they give me a short response. I think they’re annoyed that I’m talking to them as they struggle uphill, but later, when the ride is over, they scamper up to me and hand me a friendship bracelet that says MEOW. “Thank you for saying hi to me earlier,” they say, and I squeal, and they scurry away before I can ask any questions.

After the ride, I pick up shawarma for my friends. The ones who have my house key let themselves inside my home, clean off my coffee table and sofa so that we’ll be ready for the others. How I love: my home becomes theirs, I bring them food, collapse on the couch, eat. We talk of the femme’s sharp eyeliner and wonder if we’d ever see them again. My friends notice that this is, maybe, one of very few times I’ve introduced myself to someone. Through organizing for Palestine, I’m learning to trust my community; in turn, my community has grown and become more trustworthy. Collective liberation is a worldbuilding project that, like bisexuality, like polyamory, requires I expand and expand and expand.

Day 2

Today I went on a bike ride with my friend, sometimes play partner, and fellow brat, Esse. Sometimes, I think about how our personal practices of creating liberatory kink containers with each other have rippled out to our practice of co-creating spaces of grief and rage through vigils and marches. Most of the time, I don’t tell them that, because they’re an insufferable Gemini and I’d never hear the end of it.

Esse’s birthday is coming up, and, in our brat4brat banter, they suggest we all get temporary tattoos for their birthday. That night, I pull up a portrait my friend, N, drew of me. In it, I’m wearing a strap. I’m on my knees, wearing high waisted underwear, ass on my heels with my back upright, arched, tits bursting out of my too-small bra, hands in my hair. N made my skin bi and lesbian flag colors, and around the border of the photo is a chain link. I feel so good when I look at this image; I remember what it feels like to have my hands in my hair, to wear my dick and stunt for the camera. It’s my favorite representation of myself. I put it into the custom tattoo creator and see a black & white version. I write YES DADDY in the text beside the image and send it to Esse, wondering where on my body I’d put this temporary tattoo. Yes Daddy, like is written on the soft pink hat hanging in my room. Yes Daddy, I think of my girlfriend thousands of miles away. Yes Daddy, I wonder if I’ll ever be the daddy someone says “yes” to.

Day 3

Sometimes, it feels hard to access my desire for weeks at a time. This time, it’s been because of renegotiating a friendship, because witnessing ongoing genocide makes it hard to access pleasure, because I’ve been out of town and out of my routines, and because the season changes have me feeling confused about my gender. I wanted to text Zaide weeks earlier, but my desire wouldn’t spark. Eventually, I made myself reach out and put them on the calendar, because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that even when I’ve been stressed, overwhelmed, raging, and grieving, Zaide’s body makes me horny in a way few others do.

When they walk in, we kiss, and it feels like we could collapse into each other. It’s been two months since we’ve fucked. I’m ravenous, my whole torso is on fire. I direct them to the couch, take my glasses off, straddle one of their legs and press my knee into their cunt. My lips find their mouth, jaw, ear, neck. I pull their hair; a fist full of their curls is all it takes to make their eyes roll back. I pause, briefly, and ask how they’re doing, what’s on their wish list for the night. I repeat it back, and then tell them what I’d like to do.

I tease them, hit their tits, thighs, and cunt, and ask: Is this torture, or is this just right? Or both? They smile, moan, and murmur — both. One thing I love about playing with Zaide is that I’ve learned their nonverbal signals: what a moan, a nod, a whimper means, versus what a pause, or open eyes indicate. Early on, I felt insecure about the nonverbals, and would repeat questions until I heard a “yes” or “no” out loud. Now, I delight in the way they close their eyes and sink into pleasure. I trust that they’ll tell me if something’s off because over the last two years of playing together, there have been plenty of times they’ve asked me to adjust, change, or stop something.

I promise them I’ll give them what they want. But topping, for me, is not only about the bottom’s pleasure, so I first hit their thighs and pussy, put my fingers inside them, get to know their cunt again. I love topping because I offer what I want and I don’t offer what I don’t want to give; I never do something I don’t want to do. They don’t need to know why I’m making the choices I’m making. I decide.

These are the things I never talk about with Zaide: how putting my body inside theirs brings me to my own body; how I follow my intuition’s pacing and how good it feels to move slow, or feral, depending on the shape of my desire in the moment; how my own body’s disabilities affect how I fuck them; how delightful it is to attune myself to their rhythms.

Then, it’s time for them to get what they want. I spread their thighs open and tie them up. I lick. I press a hand against their flesh to give myself an air pocket: as long as I can breathe, I can live here. My air pocket eventually fills with water, my face is drenched, and I wouldn’t be able to breathe without a snorkel.

