Assistant Diaries

Miss Unemployed is Finally Miss Assistant Andy

So…after all that complaining and ranting about the shitty job market, I have — against all odds— procured a job.

I am the newest assistant for a video producer, of commercials (mostly for medicine) and celebrity wedding videos. Additionally, I sometimes assist her husband, a major Hollywood interior designer. If you’ve watched an Architectural Digest video, there’s a chance you’ve seen a home he perfected.

Holy fuck, these people are spoiled. Here are some secrets of the ultra-rich.

1. They do not refill their cars’ gas tanks. Instead, I drove a literal Lamborghini 12 minutes outside of this gated neighborhood to a gas station to refill it for my boss, Joann. I was terrified the entire time. If you see someone driving stupidly slow and carefully around LA in a luxury car, there’s a chance it’s because that car is not theirs!

2. They do not wrap their gifts. Joann’s husband hands me two Amazon packages and asks me to wrap them for his wife because her birthday is apparently coming up. May this love never find me! I am honestly sickened by the cold remove of their entire love life. If someone gets me a gift, I want it to be something they carefully picked and wrapped themselves. When I unwrap a gift, I want to touch the same shiny-soft wrapping paper they did, I want to pull apart a bow they selected and placed thinking of me. I don’t want to open some meaningless plastic from Amazon, hurriedly wrapped by the anonymous hands of an assistant.

3. The ultra rich do not talk to the working class. In fact, they do everything in their power to create as much physical, social, and mental distance from anyone who makes less than $25,000 per month. I discover that sociologically, the function of an assistant for a certain type of wealthy person is to ensure they never have to shake hands or exchange pleasantries with blue collar workers.

   A lot of the time when I call an auto shop, HVAC technician, housekeeping agency, I say exactly what Joann tells me to say. When I let them into the house, I tell them to do exactly what she told me to say to tell them to do.

   It’s possible she is lingering 20 feet away from us, on her phone, half-watching them install some new lamp or begin cleaning some luxury rug in her home while I ask questions about the price estimate. She keeps her distance, and talks to the workers through me. Given that she knows exactly what she wants and needs, it seems that she could just do it herself. Instead, she tells me what to say, confirms it, then has me tell the workers while she sits and watches or listens in on the call. If there’s a follow up, she responds again through me.

   That’s really inefficient, right? I mean, it would take less time for her to just tell the luxury rug cleaners directly: “This is Tynn Silk Mohair so please use the right liquids to clean it,” rather than tell me: “Tell them this is Tynn Silk Mohair so they need to be careful with what they use on it,” have me write that down then read it back to her to make sure I heard her right because she talks in the mumble-whisper of a rich woman who finds it too exhausting to even properly articulate. She speaks like if Gwyneth Paltrow took an Adivan with her morning coffee. Or, took more Adivan with her morning coffee, maybe I should say. Then Joann sits and watch as I let them in. She supervises my supervising.

From 20 feet away sitting on a stool beside her kitchen island, she mutters something to me with the same laziness she uses to swipe through her Insta feed. I have to ask what she’s saying, then she says it to me, and then I say it to the rug cleaners/housekeeper/HVAC guys.

This is more expensive — both in terms of paying me and time-wise talking to me. But to not speak directly to “the help,” is worth it for her. She never has to make eye contact with the people who clean her toilets, wash her rugs, repair her car, pump air into her tires, water her backyard, print her business cards, fix her heating and AC.

This explains why she’s so hard to understand on a literal verbal level. Her vocal chords have probably atrophied from barely having to speak to anyone, and the people she does speak to live in fear of not getting her directions right, so they have to listen super carefully to what she says, so it doesn’t matter if “Tynn Silk Mohair” coming out of her juviderm-d mouth sounds like “Tee sik mlair.”

I learn that the major point of an assistant is to never lock eyes, touch or shake hands, or rub elbows with real people. This helps to explain, I think, the completely unbelievable and unhinged behavior of people like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They can’t empathize with teachers, nannies, electricians, housekeepers, pool cleaners, because they literally have not spoken to or maintained a second of eye contact with this class of workers in decades.

They remove themselves, use an assistant as a physical and social barrier. Based on Joann’s schedule for the month, I see that she only goes to restaurants which have + next to them, and so she’s only ever surrounded by other people of her class. She doesn’t just go to dinner spontaneously at a random burger joint; every meal she has had for the last thirty years has required a reservation, placed of course by an assistant.

