Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby, Act Like a Lady

Here’s the deal: have lots of sex! Hook up! Have a hoement! Don’t feel bad about it!

We think it’s important to not keep track of how many people you sleep with. Whether you are a Jac, who lost her virginity at twenty-three and was so scarred from the experience that she didn’t sleep with anyone for three years after that, or your number is higher than the digits in your bank account, the number of people you have slept with is no one’s business but your own. Your number does not define you in any way whatsoever. We live in a progressive society, yet the double standard that still seems to exist between men and women regarding sex is unfair, damaging, and downright degrading. Why can men brag about “boning chicks” so freely and give each other gold stars when they get a new notch on their belt, but women are shamed for our hoetivities? You should never feel shame for having a fun drunken night with a guy. You should never feel shame for sleeping with someone on the first date. You should never feel shame for exploring your sexuality. Do you know what you should feel shame for? Judging other people based on what they do behind closed doors. It’s absolutely ludicrous when someone asks you how many sexual partners you’ve had, as if the number says anything about your character. We talk about sex pretty openly because we feel like it’s important. It’s important to normalize an act that almost every single person on this earth does, yet one gender feels a lot more guilt for. Maybe by sharing our ridiculous and often embarrassing stories, it will make at least one lady feel less alone. At the end of the day, humans are sexual beings, and we should be proud of that. So go forth and fuck! And remember to use a condom!

This is the story of how I lost my virginity. I guess I’ll preface this with the fact that I lost my virginity at twenty-three years old. I was the last in my friend group, and pretty much of everyone I knew, to lose it. There wasn’t really any profound meaning for why I waited so long to have sex. I never had boyfriends in high school, and I think I knew deep down I wasn’t emotionally or mentally ready for it as a teenager.

Looking back, I do believe that I lost my virginity at the right point in my life. I was old enough to make rational decisions, but young enough to still have a stupid experience without too much pressure. I wasn’t waiting for any religious reasons, but as I was getting older, I did find myself start identifying with my virginity a little too much. I grew up in a music-filled world where any girl hanging around bands was considered a “groupie,” so I would end up using my virginity as a weapon to combat that stereotype. But it did come to a point where I felt I was ready, and I needed to take the power back and make it something for me instead of using it as a defense mechanism.

When I was twenty years old, I got a message on Myspace from this super-cute redhead. He had a ridiculous scene haircut, played guitar for an up-and-coming band in my music circle, and just seemed like an all-around fun guy. We started chatting online a bit, eventually ended up meeting and hanging out, and I totally fell for his awkward charm.

I was absolutely obsessed with this guy. He was engaging and charismatic and friendly and hilarious, super outgoing but socially awkward, which I found to be the most endearing thing about him. I was completely and hopelessly lost in the dicksand. But what my naïve eyes couldn’t see was that he was also young and dumb and, at the end of the day, he was not the right person for me to be giving my heart to. He pulled me in with sweet words and promises, but those promises were as empty as the bottles of whiskey we went through every night together. I thought our connection was special, and maybe it was, but I bet I wasn’t the only girl who thought she had met her quirky future boyfriend.

But when this all started, I was super green and I had my love goggles on. I wanted to believe in all of the good he had to offer, which was an ongoing mistake I made a few (dozen) times after that. But I was enamored by him, I was in teenage lust, and I just wanted someone to love me back so bad. He gave me enough attention over a few years, and I thought he really cared about me. So, he was the one I felt comfortable losing my virginity to.

At the time, I was working on a punk-rock traveling music tour called the Warped Tour. It was the middle of July, and I was on an off day in Billings, Montana. The tour would always route our off days in the most random, small towns with literally NOTHING to do, so I’d usually spend my days perusing an empty JCPenney and having a gourmet dinner at Applebee’s. This day was no different, so I found the local mall, grabbed an Auntie Anne’s pretzel, bought a pair of flip-flops from PacSun, and by 2:00 p.m. I was bored off my ass, and it was time to find somewhere to get drunk.

