The David story is now a bit I have down pat.
First, I paint David in broad strokes—forty-four years old to my twenty-six; bald, a Jewish guy with a heavy Brooklyn accent. “He wined and dined me, he picked me up in his car, held doors, wouldn’t let me pay for anything. And then we had sex, and it was abysmal.”
Depending on my audience, I might give details about the horrible sex. “He disappeared for a week and then texted me to break things off.”
When I first started telling the story, I would whip out my phone to read his text aloud, typos and all, but now, I rely on a summary. “He said, ‘oh, by the way, I’m bisexual and if I’m going to be with a woman, I need to be head over heels.’”
There’s also the one-liner version of it: “I once dated a guy who told me he was bisexual five weeks in and then dumped me, saying if he was with a woman, he had to be really into it.”
Girl, when is the book coming out? friends would ask. I think I’m a funny girl and I’ve got a million of them, easy to remember anecdotes about bad dates and flings with people I reference with a shorthand. “It’s ugly out there!” I laugh.
They respond to my David story as expected: amused and mildly horrified. Sometimes there’s a little good-natured pity. We sip our drinks, shake our heads at the pitfalls of New York dating. Then it’s someone else’s turn to tell a bad dating story and sometimes while they talk, I allow myself to remember the story is longer and less hilarious than I tell it.
*
I’m still not entirely sure how I started talking to David at my friend’s thirtieth birthday party. He didn’t know the birthday girl—he’d come with a friend who did, sort of—but he’d brought a bottle of decent champagne. I had worn a girdle under my tight red cocktail dress, lipstick in the same color and dangerous, delicate stilettos. Molded into an hourglass shape, I felt like the irresistible maneater in a B-movie. David was charming in spite of all the things that are supposed to work against him, like being middle-aged, bald, shortish, and wearing a too-big blazer and a pair of jeans that didn’t fit right, either. He told me he was a bus driver for the city; I told him I was between jobs but was mostly a writer. As we talked, away from the roar of the party, I watched his desire over the top of my champagne glass, and I started drinking that in, too. He matched the pace of my quips and my laughter was real. I gave him my number because it was another night when it seemed like anything could happen.
*
“What are you looking for?” the dates always asked.
“I just want to meet people and see where things go.” Mostly, they didn’t go anywhere. But after feeling dull at my job, I sparked to life in bar twilight. I nodded, tilted my head to show I was listening. I always had another question ready once they’d finished answering the first one, because even in a noisy bar, an uncomfortable silence between strangers rings out like a cannon shot. I learned when to deploy a light touch, when I should suggest another bar. I decided I was good at dating, even after finding myself suddenly single in my mid-twenties, detached from the college sweetheart I was sure I would end up with.
I would always tell my therapist about my dates, often with disappointment. “He barely asked me anything about myself.”
That may have been what I missed most about the best of my time with Sweetheart—that, when things were good, there was so little explaining between us. Conversation had always come easy and when it didn’t, we had contented silences that were almost better than sweet nothings. Three of the years we were together were great and it took us almost two years to realize that even though we were a couple, we’d started living in separate worlds.
He broke up with me and I made dates, as many as I could. I didn’t want him to be my only frame of reference for small, sweet moments or nights that exhaust bodies and fill hearts. I didn’t want places in the city to be just for him and me in my memories, so I suggested dates to those old spots, searching for new stories. I threw myself more and more into the salsa dancing Sweetheart never could get into, dancing my partners into bed until soon, I stopped going to socials because at any given moment, three of my fizzled flames could be in the same room and I couldn’t stand to see what felt like my failures glide across the floor. At first hesitant to try online dating, I soon cycled through apps, trying to push down the confusion and rage of so much pain with a few screen taps. I wanted to have the kind of sex that moved my bed, and that said things words couldn’t. More than anything, I couldn’t bear to sit still long enough to hear Sweetheart in my head explaining how he just couldn’t handle how deeply I felt things. I miserly parsed out the feelings that were allowed to this new, single me. Usually, I initiated things fast, whether we met at a party or an app.
“You wanna meet for a drink?”
*
I texted a friend who’s always game for dating updates: It’s kind of an experiment. I feel like Jane Goodall among the apes lol. I’ll let you know how it goes. David had called me a week after the party and, curious to see if we had anything to talk about, I agreed to dinner.