4. Ultra rich people actually really don’t do much of anything. I had this idea in my head that if people live in a ten million dollar house, they at least really work for it and spend 12 hours per day screaming into a phone and pulling their hair out. I basically imagined Cher Horowitz’s dad from Cluelesss. I think that’s really more so the case for people living in houses (at least in LA) that are worth like 2-5 million. Those are your business owners, self-made entrepreneurs, orthodontists, real estate agents. Or, as is also typically the case in this city, people who bought a house here in the 80s or 90s for $50,000 as teachers or nurses and now accidentally own something worth two million dollars. Ah, to be born before 1985. Joann’s house is worth 10-11 million, and this kind of extreme wealth is often earned through very little work at all.

   As I drive around Joann’s neighborhood, I actually see two “Who is John Galt?” signs. For those who did not read Atlas Shrugged in eighth grade like I did, this question is a reference to a book whose thesis is essentially that there are a few people who hold up the world’s economy (like the Greek Titan Atlas who holds the world on his shoulders) while the rest of people are lazy, stupid, work ethic-less leeches. Individual achievement and work are king, and government intervention or efforts toward collectivism inhibit what people must do in the world.

   It’s a cute idea these people have, that they’re the ones with the work ethic, holding the world up on their shoulders while everyone sits around taking welfare checks, subsisting on social support programs funded by taxes paid by the “truly hard-working,” or lazing about in government office jobs. You can see this kind of mentality in the recent layoff of hundreds of thousands of federal government workers, a decision made by the “Department of Government Efficiency,” headed by a man who likely thinks of himself as one of the Atlases of the world (El*n M*sk).

   The truth is that the Atlases of the world are the people who mow their lawns, build their cars in factories, clean their homes, repair their roofs, sort their mail, change the diapers of their children, teach their kids how to read, and so on and so forth. Tesla would be nowhere without the people making the car parts, answering customer service phone calls, selling the cars, cleaning Tesla car shops, wiping the shop bathroom toilets, and also managing the schedule and mansions of the owner of the company.

   Nurses, teachers, healthcare workers, gardeners — these are the atlases of the world who make sure the air is breathable, the infants and elderly are cared for, the children can read and count. I find it unbearably ironic that the people who merely lucked into inheriting a ton of property and money at a young age or patented one profitable medicine or website they invented at 26 so that they never have to work again think they are the ones holding the world on their shoulders, when in fact their world sits on the shoulders of housekeepers, assistants, childcare workers, gardeners, and blue collar workers who live paycheck to paycheck.

   Rant over!

5. They have intercoms in their bathrooms. Okay, maybe this is not all ultra rich people, but it is true for these ultra rich fucks. You know how in The Office, Pam has a phone with a hold and transfer button (as all receptionists do) to transfer calls to Michael Scott’s office?

   Well, in my office (in one of the three back houses on this estate) I have a phone with an intercom to not only the offices of my boss and her husband, but also their office bathrooms, the master bathroom in their house, and so on. Maybe I’m a little too squeamish, but I think it’s insane that while trying to track them down for something I need, one of the million rooms I try for the intercom is their literal bathroom. Like, you want me to ask you questions about confirming a doctor’s appointment while you’re trying to take a shit? I don’t care how rich I am, I don’t ever want to be bothered by someone while I’m going to the bathroom.

6. They get their asses into high gear for real celebrities who pull rank on them. On my second day there, Joann says that at 1 PM we’ll need to prepare a charcuterie board for John Doe. I cannot say who John Doe is because John Doe is a real celebrity and I signed a confidentiality waiver. By real celebrity, I mean someone who even your weird uncle knows the name of — like Jennifer Aniston or Beyonce. I can’t say why this person comes to the house, but just know that it is not for a good reason. It’s for a creepy Hollywood reason that I can’t say, sorry!

