Tender.
Ten days with Antoine. (Or, why I took a week off from writing.)
My name is not Naomi. It’s a nom de plume to protect my identity. Though names and identifying details have been changed, all the stories in Gen XXX are true. My anonymity means that I rely on word of mouth to grow my reader base, so if you’re intrigued by what you’re reading, please do share with friends and consider becoming a paid subscriber.
I cry when I drop off Antoine at the airport. (Context here.) We’ve gone to the west side for the day to be closer to LAX. We start with a leisurely drive along Sunset Boulevard, from Silver Lake to Hollywood to West Hollywood and on through Beverly Hills and Bel Air and Brentwood. (There’s a roadblock near the Palisades, due to the fires.)
In Santa Monica we stop at Erewhon for $22 smoothies – an obscene and very “L.A.” thing to do – and head to the Annenberg Beach House for a four-mile walk to the pier and back. Along the way, we hold hands and wrap our arms around one another as colorful characters on bikes and roller skates whiz by and volleyball players fling themselves, face first and arms extended, into the surrounding sand.
When we get back to the car, my heart feels like it’s in my throat. A mixture of sadness and dread.
Unfortunately, driving to the airport is a breeze. I was hoping for more time with Antoine. A traffic jam on Sepulveda, maybe. Mayhem at the entry ramp to the departures level. But the road to World Way is easy to navigate and suddenly we’re there: Terminal 2.
The expression on Antoine’s face when tears pour out of my eyes appears to be a mixture of sadness and surprise.
Later, on my way home on the 110, I castigate myself for not giving Antoine a proper embrace. What the hell was I thinking? I should have gone to him. Kissed him all over his face. I guess that by staying in the car I was trying to protect myself. I was buckled in. Contained. Safe.
Except I wasn’t.
On the way home I call Olivia. She’s driving with her boyfriend and we’re talking on speakerphone. I know that her boyfriend can hear my choked up voice but I don’t much care.
Oliva tells me to lean into my sadness, and that she’s happy for me.
“He’s an excellent guy,” she says before we end the call.
It was all very unexpected. The evening that Antoine arrives, I’m out at a mixer in Highland Park for an LA-area sex positive group that hosts “play parties.” (I’ve never been to one, but I’m interested in going.) Antoine texts me that he’s landed. Then, about half an hour later, I get an update: he’s in a taxi. I figure I have 30 minutes left at the mixer before I have to head home but next thing I know he’s already at the 10 and moving fast. I jump in my car and make it home just as his taxi pulls up to my driveway.
Antoine exits the taxi and plants one on me. It’s big and aggressive. Open-mouthed, with tongue. I’m a bit taken aback. Also, I don’t like his scent. Like our pheromones aren’t a match.
Uh oh, I think. What now? Maybe Olivia was right to tell me not to let him stay at my house. I don’t know if I can handle nine days of this. I worry it is not going to go well.
But it does. The day after Antoine’s arrival, we go into Griffith Park and I show him my favorite route along the Hogback ridge trail and up to Mount Hollywood. I’m impressed by his stamina; it’s not an easy hike for someone who doesn’t do it as often as I do. At the summit, we take a few selfies and then head back home to take a shower. That night, we go to Saffy’s and enjoy a beautiful meal. I’m dressed up for the occasion and so is he.
After dinner we head back to my place and fuck.
But is it fucking? The way Antoine looks at me during sex suggests it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s a look of both intensity and connection. It feels, at times, like we’re making love. The way he undresses me, kisses me all over and dives head first into my body has an element of both affection and abandon to it.
“You’re amazing,” Antoine says. This is exactly what he said to me when I was with him in Paris. I could tell that he meant it then and I can tell that he means it now.
Afterwards, we wrap ourselves in one another’s arms and he tells me how happy he is to see me. I don’t notice that there’s anything off about his smell.
The next morning, as Antoine sleeps, I text both Olivia and Alison and tell them about the first night, and problem with the kissing. They tell me that I need to show Antoine how I want to be kissed. But how was the sex? they ask.
“It’s been so long since a man was so present and tender with me,” I write. I start to tear up. I’m grieving for the part of me that has gone so long without this kind of intimacy. I don’t think I’ve realized how starved I’ve been.
