Scout Turkel

I had forgotten how important making out is toward feeling hot and remaining stable. If I must live through this moment, I’d prefer to do so with hickeys.

I want to say this was the best sex of my life, but I know that’s impossible. I knew it the minute they unbuttoned my pants; I knew it as they bit my neck.

Do I deserve to call this violence? Was I harmed? Am I entitled to the language of hurt if I let the hurt happen to me? What does “let” mean?

What kinds of desire have I ignored toward the goal of rendering myself simple enough to be legible to my family?

Four months or so after the phone fucking began, we got a chance to see each other. She came to Southern California, and we left for the lower mountains.

I'm no better than the rest of us — I want a Brooklyn-based microfarmer to top me too. I get it.

My obsession with her became a sort of narcissism, an infatuation with myself as understood by her touching me, and my feeling it.

“If we’re both here and we both like each other, why can’t we figure out what we could be?”

Eroticism and friendship aren’t mutually exclusive, and I feel erotically toward some of my favorite friends. Even those I don't want to have sex with.

I enter open relationships not as a ready participant in the established guidelines but as an interloper. I am always sure that I might be the exception.