   Joann actually gets her ass into the kitchen and makes this charcuterie board for her husband’s business meeting with A-List John Doe. It is actually pretty amazing, that even amid her zenith of wealth and whiteness, she is still the wife, the woman in the relationship, and has to prepare snacks for her husband and his associates. Her kitchen is the size of the fucking Louvre, so when she gives me vague directions to find glasses “across from the coffee machine” and I don’t instantly find the exact glasses she wants, she shouts “THIS ISN’T HARD.” She’s right, it isn’t, but she makes every task exceedingly difficult by micromanaging it to be exactly the way she wants and by shouting at me. I grab nuts from the studio apartment-sized pantry, and they’re of course the wrong nuts. She mumbles something about a bigger bag. It goes on and on.

   I have a new theory about assistants, as someone who has been one before. They really work for people who don’t care how something is done, just that it is done well. The issue is that Joann wants you to do it exactly the way she would, with no information given. She wants specific small bowls for the hummus, and when I take out the wrong small bowls she growls. I almost want to say: it really seems like you know what you want, so maybe you should just do it! But of course, then she wouldn’t be training her assistant in using her kitchen, she’d just be cooking, and that’s not the point of all this.

7. The ultra rich are children. Some of these people are maybe one assistant away from fully putting on a diaper and having someone change them. I become increasingly disturbed throughout my time there with how infantilized these fully-grown adults are. One time, Joann’s husband has a call coming in at a time he knew the call would come in. I intercom every room and bathroom to try to transfer the call to him, and I feel like I’m chasing down a toddler. When I can’t get him on any of the 25 rooms on their estate, I tell the person on the other line that I will have to call them back. Later on, Joann’s husband tells me he was in the car when the call came in so “of course you couldn’t get me.” AAAAAH!!!

I increasingly feel a sense of mothering chaotic, infantile, underdeveloped adults. They often say that the job of an assistant is to “read the boss’s mind” and I think that’s so true because these rich people have no fucking clue what’s going on half the time, and just like a mother has to sense when her toddler is about to have a tantrum, or know if they need food or a nap or something else, you have to sense the emotional whims of these people, except they’re 40 years older than you.

At one point, Joann loses something important that she “swears” she left on my desk the day I started, and it’s no longer there. She makes me go through the nasty trash cans all around the room, convinced it must have fallen in there. When it’s not, she finds it miraculously five hours later in her studio.

8. This may not be a secret, but these people are cheap. When she loses this crucial item, I tell her that I don’t want to add an expense to her list, but that if push comes to shove, I found a replacement online for $42. She barks at me “It costs 87 dollars.” I calmly let her know there’s a cheaper version if she needs, and she storms out of the room. It’s fascinating how she’ll spend thousands of dollars on extravagant hotels and designer clothes, an extra luxury car, but it seems like anytime an expensive of under 100 dollars comes up, it’s as if I’ve asked a broke single mother to book an international cruise.

***

I expected a lot more of the job to have to do with helping with editing videos, helping on sets for commercials, bringing equipment to the weddings she makes videos for. I found out that she actually doesn’t do any of the creative stuff she says she does.

Joann “produces” commercials and “creates” celebrity wedding videos.

She does not.

As for the commercials, she has “a team” of a few directors, DPs, DITs, PAs. They make the commercial; she simply hires them. She puts it together and gets the sale from companies like Johnson & Johnson which need a new commercial because she’s well-connected.

To be fair, this is sort of what a producer is. But all this is to say she does virtually nothing besides have her assistant call or email a few people and tell them where to go and cut them a check. Most of the time, she has no idea what’s going on or where things are happening. The director mostly lines the ducks in a row, and she breathes down his neck to make sure it’s happening. He emails her a report of what he’s done at the end of the day.

For the wedding videos, it’s more of the same. She has a team of people who actually go to the weddings, shoot the footage, while she attends as a guest. She has a team of editors who put the video together, and maybe every 4 hours she’ll come into her in-house studio and peep over the shoulder, give some vague feedback, then go back to her room.

She says she’s a “creative visionary” but she’s really just a middleman with her husband’s money. All of the production management and producing work is offloaded to people who are on the ground, or me.

Joann just has resources and rolodex from her husband, and the people who do the actual work do not.

I realize that she is essentially using her husband’s money and connections to cosplay as Miranda Priestley — but she’s no Miranda Priestley. For one, Miss Priestley put out a real, influential magazine every month and had a real worldview about fashion, culture, art. She was also deeply “em-bubbled” as I call it, privileged in her privileged world, but she at least produced something real and worked.