Date night came and I reveled in the novelty of a man picking me up for a date in a car. Not only that, he rang the bell instead of waiting, double parked. It was the kind of behavior my mother insisted on from my high school suitors but as a grown-up, I knew better than to expect that kind of parent-approved behavior.
I wondered what people in the restaurant thought to see a Black girl in her twenties having dinner with a white man in his forties. I hoped my high-waisted cropped pants and off-the-shoulder blouse would show I wasn’t being paid to be with him. I made sure to sit taller. No one stared, I don’t think, but some eyebrows must have gone up when I wasn’t looking. David, for his part, was looking only at me.
Dinner flew by, ending with a disappointing and soggy kiss. But I wanted more nights where I laughed until my cheeks were sore. We made a second date, then a third, and a fourth.
On every date, David looked at me like if he blinked, I’d disappear and he wouldn’t have been able to stand it; like I was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and he said as much. His gaze was intense, dissecting.
“What’re you looking at?” I asked playfully but I wanted a real answer.
“Nothin’. Just you.” He smiled.
I didn’t know what he was looking for, but what he saw kept him focused on me in a way I wasn’t sure could or should exist. He remembered the details of what I told him about me, and I loved to see the photos he snapped when he was out riding his bike or his Harley.
I told my therapist all about him, as I did with almost everyone I had a date with.
“So, you seem to like this guy,” she responded when I paused.
“I do.” A held breath as I tried to name the shy, squirmy feeling I wasn’t sure I should feel. “He compliments me a lot and I don’t know if I should be suspicious.” I didn’t think he’d lie about being attracted to me, or that I wasn’t, in fact, attractive. “I guess I just worry that that’s the thing I like most about him.” He had so many sweet words and I didn’t know what they were all for. I asked myself and my therapist if I was shallow.
“It sounds like you guys have some things in common.”
I thought about how when I relaxed, we didn’t feel shallow. Walking to and from his car, he’d reach for my hand, and it felt like we’d had our fingers interlaced forever. He brought me a book on the history of shoes one day, yellow and orange mums for no reason at all another. I remembered that in five years, my ex-boyfriend gave me flowers only once.
I let out the breath I’d been holding. “The longer I’m single, the less straight I feel.” A big jump in our conversation, maybe; but I did that in those days when it wasn’t easy to own my desires, which felt like a spill I needed to contain before it poured over a table’s edge. There were men, always, but more and more, the pull toward a dapper woman on the train, or my eyes tingling with tears when I saw two women in a world of their own, was getting harder to deny.
“Is this the first time you’re thinking about—and let’s not get too wrapped up in this word—your bisexuality?”
It wasn’t. And I ran off a list of the small steps I’d taken with other women, from high school up until the college study abroad cheating Sweetheart didn’t think it worth considering cheating because we were two girls tasting each other’s sweat 1,500 miles from his line of vision. Remembering that afternoon’s adrenaline brought new tremors to my limbs. Then I bit the inside of my lower lip before telling her about Paola.
*
Paola’s face is blurry in my memory; it’s now a warm halo of need. I can say with certainty that she had long, straight dark hair and brown eyes but whether they were almond-shaped or she wore earrings, I can’t say.
Sometime during my all-day twenty-sixth birthday celebration, a friend texts her, and Paola and her friend meet us at Gonzalez y Gonzalez, a West Village Latin spot filled with couples on a Sunday like it is a Friday.
I’m urged forward by bottomless mimosas, gin cocktails, a feeling of incandescence: I need to dance. No one in my group knows the songs, so I grab Paola. I can dance merengue and bachata hasta al amanecer but not when it is my job to lead a woman in the steps. The dance dissipates into giggles, but we don’t let go.
The one who’d invited Paola in the first place sees the spark. “I mean, if you guys wanted to make out right here, that’s cool.”
Words sliding together, I shout something over the music about us not being there for him before leading her further on to the dance floor. Her hand is soft and fits just right. I grab the other, confident I can lead a little better this time.
The song ends and we go to the bathroom together like girls do, holding hands down the steps and along the twisting hallway. Neither of us is too steady in our heels. Paola is the thing I’m too scared to ask for, too scared to admit I want to ask for. Maybe she knows what it is to be afraid of your own wanting. This handhold is our center.