Coincidentally, the redhead texted me just as I was heading out of the hot spot of the Billings mall, asking if I wanted to meet him and his guitar tech for drinks at Buffalo Wild Wings. I immediately said “YES, PLEASE,” because I loved any excuse to drink. When I arrived at B-Dubs, there were four empty shot glasses on the table, and the guys were already well on their way to blackout land. My veins were pretty much 90 percent whiskey at this point, so my body was begging for that liquid gold. I ordered the first round of Jameson for our group (which I can’t even smell anymore without gagging), along with some boneless wings and a root beer. The rest of the afternoon turned into a total blur, and by the time we left, the entire table was filled with empty beer mugs and half-eaten platters of French fries. I’m pretty sure Redhead and I got into a fight, because I vaguely remember going outside and having a five-minute drunken cry while licking buffalo sauce off my fingers.

When it was finally time to leave, Redhead invited me back to his tour bus, which was parked outside a seedy motel on the side of the road outside of Billings. I obviously said yes, so we picked up a pack of Bud Light and made our way out. We spent the night playing beer pong and shotgunning beers. As I sunk a ball in the last cup of our game, he leaned over to me and said “Do you think we should get a room here?” and I knew exactly what that meant. Maybe it was the eight shots of mid-tier whiskey, maybe it was the romance in the Billings air, but the timing just felt right.

When we checked into our room, Redhead said, “We only really need the room for an hour,” with a wink, and I remember the look of horror on the attendant’s face. We were two totally wasted dirty punk kids, checking into a $30 motel room for an hour.

The motel room was…interesting, to say the least. It reeked of stale cigarettes, paint was peeling off the wall in real time, and there was a damp brown spot next to the bed where someone must have recently spilled a cup of coffee…I hope. There was one of those weird quilted blankets on the bed that literally never gets washed, complete with bodily fluid stains, and the bedside light kept flickering on and off. I am almost positive that someone had been murdered in that room at some point and the ghost was definitely judging my questionable life decisions.

So first thing’s first: your girl’s gotta shower. Layers of dirt, sweat, and chicken-wing grease were built up all over my body, and the last thing that filthy room needed was anymore grime. After I washed the drunken day off of me, I stepped out of the shower, soaking wet and in my most vulnerable state, and looked over at him waiting on the bed, fully naked. Oh shit, here we go. I nervously sat on the edge of the mattress in my towel, not really knowing what to do with my hands, or my mind, or anything, really. Do I do a sexy hair flip? A strip tease? Give him a BJ? Even though I had a copious amount of liquid courage, I had zero idea of what comes next. He took the lead and placed a comforting hand on my thigh, pulled me in for a kiss, yada yada yada, ninety seconds later it was over. He immediately jumped out of bed, muttered something under his breath, and bolted out of the room. THAT WAS IT????? I waited twenty-three years for a pump and dump?? The whole thing felt like a fast-forward blur, and I was left there confused, distraught, and physically and emotionally naked. I curled into a ball in the corner of the room and cried for a good hour. Looking back on it, I’m most concerned with my bare butthole coming into contact with the damp brown spot on the carpet. But when I finally pulled myself together, I snuck out the back entrance and called a taxi without him seeing me.

I saw him the next day, and he acted like nothing had happened! Any time I’d try to bring it up, he pretended like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Did I have an insane lucid dream? Was there a glitch in the Matrix? I literally had to check my texts and bank statements from the night before to make sure I wasn’t making the whole thing up. And, I mean listen, I would also love to Eternal Sunshine that night out of my memory. But the aftermath was an absolute mindfuck, to say the least.

This particular summer on the road, I found myself in a very messy love hexagon. I was obsessed with the redhead, but I was also having a summer fling with a lead singer who had a girlfriend, and I was toeing the emotional line with my bestie, who ALSO had a girlfriend. I’d vent to my bestie about Redhead, and he would get furious trying to protect me without overstepping his boundaries. I’d have sleepovers on the lead singer’s bus, and the redhead would send me texts threatening to kick his ass. It was a total disaster, but it was never boring. Because there was so much happening on the road that summer, the whole situation didn’t seem to affect me much. But looking back, I was totally turned off by sex for years after that, so I think the whole situation just gave physical intimacy a really weird connotation for me for a while.

