I got a sex diary published anonymously in New York Magazine:
http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/07/bisexual-having-a-threesome-in-a-tent.html
But that’s the edited version. Here’s the real thing.
12:01 a.m. I’m on a camping trip in Big Sur with maybe 15 people. I only know one person, Tim, and I only met him once, during a catering shift. Tim had grouped me and Ash together on the drive up, and her and I bonded. It’s dark at the camp when we get there and I feel disoriented and start pounding beers. I find out Tim’s on ecstasy, and so I offer Ash some of what I’ve brought and we both take it.
12:30 a.m. Tim convinces me to perform my two short stand-up sets in front of everyone, after I mention that I’ve been going to open mics. Everyone puts their complete focus on me and, feeling comfortable, I let the pauses sink in and ad lib extra tid bits. Everyone laughs and claps and I wish stand-up could always be like this.
2:30 a.m. Ash and I are staying in Tim’s tent, since neither of us have our own. As soon as the zipper of the tent is closed I say, “Wanna have a threesome? I mean, I’m kidding if you don’t want to, but also I am serious if you do.” They say sure, but it mainly turns into me going down on Ash, which feels amazing, until she comes. Tim starts fucking me but the dynamic breaks down, and I’m pretty sure it’s my fault as I get a little demanding of Tim. I tell him to go down on me and he gets mad and says he’s going to bed. I take sleeping pills and do the same.
10:30 a.m. Everyone gets up and eats breakfast and then packs everything and we head to Tim’s uncle’s house in Santa *** for a Memorial Day party.
3 p.m. I was worried that I had messed up the dynamic, but Tim is acting normal and not ignoring me and Ash even makes a little joke about how we could never date because I thrashed too much in my sleep and it kept her up (I’ve heard this many times, but I think it only happens when I drink). We all drink and eat throughout the day and sit around the pool.
10 p.m. Tim’s good friend Doc and I start talking by the fire and he brings me a beer and we sorta stay close for the rest of the night.
11:30 p.m. Everyone heads to bed and I follow Doc to the guest house to pee and get water. I ask him if he is really going to sleep in the bed, since everyone else is required to sleep in tents outside. But Doc is close with Tim’s family, so he gets the bed. I ask if I can sleep with him in the bed and promise I won’t sexually assault him. He pulls me in and says, “you can,” and I awkward laugh. As we get into bed I say something to gauge whether he knows that I slept with Tim, but his response is unclear.
He goes down on me right away and the whole experience is very intimate. He is very caring and looks me in the eyes while staying assertive. Afterwards, he answers all my annoying questions, such as how many women he’s slept with, and then we have sex again and fall asleep cuddling.
8 a.m. I wake up so happy to be in the comfy bed. I can hear Doc in the little kitchen making something. As I get up I see that he’s just left the condoms on the floor. I shoot him a dirty look through the wall and pick them up with some kleenex and take them to the bathroom for disposal.
9 a.m. Everyone meets at the big house for breakfast. I wonder how obvious it is that I’ve slept with Doc. I can’t tell what these people know or how they think of me.
10 a.m. Doc lives in a different city and he as he leaves he goes around the group to hug everyone. I’m the last one he hugs. He says softly in my ear, "it was good to meet you, Stephanie." I feel really good about my time with him.
12 p.m. Ash and I drive back to the city and decompress and complain about everyone. She hadn’t realized that I slept with Doc. She says Tim tried to have sex the night before in the tent, but they were so close to another tent that they could hear breathing, so she refused. She laughs that this was probably not the sexy weekend Tim was hoping for, but says it’s his fault for inviting almost only couples.
3 p.m. When we get to where my car should be, I realize it’s been towed because of Carnaval. Ash takes me to the tow place and with the parking ticket and weekend storage fees, it costs $700. I have a hard time caring because it's just more money that I don’t have. It doesn’t feel real.
4:30 p.m. I shower and watch New Girl. I’m so happy to be alone.