Washing my hands, I start it, maybe, saying how gross it is that that guy wanted us to make out for him. Our eyes meet in the mirror, and in the next instant, she pushes me back into the stall I just exited. This slender girl presses me into the wall with a certainty I’d been waiting to feel. I can’t kiss her back hard enough, fast enough and my pulse out-thumps the bass from the party upstairs. She works my tights down and then my panties. I looked at her open-mouthed, this girl I barely know somehow knowing how much I really want to know that I’m not showing off or greedy, that I am real, rational. I push her hair from her face as she looks at me.
I want to be swallowed by sensation, but her fingers feel off, mechanical after the initial rush. Someone enters the bathroom, and we freeze until it’s safe to leave the stall. I feel myself sobering up to the realization that the Paola in the stall is drunker than I first thought. We go back upstairs, hands by our sides. I ask the bartender for water. The lights flash and Paola is gone.
*
David introduced me to three of his friends, a gesture that’s supposed to mean something. We’d been dating for four weeks.
We met them at a not-too-divey dive. After a round of pool, we peeled off to choose the music and get closer. I played with the brim of his porkpie hat, which might’ve been goofy on anyone else, but sat at just the right angle to be endearing. My heart swelled.
When he drove me home at the end of the night, I took a deep breath and hoped that this time, he would respond to my lips the way I wanted. He did, until his tongue got so excited, it was unruly again. I was seduced more by the fact that we were making out in his car like he wasn’t forty-four and I wasn’t twenty-six, but we were both seventeen.
*
When you are the type of girl who likes to wear bright colors and floaty skirts and tight skirts, you can sit down, cross your legs, and convince yourself that there are probably dozens of straight women like you who get drunk and let a strange girl fuck them in the bathroom. That it isn’t necessarily more strange or dishonest than going to bed with a man who bores you, or worse, worships you with a cloying devotion. And then your straight fingers curl recalling the exact amount of force you used when you pulled the hair at the nape of her neck, her intake of breath piercing the space between you.
A text to the friend who introduced you to her: What’s Paola’s number?
*
On a whim, I joined David for a ride on his bus route one weeknight. I remembered an issue of CosmoGirl I had read in high school and broached the subject with him gently, coyly, as the magazine said.
“A little less tongue,” I suggested, “save it for later,” with my sweetest, most suggestive smile. I really believed his kissing was a small barrier to new and exciting erotic experiences.
“No one’s ever had a problem with my kissing before,” he sulked.
I was flustered because I thought all I had to do was bring it up and he’d fix it. David seemed to want only to make me happy. I didn’t think I would have to explain the drink-me-deeper gravity I craved.
We got to the end of his route and David turned the lights off. The switches seemed to work on our voices, too.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
“Sit down,” he instructed.
I did as I was told, and he kneeled. He took his time, kissing my shins, my calves. I looked down, not sure if I was more shocked that this was happening or that I had to fight to keep quiet inside the bus’s silence. Gently, gently, he lifted the skirt still covering my knees and continued. He stopped mid-thigh to listen to my breathing and look at my face.
“I have to get back to it,” he said, giving me a peck on the lips. The switch flipped and I squinted against lights. I promised to call when I got home and walked to the train station, feeling my legs hum.
Maybe this was when I started to think I could slow down. Soon, I stopped looking so hard for other dates, flirted a little less with the bartender at my neighborhood bar.
Over the course of weeks, something had grown in the dark inside me until it reached such a size, it found its way into the light: the hope that I would slip and slide into a new love.
*
It takes me a few tries, but stone-cold sober, in the light of day, I find the right tone for my text to Paola: casual, friendly, but clear that I want to see her soon. I hate the pang of disappointment I feel when my phone vibrates, but not with a message from her. Days go by without an answer, and I manage to convince myself there’s a perfectly logical explanation for her not responding, so I should think about something else. Like where we might go and if I should take the lead, picking a place and paying for at least a round of drinks. When I picture us meeting again, it is always in the dark, in some secluded booth or maybe a lounge with low couches that pull bodies together. If I let my thigh press against hers in the booth of a bar, will she stay this time?
*
“We can stay in. My roommate’s with her mom on Long Island.”
David and I had takeout, we had beer, we had our movie, which we watched ‘til the end. And then it was time. We started making out on the couch and it was as if I hadn’t just embarrassed myself days before, daring to ask him to kiss me differently. Here was the same sloppy, sogginess. Just wait, I told myself. It’s about to get better. And we went to my bed.
The clothes came off the way they always do, and I tried to get David to pay attention to the parts of my body that needed him most then, but before I knew it, he was rummaging in his pants pocket for a condom. I propped myself on an elbow to watch him, shocked. I recovered.