I was the “manic pixie dream girl” a lot in my youth. Most of it was my fault, because I was always chasing emotionally unavailable musicians or guys with girlfriends. I was the exciting, carefree “vacation girlfriend“ who would make every dude I was involved with question everything he had with his current (seemingly boring) partner. I don’t really know why I kept putting myself in those situations, because all they did was hurt me in the end. Maybe it was the chase, and wanting what I didn’t have. Or maybe I knew subconsciously I wasn’t ready for an actual relationship. Or maybe I was just masochistic (realistically, it’s probably that one). Regardless of what it was, I have paid the price of my bad karma for a good decade of dating absolute douchebags after that!

In conclusion, I bet you never thought you’d hear about Buffalo Wild Wings and sex in the same story. And for that, you are welcome.

In my thirty-three years of life, I’ve dated many different kinds of men. I’ve never been the girl who had a “type.” I always knew that I needed to go full on Baskin-Robbins while I was still young, because one day I would be having the same flavor EVERY. SINGLE. DAY for the rest of my life, and I wasn’t planning on hitting my grave having only tried vanilla. This girl needed thirty-two flavors and then some!

Even when I was in middle school, I would bounce around from Peter, the towheaded–skateboarding–class clown to Blake, the star athlete. The world was my fashion pop-up and this totally sane pattern continued throughout my twenties. I once dated a forty-year-old nightclub owner because I wanted to see what it would be like to have daddy issues. (Turns out, you actually have to have daddy issues to be able to fuck a forty-year-old when you’re twenty.) I dated musicians, actors, investment bankers, potheads, athletes, and basically any of my friends’ hot roommates. I really loved how I could date a guy and be able to temporarily step into a new life. I took on their hobbies, their friends, their kinks, you name it. What can I say? I’m an actress and needed the research. I also think it’s bullshit when girls are shamed for this behavior or accused of not having their own identity. (In my opinion.) So, sorry for your boring life, Stacey, I guess you should have asked for more samples.

The other very important reason for dating these different types was to audition different bedroom styles. How was I supposed to know what I liked if I didn’t try them all?! My mom famously asked my sister and me one day, “Why would you buy a car before test-driving it?” Very valid point, Mom. Thank you for your indirect permission to be a skank.

Now, before I dive into my most memorable sexual experience (you’re welcome), I’m going to throw out a little disclaimer here, in case there are impressionable young ladies reading this. First of all, why are you even here? And second, while I am a big advocate for “test-driving” men, please don’t be a dumbass, and always wear your, ahem, driving gloves. Men are disgusting animals crawling with diseases, and the universe thought it would be nice to give them zero symptoms for most of these diseases and infections, while women’s vaginas practically fall off the moment they come in contact with any of them. Not to mention that sex feels the fucking same for us whether there’s rubber involved or not, so don’t live dangerously, just use the fucking condom. And when the asshole complains that it doesn’t feel the same for him, you tell him that you don’t give one single fuck, point to the door and tell him to remember the sound it makes when its shuts behind him. (This also feels like the perfect opportunity to tell all you ladies to stop calling your friends in tears when you find out you have HPV. News flash: EVERYONE HAS HPV!!!!! Just stay up-to-date on those annual paps, and everyone should be okay…I think.)

With that being said, it’s time to lube up your gears, check your engines, and get ready to rotate your tires, because this is the story of my most memorable “test drive.”

The year was 2008. I was a twenty-two-year-old professional dancer in my motherfuckin’ prime…no cellulite, the perkiest ass this side of the Mississippi, and the skin of an infant. My only maintenance included highlights every six weeks to brighten my naturally dishwater-brown hair and the occasional $20 manicure. (I was so naïve about the small fortune I would eventually have to spend on the upkeep of my appearance once I hit thirty, but I digress.) Things were good, and I knew it was never going to get better than being single and twenty-two in New York City. (Spoiler alert: In many ways, I was right.)

So I was sitting in a Midtown bistro with my friends, drinking mimosa after mimosa (because sugar wasn’t the enemy yet), when a gorgeous guy breezed through the front door of the restaurant with movie-star looks, wearing a peacoat. To a girl in her twenties, a man in a peacoat represents adulthood and a guy who “has his shit together.” It was a stark contrast to the broke-ass North Face–fleece-wearing man-children I had been dating. My vagina instantly quivered.