Joann is constantly telling me she’s “going to work” in her studio but every time I walk past, she’s on Instagram.

On my second day, there’s a hiccup when I am trying to get past the security gate she (of course) lives behind. Even though I’m on the guest list and I’ve come in and out 12 times, this time the security guard has an issue and sends me out. I have to keep driving because there’s nowhere to park in these slim wealthy canyons.

I figure I’ll call Joann to let me in. When I call her, she begins interrogating me like a criminal: Who are you? Why won’t they let you in? What’s your story?

Trying to explain, I keep driving. She asks where I am now, and when I tell her, she shouts that it’s the opposite direction of where I live.

“I’m just trying to keep driving and find somewhere to park. I wasn’t planning on going home, it’s only 3.”

“YOUR STORY ISN’T ADDING UP!” she shouts. Finally, she agrees to pick me up and drive me back to her property. On the car ride, she interrogates further:

“Where do you live? And who do you live with? I thought you lived with your aunt? Oh, only in college, where did you go to college? And what did you study?”

The questions come rapid fire, and every time I answer “correctly” she leans back with a satisfied but skeptical smile, like a cop who’s decided she’ll let me off the hook just this time. I decided she’s completely insane, and I also realize I might not be able to afford to work this job.

People often forget that it costs money to have a job. You need to pay for the car to get to work on time because public transportation is often dysfunctional, you need to pay for the gas to get there and home, you need to pay for the apartment that’s close enough to where the jobs are, you need to pay for the clothes and health insurance and food you need to work. The issue is that the cost of not living, but just working, is so high that oftentimes the jobs don’t pay for themselves. It’s not that people can’t afford to live, but they can’t even afford to work to live.

She pays $4,000 per month but after state and federal taxes, that’s like $3,400. It took me an hour and twenty minutes to get through traffic to her house that day, and she also wants me to use my car to run all of her errands. So I’ll probably spend about $100 per week in gas. It doesn’t make sense to work this job nine hours per day plus 2 hours of commuting for $3,000 per month, an amount of money which hardly covers my phone bill, car insurance, car payments, groceries, co-pays for doctors and therapy.

There’s been a lot of talk about Gen Z’s warped sense of wealth, reality, and work ethic. A recent statistic sent some of the internet into a frenzy: Gen-Z says that “a salary of $587,797 and net worth of $9.47 million are needed when they envision ‘financial success,’” whereas all other generation cited much, much lower numbers.

Many wrote that Gen Z has such a high bar for wealth due to the conspicuous consumerism and flashy wealth of influencers. Gen Z is warped, they said.

I don’t think so. I think what’s happened is that the cost of living is so beyond inflated, even in smaller American cities, and even good jobs are so fickle and unpredictable (see: the mass layoffs of people with computer science degrees who were told this would propel them into a life of eternal economic security), that we feel we need so much money in order to feel a sense of real success.

Houses in middle class areas now cost one to two million dollars, and after that the cost of property taxes and upkeep and childcare and food and gas and health insurance is so high, it’s no wonder a person born in 2000 — like me — who doesn’t know of a pre-2008 world/economy, would need $587,797 per year to feel financially successful.

After the job’s first day, I go to my friend Giselle’s house because she is 70 and a therapist and she loves giving advice, and for once in my young life I actually want to solicit advice. She actually gives really good advice…maybe I should solicit more often:

“I’ve known you to be a very decisive person, so I think you should listen to the fact that you’re indecisive about this job. When you want to make a decision, you’ll know.”

This is great advice, because the next day, I do know.

I really want to quit already, but I need a sign.

I get an email, and I am not joking, it’s an official offer letter from a fully funded PhD program (meaning, they pay me to attend graduate classes, write, and TA). I applied to ten schools in the fall as a backup in case I couldn’t find a thriving career by now. I cannot say which PhD for anonymity purposes, but it’s one I really, really wanted. I figure if I have secure employment for five years starting in August, I don’t really need to be verbally abused for $3,000 per month and work nine hours per day plus two hours of driving.

I do my last walk down the moated path to collect her mail. I hear a coyote in the distance, and I dream of it devouring Joann, or even me. Nature violently reclaiming these canyons, taking back what is rightfully theirs.