6:45 p.m. I walk to improv class and see Caleb, who also interns for the improv company (in exchange for free classes). We chat and afterwards I realize that I have spent the whole time focusing on untangling my headphone cords instead of having a real moment with him. This is a problem I have when I have unexpected encounters with people.
I’d like to sleep with Caleb, but I have a hard time getting a read on him, so I haven’t made any kind of a move. I’d also just like to be his friend. He has a good energy around him.
10:30 p.m. This is the only day I’ll be at the office this week. I work part-time in marketing for a small U.S. branch of a giant Chinese social media company. All of my coworkers are Chinese and I get free food everyday and I love my job for these reasons and more.
4 p.m. I pull up to the house where I work as an assistant to a couple, and Chad is waiting for me on the curb, sweating in the sun. I ask him why he didn’t wait in the shade across the street. Clearly this thought hadn’t occurred to him. Chad and I met through a mutual friend when I moved here. He’s helped me move twice since I’ve been here. He’s picking up my minivan to move his stuff out of storage.
We’ve been sleeping together for a few months. Even though he is attractive, I have a hard time compartmentalizing the sex from our very non romantic friendship. It’s been getting harder and harder to enjoy sex with him. Mostly we talk about other people with each other, and our career aspirations.
Chad got back into town right before I left for camping. He’d been in Spain for a month since his rent had gone up too much, and his mom has flight benefits and he has a friend with an extra room in Spain, it was cheaper to move there for a month and work on his business from there. I was drunk when he’d gotten back and called me. In the morning he left a sleep mask for me, because he knows I like them. I felt like we were a married couple.
8 p.m. I’m on a recreational sports league that plays a different sport every week. Today is volleyball and I get some good serves in and my team wins. Afterwards we all go to a nearby bar and play drinking games. One of the employees of the company that runs the league, Carson, looks like my old neighbor in Wisconsin that I used to sleep with, Chase. Chase has been on my mind a lot lately since my best friend in Wisconsin, Michelle, started sleeping with him.
Michelle feels a little guilty that she’s sleeping with a guy I was in an extended sexual relationship with, and also because she teased me a little at the time about it, because Chase is two years younger and she thought he was immature. She snapchats me a lot when they hang out, as though to somehow include me in their relationship. I like it even though it makes me sad that I’m not there with them.
I noticed Carson for the first time last week, and tonight as he comes around and hangs out with different teams in the huge bar, I smile at him a lot and let my arm touch his and chat with him. He is receptive. We don’t openly hit on each other or exchange numbers, but we don’t have to since we know we will see each other again, multiple times. I am sure that the groundwork has been laid for a future encounter.
It’s like I told Chad once, “you gotta plant the seeds so that the seeds can grow into trees and those trees can fuck you.”
11:30 p.m. I’m at the airport waiting for a late flight out to Wisconsin. I am a little drunk and eating Cheez-It’s and it’s making the airport easier to deal with. I send my Wisconsin friend Nigel, “Paradise tomorrow?” “You’re in town?” he says back. “I’ll be there.” I’m extremely comforted to know that he’s not out of town.
8 a.m. I land in Madison, Wisconsin. I wait outside until Michelle picks me up and takes me to her place where I nap while she works. I have such a history with Michelle that I can’t ever stop being friends with her. Her bedroom looks like hell.
6:30 p.m. Michelle gets home and we head to her volleyball league game that’s supposed to last less than an hour. I sit and watch for almost two hours and drink beer and eat someone else’s cheese curds, getting more impatient by the minute as players get injured, rallies last for days, and time outs are called.
8:45 p.m. Michelle drives us fast back to her house and we eat leftovers from her fridge and get ready to go out. She has an extra bike, but she has a big chunk of skin missing on her foot from a camping trip or something, so we take an uber to Paradise.
As we walk into the low lit Paradise, I feel like I’m home. I search through the little crowd at the back of the narrow bar where the pool table is and find Nigel, just like I’ve done so many times before.