Over the next hour, my girlfriends and I acted like rabid, feral beasts. (For any Real Housewives fans, imagine Ramona Singer after six pinot grigios whenever a man with a pulse enters a bar.) We laughed a little too loud, we shouted across the restaurant, and we essentially heckled this handsome man until he relented and came over to our table.

His name was Steve. He was a twenty-eight-year-old actor visiting from Los Angeles. How exotic, I thought as I bit my lower lip. My inner monologue went something like this: With that jawline and those bright blue eyes, he must be the next Brad Pitt. How lucky am i to have met him before his big break?! (This was before I ever lived in Los Angeles or worked in Hollywood and realized that everyone in the whole fucking city looks like this.)

We proceeded to chat Steve up, and I became even more enchanted with him over the next hour or so. I’m not sure if it was his extreme arrogance or the way he used tactics that he must have learned from the infamous dating book The Game. In the book, the author essentially teaches men to give women backhanded compliments to break down their self-esteem just enough so that they eventually believe you’re the only one who could possibly love them…which means they will never leave you. Before you get angry and start hating men even more for this piece of literature and go full Bobbitt, I’ll point out that nowhere in the book does the author state that this technique is reserved for only men to use. I personally adopted this tactic years later, and that’s basically how I bagged my husband. It works like a charm.

So, as Steve was sociopathically mocking my career as a dancer while complimenting my legs at the same time, I was slowly falling more and more in love. (And it’s important to note that he hit on every girl at that table separately, but I was desperado and the one who took the bait.) He asked if I had plans to go out that night, and like any thirsty and horny girl in her twenties, I eagerly exclaimed, “Yes!” LIES! ALL LIES. I had no plans, but I wasn’t going to let Steve know that. (Sidebar: It needs to be said that while I want to blame my extreme youth for this eagerness, that would also be a big fat lie. Up until I met my husband at almost thirty years old, I would have dropped every plan I had on a dime and coordinated an elaborate twenty-thousand-dollar party just on the off chance that my crush would meet up with me. Stop judging me. I never claimed to be a hero.)

So…yeah, we were going out! I rallied all my girlfriends to go out that night in the hopes that I could have a sexy New York City sidewalk make-out session with a strapping actor-stranger named Steve. By the way, women should receive participation trophies for putting on full clown makeup and straightening their hair to go out just to support another woman’s dream of possibly dry humping some dude later to the sweet sounds of Nickelback.

That night, I put on an outfit more suited for a seventy-five-degree spring evening and not the current twenty-six-degree tundra, but I refused to blow it with Steve. This was before I learned the art of sexy subtlety when it came to dressing myself, but then again, who really cares when you’re 105 pounds of lean muscle? I miss 2008.

Much to my delight, Steve showed up before midnight. (Sadly, this is a victory when you’re a thirsty idiot who is used to waiting until 3:00 a.m. to finally bump into your crush.) And by “bump” into him, I mean texting every one of the friends you have in common, fishing for his location, or eventually drinking enough to simply text him for a booty call.

So I was pleasantly tipsy when Steve showed up, but PLOT TWIST: He told me he was sober, a recovering alcoholic. No disrespect, but today, that information would have sent me straight for the hills. At that time, I heard “possibly damaged,” and I was practically salivating. How exotic, how exciting, how dramatic…an addict!

The stars aligned that night, and it ended with a steamy make-out session on the uber-romantic Ninth Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen. I refused to take it any further, because I wanted to fool him into thinking I was a lady. (And also because at that point in my life, I had only had sex with three-ish people. I still believed that “my number” mattered, and I wanted to make absolutely sure this handsome, sober, devil stranger was worth the notch on the ol’ belt.)

Over the course of a couple months, we went from talking on the phone to me buying a ticket to fly out to LA to see him. (Although he still doesn’t know that’s why I made the trip.) I told him I was coming out to visit my friend who was working out there. Lies. Important life lesson being taught here: never let a man know when you’re making an effort to see him. Eagerness can often be a boner killer. I still lie to my husband and say I was already in the neighborhood if I meet him at his office for lunch. Never stop playing games. It’s the key to a happy, sane adjacent relationship.

