The summer after my dad dies is a slutty one.
I spend most of May haunting a neighborhood ex while his girlfriend is out of town. We trade plausibly-deniable texts and ‘accidentally’ run into each other at Cobble Hill’s diviest bar. I sit on a wooden stool six inches too close to him, fully aware that my silk mini skirt has ridden up around my waist. I don’t bother adjusting it. We never cross any official lines, but the thrill of possibility is enough to feed the yawning hunger that eats through my gut at all hours.
When June arrives, I re-download Feeld. It is an app designed for sex, where all types, both the vanilla and the deviant, can broadcast their specific desires. People post kinks, nudes, and addresses for sex parties. Some are looking for good old fashioned dating, others are looking for an orgy. Thanks to the immediacy of the app, where I’m quickly flooded with messages and offers of cunnilingus, I waste my days sending freshly-waxed pussy pics to an old college fling and taking forty dollars Ubers into Manhattan on Sunday afternoons to do doggy style in sparse studio apartments with strangers.
New York City is muggy and unforgiving. I sweat through my mesh underwear; I go to bed alone every night with tangled hair, low phone storage, and bruises on my inner thighs. Sheer exhaustion knocks me out, but like clockwork, I wake consistently at three in the morning unable to see anything besides the image of my father’s bare feet lying still on the tiles of our kitchen floor. His pale, swollen soles peeking out from under a throw blanket. Some nights I just see the familiar shape of his body under the coroner’s sheet. When I can’t get back to sleep, I open Feeld again.
In July, I meet a married couple off the app who asks me to have a threesome. The husband is a striking forty-year-old with dark eyebrows and graying stubble. His wife, whose profile is linked to his, is petite and stunning, with big eyes and wild hair.
I consider the offer—my random hookups have started to get stale and I’m in the process of trying to figure out how to politely tell my old college fling that I don’t actually want to cuck him. I do not want to make him submit to me at all, I just want him to tell me every gross thing he wants to do to me so I can fall asleep at night without thinking about finding my dad’s shoes in the garbage after the paramedics cut them off.
Until this point, I have had a threesome exactly two and a half times.
When I was twenty-five, I dated a man in an open marriage who was ten years my senior. Twice, I joined him and his wife in their giant white bed. They had an adult’s apartment in Queens, with a large Persian rug, hanging plants, and expensive hand creams and soaps in the bathroom. I felt like a child when I was with them. Our encounters were sensual and cozy, starting with red wine and ending with quiet orgasms. Afterwards, they would call me a car and both text me to tell me what a lovely time they had.
The half-threesome was not so lovely. A failed attempt at group sex with two strangers from Tinder that involved drinking games and an empty dog crate. But by that time, I had already learned how to abandon my body in a bedroom.
The year after Jake died was a slutty one.
I was twenty-two, and got the news of his skiing accident while sitting in the Times Square office of the media company I interned for during my senior year. A boy I had loved since we were five years old, gone in the span of one bad run down the mountain.
I spent the weeks afterward suspended in a state of grief that seemed almost liquid. Every night I would stay out until I had utterly exhausted myself, and every morning I would wake up late from such vivid dreams about death and resurrection that I almost thought about going back to church.
I had been a virgin when I arrived at college, saving myself from the sinister back rooms of off-campus houses with dance floor makeouts and dry handjobs. Even sex, when it finally arrived in its own sinister back room of an upperclassmen’s apartment, was less thrilling and terrifying than I had built it up to be. I tried it again a few times, and always came away from it wanting.
But death, its closeness and its weight, shook all of my convictions, leaving me empty and ill at ease. A void seemed to open up inside me overnight. If I was awake, I didn’t want to be sober. If I was out, I didn’t want to go home. If I did have to go home, I didn’t want to go alone. I spent most of my time flailing around wildly, and feeling sad about it.
After graduation, I holed up in a ramshackle apartment in Queens and spent the afternoons sweating cheap white wine into a Raymour & Flanigan couch and taking long, drunk showers in an ancient clawfoot tub. At night, I’d take fifty dollar Ubers into Manhattan or Williamsburg and drink until I either didn’t feel sad anymore, or until the feeling became unbearable. I’d Irish exit and go home crying to Bruce Springsteen, or worse: wake up in sparse, musky apartments in Jersey City or the Lower East Side.
The gnawing hole in my gut only seemed to grow with every sweat-soaked encounter. It wasn’t even so much that I craved sex, just the comfort of a man’s warm body wrapped around me in the dark. I felt hungry for it all the time. I’d go to dive bars with cute, forgettable guys I had met on Tinder and pound bottom shelf gin until I felt empty enough to want to fuck them.
In their rooms, I disappeared. No longer haunted by the wet stain of death, no longer searching for something I couldn’t name. Just a body laid out on a mattress or straddling a couch, while my real self waited on the stoop outside.
For the better part of five years I sought exactly that, until all my forgettable dates morphed into one looming man-shape. Blurry nights at dimly-lit cocktail joints; a stranger’s rough hands digging into the soft flesh of my hips in a dark, cramped apartment; below-freezing cab rides at 6am over the Triboro Bridge.