He smiles when he sees me walk up and we hug for a long time. I am incredibly relieved to be near him.
“Pat and I were just talking about your little book,” he says. I had dropped out of college and gone back at 25 and was finishing my last year when Nigel and I started hanging out. Over that year I wrote a story that turned into a 60 page novella for my Creative Writing thesis. I had no idea that it would turn into a love story; it was just based on my life over those months and turned into the story of Nigel and I.
“Did you like it?” I ask. I haven’t seen either of them since they read it.
“Of course... I wish I saw myself the way you see me.”
This makes me incredibly sad because I thought that that was how he saw himself.
I had never been more attracted to anyone than I had been to Nigel, and it’s somehow reassuring that even though he has gained weight in his stomach, it doesn’t change my feelings for him.
Mike L is here, too. In San Francisco I think about him more than most of my other friends, but I’m not sure why. Maybe the reason is that him and I had multiple threesomes together and slept with each other a couple of times, and he’s very sweet even though he comes off as a grumpy alcoholic. He never let the sex affect our friendship in any way.
My friend Johnny, who also played a big role in the lil book, comes in with his boyfriend, my old coworker. He is out of his mind happy to see me, but it soon fades into the dark distractedness that is in his mind.
Pretty much everyone here has read my book, and they all act very impressed by it. I suspect that they are impressed that someone they know was able to articulate their feelings in an honest way and let their closest friends read it. Plus, it is a story of all of us. Everything feels good and right.
10:15 p.m. I’ve brought molly and Michelle, Nigel, and I take some. Nigel and I go out the back to smoke a cigarette and talk for a long time. Nigel tells me I was always one of the boys, which is the group of guys I desperately wanted to be a part of when I lived here. Nigel’s best friend is P, which is Michelle’s childhood friend and the reason I know Nigel and Mike L. I want to cry because every time in my life that I’ve felt like an outsider, I’ve later been reassured that it wasn’t true. Deep down, though, I know I was never one of the boys. But I’m glad he’s said it. We play kick the chain for a little while.
I tell him about my experience of being in love with him and moving and falling out of love with him, and how that somehow felt even lonelier. He tells me that him and I just didn’t feel right to him even though it should’ve, because everything was right about us. I understand this, because I’ve had the same thing happen to me more than once, where the other person felt that everything was kismet between the two of us, and I understood why, but I didn’t feel it in return. I tell him that I’d pop up places where I’d expected him to be hoping to run into him. It’s alright. Nigel accepts all of this about me, and I know he loves me in a complicated way. I’ve known this ever since I confessed my love for him and he was nice to me. Soon after that, though, he was in a relationship with another girl. He tells me he’s unhappy in his relationship, unhappy in his life. I feel deeply connected to him, that we can still be close through all this.
11 p.m. Nigel and I reemerge and Chase comes in and runs to me and picks me up and holds me so tight that he is hurting me, but I don’t say anything because I don’t want him to let me go. I give Chase some molly and after a beer we head to a new lounge bar that I’ve never been to.
12:30 a.m. Nigel starts rubbing my leg and holding my hand, which is so strange and has never happened before. Suddenly he jumps up and announces, “let’s go.” I’m confused, but I say okay, and say bye quickly to my friends. I call an uber on my phone and we smoke as we wait.
I had kind of wanted to never have sex with him again so that I would remember the amazing sex we had when I was in love with him. The sex is good anyway, but the whole time I feel like I’m not drunk enough. I’m distracted. As he fucks me he is looking in my eyes and I say, “You’ve never loved as much as I love you before.” He tells me to shut up, but gently.
Afterwards he stands up and says he has to leave and then looks at me naked on the bed and gets back in and holds me. I tell him to change his life if he’s unhappy, but I hate being preachy. I try to never tell Nigel how to live his life, although it’s hard not to when he complains about how he’s wasting his life sitting in dive bars.
2:30 a.m. When he leaves I’m flooded with feelings, but they’re neither positive or negative. I just feel so disoriented.