My first night in LA was dog farts. He showed up to my hotel room in a onesie…yes, a fucking onesie, like a child. Where was my inner ref to throw out the first red flag? Oh, I know, she was still off getting her butthole waxed in preparation for fucking a goddamn dreamboat! Anyway, this onesie ensemble was a stark contrast to the sophisticated peacoat. I was so confused. I was thinking, Who the fuck is this guy? Does he even like me? Does he not? He’s clearly not trying to impress me. Is this the friend zone? Is this real life? It tortured me. It made me want to jump his sober bone even more.

We proceeded to have, from what I remember, pretty normal sex. Missionary, maybe a little oral, with the grand finale being a sensible doggy-style. (I miss the days of doing doggy-style and being so confident that even my butthole felt sexy and attractive to stare at. Now it looks like an abandoned haunted mine.)

I moved from the hotel to his apartment on the second night because I had already proven that I was a strong independent woman by booking and paying for my own hotel room for one whole night. However, I don’t know what was worse, my shithole hotel room in Hollywood or his apartment. His apartment was exactly what you would expect of a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor in LA who’s an actor (and by “actor,” I mean, like, did one independent Western movie about snakes in a bar). It was a courtyard-type apartment building with a pool in the middle of it all. Just dirty water and dead leaves floating around, with even dirtier kids swimming in it. He had a two-bedroom, and his roommate was an amateur or aspiring bodybuilder. I can’t remember which one, but both were roided and sad. The bathroom inside the apartment had that familiar chalky bachelor film all over it. It was bleak. But again, it didn’t stop me. I wasn’t going to let a cloudy shower door stand in the way of my weekend of sex with a solid ten.

The first couple of times we had sex that weekend were relatively normal. On the last night of my weekend, he was going down on me while I sat on a garage-sale desk in the corner of his bedroom when he offered me a cigarette…mid cunnilingus. He said something along the lines of, “It turns me on to watch you indulge while indulging me.” This guy was good. It was the first time someone had really talked dirty to me, and I was suddenly a porn star with more confidence than Jenna Jameson. I was hooked. This was my sexual awakening, and I was READY.

That progressed into him taking photos of me during sex (which, praise the lord above, did not live on in my Cloud), then to lots and lots of costumes he would buy for me to wear. One of the most memorable ones was a white thigh-high tight and a white platform stripper shoe. Think “Leg Avenue Naughty Angel” Halloween costume. (Let’s be honest, “Naughty Virgin” was probably more what he was aiming for because men are twisted.) Interesting choice, but I didn’t care, I was a sexual beast. I would have worn a Time’s Square SpongeBob costume if it meant steamy sex. We had sex EVERYWHERE: in the car, on a lookout on Mulholland, in a friend’s backyard—you name it, we did it. The sex was constant and probably should have been an indicator that his addiction wasn’t reserved for just substances. But guess what? My vagina was his kryptonite, and I was down for that. Our long-distance fuckfest continued, and I was blossoming into a full-blown sex expert.

How did I ever walk away from that, you ask? Let me explain. Steve was a full-blown (very proud) SEX ADDICT!!

More specifically, though, my “aha moment” came six months later. (No pun intended.) I was tied to his four-poster bed. (Yes, another red flag. Who has a four-poster bed in a six-hundred-square-foot apartment?? Not his first rodeo.) I was wearing a white ruffled thong with nothing else, and he was pouring red wine all over my naked body. It was like a scene out of a porn called The Sexcorcist. This was the closest I had ever been to being baptized, and suddenly the spirit moved me. In that moment, I also realized that I couldn’t possibly keep up with the charade. I knew that I was probably days away from having to strap on a dildo or learn how to shoot ping-pong balls out of my vagina, and that just wasn’t my journey. So I threw on my clothes and took my sticky ass to the airport.

It fully ended when he tried moving to New York for me, and I had the flashback from my baptism and gave him a firm no. I knew I didn’t have the stamina to keep this up full-time. And I’m not even Catholic! I had things to do, goals to achieve. I had to stop starring in the filthy red room so I could start starring on Broadway, and our sex schedule was far too grueling for me to do both. And, if I’m being completely honest, I mostly said no because I had just met another guy in a strip club in New Orleans who seemed pretty promising. You heard me.