“Not yet. Can you use your fingers?”
Impatience and annoyance crossed his face.
“What?” I asked, shocked.
“I’m thinking, ‘she wants my fingers instead of my dick?” He sounded irritated and inconvenienced, like he’d been cut off on the highway.
“Not instead of. Just…I’m not ready yet.”
“Really? You seem ready.”
It then dawned on me that the brief moment he’d had his hand between my legs was only him making an assessment, like someone licking their finger and holding it out to see which way the wind was blowing. The careful, reverent man from the bus was gone. I tried to call that man back; I was sure he would come back if I just said the right things. So, I asked for a pause, and then asked him about what turned him on, if he wanted me to play with his nipple rings. Seeing him soften, I touched myself for myself and for him. Maybe this will work. His excitement awoke and he returned to my arms. Not wanting to lose the moment, I guess, David left the condom at the edge of the bed.
“I’m a healthy guy,” he responded when I stopped him.
But David, this is not about your fifteen-mile bike rides; this is about safety, not doubt. “I’m sure you are, but I’m not doing this without one.”
Reluctantly, he rolled it on.
OK, let him start, make sure he’s completely hard, and I’ll pick the next position so I can feel something. I felt myself float to my bookcase, watching our sex from a distance. It–he–finished before I could make it better. We went to sleep, spooning.
*
I think it’s time to try calling Paola and it goes to voicemail. I pitch my voice low so she can’t hear that I’m nervous, that this is the first time I’m calling a girl, instead of reacting to a kiss that catches me off-guard but melts my resolve. The anticipation doesn’t feel all that different than waiting for a boy to call back, yet I keep holding my breath waiting for something to change.
Of course, she doesn’t call or text me. I try texting the guy that introduced us, faking a confidence I don’t feel: What’s up with your girl? Why won’t she let me take her out?
Oh, he says. She lives uptown with her girlfriend.
I stop trying to reach her.
*
A week went by without David answering my calls or texts and then came the message.
Sorry for the disappearing act. I guess there’s only one way to say this. I didn’t feel the chemistry was right. Plus, I’m bisexual, so I don’t want to waste your time. If I’m going to pursue a female, I would have to be completely head over heels. Sorry for not telling you earlier.
Fury shook my limbs as I called him back. Of course, he didn’t answer.
*
Let’s say when I talked about David, I didn’t say it like it was supposed to be funny. Let’s imagine I took a deep breath after I read his text out loud and said, “I was furious, yeah, but I was also hurt. And it’s kinda sad, isn’t it?” Because eventually, I softened enough to feel for David in what seemed like a closeted life. It started to make an unfortunate kind of sense how the man from that night on the bus and the man who came into my bed could exist in one person. I wondered if the big muscly guys he rode with would be cool if the next date he brought to their favorite dive was a man. Or what would send his mother to her grave faster: David showing up to Shabbat with a boy or a Black girl?
It would be years before I could have that same softness for myself: someone who didn’t have the ability to define myself for myself. I wasn’t closeted, necessarily, but I was too scared to look at myself with clear eyes. My arrogance—that I couldn’t acknowledge the parallels between David’s story and mine—still surprises me. Some days, it makes me laugh and shake my head.
That is the part of me that harbors a fantasy. That maybe if David had been brave, I could’ve been brave, too. And brave me would’ve said, It’s one thing if you’re not feeling it, or if you think I did something wrong. But why not bring up being bisexual before now? And I might’ve told him that I shrugged when a friend of a friend told me his last relationship—with a woman—ended because she caught him watching gay porn. See, David? I don’t judge. It’s not about that; it’s about you and me.
In this fantasy, I would’ve said, I’m not completely straight, either, I don’t think. Because some girls stop me in my tracks and I’m still not sure why, but men are easy, expected. Is it the same for you sometimes? And we would keep talking, like friends who trusted each other, who could say, “You are like that part of me I don’t want to see but we can peek together.”
Besides, the laughter we shared soothed my racing mind, and in his company, I knew for a fact that I was funny, beautiful, smart, and the right kind of sensitive. And I wished for a long time after we broke up that I’d had the chance to go on his motorcycle.
David was the only person I trusted to keep me safe on the back of his Harley, but we never took that ride.
************
Are you a writer? We’re looking for short stories and personal essays to feature on our digital and print platforms. Click HERE to find out how to submit.
