Text: I don’t want sex from you. I’ve tried to imagine it, the appeal of it. I’ve thought of myself in sparkly gray silk…you in a crisp white button-up shirt. In the dark somewhere, in a four-poster bed with soft sheets. There’s candelight. Firelight. You start off, since you’re more experienced than I am. You’ve noticed how my breath catches when you touch the interiors of my wrists, so you begin by taking my cold hands into your warm ones and gently stroking them, gently, whispering how beautiful my fingers are. The sensations make my mind go blank. I fall limp onto my back. The silk pools. You lean over and kiss my lips, not parting them, merely applying breath and warmth. In between you murmur a word or two of gratitude. I can’t understand what you’re saying. I struggle a little up against you. You shake your head, just barely. Your face wanders down beneath my ear. There are long moments of nothing but pure physicality. No thoughts. No breath. Your hands move from mine down the inside of my arms, tracing the path of every quivering nerve, sliding along the silk, all the way down to the sides of my ribs. I reach up to you. I start shakily undoing your shirt, fingertips grazing your chest. Your cologne, my perfume, intermingle, and then - But instead of escalating, there the fantasy drifts away. Breathing fast and heavy - your thrilling proximity pounding through each and every vein - that would be enough, that would be more than enough - it would seem a betrayal to do anything else; it would feel animalistic, inhuman, unnatural. And yetI’m acutely aware that you and everyone else would peg my desires as the unnatural ones. (This thought never stops boiling.) So instead I dream about lightly stroking your hair or your forehead or your collarbone, wherever you should like my attentions best, until you drift away to sleep, and I follow you, and we awake together in the morning sunlight. Such affection somehow strikes me as purer. More authentic. It shouldn’t - it mustn’t - but nevertheless it does. Such a sacred intimacy is the greatest fantasy of all.