THROAT: Unorthodox Intimacies

THROAT is a serial about sex written by Sydney Allen-Ash. Sign up to get THROAT delivered to your inbox.

The woman dated Jake for ten days at the end of February. They matched on an app and made out on a coffee date at 11:30 am on a Saturday. They texted constantly and saw each other two more times (Saturday night and a sleepover the next Friday) before he stopped replying. Her last text read, 

“Since I haven’t heard from you I’m making other plans tonight. I’m not sure what happened here but this is really disappointing.” 

Time of death: Wednesday, March 6th, 10:42 am EST.

(Time of Resurrection: Friday, March 9th, 7:34 pm EST. After two glasses of wine the woman texted him, “Fuck you, dude. Learn how to communicate.”)

This was her first experience with the double whammy — “love-bombed” and “ghosted.” (These phrases were dumb and ugly but she could not find a better way to explain her — their? No, her — situation.) While her faith in humanity (dating) would grow back, the shrapnel of the relationship remained. The sharp fragments of phrases, actions, and habits that were simultaneously too painful to excise and impossible to recreate. In Jill Scott’s Cross My Mind she says,

I was just thinking about you Wondering if you wear the same cologne Smelled good on you Had the next boyfriend of mine try the same kind But it stunk on him though

On Saturday morning after the first (and only) night Jake slept over at her apartment in Bed-Stuy, the woman awoke on her stomach looking at the illegible tableau of tattoos and sparse constellation of pimples covering his back. She kissed a bump of vertebrae near the base of his neck then turned her head to face the wall. He rolled toward her, slid his hand into her sweatpants, and hooked his fingers around her waistband from the inside. It felt like he was going to airlift her like an injured animal to some far-off veterinary clinic. But his hand laid still against her back, his knuckles grazing the top of her ass. She exhaled and fell back asleep.

Moments like this were archived in her catalog of unorthodox intimacies. They struck her as remarkably profound, though she could not quite convey their impact to friends. Perhaps, she considered, it was her ability to register intimacy that was off. Blunted, in some way, by all the casual sex she’d been having the past year. She noticed odder, more intense versions of these moments in films and books and cataloged them, too, with a pang of envy. In The Worst Person In The World (2021) Julie and Eivind (who, just for context, was played by the beautiful Adam Driver-esque Norwegian Herbert Nordrum) teeter the line of infidelity. “What is cheating?” they ask as they smell each others’ armpits and listen to each other peeing. The nameless narrator in Miranda July’s All Fours takes it a step further with her paramour Davey, sticking her hand in a stream of his hot piss. Afterward, Davey takes out her tampon and inserts a new one. “Sex was great,” July writes, “but this. This was something we’d never do with anyone else.” 

Jake was a white guy with a big head, sharp blue eyes, and a defined jaw. He was tall and broad and athletically built in a way that made everything but gym clothes look silly. Seeing his body stretch the limits of chinos and a jacket was almost obscene. He was covered in tattoos — even his neck and hands — and he had a grown-out dirty blonde buzz cut. He joked that it didn’t matter what he wore, he would always look like an undercover cop. But he also surprised her. On their first date, he gushed about his queerness and love of sucking dick. On their second he was ten minutes late because he was selling a card to a chatterbox with whom he played Magic: The Gathering.

On Saturday night, after meeting only that morning, Jake took the woman to The Gutter in Greenpoint. They sat in what he called “the kissing booth,” a half-width table with a dirty mirror where the other seats should’ve been. Their long limbs jammed into this tiny booth made her feel giddy, like they were two kids in the back row of the school bus. He watched her in the mirror with an open-mouthed smile as she licked his neck and kissed the bottom of his ear. He seemed genuinely incredulous, like an inventor whose designs finally worked. 

“You know what’s fucked up?” he said in the kissing booth with a crazed grin. “If you said you’d want to get married right now, I’d do it.” She looked at him half-smiling with her head cocked to the side, her eyes narrowed. The woman proclaimed, confidently, unabashedly, that she was happy sleeping around. She described herself as “a princess, a brainiac, and a slut,” on her dating profile. Still, her subterranean desire to be picked drew her to him like a heteronormative homing signal.

Meanwhile, Jake seemed thrilled at his inscrutability. His impish jokes and bluffing and bravado were imperceptibly shifting the power balance in his favor. It was like he was delicately sliding Jenga blocks out of her tower, waiting to see when she’d notice she was on the verge of collapse. All of this moved so quickly that she did not have time to discern that being pushed to the edge of humiliation created an exhilarating vulnerability that felt almost like falling in love.

The woman thought she did a pretty good job of playing along, of keeping her reactions light and ambiguous, but later realized she gave it away in glimpses. Like her repressed dream for a partner (and also marriage and potentially children) was behind those swinging double doors to a restaurant’s kitchen. Every joke she took a little too seriously, every kiss that was more tender than sexy, held the doors open a half second longer, revealing more of the soft glowing hope she had hidden away.

On Saturday night after one beer for the woman and a liter of water for Jake (he was straight-edge, and from Boston, naturally), the pair left the kissing booth and headed to another bar. They braced against the winter wind and she looped her arm through his. At the corner of Nassau and 14th, he turned and faced her,

“What do you want to do now? Do you need food? Are you cold? Are you tired? Should I water you?” he asked playfully in quick succession.

She said an extended uuuummmmmmm and planted her forehead on his chest to shield herself from the wind. Pleasure, to her, was not thinking. He wrapped his arms around her and spoke softly into the top of her head,

“Is there anything I can do for you?”