So there you have it. I had a magical, twisted tryst with a sex addict, and it was (mostly) glorious. My thoughts and prayers to the girls chained to his bed as we speak.

He was never going to be my forever person, but he taught me my own boundaries in the bedroom and (shout-out to Zach) I ultimately ended up with the perfect flavor for me…something between vanilla and Christ’s blood.

LADY THOUGHTS

Sexpectations

JV:How much sex is enough sex when you’re in a relationship?

KK:I think that you have to have a conversation with your person what their expectations are. I remember one time I had a boyfriend, and I was like, how many times a week do you want to have sex? He was like “every day,” and I was like, it’s never gonna work out, because I’m not a sex-every-day kind of person.

BT:Who has time for that?

If You Don’t Fuck Your Partner…Someone Else Will

KK:I would say, if you go six weeks without sex or trying to have sex, start looking at his phone.

BT:Agreed. And if he’s not complaining about it, be concerned.

JV:Or if they stop trying.

Fuck Buddies

KK:Should you have a fuck buddy?

JV:Yes, in between relationships a good fuck buddy is great.

BT:A good fuck buddy is hard to find, though.

JV:It’s hard to find a fuck buddy because somebody always catches feelings. That was my problem. I could never have a fuck buddy because I’m an emotional person, and I always connect the two. I could never separate sex and feelings, but if you can, godspeed. I just don’t want a fuck buddy who spends the night. Once we’re done, they gotta leave.

Sex Tapes and Sexting

BT:Never ever ever ever ever make a sex tape.

JV:People will always use a sex tape as blackmail. Also, you don’t want to always live in fear, thinking it’s going to be leaked one day.

BT:That’s the thing. Sometimes you’re in the moment, and it’s hot. Weird, gross things are hot. But it’s like having a drunken night and having to watch it back the next day sober.

JV:And it’s never flattering. It has to be light enough to see, which means it’s too light.

BT:Which means I can see my butthole, and I don’t want to.

My one-night stand was at 2:00 in the afternoon. Yup, you heard that right…I had a sexual tryst with a complete stranger in broad daylight and never talked to him again. And I was sober. SOBER!

It all started when I was watching a short-lived sitcom on TV about a group of single strangers who meet in a bar and how fate directs their destiny in a single night. How original! The show itself was subpar at best, and I think I mildly chuckled twice…thrice if I’m being generous. I was about to change the channel to Arrested Development when a burly redhead caught my eye.

I’m sure you can pick up on the fact by now that I have a very interesting attraction to redheads. I’ve been thinking long and hard about where this could possibly stem from, and I believe the inception of my redhead love goes back to Ron Weasley. There was something about his chubby cheeks, insanely pale freckled skin that would sizzle when exposed to five minutes of sunlight, and gorgeous sunburst locks parted ever so elegantly down the middle that really did it for me. And somehow, some way, that teenage crush really transferred its way into adulthood.

So, I saw this dude on the screen. He was rugged, a little out of shape but in a cute way, with bright fucking red hair. Like, I don’t know if they did some weird color correction on the screen or if my TV was just malfunctioning, but his hair looked like a goddamn highlighter. I watched for a few more minutes, and he was the only one on the show who was even remotely funny, and he just seemed to have this vibe. And by “vibe,” I mean he was probably a total douchebag, so HELLO THERE, COME TO MAMA! So I did what any normal millennial girl does when she sees a hot dude on her TV screen: I googled him immediately. This obviously led me straight to his Twitter and Instagram, which I stalked extensively to see if he had a girlfriend or not. After scrolling all the way back through some embarrassing audition clips and disgusting Vegas pool parties, all the way to his vacation to Barcelona in 2012, by deductive reasoning I decided that he was, in fact, single. SCORE.

