The Director.
A man with the gorgeous penis drove two hours to meet me for a date. Plus: getting a UTI from a guy in Paris.
My name is not Naomi. It’s a nom de plume to protect my identity. Though names and some details have been changed, all the stories here are true.
Maybe I’m ovulating, because my sex drive is through the roof. So when the 56-year-old director I’ve been talking to suggests that we meet one another halfway between LA and Santa Barbara, I seriously consider it.
“Is Thousand Oaks halfway?” I ask him. “Camarillo,” he responds.
I think about driving back to LA on the 101 in the dark after having done…what? Meeting this man at a bar and then checking into a Hilton Garden Inn for an hour or two? A quick fuck, then a drive home?
No. That’s not my style. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s not my bed.
“How about you come to Los Angeles?” I say. I understand that I am asking a lot of the director. Santa Barbara is an hour and a half away. Maybe more. And he has a 7am work call. But he is going to be away for three weeks and our vibe is so great, I want to keep up the momentum. So does he. He’ll leave at 6:30 and hopefully be in LA by 8. Unspoken, I think, is that no matter what, he will not be spending the night.
We meet at 7:50 at Bar Sinizki in Atwater and I have two mezcal cocktails. He has a whiskey with one cube of ice. We talk for a couple of hours. Well, mostly, he talks. I don’t mind, though. While he is talking, I can take him in a bit. Check him out.
The director isn’t totally my type — he’s much shorter than I am, and looks older and softer than he appears in his profile photos. Like a dad. Unlike Nico, who does not look like a dad. This is part of the problem with Nico. The fact that he has two young kids makes me feel sick to my stomach, but it doesn’t make me sick enough. “Not enough” is what keeps me attached.
The director tells me about a near-death experience that he had on a film set and how it changed his life. Some of what he says about this sounds far-fetched or woo-woo but he seems sane in every other respect, and who am I to judge what happens during — or after — a near-death experience?
After we finish our drinks, I invite the director home with me — “Do you want to go to my house and make out?” is how I phrase it — and discover that he is not the greatest kisser. He just holds his mouth there, slightly open, and then his tongue moves around. Yuck. I respond by moving my head to the side so he’ll be prompted to kiss my neck instead, which is much less yuck.
While the director kisses my neck, I reach down and touch his penis through his pants. It’s impressive, though not intimidating. I want to see it in person, so I take him to my bedroom and pull down his pants. It’s beautiful. The shape, the curve. Plus, the director has a little bit of a pot belly — a firm one, not a squishy one — that, for some reason, makes his lower half seem even sexier.
I go down on the director while I sit on the edge of my bed. Occasionally I look up and catch him with an expression on his face of such seeming ecstasy that I almost start laughing. He looks dazed. “You’re so fucking sexy,” he murmurs at one point. I take his cock out of my mouth and say thank you. I know that I am good at oral sex, and the praise feels sincere. I just try not to think about the silly look on his face.
After a while, I tire of what I am doing and the director guides me onto the bed, pulls off my jeans and underwear, and goes down on me. He is good at it, but I know that he will not bring me to orgasm — I am too self-conscious to relax into oral sex with a man I’ve never been with before — so I tell him I’m going to make myself come with my vibrator.
Normally, I’d be embarrassed to bring out my toy — the visual plus the sound of it probably isn’t that sexy — but a psychic named Lisa told me last year that I need to “own” my orgasms and go after what I want. Hearing this felt like a revelation; I was being given permission to prioritize myself sexually. Besides, the older I get, the less fucks I have to give. So to speak.
I ask the director to kneel by my side on the bed a few feet away and stroke himself so I can watch. I love seeing a man masturbate. Only a few minutes go by before I climax; I’m really worked up. So worked up that I don’t even have to close my eyes and think about a scene I saw in a porn movie, or imagine Nico in the doorway of my bedroom, disrobing.
After my orgasm, the director and I fuck for a bit. It feels amazing: I think the curve of his cock makes a big difference. Eventually, he starts to get worn out, so I get on top of him, even I don’t always like woman-on-top sex. I feel like my body is on display, and not in a way I want it to be.
After about 5 minutes of this we stop. It’s late. The director needs to head back to Santa Barbara soon. We cuddle and make sounds of contentment. It feels easy. It reminds me of what’s like to be with a man in an intimate relationship.
I tell the director to text me when he gets home, and then I see him to the door. After he leaves, I get back into bed, grab my vibrator and make myself come again. I do it twice the next day as well, thinking of the sight of him kneeling next to me. What a beautiful cock. It has been a while since I’ve seen one that gorgeous.