I realize that he wanted to leave the bar early so that he could still get home at bar time so his girlfriend won’t know. A few years before Nigel and I had gotten drunk together and he tried to sleep with me while he was with a different girlfriend. I fooled around with him but wouldn’t have sex. He’d said a bunch of afterschool special stuff, and left, and a few days later texted to apologize, saying he didn’t remember what for, but that he’s definitely sorry.
I search the house twice for any drop of alcohol, but can’t find any, so instead I shower, take a couple sleeping pills, and fall asleep.
7 a.m. Michelle comes home to pack for a festival camping trip and I wake up. “Wait until you hear the story Chase has about last night!” she says.
I get up and get ready and eventually walk over to Chase’s house, (next to my old place), but he doesn’t answer the facebook message I send him (his phone is broken or something) and his sister and their other roommate don’t answer their phones either. I eat some spicy potato chips left out on their sweet porch set up until his sister walks up. “Hey, girl. You forget the lock code?” she asks. “I’ve had to learn so many numbers since then…” I say.
7:30 a.m. Chase is in bed and I crawl in with him as he opens his eyes. He tells me that Michelle was riding on the back of his bike and they ran into a tree. His bike is broken and he has a huge scrape on his back. We head to a breakfast place, and past the teeny tiny tree that gave him trouble. He orders a double screwdriver. He says it’s bullshit that Nigel made me leave early. “You had other friends that wanted to hang out with you!” he says indignantly. I’m surprised by this and flattered.
1:30 p.m. Later we sit on his porch, one of my favorite activities ever. We drink beer with his roommates until he heads to his shift as a line cook.
9 p.m. After dinner with friends I head back to Michelle’s place and Laurel meets me. Gatzke picks us up and we check out our old usual bar, but we don’t recognize anyone, so we go to a new bar where Nigel is working with my manager from a different bar. Their moods are not good. My old manager is not his usual hyper self with me. Normally he’s excited to see me.
Nigel asks if I slept last night, because he didn’t. He is wearing a uniform vest that shows where his stomach has grown. Again, I’m comforted to be near him, even though we don’t interact much.
12 a.m. Nigel finishes his shift and tells me that he needs to go home and sleep. I nod and he hugs me goodnight and leaves. I debate running out after him, because I want to talk to him, and I know I might not see him again. Like usual I have the sense that I have a lot of things to say to him, but when I try to think of what they are, nothing comes to me.
We finish our drinks and head to another bar. On the sidewalk outside I see D on the sidewalk and he asks politely for a cigarette after we chat. D grew up a street away from me and was in my grade. We made out once at my house after partying. He has been homeless for a couple years now, but he looks pretty good still. I’ve heard a lot of reports of him asking people I know for money.
We head to another bar and Chase meets us, being his fun, energetic self. When the bar closes Chase and I bring our beers with us as we all walk to the Cardinal, where I worked for two years. My old coworker lets us in and we finish our beers there. Laurel heads to her house and I walk with Chase back to his, a walk I’ve made so many times before. Being with Chase was always so easy; we always headed home to the same place anyway.
I kind of feel like he doesn’t really want to have sex with me, that I just keep being here as we drink another beer and talk with his sister who smokes a couple of cigarettes before bed, and that it will just be easier to go through with it rather than outright reject me. I wonder if I’m just being insecure, or if he’s reluctant because of his sex thing with Michelle. I’ve had too much to drink to figure out how to reassure him that this is fine because Michelle is out of town and that we believe sharing is caring. I’m not sure if that’s the problem, anyway, if there even is a problem.
I follow him to his room and he makes the first move. He’s better at sex than he used to be.
8 a.m. My step dad calls and wakes me up; he is on his way to pick me up. I gather my things from the floor and hug and kiss Chase and run out of his house to Michelle’s, two blocks away. I curse Wisconsin for how I feel and brush my teeth and try not to look like a nightmare. I drag my suitcase downstairs and eat leftover curry out of the container while I wait for him to get there.