The next few days are not so much a blur as a whirlwind of activities and sex. We go to a picnic in Elysian Park where a bunch of my friends will be. I’m nervous about what they’ll think of him. I don’t know why. Maybe because he’s not as “hot” as I’d like. Antoine is smaller than me, and scrawny — very scrawny. I have more muscle tone than he does, even in my arms and legs, and he shaves his hair, which makes his head look relatively big on his small body.
Sometimes I’m so fucking superficial.
After the picnic, we visit a fetish store on Glendale Boulevard and buy two lengths of rope that Antoine will use to practice Shibari on me. That night, I light a candle and arrange myself in a cross-legged position on my bed, naked, my arms folded behind my back and my wrists pressed together. Antoine takes a piece of rope and begins to wrap it around my arms and upper torso and breasts, making a series of knots as he goes. When he’s done, he takes a picture of me from behind with his phone. It’s moody and sexy and gorgeous.
Then he gets my vibrator and makes me come.
The night sweats resurface on day three of Antoine’s visit. I’ve warned him about them in advance but he doesn’t seem disturbed. Nor is he bothered by the estrogen patch on my abdomen.
“I’m not 20 anymore,” I remind him at one point.
“You’re not 20 but you’re beautiful,” he says.
Antoine is getting along well with the cats, and they’re responding positively to him. One evening, as I’m trying to make myself orgasm with my vibrator, one of the cats jumps up onto my abdomen, ruining everything. Antoine and I howl with laughter.
Another day, the same cat comes into my bedroom at some ungodly hour — 5am, I think — to wake me up for breakfast, pawing at my face and biting my arm. I dive under the comforter to escape. Later that morning, Antoine will tell me that the cat came for him next and bit him on the cheek. In a loving way, he adds.
“I’m sorry,” I say, trying to hide my amusement.
“I love waking up with you,” he says.
“You’re cozy,” I say.
“What is ‘cozy’?” he asks. I explain what the word means, and throw in definitions of “snuggly” and “naughty” for good measure.
Nico can sense that something is going on. On Antoine’s second day in town, I tell Nico that I have a friend staying with me for the next eight days.
“A friend or a ‘friend’?” he asks.
“I’m not sure I’m willing to answer your question,” I say. This, of course, is a very pointed way of answering his question.
Nico apologizes for the query. “It’s okay,” I tell him.
Two days later he asks me about it again. He’s “curious,” he says. What I’m hoping is that this means he’s jealous.
“He’s a ‘friend,’” I say.
Antoine is a wonderful distraction from my obsession with Nico, but only to a point. One morning, when Antoine leaves my house to go on a studio tour at Paramount Pictures, I use the opportunity to play dress up with Nico, making videos of myself in lingerie. On another day, as Antoine does prep for a dinner that he’s making for Olivia and I that evening, I go into my bedroom to take a “nap” and play with Nico a second time.
I am well aware that I am sending sexy selfies to a man who doesn’t tell me he loves it when I smile, or hold me in his arms and kiss me tenderly as we’re making love, much less actually meet me in person.
This feels both titillating and terribly depressing.
Antoine and I are going on a trip to the Grand Canyon. When Olivia comes over for dinner the topic comes up in conversation and I realize that I’ve never told her about the plan.
“You’re going out of state with a guy you met on the internet?” Olivia asks. She sounds incredulous. Annoyed. Irritated. Judge-y.
I know she doesn’t mean to be. I’m certain that she has visions of me being pushed over the edge of the canyon rim by “a guy I met on the internet.” She’s just watched a Gabby Petito documentary so the issue of intimate partner violence is fresh in her mind.
“Yes,” I say, quietly.
I give her a look as if to say, “Stop.”
She doesn’t stop. (Later she tells me that she was just “teasing” and that I was being “super shady.”)
“Well, I’m surprised,” she continues. “I don’t know why you didn’t mention this until now.”
Antoine is silent. My face reddens and I ask to change the subject.
I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t tell Olivia about the trip. I think it’s probably because I knew it would be met with disapproval.
All week I’ve been getting alerts on my phone that a variety of men have “liked” me on the sex app. Others have reached out via text, like the Director and Nomad No. 2. I don’t respond to the messages. In fact, I haven’t opened the app since Antoine arrived, nor have I felt any desire to. Save my interactions with Nico, I am not feeling in need of additional male attention.