This question — is there anything I can do for you — was, to the woman, not so much a question but a declaration, I will do anything for you. It was tender and erotic, authoritative and subservient. The question was in itself an answer to a kind of diffuse unarticulated question she had about men and love and care. 

They went back to his place and she straddled him on his small uncomfortable IKEA couch. She kissed him with her head turned almost 90 degrees to avoid the bike hanging on the wall above them. His frat-like apartment embarrassed her but she added this to the column of traits labeled “Unfortunate Realities of Dating A Real Person And Not An Idea Of Someone.” (Other traits included that he ate almost exclusively rice and protein bars and said “That’s gay” as a pejorative, which she knew was his pejorative to use, but it still made her uncomfortable.)

He kissed her neck and spoke quietly into her right ear as he slid his hands down her back and cupped her ass, 

“Is there anything I can do for you?” 

She tipped the overflowing bowl of her hips into his. “So many things.”

The woman woke with the sun beaming on her face through his uncovered window and immediately kicked herself for fucking him without a condom. She never fucked without a condom. She did some type of emotional accounting and decided that the question-declaration (combined with the sexual attraction and banter) said something about him as a person that made the condomless sex okay. As though STDs and pregnancy were prevented as much by charisma and daydreams of a life together as a barrier of latex. She also secretly believed there was something auspicious about a dick that fit perfectly inside her. Though she had not yet encountered a penis that could not fit, there were just some dicks that just fit better than others. Jake’s dick fit better than others. She imagined explaining this to her friends or her doctor and felt like an idiot.   

They had sex again that morning (no condom again, why start now?). He thrust aggressively into her and spat in her mouth as he held it open with his thumb. His pupils dilated in a way that made her think of a great white shark. 

At one point he got tired and soft, “Sorry, sometimes I just can’t cum.”

“You don’t have to apologize for that.”

They rolled over and she kneeled beside him, straddling one leg. She kissed his chin, then licked the sweat off his neck. She took her time kissing and licking his chest and the softness of his stomach. She bit his hip bones gently and looked up at him grinning as she licked the pubic hair below his belly button. She made her tongue wide and flat and licked the inside of his thigh and the delicate skin around his cock. She took him completely in her mouth and slowly, sensually (almost lovingly) swirled her tongue around it. She held his balls with her hand and pumped her mouth up and down as she felt him get harder between her lips. She held his dick then licked up the length of him with her tongue outstretched while she watched his face and let a strand of drool hang from her mouth. He had the look of inventor’s incredulity from the bar but this time it was more bald and raw. She felt protective of his vulnerability but also high off the power. (The woman wondered if the real back-of-the-brain reason why men love getting head was the illicit thrill of castration on the other side. One strong Lorena Bobbit bite, she thought, and it was game over.)

Once he was hard enough she swung her other leg outside his hip and slid him inside of her. She sat up and threw her head back with a mix of pleasure and triumph and felt his hard cock push against the inside of her abdomen. She looked down at him. He was completely bowled over.

“I think I’m in love with you.” The woman just laughed. 

It took two humiliating months to recover from Jake. During this time she was vigilant and distrusting but also embarrassingly available. When she met any moderately attractive kind man she felt herself falling into him as though she could not wait to be picked again. She would be overly flirtatious, then spend a train ride imagining why his feelings would be mutual. She’d get home and gingerly stalk his LinkedIn, Twitter, portfolio website, and Instagram all while lying in bed, her thighs wrapped around a pillow. She would message any trustworthy mutual friend to gauge his relationship status, read that one news article about his high school lacrosse game in his hometown newspaper in March of 2009, and then, finally, swipe Raya (Tinder, Feeld, Hinge) in a fugue state trying to find his profile. 

Thankfully, this cycle was fast — a day or two, a week at most — and then the spell would break. It felt like she was frantically trying to sculpt her daydreams into the perfection they could be before they hardened into the lumpy reality that was. Still, this efficiency meant that she cycled through one washed-up 52-year-old actor, three platonic male friends, and two different British creative directors in the span of a month.

As the weeks ticked by, the woman tried to make this desperation into a cool “hot girl summer” thing but it was too frenzied to be empowering. At the core of it all, she felt exhausted and demoralized. She had not been aware there was a race then suddenly felt like she was flailing over and over again toward a man-shaped finish line only to realize she had ten (or 20 or 7000) miles left to go.

In mid-April the woman said to her therapist, “I feel boy crazy.” 

Her therapist replied, “That’s just where you are now. Try to accept it.” 

As the spring ripened into summer the woman began spending her mornings going for long walks with a hound she was dog-sitting. One morning she walked past the firehouse on Hancock and a stocky rust-coloured firefighter wanted to pet the dog.

“Here,” the woman said, putting treats into his open hand, “You can bribe her affection with these.”

He fed one to the dog but she remained skittish and shy, standing at an arm's length. 

“I’ll try again next time.” He went to place the treats back into the woman’s hand and delicately ran the tops of his fingernails against her palm in a kind of starburst pattern as he let go. An electric pulse halfway between a tickle and an itch ran up her arm, making her chin stick out at an angle. 

“Have a good rest of your morning,” the ruddy firefighter said with a grin. 

"You too."

She walked away smiling, the sensation tingling in her palm.

THROAT is a serial about sex written by Sydney Allen-Ash. Sign up to get THROAT delivered to your inbox.