Dating & Sex updates b/c I am Carrie Bradshaw if she lived in LA with her 90-year-old grandma because having a weekly column no longer pays for an apartment like it did in the 90s

So if you recall, I had begun a flirtationship in December with a 67-year-old butch lesbian named Tania. Yes — I am 24. You don’t have to want this level of age gap for yourself, but if you are truly disturbed by this age gap, you’re not cool or cunt enough to rock with this blog. If you’d like to read something more up your alley, may I recommend Colleen Hoover?

I go to Tania’s house again last week. She pays for dinner. Again. This time, we really, really click — over the fact that it’s so difficult to be a woman with a high sex drive and low inhibitions. I call myself a low-inhib freak. She tells me she’s been so horny that she’s jerked herself off while on the freeway. I have never met anyone else who’s done this, and I shout in excitement back: “I’ve come on the 101 before!”

This definitely should have been one of the lines on SNL’s The Californians.

We share stories of times we’ve had to constantly be the leader or initiator with other women, women with lots of inhibitions, insecurities, uncertainties, lack of erotic imagination who want someone to play with them like a passive doll. I feel like I’m speaking to a mirror.

At her place, we start massaging each other. This time, when I reach under her shirt to get her lower back, she slips her shirt off. When it’s my turn, she grazes my ear lobes and say if I get them pierced, she’ll pay for the first pair.

“Any kind of gold you want — white, yellow — you pick.”

We start holding hands and rolling our bodies against each other, when she says,

“Okay, I have to send you home before I seduce you.”

“Who’s to say you’re going to do it? I can do it.”

My back is turned to her, my head resting against her strong right thigh, one of her hands on my shoulder and the other cradling my wrist.

“You’re too young.”

I spin back like a helicopter blade.

“What?”

“I feel what you feel, you’re very cute, I understand why you want to, but you’re just too young for me.”

We go back and forth, back and forth.

“Don’t you want to know what it’s like to fuck yourself? A younger version of yourself?”

She laughs, but we resolve to not do it. On the way to my car, she walks me by basically carrying me at the waist. We exchange these texts when I get home:

how can you adore me but not want me! comme c'est tragique

I post a TikTok about the situation, and it gets 300,000 views.

At the end of the video, I tell all cool gay women of LA to message me for a good time, if they’re groovy and if they’re truly down — and if they’re at least 5”4. I get flooded with about 50 DMs from women:

“5”6 lesbian here. whats up?”

“5”5, in LA. I don’t meet the 67 age requirement but I’m down.”

“LA dyke here. If you’re still feeling feral, message me on insta, it’s the same username as on here.”

***

I start messaging furiously back and forth with a woman named Brooke. We exchange long voice notes, and finally sext a few days later. I ask her out to a movie on Saturday, to see Babygirl. (for those who do not know, Babygirl is like girlboss fifty shades of grey, a sexy movie more or less). Brooke texts back, “I’ll bring a blanket to the theater.”

I jump for joy behind the screen. I always wanna say some unhinged shit like that, but feel like I need to reel it in to not scare people away. She tells me doing public stuff is one of her biggest kinks. I feel like I’ve met a woman who can finally match my freak.

***

A few days before that date, I grow desperate and hit up a guy who lives just a four minute drive away from me, which in LA is a green flag akin to emotional availability or a therapist-written recommendation letter.

I just quit on Joann and got into grad school two days ago, so I feel like taking advantage of my new freedom.

Sex with him is boring. I keep hoping it’ll get better if I work hard enough at it, like an internship becoming a career. Instead I’m just stalled at the sexual equivalent of picking up coffee and shredding sensitive documents.

I came over late at night and ended up being too tired to fuck. His one saving grace is that he was raised by a single mother and four sisters, so every time I come over he has prepared some sort of immaculate charcuterie board, ice cream, and red wine in spotless glasses.

This, combined with the fact that he fucks me like it’s a terrible chore, does problematically make me question his sexuality. But not in a bad way! I just mean, truly, if you do not like a woman’s body you should go be gay. He eats my pussy for like ten seconds and always wants to fuck me with as much physical remove as possible, no sensuousness or touching.

In the morning, when we start fucking, he has no rhythm. He’s not having sex with me, he’s using my vagina as a better version of his right hand. He’s using my body to jack off and it pisses me the fuck off but I’m horny so I try to make it work. (Special skills: persistence and ambition). I keep trying to show him what kind of rhythm to have, to not just sloppily slam his dick in and out or around in bad circles, like some trick he read on Reddit in 2012. He is not teachable.