Antoine knows nothing of Nico. There are other things I hide from him. Like the fact that I’m on antidepressants. I only take them when Antoine is asleep or in the other room. I don’t want him to know the extent to which I’ve struggled with my mental health.
When I pack my things for our trip to the Grand Canyon I am extra careful to hide my pillbox at the bottom of my suitcase.
Grand Canyon National Park is a revelation. We fly into Phoenix from Burbank and drive 4.5 hours to the park, arriving at the park at around 4pm. After we unpack, we walk along the canyon rim for a half mile before heading to dinner — hamburgers — and then retiring to our hotel room. I put on my pair of flannel pajamas. “Not sexy,” I say to Antoine, laughing.
“You’re always sexy,” he says. He walks towards me and takes my face in his hands and kisses me. A short while later, he pushes me up against a window facing the canyon, pulls down my pajama bottoms and takes me from behind. Then we move to the bed and fuck some more. The next morning we will notice that there is blood on the sheets, the result of an abrasion on Antoine’s left knee caused by the bedsheets as he knelt and moved into me.
Antoine and I have a lot of great sex, but there’s more to it than that.
For me at least.
Maybe for him, too.
“I like you so much,” he says at one point. “We’re on the same page about many things,” he says later.
We chatter a bunch, asking questions and sharing experiences about everything from our relationships with our mothers to the music we love to what inspired us to get into our respective careers. He likes to tease me a bit, making fun of the way I walk when I hike (hands on sides of hips) or the frequency with which I initiate conversations with total strangers. I like to tease him about his accent and his command of the English language. (A favorite new word is “hoodie.”)
This isn’t to say that we’re always gentle with one another. One of our most tense moments takes place at the rim of the canyon, though it’s Antoine, not me, I’m worried about. He’s getting too close to the edge in search of the perfect photograph.
“I’m going to walk away,” I snap. “I don’t want to watch you die because you wanted to get a good angle.”
I head to a bench nearby and send Nico a picture of myself that Antoine took earlier that day.
“Beautiful!” Nico writes.
On our second day in the park, Antoine and I take a shuttle bus to a trailhead a few miles away from our hotel. On the way there, we bicker about the feasibility of going all the way down to the bottom of the canyon and back up.
“You can do what you want but I’m not going to join you,” I inform him. I tell him that all of the official park recommendations suggest that a same-day down-and-up hike is dangerous to attempt because of issues of heat, dehydration and elevation. Antoine seems dubious. I remind him that he has just one bottle of water, whereas I have three. He seems unmoved.
We start our descent at 10:15am. The light is weird and otherworldly on the way down. There’s a bluish-yellow tint to it, which makes our faces and arms and legs appear a sort of sickly green. I can’t tell whether the quality of light is due to the cloud cover reflecting the yellows and greens of the vegetation in the canyon or if it’s the vegetation in the canyon that is reflecting the cloud cover.
“Do you notice how strange the light is out here?” I ask Antoine.
“No,” he says.
I feel like I’m on drugs.
Two hours into the hike, we reach a small mesa, where we stop to take in the view. I turn to Antoine and tell him I want to fuck around with him. I’m titillated by the idea of being physically intimate with him in a vast space where we are both totally exposed and yet totally alone. He gets a funny look on his face and follows me as I make my way off the trail and around the corner of a large rock formation.
“This will be a souvenir,” I say as I pull his cock out of his pants.
After we’re done, Antoine and I decide to turn around and head for home. He seems to have given up on the idea of reaching the canyon floor. The sun has come out, and it’s getting hot. And there’s that issue of the one bottle of water.
We make good time, settling into a steady rhythm as we ascend. I’m in front of him — “you should set the pace,” he says — and in just 90 minutes we’re climbing out of the canyon and high-fiving one another.
There’s something musical about our time together, I tell Antoine later. We enjoy an interesting cadence. In conversation. During sex. On the drive from Phoenix, I introduce him to Marvin Gaye and Donny Hathaway and Joni Mitchell and he taps his hand on his thigh to the beat of the music as I sing along.
Later, when we’re back in LA, Antoine will buy a Marvin Gaye album at Record Safari in Atwater Village.
It’s Antoine’s last day and the weather in LA has finally cleared up. Olivia and her boyfriend take us to dinner at a Mexican restaurant in the arts district with a great view of the downtown skyline. Towards the end of the meal, Olivia takes photos of me embracing Antoine from behind. I look happy. So does he.