So then I did what most millennial girls are too embarrassed to do…I slid into his DMs. And I’d like to make a note here: I was sliding into DMs before sliding into DMs was a thing. Back in my day, I called it “the Twitter Con,” because Instagram and DMs hadn’t even been invented yet, so for me it was just this fun game I’d play to date random D-list actors I would see on shitty TV shows. And for someone who had waxed off three-quarters of her eyebrows that never grew back, I was pretty damn confident when it came to digitally hitting on guys. I had literally zero shame, which you will understand in one second, when I tell you what the DM said:

Yeah, you’re welcome. Keep that one in your back pocket, because it worked. He wrote back immediately, and after a few flirty messages, we moved our love affair to texting. I made sure to ask my preliminary questions: are you single, how tall are you, have you ever murdered someone, etc. He seemed to check out as a non-psychopath, but he was sort of boring, seemed kind of stupid, and constantly made grammatical errors. My twenty-six-year-old self was a professional at ignoring red flags, so I continued the flirtation because…why not? After a few weeks of late-night, slightly tipsy back-and-forth, we finally built up enough tension to bring this digital flirting into the real world.

It started one night when we were both in our respective households and the texting chemistry was off the charts. We were both semi-realistically considering peeling ourselves off the couch to meet for a nightcap, but I zonked before we could come up with a concrete plan. I never go out after the sun goes down, so good luck convincing me to put makeup on and leave the house at night. The vibe continued into the next morning, and he was leaving for work later that night for a few weeks, so I knew if I didn’t want the chemistry to fizzle, I had to ACT NOW. That day happened to be a day I was on an insane deadline for work but also working from home. He kept tempting me with different situations where he could come over and “distract me from work,” and I finally caved and said he could come over for forty-five minutes. Not a minute longer! I literally set a timer.

He told me to “leave the door unlocked and be waiting in bed naked.” Ha, yeah right, buddy. I lived in Hollywood, and my neighbor’s apartment got broken into literally yesterday. But after a few minutes of serious contemplation…I left the door unlocked and waited for him in bed naked. Because I’m a sucker.

I was restricted on time, so my hair was still wet, and I hadn’t had time to put a stitch of makeup on by the time he got to my place. Again, I only had a quarter of my eyebrows, so this was especially frightening. He stayed at my apartment for a total of thirty-four minutes, which gave me eleven minutes of free time after. I’ll spare you the details because they were so unmemorable that I couldn’t recall them if you paid me. But I guess just picture what sober run-of-the-mill missionary sex with a stranger in broad daylight would be. I give it a good five out of ten, and honestly, I could have really used that half hour to get some more work done, but you know…had to do it for the story.

I started dating a new guy shortly after my less-than-enthralling one-day stand. The new guy was pretty rad and actually put some effort into planning some really fun unconventional dates. For our first date, he took me to an L. Ron Hubbard play. We got kicked out for smuggling in Jameson, and he still gets harassed by Scientologists to this day. For our second date, he took me to a comedy show. I didn’t know who was performing, but I was obviously down because I love me some stand-up. I am almost legally blind and I forgot my glasses, so we got to the venue early to get a seat in the first few rows so I could actually see what was going on. After a few pre-show whiskeys on the rocks, I was ready to chuckle. The first act came on, cracked some jokes about traffic in LA, and on to the next. Then, to my utter surprise, who came strolling out on stage, an arm’s length away from me? MR. ONE-DAY STAND HIMSELF. I immediately sunk in my seat, tried to cover my face with my hair, and downed the rest of my drink before he saw me. Well, that didn’t work, because he noticed me within thirty seconds.

He obviously noticed that I was on a date, so he took it upon himself to make me super uncomfortable the entire show. At first he kept trying to wink at me, but he couldn’t really wink that well, so it just looked like he had an eye twitch. After a few failed winks, he stepped his game up. Anytime he would talk about something sexual, he would come over to our side of the stage and lock eyes with me the entire joke. Like, so intensely, to the point where he wouldn’t even blink the entire time. So he went from blinking TOO much to not blinking at all. One time he even licked his lips ever so slowly while staring into the depths of my embarrassed soul. My date was oblivious to the intent behind the embarrassment and just assumed he chose us as the couple to heckle the entire time.

The show ended, and I immediately bolted from the venue, because if he was savage enough to point me out in front of an entire crowd, he obviously would embarrass me if we ran into each other in public.

I never heard from him again, until one day, a few months after our fateful encounter, when I received this random text:

So what did I learn from my one-day stand experience? Never sit in the front row of a comedy show, don’t trust a dude who says “lol,” and sex with a stranger is always better with alcohol.