Nico has been saying he’ll send me some new lingerie. I’ve even figured out a way for him on how to do it so his wife won’t find out. (She does all the bookkeeping.) I tell him to take cash out of an ATM and buy a Visa gift card with it from the grocery store and then use the number on the card to buy the lingerie. I think this is a very clever work-around. So does Nico. But nothing ever comes in the mail. When I ask him about it, he says that “unfortunately” he hasn’t “thought much” about it since our last discussion. He’s had other things on his to-do list.
I always wonder what it is that I do to make Nico withdraw. Do I act overly available? Respond to his texts too quickly? Assume too much familiarity? Show that I might have “feelings”? Bore him? He always comes back, though I dread that one day he will not.
A few days after my date with the director, I have a video-chat with Antoine, a guy who lives in Paris. I met Antoine on the sex app while in Europe for a friend’s wedding the previous summer. We went out on three dates. The first date was brunch, then an hour-long walk near the Seine. No kissing. Date number two was dinner and then kissing (mediocre) and then sex (far from mediocre). For date number three, my last night in town, I went straight to Antoine apartment in the 14th arrondissement after a late dinner with my friend Margaret. Antoine and I started fucking almost immediately. The sex — there was hours of it — was fantastic. Dirty. Dirty enough, at least, that I arrived back in Los Angeles with a urinary tract infection and went straight to urgent care from the airport.
Antoine and I have had a few ups and downs. In September, a few months after my return to Los Angeles, we made plan for me to visit him for a week in November. I was under no illusion that we were going to fall madly in love — I met him on a sex app, and besides, he lives six thousand miles away! — but about three weeks before I was set to travel, Antoine started acting weird. I texted him over WhatsApp to ask him about it. Was he getting cold feet? Feeling anxious? He conceded that he was concerned that I’d expect something “serious” to result from my stay. “No,” I said. “Honestly, I thought we’d just walk around and go to museums and eat good food and talk and have great sex.”
I told Antoine that I thought it was best if I cancelled my plane reservation. I was not so much hurt as disappointed. I’d been looking forward to the trip. Later that day, Antoine tried to walk things back. “I’m sorry for what I said to you,” he texted. “Did you already cancel your ticket?” I told him that it was too late. There was no way I was going to travel halfway across the world to spend close to a week with a man who was acting squirrely or worried about my intentions. It would just make things more awkward than they’d already become.
Now, on the video chat, Antoine tells me that he wants to come visit me in Los Angeles in May. I almost burst out laughing. As Olivia said back in October, “he’ll be back.” (Other friends said I’d pulled the plug on the trip too soon and that I should have given him a second chance.) I tell Antoine that he’s free to come to Los Angeles whenever he wants and that I’m happy to show him around. And I am! But I’d be lying if I said that something hasn’t changed for me. I feel fondly towards Antoine. But I don’t feel very turned on by him anymore, even though he is an interesting (and interested) man, and his repeated apologies were sincere. Ugh. It’s so like me to regard a decent man’s attraction to me as unexciting. Honestly, I’m old enough to know better.
I don’t have tons of other prospects right now. Despite what it may sound like, I actually don’t go on tons of dates. There are so many hoops to jump through. First, I have to find a guy alluring enough to match with him. (And vice versa.) Then we have to actually have a conversation. A good one. A promising one. One with momentum. Then he has to ask me out on a date. And actually show up!
Getting to these final stages can be an ordeal. A couple of weeks ago, I spend a fair amount of time talking to two men, both of whom flake out when it comes to meeting up in real life. I send both of them a version of the same irritated message: I wish you hadn’t wasted my time!
Last week I match with an attractive real estate developer who lives in Newport Beach. The bio section of his profile is totally blank but after we match, he describes himself as “dominant and passionate.” We chat for a bit and I ask him about one of the photos in his profile; he’s shown kneeling next to some cows in a barn. The developer tells me that he used to be a bullrider. Why did you stop? I ask. He fell and broke his pelvis, he says, and that was that.
Later on, after a back and forth about what we like sexually — he likes lingerie, and “an easy going and obedient partner” — his pelvis comes back up in conversation. I make an inquiry, disguised as a joke, as to whether the lower half of his body still “works.” It does, he says. Took nine months but it’s in great shape. Then the developer sends a photograph but it doesn’t upload all the way; all I can see is a dark grey rectangle where an image should be. Ugh, I think. Another dick pic. I hate them! My profile specifically tells men not to send them! Still, I’m curious enough that I click through on the photo to see if it will load. It does. It’s an x-ray of the developer’s pelvis with a bunch of rods and screws in it.
I shriek, and heart the photo. It’s the funniest thing a guy has sent me in months.