“Let’s put on some music,” I say. I play “B2B” by Charli XCX. He fucks me to the synth pop beat, and I feel like I’ve put a shock collar on a dog. It works. He fucks me with a proper rhythm; his chest gets closer and closer to mine now that he’s not trying to posture his body in some bizarrely distant position; and I can lean in to smell the pheromones emitting from his neck.

Finally, I’m into it. I look to the left and I see the sun shining and a palm tree staring back at me through the apartment’s window. A warm ray touches my arm and his big, hairy hand is on the other.

He pulls out for us to take a break and there’s a bright red smear on his white sheet. No wonder I was so horny.

I got my period a week early, and I know why. I have been DMing with Brooke, who I am almost certain I will fall in love with (yes, I need to be medicated) for a week.

She told me the night before that she just started her period. I have a 100% rate of period-syncing with women I am dating or interested in.

And may I add — my period always syncs to meet theirs exactly, even if it means coming a week early or late. I think this suggests really great compromise skills as a partner!

It’s also one of my favorite things about being with people who get their periods. Period-syncing is one of the most primal things I can imagine. The production of eggs and blood and shedding in our bodies aligning because we like each other, the hormones and chemicals in my brain and pelvis transfiguring to tune in with hers. It’s a reminder that we are all bodies. Human, animal, feral bodies made up of pheromones, hormones, attraction, desire, drive, raw animality. We are not meant to spend every day on Slack and Zoom, our touch starvedness staved off by the warmth of a million screens. We’re supposed to connect as beasts who sweat and bleed.

I see the rich, red blood stain on his hospital white sheet, and it’s like a flash of the wild against the clean, corporate, cold world.

When I go to the bathroom to wipe the blood off before we fuck all over his room, kitchen, and bathroom, I’m overcome by the intense somatic synchronicity.

I feel that my body is the body of an animal, whose menstrual blood cycle syncs with the women I love around me, like the howls of wolves harmonizing at the same moon, our shared blow flow a sapphic mating call, the body yelping for sameness and connection.

People talk a lot about the plentiful biological mechanisms which foment heterosexual sex, reproduction being evidence of that, blah blah blah. I wish someone would study the fact that women’s cycles sync and for me this has always been a biological-sex drive mechanism to also facilitate female-bodied people having sex with one another, since if you menstruate at the same time it’s easier to have sex the rest of the month. Too, it’s a carnal channel which brings your body in closer contact with another, which suggests your connection and intimacy before it even begins. Our insides have linked in lockstep, why can’t our outsides?

I cry a few tears. Maybe it’s the hormones, but I think it’s the gratitude I feel to be so rooted in my body, for so many signs to hit me. I feel the body hair on my armpits and legs that I’ve left unshaved for 11 years, my 14-year-old self already realizing the banality of removing hair every five days that we all know grows there, to be a shaven shell of a real woman with fat, hair, sweat, blood, tears. I don’t want to be waxed, polished, smoothed. I don’t want to wear Spanx and a polyester outfit with keratin-ed hair to a freezing cold office where we all ensconce our bodies in robots and machinery and profit.

I was meant to feel the blood drip down my thighs as I fuck this hirsute man, the hair on my calves brushing against his, entwining.

I was meant to have sex at 11 AM to Charli XCX’s vaguely menacing, cheekily disdainful electronic drone and spend the afternoon walking dogs, tutoring children in reading, and writing and sipping tea with my grandmother, not wasting away another day gassing up a luxury vehicle and deleting spam mail and scheduling an at-home nail appointment.

I am not a cog, I’m not a machine, I’m a woman of the jungle. I’m undomesticated, a dog in an alleyway, a bitch in heat. Don’t ask me to learn another CRM technique or SEO system.

Back in his bed, I start asking questions about his job. He’s a construction contractor, and amid our time in bed I had asked him if he ever gets hit on by clients.

“No, it’s mostly old couples,” he says. Snoreeeee.

“Okay, let’s pretend I’m 33, and I’m a mom. I’m religious, so I’ve only ever had sex with my husband, and he’s gross and sucks in bed.”