Day 4

The next day, after I drink my coffee and write, I clean up the wreckage. Three pairs of used gloves, a condom wrapper, bags of chips and candy wrappers, rope thrown towards the kitchen, paddle, gold hair clip, pink dick with the condom still on. Oh, the blankets. I strip the blankets off the couch. Right.

I send my Next Day Text when a sex memory brings a smile to my face: they sucked on my fingers while I paddled them, and then, suddenly, they pushed the paddle away, and thrust my fingers, hard, into their mouth. I could feel the suction made by their tongue and roof of their mouth, and the way they turned me on – I came, from that alone.

Tonight, I’ll come with my Hitachi and imagine my dick between Zaide’s tits.

Day 5

My facetime date with my girlfriend daddy this week is called “wax me wax me wax me.” I’m not in charge, though, and when I wrote it in, I also told her, “I mean it’s up to you, you don’t have to wax me if you don’t want to, but I’m just sayin!” I’m her brat, I ask for what I want but she decides if I get it.

With about an hour left in our date, she asks me if I want her to wax me. I don’t want to skip a week of X-Files, though, so we lengthen our date to accommodate both. We both go pee, and I get my waxing kit. I lay everything out: I want to be a star student! I want to be prepared for when my daddy instructs me how to make my body hers! I wait with my hands folded in my lap, and when she returns to the facetime screen, I show her I’m so ready.

She asks me to display my leg for her, and places her hand on her own body where she wants each strip to go. She rubs down her bare, newly growing, pregnant tit, showing me the way she wants me to rub down the wax strip. She showers me in kisses before she says, “1-2-3-go!” and makes a motion of ripping the strip from the bottom up. I mirror her. I become exactly what she wants me to be, and she kisses me after each strip shears the hair from my flesh. I barely scream. When it hurts bad, she pets me through the phone and coos sympathetically. We do this around twenty times, until all the hair below my knees is gone.

Afterwards, I use the oil cloth to wipe down my legs. “So smooth, so shiny,” my girlfriend daddy says.

“You make me so smooth! You make me so shiny! Thank you for teaching me how to be smooth and shiny!” I tell her. I’m beaming with gratitude, with love, with the brat’s paradox of getting to be a tiny, crushable thing, and the center of attention, all at the same time.

Day 6

Some queer friends, both new and old, came over tonight and we watched The Journey. It’s one of my favorite movies ever, but I’ve only ever watched it with my girlfriend. During the scene of the first kiss, they did the classic, Bollywood, not kissing, but fingers on lips and lips on necks., and represented the kiss / hook up with a foot splashing in the water. It was the most erotic footsplash I’ve ever seen.

I’m thinking about how, when I was at the gay bar last night with Esse, I locked eyes with Zaide a few times as they fluttered back and forth across the space. I wondered if they were nervous–I kind of hoped so. I wondered if they’d step up to where I was sitting and say hello–I’m glad they didn’t. Esse and I were deep in an intense conversation. I wondered if I’d get a kiss before they left, and when they, instead, loudly said goodbye to friends beside us, and glanced in my direction, I felt…so seen? I didn’t want the sex we have to be on display to all these queers who would run their mouths. I wanted to undress them with my eyes, I wanted to feel their clit on my tongue when I slowly sipped my club soda, and I wanted them to squirm, knowing that I knew what their insides taste like. A whole world within those glances across the bar, a whole fucking gay ass language.

Day 7

I have a date tonight, affectionately nicknamed “hole within a hole,” because they’re the only bearded person I ever enjoyed kissing. Getting past the beard to the lips, then past the lips to the mouth – it was a whole process! It’s been five months since we’ve seen each other and it feels like my needs and desires have changed. I’m so nourished, in love, with my friends and lovers and community; I’m feeling so much less raw energy for fucking and playing with new people than I did when we first met. I’m not sure how I’ll tell them this, or if it’ll come up tonight, but more importantly, I’d like to feel what it’s like to be around them again and go from there.

Once together, the banter is great, flirtatious and sweet. They’re chatty in a way I like in a bottom, and I don’t feel the need to entertain them. I feel so at ease, and so desired, and I touch them sweetly. Knees grazing, arm around their shoulder, they are so small for me. A bunch of my friends arrive unexpectedly, and when the DJ’s transitions get too jarring, my date leaves. I spend the rest of the night dancing and, when I close out, realize the bartenders aren’t charging me for my silly sober drinks anymore. I feel known at the bar, which is scary, because I’m not used to being seen. But, also, it’s sweet to be shown care. Maybe I can trust them, too.