After dinner, I drive to the Griffith Park Observatory so Antoine can see the landscape at night. The city’s north-south arteries are lit up by cars stretching all the way from Long Beach to Los Feliz. The city is “massive,” Antoine says. “Amazing.”
Later, after returning home, I recline against the pillows on my bed so that Antoine can tie my feet and legs together with the Shibari ropes. Watching him work —seeing the level of concentration and care he takes as he winds the cotton cords around my body — is incredibly erotic. It’s the process that turns me on. The tenderness and the element of trust. The end result is just a bonus.
After Antoine is finished, I roll over onto one side and ask him to spank me.
“Your ass is getting red,” he says, after a few minutes. “And warm.” He’s alternating the spanking with stroking, which takes the sting away. It feels amazing.
Later, after we’ve had sex but before he loosens the ropes, I ask Antoine to take a picture of me in repose.
“Another souvenir,” I say.
At the airport, Antoine thanks me for “everything.”
“Thank you,” I respond. Then my face starts to crumple.
I wonder if he has any idea what I’ve been feeling. If he didn’t before, he sure does now.
After I get home, I send Antoine a text, explaining that I’m embarrassed that I started crying. “Having you here felt very intimate and warm, and I felt emotional about it,” I write. “You’re a great man: smart, kind, curious, sexy, affectionate and communicative. I appreciate you very much.”
“I felt emotional too,” he says.
Margot was right, I realize. I “caught feelings.” That night, I take half a Xanax to knock myself out. I just want to sleep. When I wake up the next morning, I see that Antoine has texted that he’s arrived in Paris.
I like that he does this. That he checks in.
Later that day, I FaceTime my friend Max to tell her about the visit.
I miss him, I say. And I know that nothing can ever really come of our time together. He lives so far away. Across a continent and an ocean. It sounds corny, considering, but a sort of canyon separates us. He’s also almost a decade younger. He should get married someday; have children with a wonderful woman. I know that I am not that woman.
“I’m so happy for you,” Max says. “He cracked you open a bit.”
“Yes,” I say. “I also think I have a UTI.”
After Max and I get off our video call, I scroll through the photos that Antoine and I have taken over the previous week and a half. Most are pictures of the two of us together. At a trail overlook in Griffith Park. In our seats on the plane to Phoenix. Above the Grand Canyon. Behind the Hollywood Sign. Next to the Observatory. On the beach path in Santa Monica.
I realize that I’ve been so focused on how I look in the pictures — Am I pretty? Is my turkey neck visible? Do my lips look dry and cracked? — that I haven’t been that looking closely at him. In almost every picture, I notice, Antoine’s eyes are sparkling and alive.
Max is a good friend. The day after our first post-mortem, she FaceTimes me to check in again. I say that I’m a little bruised, explaining that, a few hours earlier, Antoine texted me something I didn’t like.
“I miss kiss you, and fuck you…” he’d written in his usual broken English. “We’ve spent 10 intense days from a sexual point of view. I loved it.”
From a sexual point of view. Maybe, I tell Max, Antoine and I are not on the same page about as many things as we thought we were.
I inform Max that I responded to Antoine by saying that because it’s impossible for me to totally separate the physical from everything else, our time together was intense in more than just a sexual way.
“For me,” I’d added.
“Yes,” he’d said. “It was cozy and naughty at the same time.”
“He was setting a boundary with you,” Max says after I read her the text exchange. I know she’s right, even though I don’t want to hear it.
“You said so yourself the other day,” she reminds me. “He lives on the other side of the world. Nothing can really happen between you two.”
I tell Max that maybe I’m in what my friend Margaret calls a “fuck fog”: When the hormones that get stirred up after an intense and consensual experience temporarily blind a person to reality or make it difficult to make judgments regarding a situation and the person with whom it was shared.
“I’ll get out of it,” I say to Max.
“I don’t think you have to get out of it,” Max says. “It was great. And you’re also crying.”
A few hours later, after Antoine wakes up — it’s 6am in Paris and 9pm in Los Angeles — he texts me a tender “good morning.”
“It’s so surreal that when your day is beginning, mine is ending,” I say.
“I would have you now here and kiss your neck once awake,” he writes.
“And some rubbing of my ass,” I add. (I like to have my ass rubbed.)
“One of the best moments of our days together,” he responds. “I miss them.”