So when I first laid in a large bed with a husband and wife, it surprised me how much I didn’t want to escape my body. I liked experimenting with them because it felt like playing pretend, like a game where no one lost. No strangers or dog collars or intimations of violence. Afterwards, I never wanted to commit another empty act of desperation or find myself on my knees in a foreign apartment again.
Until I found my dad dead on the kitchen floor of my childhood home one night, until I watched them take him away from me under a sterile sheet, and give him back to me in a wooden tube.
Every time a siren sounds that summer, I am returned to the living room stairs, waiting for him to get up from the floor and tell me it’s time to go back to bed.
The handsome couple who have propositioned me for a threesome suggest we meet up the day after the Fourth of July. Let freedom ring, indeed.
After picking a bar near their apartment in Prospect Heights, the husband backs out of the date with a work conflict. Would I be okay with just meeting his wife for a drink? Yes, of course. I will meet anyone for a drink so long as it means I don’t have to go home alone yet.
Even in the dark of a dive bar, the wife is more beautiful than her photos. Lithe and bohemian, with big earrings and a lace tank top clinging to her dancer’s body. She is somehow both maternal and flirtatious, and I find myself wanting to tell her every single one of my worst secrets.
After trading movie recommendations and Spotify playlists, she turns her big eyes to me and asks, as if she knows, “So what’s your summer been like so far?”
I tell her everything without hesitation. I tell her that I have been naked and drunk and scrambling for some semblance of relief since April.
She nods intently. “Oh, you’re so deep in it right now. It took me years to get out of that hole when my mom died. You’re doing everything right.” She takes my hands in hers, and I can feel a lump in my throat growing. “You just need to feel it all right now. Don’t be too hard on yourself.” When she wraps me into a tight hug, it is more intimate than any nude photo I have ever sent.
At this moment, I want her to be my therapist and my best friend. When she asks if I want to go home and meet her husband, I say yes, definitely.
Her husband is smoking a joint in their candlelit kitchen. He is, at first glance, one of the most attractive men I have ever seen up close. For a moment I worry that I’ve been drafted into a human trafficking scheme or some elaborate guerilla marketing tactic for the Feeld app. He, too, is affectionate and easygoing. When he passes the joint to me, his fingers linger on mine and I feel a jolt below my navel.
We fill him in on what he missed at drinks. “She’s in the dark place,” his wife tells him, and he nods knowingly, also leaning to give me a tight hug. Suddenly, in the cramped space between the oven and the butcher block, I am hornier than I have been in months. Genuinely, thrillingly horny. When I go to the bathroom, my lace thong is soaked. And when I return to the kitchen, I take it off.
Their profile said they liked foreplay, but I had underestimated just how much. We spend a long time in the kitchen just making out and feeling each other up. We take our shirts off; the wife and I pull on each others’ nipples while we pass the joint back and forth. Then, the husband reaches for something on the kitchen counter: olive oil in a glass bottle. He leans in to kiss me and begins drizzling it all over my breasts. The two of them take turns massaging me, and then she and I are going down on him, slick with oil and spit. It is, pound for pound, the most sensual experience of my life.
The next two hours proceed in the same fashion. We move to their living room and sixty-nine on their rug; we swap vibrators and positions in rapid rotation. Not one of us is without a hand or mouth on our skin at any moment. I am ravenous for it in a full-bodied way. I can feel blood pumping to every limb, the rough fabric of the floor against my ass, a handsome man’s strong fingers between my legs.
After midnight, the husband finally slips on a condom and we fuck on the floor. When I finish, I am covered in sweat, and completely spent. My mouth is bone dry and my jaw is sore. I can barely move my legs. I rest on their couch while they continue to tease each other. Finally, when it becomes clear that they’re not slowing down any time soon, I very politely announce that I think it’s past my bedtime. They call me a car, and when I get home they both text me to tell me what a lovely time they had.
I go to bed that night with tangled hair and bruises on my thighs, utterly exhausted. I delete Feeld in one swift motion and leave my phone plugged in on the opposite side of the room. For the first time in months, I sleep through the night. And when I wake up, I’m not hungry for another person. I’m not thinking about anything at all.
-Meg Riley
Meg Riley is a copywriter by day and everything-else-writer by night. Her essays have been published in The Syndrome Mag's digital book, Show Us Your Wits, as well as online for The Syndrome Mag, West Trade Review, and Fieldwren Literary Magazine. Currently, her less-polished writing can be found via her emerging Substack, @soltera. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with a 13-lb calico cat named Turnip.
The summer after my dad dies is a slutty one.
I spend most of May haunting a neighborhood ex while his girlfriend is out of town. We trade plausibly-deniable texts and “accidentally” run into each other at Cobble Hill’s diviest bar. I sit on a wooden stool six inches too close to him, fully aware that my silk mini skirt has ridden up around my waist. I don’t bother adjusting it. We never cross any official lines, but the thrill of possibility is enough to feed the yawning hunger that eats through my gut at all hours.