9 a.m. At home I immediately feel stressed by the tension. We’re preparing for my brother’s high school graduation party, and I have to keep telling them to relax.
My ex-boyfriend, Jason, is supposed to come by with his new girlfriend. Jason was my longest and best relationship, and we broke up when I was 18 because he had moved a couple hours away and I wanted to start dating girls and would be heading off to college soon. He’s more of a family friend, now. We still say we love each other at the end of phone calls, but we haven’t had sex since we broke up. When I call him he makes excuses for why he can’t make it today. I cut him off and tell him to just come or not come, but that we want him to be there.
4 p.m. During the party my mom and I are both inside preparing more stuff for the party. I tell my mom that I saw Nigel. She sighs and asks why. I tell her more about him and how his dream was to take off in his van and travel and have adventures and not come back, and how when I’d seen him he’d joked that I’d stolen his dreams. She asks if that’s the reason that I moved. I tell her no and start explaining stuff from the lil book, which illustrates what led up to it for me, and then I start getting a little mad and ask her why she’d never asked to read it.
“Have you tried one of these energy pouch drinks? They’re so tasty.”
I don’t say anything, but this shit is why I left.
11 a.m. My mom and brother and I have lunch while the clouds cover the sky. We go for a walk by the beach. My brother wants to hang out longer but mum is anxious to get home and I’m anxious to see Nigel, which I feel guilty about.
2 p.m. They drop me off at Paradise, where Nigel is finishing up his shift. He has a beer with me after and then tells me he has his motorcycle there and asks if I want to go for a ride. I’ve been waiting for him to ask me this for a year and a half, so I say yes immediately.
2:30 p.m. I’m actually pretty afraid of motorcycles, but Nigel’s is a little more sturdy than the other ones I’ve been on, and I trust him more. We ride past growing fields for hours and I am overwhelmed by the beauty of the place where I’m from.
3 p.m. We stop at a gas station and I tell him we should go for a walk in the nature reserve we just passed. When we walk in Nigel looks over his shoulder at me and says, “Want to find a spot and fool around?” I feel conflicted, but shrug. “Is cheating on your girlfriend a thing you do?” I ask. “Not really, but I figured since you’re around…” We hold hands.
We search for a clearing and find a little spot down by a stream. He finishes pretty quickly (“It’s weird how fast I come when I’m not fucked up.”) and cums on my lower stomach. It drips down as I look for something to clean up with. All I can find is a beer coozie, so I turn it inside out and use it while I make a face at Nigel and he laughs at me. I ask him to go down on me. “Now?” he asks. I nod. “Well we’re already here,” he says and lays down on the ground and starts. I get really really close to coming but I don’t and while we ride back to town I wonder if it means anything more than that I have a hard time coming with partners.
When we leave we realized we’d been in full, clear view of a walking bridge.
4:30 p.m. Nigel drops me off at Paradise and gives me a long hug. “You’re the best,” he says and leaves to do laundry before his shift at a different bar. I eat cheese curds and a chicken sandwich and drink PBR until Michelle comes to pick me up. We are a little late and as I’m trying self-checkout and it doesn’t work, a guy with his daughter asks if it worked. We both get processed and then in the security line my bag is checked because the brick of cheese in my bag shows up as suspicious.
When I run to the gate, I see the same guy there, paying for a surprise bag fee for Frontier. ‘60 bones’ he mouths at me. He boards and I pay and board and when I find my seat...his daughter is at the window, he’s in the middle, and I’m in the aisle. It’s like a shitty rom com. The 2 hour flight turns into a 3.5 hour one as the plane circles above the Denver airport. Alon and I have made close friends by now, and I know a lot about his 9 year old daughter. I get his phone number and promise to call the next time I’m home.
My connecting flight is delayed and two gates down, so I make the flight.
11:59 p.m. The plane lands and I’m back to my new home. I feel relief.