He laughs mockingly. Straight guys always do this. They discount the value of someone who’s verbally talented in bed, or the power of a good bedtime story, so to speak.

“I’m way hotter because I was married off by a matchmaker and I had no idea how hot I was when I was 19. I have two kids and husband’s at work all day. You come over and I notice your big hands, your tall body, naturally muscled by all the demo work. I start flirting with you and I think you won’t notice, that this will just be something fun to do because I’m so bored, but it won’t lead to anything. But when I bring you into the room that needs work, I’m brushing my hips against yours constantly, moving past you by quickly rubbing my breasts against the side of your arm. You grab me by the extra fabric of my shirt, your knuckles brush against the soft pool of skin between my ribcage.”

Now he’s really into it, I feel his dick harden against my thigh.

“Yes, more, what happens next?” he asks, desperately. Got him.

“You tell me that you’re not here to just fuck around, if I’m going to behave like that I need to take the consequences. You won’t be teased. Then you flick me away.”

I complete the story, with the “choose your own adventure” edits he gives me — he wants a double penetration scene with one of his construction workers. I give it to him, and even pretend to enjoy his final request, that they both come on my face. If it’s just for the story, I guess I’ll do anything. But honestly I’m bored and feel like the sex was good because I made it good, a realization many women come to in their long careers of having sex with men.

***
Saturday is date night. With Brooke. I bought us tickets for Babygirl, and I spot her waiting in line to show our tickets. We walk up to the concession stand and I ponder aloud what I might want to get.

“You can get whatever you want,” she says, taking the wallet out of her pocket.

My body flutters, not just because it’s hot when someone offers to pay, but also because I’m not sure if I have enough money in my checking account to pay the exorbitant amount that AMC charges for popcorn and one candy. The total for everything is almost 30 dollars. I think I could have afforded that.

The movie begins, and the first few sexually tense scenes are more comical than sexy. We laugh with the rest of the theater. Then the movie heats up and the first real scene, so to speak, begins.

Babygirl, in short, follows a high-powered female CEO who hasn’t had an orgasm in 19 years from her husband, because she secretly craves rough, BDSM sex — and when she encounters a much younger intern who can give her what she really wants, it changes her life.

In a private office room, he keeps telling the CEO to “say it.” At this point, she’s denied herself what she wants. She doesn’t know what “it” is. He tells her to say, something along the lines of, “You can do whatever you want to me.”

She says it through a pant: “You can do whatever you want to me.”

The mood in the film and in the theater shifts, completely. A collective fuck is felt in this big, dark room, and in the small space between Brooke and I, our shoulders already pushing against one another.

She throws the blanket onto my lap like an owner throwing a leash at a dog. It lands with a heavy thud, and I scramble to unfold it and throw it over our laps. We start slowly grazing each other’s inner thighs over our jeans and cargo pants. The scenes heat up and I can’t help it anymore, I lean in and give a long lick to the side of her neck; we start making out. It is ecstatic. I rarely enjoy kissing that much — most of the time I find it boring and just want to move on to the next thing, but I feel like I could kiss her forever.

The next time I try to touch her or myself, she tells me I “have to wait.” When I try again, she grabs my throat and tells me I need to learn how to listen. I feel a wave unrest through my body, and my breath somehow slows to a halt and also picks up with the force of a riptide.

(For those of you freaking out — don’t worry, the theater was basically empty, save for another young couple in the far back seats)

We go to fuck in her car. We drive around different parking lots near the beach, but each one has a park filled with kids, or cop cars — UGH.

Finally, a quiet, dark, residential street appears with a parking spot far away from the rest. She has one of those cars where the seats can fold down, so we basically have a bed in the back. The rest of the night is immaculate. I go down on her, and she’s at the very end of her period, which I love. I lean in and take a deep, yoga inhale.

I love the scent of blood, that slightly metallic-y and hormonal miasma filling the car. The more I lick, the more I taste the combination of the mildly sweet, fictile, erotically acrid, nature dew-like savor, a whole mother earth between her legs. I’m getting so turned on and the car is getting hotter and hotter. She throws me onto my stomach and fingers me from the back while using her thumb to gently punch my clitoris; I feel a building, tight stir.

Afterward, we meet her friends at a nightclub, and dance until the lights come on, but before that I leave my mark on the car’s dashboard window: